Assuming I lost the signal, I grab the phone in my room, but I don’t get a dial tone. “Hello?” I say into the receiver, wondering if someone’s on the other end. I click the phone on and off a bunch of times without any luck. It’s as if the phone line has been cut.
Floorboards creak somewhere in the house. I snag a bookend off my shelf and peer down the hallway toward the kitchen. I know I left the kitchen light on, but someone has turned it off.
I open my door a little farther so that the light from my room illuminates the hallway. Slowly I move toward the kitchen, my heart pounding with each step—so loud I can hear it in my ears. Finally in the kitchen, I flick on the light.
Everything appears normal, like I never left it. I turn on the light in the living room as well. That appears okay too.
I take a deep breath, feeling my stomach lurch. I trade the bookend for a knife from the drawer, then close my eyes and silently count to ten.
A moment later, a breaking sound comes from downstairs. The noise cuts right through my bones and I let out a gasp. I open the basement door as carefully as possible, but it lets out a high-pitched whine. “Hello?” I call.
I flip on the stairwell light and wait a few moments, listening. There’s just the hum of the refrigerator from somewhere behind me.
Still gripping the knife, I move down the stairs. “Is someone down here?” I ask.
The basement light is just out of reach. I take a couple more steps, feeling a chill in the air, wondering if my dad forgot to close up the corner window again. I peer in that direction, noticing a flame flickering on my worktable, as though from a candle. Its light casts a shadow on the wall.
Adrenaline courses through my veins; I can feel it in my arms as I grip the knife tighter and turn on the light. I move closer to my worktable. The candle illuminates a series of snapshots propped up against various bowls I’ve made. They’re pictures of me and pictures of Ben, though we’re not together: it’s either me alone, or Ben by himself.
It takes me a moment to notice the writing across each snapshot. Someone’s scribbled a word over each of the photos, until the message comes together: TILL DEATH DO US PART.
The knife drops from my grip. A long-winded scream peals from my throat. And then someone’s hand covers my mouth.
59
With someone’s hand still cupped over my mouth, I try to step back, but the person doesn’t budge. And so I bite down into the skin of his hand until my jaw aches—and until I’m finally released. I grab a carving knife from my worktable and spin around. Only to find Ben. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?” “Shhh,” he says. “You left the front door open.” “No. I didn’t.” I know I locked the front door promptly behind me. “We’re not alone,” he whispers, gesturing toward the photos. “Someone called me tonight.” “Who called you?” “I don’t know,” he says, keeping his voice low. He looks over his shoulder toward the staircase. “You need to come with me.” “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what you’re talking about. Until you tell me what you’re doing here.”
“I’ll explain everything. Just come with me now.”
“No,” I say, glancing back at the photos.
Ben follows my gaze. “You can’t possibly think it was me who left those pictures.”
“How long have you been here?” I ask, assuming that it was he who made that door slam upstairs, that it was his footsteps that made the floorboards creak.
“Someone called me,” he says again.
I shake my head. “You have to go.”
“No.” His jaw locks. “I’m not going anywhere.” He goes to grab my arm, but I push him back.
He comes at me again, slowly at first. But then he takes my arms, squeezes the knife right out of my hand, and restrains me from behind.
I stomp on his feet and bite his hand again. He lets out a wail, loosening his grip. I kick at his shin—hard— plunging the heel of my boot against his bone. He continues to try to overpower me, to grab my arm and lead me toward the back of the basement, by the bulkhead exit. “Please,” he insists, trying to keep control of his breath.
I twist my arm, forcing him to release me. Then I grab a pot off my shelf and bash it over his head. Ben lets out a moan before going down. The pot smashes to bits on the floor.
I hurry up the stairs, nearly tripping at the top and suddenly noticing that the phone in the kitchen is on the floor, where I’d dropped it before. I pick it up. The line-in-use light is on, indicating that it’s been off the hook. For all this time. It must have clicked on when it landed against the tile.
I click it off and then turn it back on to get a dial tone, surprised when I hear a beeping sound, like someone’s trying to dial. I turn it off, then on again, and reposition the receiver against my cheek, thinking maybe I brushed against it by accident, that maybe I hit the redial button.
But then I hear a voice: “My name is Camelia Hammond. And my ex-boyfriend wants to kill me. He’s broken into my house.”
My mouth quivers open, completely confused. The receiver still pressed against my ear, I peer down the hallway toward my room.
“What is your address?” the operator asks.
“I live at 222 Seersucker Road, Freetown, Massachusetts,” the female voice says.
“We’re sending someone over right away,” the operator continues. “Just stay on the line with me.”
“I can’t,” she says, between tears.
“Why not? Can he hear you? Where are you in the house? Where is he?”
“I’m in my bedroom.” She sniffles. “I don’t know where he is. In the basement, maybe.”
Slowly, I move down the hallway toward my room, listening as the 9-1-1 operator instructs the girl to try to relax. I edge the door to my bedroom open.
Debbie Marcus is there, crouched on the floor; the phone receiver is pressed against her cheek. She clicks the phone off, a smug smile across her freckled lips. “I was hoping to leave before you saw me.”
Dressed all in black—from ski hat to snow boots—she lets out a sigh. “But I couldn’t get the damned phone to work.” She tosses the receiver to the floor, and it rings not two seconds later.
“Why bother getting it?” She rolls her eyes. “The police will be here any second, which is why I’d better go. Thanks for not locking the basement window, by the way. It sure makes for an easy break-in.”
“What are you doing?” I ask, already putting some of the pieces together—the photos, the weird phone calls, and the message written across the bulkhead doors. . . .” Did you do that?” I ask, gesturing to my sweatshirt behind her.
“Who else?” She yawns. “I knew it was yours, and I was there when Ben left it in your homeroom that day.”
“Why would you do this?”
“Are you serious?” She laughs, her apple cheeks puffing up as she smiles. “Ben’s stalking you, remember?”
“You’re stalking me.”
“Correction: I’m only making it look like you’re getting stalked. And I must say, it’s too bad it had to come to all this. I thought you would’ve been smart enough to alert the authorities, or at least your parents, way before this— more like around the time I left you that shrine photo. But no, you had to be all stubborn and independent.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ben doesn’t belong here,” she says through gritted teeth. Her steel blue eyes look fierce and feral. “And I have a feeling that after tonight, the police will agree with me.”
“After tonight?”
“So it’ll go down like this,” she begins. “You came home tonight to pack, heard some funny noises, found some scary things, only to discover that Ben had broken into your house. And so you dialed 9-1-1, which is the phone call you just heard.” She motions to the receiver with her glove-covered hand. “I’ll leave out the window before the police arrive, and you can tell them everything.”
“What I’ll tell them is how crazy you are, how you plotted this whole thing
just to frame Ben.”
“Prove it. I have an alibi for tonight. I’m at the movie theater.” She flashes me a ticket. “Plus, let’s face it, who are the police going to believe—Killer Ben; you, who love him; or me, victim of a coma?”
“You called him to come here, didn’t you?” I ask, remembering how Ben mentioned someone phoned him.
“Damn straight I did. I had to get him here at just the right time. I had to be all mysterious by blocking the call and changing my voice. I told him that you were home alone, and that he’d better get here if he wanted to see you alive again. I even opened the front door so he could just walk in. Pretty savvy, no?” she asks, tucking a few stray curls back in place beneath her hat. “Even savvier was planning this whole thing. The only snag was your nosy neighbor. After I wrote that message on the bulkhead, I went back to my car all stoked over a job well done, but then I spotted some old guy sitting on his front porch, looking in my direction. It totally freaked me out, so I ended up going back and washing the whole thing off, which is why I called you that night. I wanted to make sure you saw it, or at least that you got the message, so to speak.” She laughs.
I shake my head, amazed at how passive she looks, like none of this even fazes her—like she has zero conscience at all.
“Everything really fell into place,” she says. “Especially when I overheard you in the hallway today, telling Ben that your parents were away, and that you were coming back here tonight, alone. But then that stupid phone.” She gestures to the extension. “If it had actually worked one of the first fifteen times I tried to call out, I’d be out of here. You never would have seen me. You’d totally believe that Ben was the one stalking you this entire time, am I right? Touché with knocking him out, by the way. I heard it all the way upstairs.”
“I can’t believe you did this.”
“I did it for your own good—for everyone’s good. Ben doesn’t belong here. It’s because of him that my grandfather’s dead.”
“That’s not true.”
A moment later, police sirens sound in the distance.
“I gotta go,” Debbie says, moving toward the window.
“No!” I shout, grabbing her forearm.
Debbie jerks away, but I’m able to snatch her arm back. I go to pull her into the room, but she grabs a picture frame off my shelf and jabs the glass corner into my wrist. A shooting pain ripples up my arm and I have to let go.
Debbie draws the windowpane up and straddles one leg over the ledge. I take a wide stance, angling my body against a bookcase for support. The sirens grow louder, just around the corner now. I lunge at Debbie, digging my fingernails into the fabric of her coat and dragging her off the sill, back into the room. She tumbles onto the floor.
I pin her there, straddling her back and holding her arms down against the floor so she can’t move. But still she kicks me. The heel of her boot jabs into the small of my back, sending a searing pain up my spine. I topple off her back. Debbie gets up and kicks me in the gut. I sputter and wince, but still I don’t give up. I reach for her leg, but she’s able to break free. She snatches a pair of scissors from my desk and positions them high above her head.
“Maybe Ben stabbed you with a pair of scissors while he was here,” she whispers. Her eyes are wide and searing.
I position my arms over my head to protect myself. At the same moment, I see Debbie fly backward against the bookcase. Ben rips the scissors out of her hands and tosses them to the floor, out of reach.
He holds her in place using the sweatshirt from my bed as a buffer between them, so he doesn’t have to touch her—so he doesn’t have to risk losing control all over again. Meanwhile, three police cruisers pull up in front of my house with a screech. I sit back on my heels, grateful that the trickery is finally over, but feeling horrible that I ever suspected Ben was a part of it; that, once again, I doubted him.
60
It’s been four days since the incident at my house, and I still haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep. I’m sitting at the Press & Grind with Kimmie and Wes, trying to caffeine-and-sugar myself awake so that I won’t nod off this afternoon—so that maybe I can get a normal dose of shut-eye tonight.
“I still can’t believe Debbie,” Wes squawks. “I mean, talk about crazy. She puts the nutter in butter.”
“Excuse me?” Kimmie asks; her Pepto-pink lips bunch up in confusion.
“Nutter Butters,” Wes explains. “The world’s trippiest cookie . . . ?”
“Whatever,” she says, rolling her eyes.
The ironic part of this whole Debbie-prankster thing is that she worked so hard at getting Ben to go away. But now she’s the one who’s gone.
Since no one was seriously hurt, and since my parents knew about Debbie’s history with the coma and her grandfather’s death, Mom insisted that we not press charges. Dad agreed. Instead, Debbie’s parents pulled her out of school, in hopes that she’ll be able to get some much-needed perspective, not to mention a bit of counseling.
As soon as my parents heard the news about Debbie and the break-in, they got the first flight home.
“I feel really bad about that,” I tell Kimmie and Wes. “This was my mom’s opportunity to make real progress with her sister.”
“Stop guilting yourself,” Kimmie says. “It’s our job to screw things up for our parents. Just look at me and Nate. If we’d never been born, my parents would probably still be together.”
“Since when are you the poster child for self-pity?” Wes asks, through a mustache of cappuccino froth.
“It’s not like my dad didn’t say so himself.”
Not so surprisingly, Kimmie’s parents have decided to separate for a while. Her dad’s already renting an apartment in the city, with promises to see Kimmie and Nate on the weekends. “My life sucks goat cheese,” she says, banging her head against the table.
“Well, let’s hope that goat cheese is organic,” Wes says. “Remember when Camelia’s mom told us they let pus leak into the regular stuff. And I doubt you’d want to suck pus?”
“You’re sick,” Kimmie tells him.
“Just look on the bright side,” he continues. “At least your dad isn’t leaving dirty magazines all over the house for you to find. Underneath your pillow, in your gym bag, tucked beneath your place mat at dinner . . .”
“And tell me, oh wise one, why would that side be brighter? Maybe I could use a little dirty distraction.”
“What does your mom say about all that dirt?” I ask him.
“Mom’s a mouse, even Dad calls her that. If you’re not listening closely enough, you won’t even hear her squeak.”
“Honestly, I don’t know how that woman stays with him,” Kimmie says. “I think she needs a shrink.”
“Yeah well, maybe she’s not the only one.”
“Are you referring to me?” she asks him.
He shakes his head and looks away, his face all sullen and pensive.
“Um, Earth to Wes,” Kimmie sings.
“Don’t worry about it.” He forces a half-smile. “I think maybe the coffee-grind fumes are starting to get to me. Does anyone else feel bold and nutty?”
“You know you can talk to us,” I say, wondering if the pressure at home is starting to get a little too intense for him.
“I know,” he says, choosing instead to make fun of Kimmie’s 1960s pillbox hat.
Kimmie and I exchange a look, knowing full well that he’s not giving us the full story, but that he clearly doesn’t want to elaborate.
Instead, I tell them about the situation with my aunt: how she told my mother she’s been hearing voices whenever she paints.
“Seriously?” Kimmie asks. “So this power of yours might actually be a hereditary bonus.”
“Like having nice hair?” Wes says, running his fingers over his thickly lacquered coif.
I nod. “Except they don’t exactly think of it as a power—more like that she’s crazy.”
“Which would mean they’d probably t
hink you’re crazy too,” Kimmie says.
“Or maybe not. Maybe telling them about me might help Aunt Alexia. My parents could think of her supposed psychosis in a whole new way.”
“Are you really ready to take that chance?” she asks.
I sink back in my seat, knowing that I’m not—not yet, at least. My mom, especially, was hurt that I didn’t say anything, once again, about all the pranks going on. I really don’t feel like adding to the list of things I neglected to tell her.
“Bottom line,” Kimmie says, “you need to talk to your aunt.”
“Agreed,” Wes says. “And I’d like to be a fly on the wall when you do.”
“I know,” I say, wondering if I can convince my mom to let me go with her the next time she travels to Detroit, which is supposedly in a few weeks.
“Were your parents super mad?” Kimmie asks.
“More like super disappointed, but Dad tried to smooth things over, telling Mom about the heart-to-heart we’d had in the parking lot of Taco Bell when I hinted about what was happening.”
“Your dad must be heartbroken about Adam,” Kimmie says. “I guess it’s safe to assume he won’t be your dad’s future son-in-law.”
“Adam is the tricky part in this whole funked-up situation.” After the whole blowout, he wrote me a letter. I pull it from my pocket and slide it across the table at them:
Dear Camelia,
I know you won’t talk to me right now, but I need to tell you my side of things. It’s true that I came to Freetown to try to get back at Ben. I wanted him to know what it feels like to have someone he cares about taken from him, just like he took Julie from me. I know that sounds messed up, but like I said before I never imagined falling for you the way I did.
The plan was stupid. I was stupid. And I’m embarrassed to even have to own up to it now. I hope one day you can forgive me.
I’ve quit Knead, by the way. It’s your place, not mine. But I’m still staying here at the community college. You have my number. I hope you’ll use it. I hope one day you’ll even be able to forgive me.