The Creek

  “Let me go,” she begged.

  “Oh, no, I can’t let you go. I’m just getting started,” he said in a horrible voice. He kneaded her stomach with his other hand.

  Penny froze.

  “See, I know it was you and your little friends who called the cops,” he breathed, his mouth tickling her neck.

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “And messed up my car.”

  Penny blinked her eyes open and twisted her head around. Behind her was the cliff, and she felt the edge with the heel of her sandal, felt how it gave way, suddenly, to emptiness.

  There was nowhere to go. He was going to kill her. Or worse. This was real, she thought.This was not one of her nightmares. They were going to find her dead, just like Mr. Cat. Or like that Jeffy kid. With all her fingers cut off.

  Then she remembered the BB guns in the hollow tree just steps away. If she could just get to it and climb up into the branches, she could keep him away almost indefinitely with a steady stream of stinging pellets. But she had to get to the tree first.

  Caleb whispered into her ear, “And I’ve been wondering why you’ve been trying to mess with me, Penny Carson.”

  And in that moment Penny did the only thing she could think of—she shoved her elbow hard into his stomach. He cursed, and when Penny felt his hands fall away from her waist, she leaped with all her might at a low-hanging branch of the tree. She grabbed on and tried to pull herself up, kicking out wildly when she felt Caleb reach for her legs, his hands tangling in her sandals and breaking one of the straps, and then there was nothing.

  A soft thudding sound echoed through the woods.

  Penny hung suspended from the tree for another minute, legs swinging, and then let go of the branch to fall to the dirt below. It seemed that her feet had barely touched the earth when the ground at the edge of the cliff gave way beneath her and she was falling, sliding down the slope on her stomach in a rain of loose, dry soil and pebbles. She groped the ground frantically, digging her fingers into the dirt until her nails broke, halting her descent by clutching at a thick exposed root. She held on to that root as tightly as she could, her feet scrambling to get a footing. And then something beneath her caught her eye, something far below, in the creek bed.

  Something that looked an awful lot like Caleb.

  Penny swallowed and clawed her way up the cliff, hand over hand. When she reached the top, her arms felt like rubber, and she fell to her knees, breathing hard. She stood up slowly, gingerly, her arm aching where Caleb had crushed it, and peered over the edge of the cliff.

  Caleb’s body lay facedown, blood streaming from somewhere under his head, his legs and arms spread out at unnatural angles.

  There was a crackling, and the sky exploded above the woods from fireworks set off by some neighborhood kid. Was it a trick of the fading light, or did Caleb’s hand just move?

  Penny gave a ragged gasp and then turned and ran, the sound of buzzing cicadas rising around her like a roar, the green, thick place teeming with life.

  Penny was in the small blue bathroom upstairs. She had changed into shorts, an undershirt, and tennis shoes, her sandals ruined beyond repair now. She was inspecting the huge bruise on her arm from where Caleb had grabbed her, running her scratched and bleeding fingers lightly over it and wincing slightly. Her knees were scraped up and oozing blood from her slide down the cliff. She heard a small gasp and whirled around, startled, to see Teddy and Benji standing there.

  “Where have you been?” Benji demanded, taking in her undershirt. “Thanks for sticking me with all the trash.”

  Penny shifted awkwardly and crossed her arms across her chest.

  “You get the fireworks?” Benji asked.

  Penny blanched. “Uh, no,” she stammered.

  Benji and Teddy exchanged glances.

  “Some water had gotten into the tree and they were all ruined,” Penny improvised.

  “All of them?” Benji asked, aghast.

  She nodded.

  Benji exhaled. “That blows.”

  “What happened to you?” Teddy asked, eyeing the angry-looking bruise on her arm, her scraped knees.

  She tried to be nonchalant but failed, stammering, “I just, you know, fell. It was dark in the woods.”

  Teddy regarded his sister suspiciously.

  Mrs. Albright called in through the front door, “Hey, you kids in here?”

  “Upstairs, Mom!” Benji yelled.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling for you? We’re leaving right now, so if you want to see the fireworks, you better get moving.”

  “We’re coming,” Benji yelled down.

  “I gotta put on a shirt,” Penny said.

  “Hurry,” Teddy said, shifting his weight on his crutches.

  She met her brother’s eyes in the mirror, gave a reassuring smile, and said calmly, like the big sister she was, “I’ll be right down.”

  CHAPTER 13

  She was running through the woods, the monster dogging her heels, his breath a hot lash against her neck. The moon was a thin shaft of light dancing between the trees, causing the shadows to move and waver and trick her eyes so that everything seemed farther away than it was. But still she ran, fast as she could, her sneakers silent on the soft, pine needle-carpeted floor.

  There was a soft, plaintive meow behind her, and she knew instinctively that it was Mr. Cat. She turned to look back, and slammed right into a hard body, felt firm, steadying arms wrap around her.

  “Hey. It’s okay,” the voice murmured soothingly.

  She blinked up to see Caleb. He was wearing a black T-shirt, the thin fabric molding the lines of his chest so that she could see the curve of his collarbone.

  He ran a hand down her hair, tucking a strand behind her ear.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” he whispered. “I’ll take care of you.”

  She watched as he leaned toward her, his eyes near now. They were like the watchful eyes of a cat, and they were looking right at her, eating her up, as if she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. And maybe she was, because he was bending toward her, so close that she could smell the skin of his neck. It smelled hot, like fireworks, and she couldn’t help herself, not with his warm arm around her back, his fingers toying with the hair at her neck—she just closed her eyes as his firm lips covered hers.

  This was not the tentative kiss of a Benji—no, this was the assured kiss of a boy who knew what he wanted. The way he opened his mouth, and taunted her with the tip of his tongue, making lightning whip through her, causing her knees to buckle so that she clung to him. His will alone held her up.

  His lips wandered to her neck, nuzzling the soft place behind her ear, but they suddenly felt cold, icy, and the little hairs on her arms stood up. She shivered and opened her eyes, squinting.

  A dead rotting zombie Caleb grinned at her—face bloated, lips blue, teeth blackened, skin rotting and peeling off in strips.

  “Penny,” the zombie whispered, reaching for her.

  She screamed.

  And then Penny woke up, breathing hard.

  Penny heard the familiar sounds of family life downstairs: Baby Sam bawling and her father’s voice rumbling, and Teddy yelling that he couldn’t find his Super Ball, the brand new fluorescent yellow one, and had the dumb baby eaten it? It was all so perfectly normal, normal in a way that felt disconnected to Penny, as if the rest of the world was moving right along while she watched from the sidelines.

  “Penny! Breakfast!” her mother called.

  Penny sighed and swung her feet over the bed. She felt hot and sticky, and just a little feverish.

  In the mirror on the closet door, she studied her limp dirty-blond hair, her sunburned cheeks, the slender way her neck rose above her shoulders, almost pretty if she looked a certain way. She remembered Caleb nuzzling that place on her neck and shook her head, startled. Better, she thought harshly, to look at the bruise on her arm where he had grabbed her, the bruise that was fading now, gone a yell
owish-purple. Nearly a week had passed since that single heart-stopping moment on the cliff with Caleb, a moment that had changed her life forever.

  “Penny, I’m not going to call you again!” her mother hollered, exasperation plain in her voice.

  “Coming!” Penny called back, padding across the carpet to find her slippers. For a brief moment her eye was drawn back to the mirror, and that was when she saw him: the dark angry boy, all bloody and full of fury, just waiting to reach out from behind the glass and hurt her bad, make her pay, finish the job this time.

  She gasped in shock, tripping back and banging into the small side table with the porcelain lamp that had been a present from Nana. The lamp teetered and fell and Penny lunged for it, catching it before it hit the floor. She looked back at the mirror fearfully, brandishing the lamp like a weapon in front of her.

  But he was gone.

  “Let’s go,” Mac muttered to himself, leg twitching. He wore a thick bandage on his cheek, a souvenir from the bat bite. He’d gotten four stitches, and Penny’s dad said that he’d probably have a scar.

  “Shut up, Mad Dog,” Benji teased. The boys had taken to calling Mac “Mad Dog” when they’d heard about the rabies shots Mac also had to have.

  “How long does it take to put on a swimsuit?” Oren demanded, his face looking drawn. Oren had fared better than Mac from his trip to the emergency room on the Fourth. Since he’d thrown up nearly everything he’d eaten by the time he reached the hospital, all he’d gotten was a shot, and then he’d been sent home to spend the next two days in bed, where he threw up some more. He’d lost a few pounds, and Penny figured he wouldn’t be eating clams again anytime soon.

  “It’s not fair,” Teddy said, banging his crutches irritably. “I want to go in the water. I don’t wanna sit around and watch. Who cares if my stupid cast gets wet?”

  “But if your cast gets wet, it’ll melt,” Oren said.

  “And smell,” Mac added.

  “It already smells,” Teddy muttered.

  The voices swirled around Penny, but it was like she wasn’t even there. She was just going through the motions. Putting on a swimsuit and flip-flops. Sitting on the front porch and waiting for her mother to drive them over to the public pool. She didn’t know how she was supposed to be excited to go swimming when all she could think about was Caleb.

  Everything had changed. She had gone through some door and there was no going back. It was like she had been sleepwalking before, and finally she was awake and everything was brighter somehow, the colors sharper. Even the blacktop driveway radiating heat in thick waves reminded her of the hot, stinging touch of Caleb’s skin on hers, the tar smell of his fingers gripping her arms.

  “Hey,” Mac said, nodding toward the Bukvics’ house. “You seen him over there lately?”

  “Uh, no,” Penny said with forced casualness. “Maybe, they’re, like, fighting or something,” she improvised, amazed at how calm she sounded. She added a careless shrug for good measure.

  Becky Albright came running up the block wearing a pink gingham bathing suit and carrying a towel and inflatable floaties. She looked waifish from her bout with food poisoning.

  The sight of the little girl, so innocent, rubbed against Penny like a sliver digging its way under her fingernail.

  “Get lost, Becky,” she said sharply.

  Becky looked startled, tears welling up in her eyes. “But Mom said I could come,” she said, her voice trembling with hurt.

  It was on the tip of Penny’s tongue to say that she couldn’t care less when she realized that all the boys were staring at her with strange looks on their faces. And then Mrs. Carson walked out the front door, Baby Sam on her hip.

  “You kids ready?” her mother asked brightly, her own sleek bikini clearly visible beneath her cover-up.

  Penny sat sandwiched between Benji and Oren in the backseat of the minivan. Their combined boyish scents of dirty sneakers and sunscreen lotion attacked her senses. It was all she could do to close her eyes and feign sleep when she was penned in by the warmth of their bare skin pressing against her. Oren’s curly hair tickled her shoulder, but she held herself still, even when the minivan hit a bump and Benji reached out to steady himself, his elbow glancing off her chest.

  It was with relief that Penny dove into the deep end to cool off all the hot sensations thrumming through her body. She held her breath as she glided across the length of the pool, remembering how she had swum in the creek mere weeks ago. Could she ever swim there again, knowing that Caleb’s blood had soaked into the rocky creek bed?

  She broke the surface, opening her eyes and then shutting them reflexively, the sharp chlorine stinging. She gasped.

  “Are they trying to blind us?” Mac exclaimed, rubbing his eyes.

  “They must have just put chlorine in the pool,” Oren said, blinking rapidly.

  Penny rubbed uselessly at her eyes, trying to rub away the stinging. She opened her eyes a crack, but everything was hazy.

  The kids paddled to the side of the pool and clung to the edge.

  “Let’s play Marco Polo,” Benji said.

  “Yeah,” Zachary agreed. “There are a ton of kids here today.”

  “Yo, anyone who wants to play Marco Polo, head over here!” Mac yelled.

  “I do!” Becky Albright said eagerly.

  “Of course she does,” Penny said sourly, earning a look from Benji.

  The slim, pretty lifeguard who was sitting on a tall chair shouted: “No Fish Out of Water, got it?”

  Fish Out of Water was when you snuck out of the pool, ran around, and leaped back in before the person who was It shouted “Fish Out of Water.” Sometimes kids took terrible spills when they were Fish Out of Water, slipping on wet tiles.

  Mac groaned. “Come on.”

  “No way,” the lifeguard said, with a firm shake of her shining shoulder-length hair. “You stay in the pool or you’re out of here, got it?”

  “I’ll be It,” Penny volunteered, squinting. Her eyes hurt so much from the chlorine that she didn’t much care if she had to be the one to swim around blind.

  “Okay,” Mac agreed.

  Penny closed her eyes and waded in a slow circle, counting to ten in a loud voice. She heard the anxious giggle of the other kids as they rushed to get away from her. Penny paddled around aimlessly, her feet kicking at the water. “Marco!” she called.

  “Polo!” the voices echoed back at her.

  She felt the kids swarming around her, brushing her thighs, her rear end. Someone grabbed her kneecap and she reached for him, but he swam away, her hands catching nothing but water. She circled warily, calling out “Marco!” and trying to gauge the distance by the sound of the shouts coming back to her. Kids shouted “Polo!” but they were farther away now, maybe even at the other end of the pool. She heard Mac and Benji talking to the pretty lifeguard.

  “You’re sixteen?” Mac asked in an impressed-sounding voice.

  “Just last month,” the lifeguard replied silkily.

  “So, you must be like a really good swimmer, huh?” Mac asked, sounding incredibly awkward to Penny’s ear.

  Voices came and went, rising around her and then disappearing as the taunting kids swam away. One voice—was it Oren’s?—seemed to stick in her head, and she swam toward it, into the deep end. She could tell it was the deep end by the way her feet could feel nothing, even when she bounced down toward the bottom. She must be at the very deepest part of the pool, she thought, and then there was that voice again.

  “Polo!”

  “Marco!” she called, feeling certain that she was nearly on top of him now.

  “Polo!”

  She lunged, but all she grasped was water. Frustrated, she paddled around, trying to catch her breath, her feet kicking in a rhythmic motion, and felt someone brush her thigh.

  “Marco!” she shouted.

  A hand snaked around her ankle.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Suddenly, without any warning, firm
hands gripped both her ankles and she was pulled beneath the water. She tried to kick out, but it was useless. Flailing in fear, panic roaring in her ears, she was pulled relentlessly down by the hard hands. She needed to take a breath but couldn’t; her lungs were freezing up. Someone was trying to drown her!

  Still underwater, Penny opened her eyes, the chlorine stinging them brutally. She looked down, and for a moment she saw a ghostly face, strangely distorted in the dark, watery depth of the pool. But it couldn’t be! she thought wildly.

  Caleb.

  Then everything went black.

  When Penny came to, she was lying on the hard tiles, her mother’s nose just inches away from her own. And then she was coughing and spitting up what felt like gallons of water. Someone turned her on her side, and the water kept coming.

  “Thank heavens!” her mother said with a sigh, leaning back on her ankles.

  Penny’s eyes fluttered open, her tongue sharp with the metallic aftertaste of chlorine. The boys were jostling one another to get to her, and the pretty lifeguard was leaning over.

  “Give her some room,” her mother ordered.

  “Caleb!” Penny sputtered, her slender body racked with the force of her coughs.

  “What?” her mother asked, startled.

  “It was Caleb!”

  Her mom looked at Oren, alarmed. “Did you see Caleb? Did you see him in the pool?”

  “No way, Mrs. Carson. And I know what he looks like,” he said in a solemn voice.

  “Oren saved you, Penny!” Teddy blurted out.

  “Thanks,” she whispered hoarsely, meeting Oren’s eyes. He blushed.

  “Any of you kids see Caleb?”

  They all shook their heads in bewilderment.

  “Honey,” her mother said, smoothing Penny’s hair back in a soothing gesture. “Are you sure you saw him? None of the other kids saw him, and I was watching, too.”

  “But I saw him,” Penny began, her lower lip trembling.

  “We didn’t see him, Penny,” Benji said. “And he’s pretty hard to miss.”