He hopped out of his chair, kissed Kasey on the top of her head, and patted me on the shoulder, which made me squirm. The only thing worse than parents who don’t pay any attention to you is parents who pat you on the shoulder on their way out the door.
He didn’t say good-bye to Mom, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was staring down at Kasey.
“Tell you what,” Mom said.
Kasey looked up, a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“If you can promise me that you’ll use your day planner and write down all of your assignments and let me know in advance when you need help, I’ll help you out with this extra credit.”
Kasey perked right up. “I promise!” she said. “I’ll go get the questions!”
Mom’s face fell. “Oh, Kasey,” she said. “I didn’t mean tonight. Sweetie, there’s just no way I can do it tonight.”
I had to turn away so I didn’t see Kasey’s expression.
“We need to work on our planning skills,” Mom said. It was the kind of thing she would say to one of her underlings at work, but in the sad voice of the disappointed mother.
Mom shot Kasey a regretful look and then walked out. Her footsteps thumped up the stairs, and the bedroom door closed.
It was just my sister and me.
“Hey,” I said. “I grew up in Surrey. Do I count?”
She looked up at me, her eyes heavy and dull.
“Why don’t you go get your questions—”
“I can take care of myself,” Kasey said, shoving her plate away and laying her head down on the table. A fat tear rolled down over her nose and landed on her sleeve.
Feeling stung, I stood up out of my chair and headed upstairs, trying to figure out why that sentence seemed to drill right into me.
Oh, yeah.
It was what I’d said to Carter in the clinic.
I WENT INTO MY ROOM and sat down on the bed, facing the door. I was restless. Part of me wanted to let my sister cry it out. I can’t be Mother Teresa all the time, you know? She didn’t want my help. Fine. Let her work through her issues on her own.
Right. So I wouldn’t look for her.
I sat in silence for a minute.
Okay. I grabbed my camera. Here was the plan—I would go out and take a few pictures, and if I happened to find Kasey, I might talk to her, depending on how I felt at the time.
I slipped the camera strap around my neck and headed out into the hallway, making a lot of noise so she would know where I was.
The dining room was empty.
“Kasey?” I called quietly, stepping into the dark living room.
No answer.
I went back to check the kitchen—maybe she was sitting on the floor in the corner, eating ice cream out of the carton (it’s been known to happen).
Nope. I opened the garage door. “Kase?”
I heard a thump below my feet.
The basement.
I’m no fraidy cat, mind you. I’m very open-minded about snakes, clowns, airplanes, and many other things that scare the bejeezus out of most people.
But I don’t like the basement.
In fact, Mom doesn’t like it either. It’s the one thing we agree on. Going down there is highly discouraged on the basis of Mom’s having found a nest of black widows two years earlier. The spiders were long gone, and the exterminators, who dutifully show up the third Thursday of every month, claim that they’ve never been back, but it’s still off limits. I can’t say I blame Mom. Knowing my luck, I’d find the one black widow strong enough to resist the chemicals. And I’d find it with my bare foot.
The basement door is right down the hall from the kitchen. I stood outside it for a long minute, staring at the doorknob. I really—and I mean really—had no desire to open it and go down those stairs.
But if that’s where Kasey was . . .
I turned the knob and pushed the door open, waiting for an enormous, hairy arachnid to swing down and jump onto my face. Didn’t happen. Maybe they’d all jumped onto Kasey, and the path was clear for me.
I took a step down, flipping the light on and closing the door behind me. There was a single lightbulb glowing pathetically over the stairs, and everything beyond that melted into a smudgy blackness, punctuated by shapes caught in the faint moonlight streaming through one tiny window.
The air was stale and stuffy. It made my head ache the same way a really humid day does. But I didn’t see any spiderwebs in my path, so I kept going.
“Kasey?” I whispered. My voice sounded hoarse.
No answer.
The room was shaped like a U, with a center wall dividing the two sides.
I thought I heard something on the other side of the wall.
“Kasey, are you down here?”
Still no answer, but this time I heard a definite sound. I went around the U—as far as I could go and still be standing in a patch of light.
I’m not afraid of the dark, but I wouldn’t say I love it. I was tempted to turn back. Even if my sister was down here, she clearly wasn’t interested in company.
Besides, who’s to say the noise was Kasey at all? It was probably gophers. Or huge rabid sewer rats.
I was a nanosecond away from making tracks back upstairs when I heard a muffled sniffle.
Even huge rabid sewer rats don’t sniffle to attract their prey.
“Kasey,” I said, trying to sound no-nonsense. “Where are you?”
“Down here,” she said.
“Down where?”
“Under the card table.”
Naturally.
“I have a flashlight,” she said, and a weak yellow spot of light illuminated the cement floor ahead of me. I followed its path to the corner. Then Kasey shined the beam on her own face, which was puffy and wet with tears.
“Come on, Kase,” I said. “Come back upstairs.”
She shook her head furiously. “No,” she said. “I’m never going back up there.”
“Never?”
Her head bobbed in the darkness.
“Where are you going to go to the bathroom?”
She sighed. “I mean it, Lexi.”
“So do I!”
“I’ll use the guest bathroom.”
“That’s upstairs.” I reached over and took the flashlight from her, shining it around the room. “Maybe there’s a bucket around somewhere.”
She sighed a sigh that was way too big for someone who hasn’t even started high school yet.
I decided to give her a second to be alone with her thoughts, so I shined the flashlight around, looking for spiders. Just because we’d made it that far without being bitten didn’t mean they weren’t planning their attack strategy. I kept my eyes out for the shiny, blueberry-like body of a black widow.
I didn’t find one. I didn’t see any bugs at all.
I did find shelf after shelf of everyday items that should have been thrown away long ago. Mom will save anything. She’d even saved the boxes of other people’s rubbish that were in the house when we moved here. Dad and I are much neater, but we know better than to try to toss any of Mom’s precious garbage—excuse me, stuff.
“Lexi,” Kasey whispered, “will you tell me a story?”
A story.
My thirteen-year-old sister wanted to hear a story.
I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn’t know what to say.
She sensed my hesitation. “My brain is stuck. I need to change the channel.”
Her hand grabbed my arm.
“Please,” she whispered.
“A story,” I repeated, hoping she would pick up from my tone of voice that it was a kind of a strange request. “Stories are for . . . little kids.”
“I don’t care. A short one. About anything.”
“Um . . . there’s a girl who lives on a farm in blackand-white, and then one day her house gets caught in a tornado and she wakes up surrounded by midgets and everything is in color.”
“I’ve heard that one,” she said. Her voice sounde
d tired and strained. “And you’re not supposed to say midget. It’s mean.”
“Oh, Kasey . . .”
She started to cry again. “Please, Lexi, please.”
Kasey had been normal once, had done normal kid things. She’d been bold and funny and stood up for herself. And now she was just . . . coming apart at the seams. Sitting under a card table in the basement. Talking to her dolls. Making a request a six-year-old would make.
Maybe I was an enabler. Instead of coddling her, I should tell her to make more friends at school, to do her own homework or take a failing grade. Not stand up for her anymore.
And definitely, one hundred percent, not tell her a story.
“Once upon a time,” I began, surprising both of us, “there was a man and a woman who lived in a little shack in the country next to a river.”
My voice was hard and shaky. I took a deep breath.
Kasey was silent. Afraid to say anything, probably, in case it would make me stop.
But I didn’t want to stop. I felt more of the story welling up inside of me, like a breath that needed to be exhaled. “They were young and poor—so poor that, like, some nights they didn’t have enough food to eat, but they loved each other so much that they didn’t even notice.”
Kasey drew in a quivering breath. I shined the flashlight around, making squares of light as I spoke. I moved the beam so fast that sharp glowing lines seemed to burn themselves into my brain.
“But the man worked really hard, and before long, they were doing well enough to build themselves a house.” I stared at the basement ceiling—wood rafters, some that looked a hundred years old and some newer ones, and crisscrossing rows of metal pipes. “So he built the biggest house in the whole county, big enough to show their neighbors how rich they were. They had a huge oak tree in the front yard and they built a swing on it, and on nice nights they would sit outside and swing together, and when it was cold they lit a fire and stayed inside.”
I could see it so clearly in my head; it was our house and our oak tree. And I could see the man and the woman, in their old-fashioned clothes, walking around, coming in through the front door, sitting in the back room with a fire in the fireplace.
“How did they meet?” Kasey asked.
“They met . . .” My eyes trailed the line of a thin pipe snaking around the edge of the room. “They met in college.”
“How long ago is this supposed to be?” Kasey said. “Ladies in fairy tales don’t go to college.”
“This one did,” I said. “They met in class and they fell in love.”
He was sitting at the desk closest to the door when she walked into the classroom. She was all alone. After class he waited and spoke to her. He asked if she knew where the Remington Building was, and she did, because her father—
“Ummm . . . Lexi?”
I blinked. How long had I been lost in thought? And . . . more important, where was this coming from? I’d never so much as daydreamed any of this before, but as the words formed themselves, it felt like I was telling Kasey the plot of a movie I’d watched earlier that day. The details . . . everything was right there. I just knew all of it.
“They got married . . . ?” she prompted.
The words pushed out of my mouth before I had a chance to think. “So after they’d been married a while and built their house, they had a baby girl. And the mom stayed home to raise her, and the dad worked but spent all his free time playing with her and teaching her about animals and music. And the other kids in the neighborhood were always around—”
“You said they were way out in the country,” Kasey said, almost reluctantly.
“But the kids in town liked the daughter so much they walked miles just to be with her. And she made tons of friends and was everybody’s favorite person to hang out with. She was like a little angel. She wore fancy dresses with bows and lace, and she had blond hair and a round face with cheeks that turned pink when she went out in the cold.”
I could see the girl in my head as clearly as if I were looking at a photo of her. She ran down the upstairs hallway and into what was now Kasey’s room, three little friends running after her. She loved to sit at the window and look out at the lane that led to town, waiting for her father to come home.
“What were their names?”
“Who?” Her question jolted the image out of my mind. The basement seemed to be getting warmer, and what had been the faint beginning of a headache was starting to pound.
“The man and woman.”
“Well, her name was . . .” I gazed around the room, then it came to me. “Her name was Victoria. And the man’s name was . . . Robert.”
“And they all had beautiful exotic green eyes,” Kasey said.
“Why does that matter?” I asked.
“Because I like green eyes, and they’re running out. Soon all that will be left is brown eyes and blue ones.”
“There’s nothing wrong with brown eyes,” I said. “Or blue ones like . . . ours.” But the eyes that popped into my head were Carter’s.
“I know,” Kasey sighed. “But still.”
In my head I saw the little girl dancing down the upstairs hallway. She stopped and turned to look at me.
She did have green eyes.
I didn’t want to admit that Kasey was right. “So . . . where was I?”
“All the girls from town came out to play with me.”
That word—me—swooped in at me, made me catch my breath.
I looked at her. “I never said the girl was you.”
“Who else could it be?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking up at the pipes again. Every time I looked, there seemed to be a new one winding around the room. “It wasn’t you, though.”
But as the picture of the girl faded back into my head, I could see a slight resemblance: the girl had the same soft caramel-color hair as Kasey, and the same sweet, soft eyes—although the girl’s were green, and Kasey’s were blue.
“It’s my story,” she said.
“Yeah, but it isn’t you,” I said.
“How do you know?”
Because I can see her when I close my eyes, that’s how I know. “I just know, okay?”
“I want it to be me,” Kasey said. She clenched her teeth, making her jawbone jut out near her ears. “You don’t have to be a jerk about it.”
I started to stand up.
“Forget it,” she said. “Forget it. It’s not me, okay?”
“All right.” I took a deep breath. “So anyway, when she turned ten years old, the little girl got a beautiful doll for her birthday.”
Kasey fell silent.
One pipe above our heads was covered in small red painted marks, a sloppy job. I couldn’t even tell what the marks were supposed to be.
“And when she took it to school, all the other kids got jealous because they didn’t have anything nice like that. But she loved her doll so much that she talked about it all the time. And eventually she started taking it everywhere, and acting like the doll was talking back to her. And the other kids were so freaked out that they stopped coming to see her. Gradually it got worse and worse.
They were mean to her at school and called her names and stuff.”
The red-painted pipe was so old the surface was flaky, and the end I could see was open, not connected to anything. The other end . . . I followed the pipe with my eyes. It led deeper into the room, back toward the darkest corner.
She came home from school one day, gray and pale, and said she didn’t want to go back. Her mother asked why, but the girl refused to tell. She was ashamed to say that the children in town were making fun of the whole family now—saying the mother was unfeminine for going to college, saying that they were vulgar show-offs for building such a big house for just three people.
“And the kids just got more and more suspicious,” I said. “Pretty soon they started telling everyone in town that the little girl was crazy. That she thought her doll was alive.”
&
nbsp; The doll was her only friend. She sat in her bedroom staring at it, wishing it would wake up and speak to her.
“So one day when she wandered too near the school, all the town kids started teasing her. She ran away, but they chased her and grabbed her doll, and one of the girls took a pair of scissors and cut her hair off.”
“The girl?”
“No, the doll.”
Kasey breathed in sharply. A vicious doll-haircutting was probably the worst fate she could imagine.
“So she tried to stay away from them, and she never took her doll with her anywhere. But the next time they saw her, they chased her home, and she was so scared that she climbed up the oak tree to get away from them.”
“Wasn’t her mom home?”
“No,” I said.
“What happened?”
“The kids saw her in the tree—”
It was like the words were being planted in my brain all by themselves.
I could see it unfolding in my head—the girl climbing the tree, a pack of dusty, rowdy children shouting up at her, making fun of her, telling her she was going to tear her fancy dress.
“And they started . . . yelling . . .”
I forced myself to stop.
These were words Kasey didn’t need to hear. It would just increase the crazy quotient in our house, which, frankly, didn’t need any boosting.
I tore my eyes away from the pipes and spread my fingers flat on the ground. “Then the girl’s mother came home, saw all the rude kids, and scared them away. But first she scared one of them so badly that she peed her pants and none of the other kids ever talked to her again.”
It was a lie. Saying it made my throat hurt.
“Nice,” Kasey said.
The knotted feeling in my chest grew looser.
“Yeah, well, that was . . . was the evil Megan Wiley,” I said. The air in the basement was getting easier to breathe. As I went further from the story in my head, the words came out more smoothly. “And the girl came down, and she and her mom had tea, and it was cool. She went back to school and she was the most popular kid in her grade, because her mom made the evil Megan Wiley pee in her pants in front of everybody.”
“And?”
“And what?” I stared into the corner, where all the pipes seemed to end.