The Bargaining (10 page)

“Penny. Um, Warren,” I answer, my own last name escaping me for far too long.

“Penny, I don't know you really well. I mean, I know that you just moved here, and that you're living in a house nearby or you wouldn't be shopping here. And I know that your friend over there already hates me.”

“Stepmom,” I say.

He smiles at me for the first time, and a single dimple creases the corner of his lip.

“But I think you should let me hang out with you some night,” Miller says.

“Why?” I ask, my throat feeling suddenly constricted.

He releases the paper towels and walks to a refrigerator case lining an entire wall of his family's store. He pulls out the largest bottle of water they sell and hands it to me without answering my question. “If your new place is anywhere around here, your tap isn't going to taste very good.”

“Oh, well, it's not near anywhere. It's out in the middle of the woods. There's no one living for, like, a thousand-mile radius around that place.”

But you already know that, I guess.

I trail off for so many reasons, but mostly because now this Miller guy with the burnt red hair is staring at me. Hard. Like he can hear everything I'm thinking.

“Eggs,” April says, her arms full of spray bottles and roles of silver tape and pads of pink Post-it notes and a bucket with a mop and a broom tucked under one arm and a bucket of paint and supplies tucked under the other.

She looks at Miller, then at me, then back at Miller. “And toilet paper,” she says firmly, like she's scolding one of us. Maybe both of us.

I break from Miller's stern gaze first, then grab a package of two dozen rolls of toilet paper, feeling embarrassed and pissed for being embarrassed over nothing.

“Don't have eggs,” Miller says, flipping a switch and ­showing April the tiny dimple in the corner of his mouth he showed me just a minute ago. “But there's a grocery store called Maggie's just a quarter mile up the road. Might even find your coffee filters there.”

“Guess that's something we're going to have to get used to, Penny. No more life in the big city.” I barely hear her. I just set the toilet paper down beside the register, give the guy with the burnt red hair I've inexplicably managed to offend an awkward wave good-bye, and walk straight out the door, the tiny bell singing me farewell before I'm standing in the early morning mist. I scroll through my phone and pull up Rob's number.

“Are you on your way back yet?” he asks.

“Fifty-eight more days, but I'm not counting or anything,” I say.

He waits because he knows there's more. He's the only person in my life who waits.

“She should just leave me here.”

He waits.

“Like, after the house is ready to sell. She should just pack up and leave me.”

“That's what you want, huh? For her to leave you there.”

“Why not? It's not like I fit anywhere else.”

“I think Dad would probably wonder after a few days. He says hi, by the way.”

“I'll bet.”

“Seriously. He told me to tell you the next time we talked.”

Because he can only afford the time to call one of his kids.
This is what I don't say. It's not Rob's fault.

He's quiet for so long, I start to wonder if the call dropped. Then he says, “She's not going to punish you just because you don't know how else to punish yourself.”

Now it's my turn to wait.

“Look, I'm going to tell you something, but it's going to be the only time I tell you because it has to do with my dad, and I don't like to talk about him because he's a dick. But I guess you need to hear it, so just listen and don't say anything, okay?”

I don't say anything.

“I know you're going through things. I'm not even going to pretend I understand. But . . . just try not to make my mom do the dirty work, okay? I already did that to her once. After my dad left. She always says it's because they married so young, but I thought it was because of me. I didn't understand that he just didn't want to be an eighteen-year-old dad. Anyway, Mom's the one who didn't quit on me, even though I'm sure she wanted to a few times when I got older and she
got tired of doing it all on her own. It's not her fault we can't figure out how to be mad at ourselves.”

The jingle behind me tells me that April is done with her shopping and ready to get on with the housework.

“Call me again,” Rob tells me.

“When?”

But he hangs up, and I consider the invitation an open one.

7

I
CAN HEAR
R
AE SCUFFING
her heels behind the equipment shed, and I know this is my last chance to walk away. I could pretend I got the place confused. I thought we were meeting by the track or the parking lot. I thought it was tomorrow. I thought it was yesterday. But I'm here, and my feet are moving me down the path, and I can hear my own false comfort falling from my lips, landing at the feet of Melissa Corey.

I won't walk away. Girls who are weak walk away and then make up lies later on.

“I didn't say anything, though. I barely even know her.”

“Just . . . talk to her,” I say, knowing it won't do any good.

“But why would I—?”

“Just tell her, and I'm sure she'll calm down. I'm just trying to be
a good friend.” It's as though someone else is forming the words on my tongue.

“Wait, are you mad at me too? Do you actually think—I just sit next to her in chemistry! Can't you just tell her I didn't do it?”

When we round the corner, I see Rae. She's wearing her sympathetic face.

“I didn't say anything about you. I swear to God. I mean, I don't even know you—”

Rae looks at her pityingly. “I know. Which is why it's just so hard for me to understand. Why would you go talking shit about someone you don't even know?”

Melissa Corey shakes her head swiftly, brown curls slapping her round face as punishment. “I don't know who told you I did, but they're lying.”

“Oooh,” Rae says, and now I know it's begun.

“What?” Melissa Corey is on the brink of panic. Her skinny legs poke out of denim shorts too long to be worn by anyone who would really be guilty of talking shit.

“See, now we really have a problem,” Rae continues.

Now we're both looking at Rae.

She leaves Melissa Corey and walks to my side. “Because Penny's the one who heard you say it.”

Melissa Corey is pale and sweaty. Her hands feel cold and heavy by her sides. I don't know how I know, but I do, and my own fingers are tingling like they might go numb in a second.

Melissa looks at my shoes. “What . . . what did you hear me say?”

But she already knows the answer to that question. And this is when we all know that Rae holds the only important truth between the three of us. No matter what happens now, it will be Rae's words that feed our ravenous actions. Melissa Corey probably knew that the minute she agreed to walk with me behind the equipment shed.

And I knew it even before that.

So when Rae looks at me, silently feeding me the heinous crime Melissa Corey never committed, I eat every last bite of what she offers before taking one, two, three steps away from a trembling girl in long shorts and prove to Rae I'm a true friend.

Thirty minutes later, in the bathroom Rae shares with her mom and her mom's boyfriend, I look for what's out of place and find nothing. The pieces of my face are all there. Until they rearrange and scatter, refusing to show me something recognizable. And when I push my head into the sink and come up for air only after I think my lungs might burst, the face I see isn't mine at all. It's Rae's.

She reaches a bright red fingernail to the glass and taps a steady rhythm to a tune I vaguely recognize.

My sheets are soaked with sweat when I wake up in the middle bedroom of the Carver House, though it takes me a minute to remember that. Two nights in someone else's house isn't enough time to establish a feeling of comfort upon waking, and it's been a while since I felt permanent anywhere.

So when I finally remember I woke up for a reason, I search out the clicking. The needles of a nearby tree branch drag across the windowpane, and I follow their shadows' movement on the wall across the room, the silver light of the moon brightening the scene a little too much for this late at night. I vow that tomorrow I will beg April to get a shade for the window and maybe—just possibly—get a decent night's sleep in these insanely loud woods.

But as I follow the branch's dance across my window, I notice that it's moving with more force behind it than a mere gust of nighttime breeze could provide.

I go to the window and search the ground below in time to see a hand relinquish control of the branch that was tickling my windowpane—a hand attached to an arm leading up to a set of large purple curls pinned to Vargas Girl perfection.

Rae backs into the woods and out of sight.

“No,” I tell her. But I know she's still there, just outside the light of the moon, and she'll stay there until I come out to meet her.

“You don't get to dictate what I do anymore,” I tell her. But I say it softer this time. And I'm already sliding my jeans on, and my boots over my jeans, and my fleece over ­everything.

“You're dead,” I say through gnashed teeth.

“Promises, promises,” Rae sings from somewhere in the dark.

“I'm serious,” I tell the dark.

“That's the problem,” she says from the shadows. “I can't quite trust what you say anymore, you know?”

I could pretend she's not there, but I'm half asleep and too tired to pretend. And it's not like she's going to let me ignore her anyway. The nights are when she's at her best.

I hit every creaking step on the way downstairs, but still manage to slip past April's room on the bottom floor without hearing her wake. I grope my way into the kitchen, squinting through darkness until I make out the tiny square window cut into the back door, its new bolt already in place.

Grabbing a flashlight April must have brought with our meager kitchen supplies, I unlatch the door, catch it before it slams shut behind me, and immediately wrap my arms around me to brace against the night chill that has blanketed the woods. I stare at the tree responsible for tapping me awake and can't find Rae anywhere near it, not that I'm surprised. She wants me to come to her, and so far, she's getting her way.

So I aim the flashlight and walk.

At the base of the tree, I see grooves in the damp ground where shoes might have stood. They look a little small to be Rae's, but it's hard to see anything, even with the yellow glow of the ancient flashlight. It flickers for a second, as though
sensing my disdain with its performance, then sputters back to life.

“Seriously, we couldn't have put a real flashlight on that massive supply list?”

I cast the beam across the trees in front of me, deeper into the woods. I bury the twitch in my stomach that warns me against walking farther out. There's nothing out there but Rae, and she's followed me all the way to this tiny wooded town. I won't let her chase me back to Seattle. Or Phoenix. Or wherever I'm deposited next when even April has exhausted her supply of hope for me.

“I know you're here,” I say softly. I mean to sound commanding, but I end up sounding tired.

“This is stupid, Rae. It's the middle of the night, and I've had enough. Whatever you want, you win, okay? I'm done.”

The bulb in the flashlight fades, blinks back to life, then wastes away, a quiet death. I toss it into the grass by the kitchen door.

Wind slides between the branches of the trees, and the trunk closest to me groans under the weight of what it's holding. I hear a pop in front of me and look up in time to see a branch pull back and snap forward, catching the quickest flash of iridescent skin under the meager light of nighttime.

I stomp forward, no longer caring how much noise I
might make. The trees catch every inch of my clothes and whatever skin I've left bare in my haste to come outside and rid myself of Rae, and dampness soaks the skin I haven't covered. I look up but already know it's not raining. It's the perpetual moisture that hangs low in the air in these woods. And when I notice that I'm panting, I stop moving, finding only now that I've been practically sprinting between trees, my eyes on constant alert for some sign of her. I stand still long enough to pull in three deep breaths and swat away the branches that feel closer than they did a minute ago.