Chapter Twenty-One
April 2, age 11
Four months after my nightmarish eleventh birthday party, I was desperate to make the girls in my class like me. Instead, I faced my first experience with a tomb.
Even in my innocence, I was no stranger to tension. Our trailer in the woods was no castle on a cliff. My parents kept the yard clipped and clean. They took pride in what they owned. But we were not well-liked, nor were we disillusioned as to our status in the community.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I could hear the frown in my mom’s voice. She brushed my hair into a slick ponytail on top of my head. I winced as the teeth of the brush pressed firmly into my tender scalp. It was a bit embarrassing to still have my mother doing my hair in middle school. Other girls had learned how to do their hair, but I struggled to keep my arms high and twist the band tight enough to get the desired result. I flinched as the brush once more yanked a bit too hard. My mom clicked her tongue, saying, “It hurts to be beautiful.”
“I’m ready to go,” I said, getting down from the chair. I dipped for the duffle bag resting beside the bed.
My mom crossed her arms as she looked between me and the bag I’d packed.
“Yes,” I assured her. “Chelsea’s never invited me to one of her parties before, but all the cool girls get to go. I’ve heard her mom is really funny. She plays pranks and reads scary stories.”
“Is Kirby going to be there?”
I fidgeted. My mother wasn’t fond of my only friend since Kirby’s parents didn’t go to church. My mom permitted the friendship if only because it had been the single shred of kindness in the wake of my traumatizing eleventh birthday. As it stood, Kirby was only allowed to come over to my house because the visits could happen under good Christian supervision.
“No. Kirby isn’t cool, either. Maybe if I get into the group, we’ll both get in.”
She tapped her fingers rhythmically on her bicep as her frown deepened. She looked off into the corner of the room and stared into the empty nothingness for a long time. “What if we make a bargain?”
I looked over my shoulder to see the empty chair that had drawn her attention. The stitched bunny my mother had made sat upright, ears flopping to the side. It stared back at me while my lips turned down. I looked up at her.
Reluctance and hesitation scratched at me. She wasn’t the sort to strike deals. This home was a dictatorship under God’s mighty plan with my mother as his mouthpiece, not a democracy. I felt the slumber party slipping through my fingers as I scanned her face for signs that she was about to take one of my first exciting social experiences away from me. “What sort of bargain?”
“Call me,” she said. “Tonight after dinner, give me a call. If you still want to stay over, I’ll drop off your bag. If you don’t call, I’ll assume you want to be picked up, and I’ll come get you.”
I was certain I didn’t hide the confusion from my expression. She wasn’t trying to run my life from behind the curtain. She looked genuinely concerned.
“Why?” I asked.
She looked to the rabbit in the corner again for a while, and the room grew heavy with the weight of unspoken sorrow. I wasn’t sure how much time passed before she said, “When I was in high school, I knew a girl who was really excited to go to a party. She was pretty unpopular. Weird parents, weird girl, didn’t get asked out very often. They gave her a bottle and told her it was beer, but it wasn’t. One of the boys had peed in the bottle, and they watched her drink it.”
I watched my mom while she stared at the rabbit. She’d settled into her cold, numb trip down memory lane.
Somehow, I knew that she wasn’t telling a story about some other girl.
“Okay,” I said quietly, because there was nothing else I could do. I was certain that it wasn’t my place to touch her or comfort her. I wasn’t old enough to know how to help, but I understood this was a memory best left in disconnect. “I’ll call.”
My father grunted something or other as we walked past where he sat with the newspaper in the kitchen, and I muttered an equally insincere goodbye. It was a twenty-minute drive from our trailer outside of town to Chelsea’s house on the edge of town. She was one of the only other classmates who lived on the outskirts of town, even if her neighborhood was nestled within city limits.
My mother’s discomfort grew as we pulled up to Chelsea’s house.
“It’s so pretty.” I grinned in admiration at the Victorian-style house with enormous, white wooden pillars. The mature tree in the front had a tire swing, just like in storybooks. It was a far cry from our single-wide mobile home. “It looks like one of those old houses from a rich person movie!”
“It is,” my mom agreed, peering through the windshield at the three-story home.
“I’ll call,” I said again as I closed the car door. She waited in the driveway to ensure that Chelsea’s mom was indeed home before she pulled away.
What ensued was everything I’d imagined and more. Tiny snacks were served on trays. Festive, kid-friendly cocktails came out of the kitchen while we played a scavenger game filled with riddles and questions. I got to explore Chelsea’s home in a round of sardines, where all seven of the girls at the party set off to find the elected girl in hiding. If you found her, you needed to crawl into the space beside her and remain quiet as the second, then the third, then the fourth one discovered you. The last one to find the pack of sardines was the loser. She had a basement, three stories, and the sort of dusty A-frame attic filled with cobwebs and antiques that I hadn’t thought truly existed.
I was the only person who’d never been to Chelsea’s house before, so I, of course, was the last to find the canned sardines.
“Do I hide next?” I asked.
Chelsea exchanged looks with a few of the others. They nodded before she asked, “Do you want to see something cool?”
Yes, I did want to see something cool. Chelsea announced to her mother that we were headed to the woods behind the house, which I found fascinating. She didn’t ask permission, merely disseminated information. Her mother waved a supportive goodbye as seven little girls marched out of the door, water bottles in hand. Chelsea carried flashlights, a hammer, and cheese sticks in her backpack.
“Where are we going?” I asked. I was no stranger to the woods, but something about this felt different. My trees were safe. The trails, bushes, plants, and mushrooms near my house were my friends. Besides, I was never truly alone when I wandered outside near my house. My vibrant imagination kept me company in the form of a delightfully pretty fox. I was relatively certain there were no foxes near Chelsea’s house.
We rounded a corner at the end of her street and began to walk down a poorly maintained gravel road. Grass sprouted up from the center. A tree had fallen toward the road’s entrance, and though its leaves had died and it had begun to rot, no one had pushed it out of the way. I wondered how long it had been since someone had driven down this road. It was a relatively warm day. While we weren’t yet in the sweaty grips of summer, our collective uniforms were the jeans, T-shirts, basketball shorts, and backward hats of middle schoolers.
“You’re going to love it,” said McKenna. She was the first in our grade to get a boyfriend. I’d never been allowed to go to her house, as her parents’ reputation as barflies did little to impress my deeply religious family. “There’s a haunted house in the woods.”
I couldn’t keep the tingling excitement from my voice as I repeated, “We’re going to see a haunted house?”
There was a magical part of me, the part that had sat on the bed and listened to my mother read stories of secret worlds in wardrobes and kind wizards and important quests, that itched at the possibility that there might be something fantastic hidden just beyond a neighborhood, something that could be discovered by an intrepid crowd of voyaging friends. Maybe Narnia awaited us. Or maybe I’d get to show the other girls that I had an arctic fox for a friend, and they’d think I was cool after all.
Chelsea nodded as she marched us forward. “I’ve shown most of them the house before! It’s really freaky. It’s abandoned.”
“Is it safe?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if it was a question with a real answer. Nothing haunted was ever truly safe. I hadn’t been allowed to watch horror movies, but McKenna had told us the plot of a rated-R movie where a family had moved into a house with ghosts, and we’d listened in rapture around the lunchroom table.
“Sure!” Chelsea said without looking over her shoulder.
They all turned to look at me with poorly concealed anticipation as we rounded into view of the home. The weathered gray wood of a two-story home sat at the end of the driveway. It was old, but not in the fancy way that Chelsea’s home had been old. There was something forlorn about the farmhouse and its thin, splintering pillars. The windows had been boarded up with planks that matched the ancient home around it. The thistles, tangled rose-briar, and wild grasses nearly covered the ground-floor windows.
“It’s all planked up,” I said.
Chelsea nodded. “The door at the back is open. We come here a lot.”
“Have you been inside?” I asked.
They exchanged looks again. I thought I caught a giggle, but took it for excitement over our shared adventure.
“It’s really cool inside,” Chelsea promised.
“So you’ve been in? How many times?” I asked as we picked our way through the grass. Thorns and brambles tore at my legs, and I wished I’d worn long pants. I swatted at an itchy bug as I followed our leader.
“It’s so cool,” McKenna said, echoing Chelsea’s assertion. “You’ll love it.”
We kept to the house’s perimeter, and I saw what she meant. The back door had a single large board on hinges. It had been padlocked, presumably by whoever owned the house.
“Are we trespassing?” I asked. I knew the word from the signs my father had hung on all corners of our property. While this particular home lacked the large black-and-red posters, the padlock told me that someone had made painstaking efforts to keep visitors out.
“Of course,” Chelsea said, “but no one’s going to find out. No one comes out here.”
“Then why do they need a lock?”
She shrugged, which I understood. These were the sorts of mysteries that would probably never have answers. I took a step away from the group of girls to peer at the windows on the second floor. They were too far from the ground to require the same boards and protections as the ground floor. I was about to point out that there was a stained-glass picture of a rose when Chelsea called out.
“You’re first, Marlow.”
The buzz of enthusiasm vanished. Worry replaced anticipation as I looked at her. “You want me to go in first?”
“Yup,” McKenna agreed. She looked to the others, and they all nodded along. “It’s like…what’s that word for when you’re new to a club?”
“Initiation,” Chelsea said, handing me a flashlight from the backpack.
“Right,” McKenna confirmed. “Initiation. It’s your first time here, so you lead the pack.”
Something wasn’t right. I fought the urge to take a step backward. I wrestled with the cowardly voice that told me to run.
This is what it’s like to have more than one friend , I told myself. It’s just scary because it’s new.
I took the flashlight from Chelsea and leaned around them to see in through the wooden board that stood ajar, padlock open.
McKenna opened the board wider and the fear became a mist, filling my lungs and seeping out through my pores. I swatted at another bug that bit into my skin, but couldn’t tear my eyes from the tiny door at the back of the house. While the board covered the entrance to the outside, a thin atrium ran to the original detailed wooden door that separated us from the haunted house. Though the frame remained intact, the bottom panels had been punched out, leaving only a black hole that led into the belly of the home.
“You…want me to go first?” I asked again, hands clammy as I adjusted my grip on the flashlight.
“Just crawl through the hole,” Chelsea said. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Don’t.
This time, the voice in my head didn’t sound like it belonged to me at all. I whipped around to the trees, but no one was there. My fear had taken on sentience. I shoved it down as I looked at the others, all smiling and nodding.
“And you’ve been in there before?”
“It’s so cool inside,” McKenna repeated.
They aren’t answering your question because they’ve never been inside.
I whipped over my shoulder once more, heart thundering in my ears. The adrenaline made me begin to shake. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt the sudden urge to cry. I extended my flashlight to Chelsea as I attempted to hand it back to her. “I don’t want to go inside,” I said.
Chelsea made a face.
McKenna’s eyes may have stuck near the back of her head for how aggressively she rolled them at me. “I told you she wasn’t cool enough to go in,” she said.
“You were right,” Chelsea agreed, with the others muttering similar disappointments.
“No,” I protested weakly. “I can…”
A man’s voice in my head spoke again.
Marlow, please listen. Do not go in.
I swallowed down the fear lecturing me from the most insecure parts of my subconscious. I reminded myself that there was no such thing as ghosts. I was being a big baby. They said it was really cool inside, and they’d be right behind me.
The voice in my head begged me thrice to stop, but I stepped up to the door. I looked over my shoulder, wiping sweat from my brow. It wasn’t sweat of heat, but the physical manifestation of nerves that I couldn’t contain. The slumber party of girls looked on expectantly.
We’d had a wonderful day. They’d fed me snacks, we’d gone on a scavenger hunt, we’d played sardines, and now they were showing me a special secret. I was one of them. I wasn’t going to ruin it by being a coward.
I hoped my swallow wasn’t audible as I stepped over a thicket of sprawling weeds and planted a foot into the atrium. I looked at them again. “Are you coming?”
There was an odd, gluey quality to the way their gazes stuck to each other’s.
“We can only go through the door one at a time,” Chelsea said, eyes on McKenna.
I looked at the black hole that gaped like a screaming mouth crying for me to stay out of its insides. She was right. There was only room for one of us to fit at a time. I nodded, ignoring their grumbles about how long it was taking me to move forward. The second I stepped into the atrium, the temperature changed. There were no windows for sunlight to seep through. The chilly air made the hairs on my legs stand up.
“Go on,” McKenna urged. “We can’t go in until you’ve gotten through the door.”
In hindsight, I knew exactly what they were doing, even in the moment. I felt it deep in my bones, ringing through my thoughts, aching in my gut, though I forced my instincts to be silent. The evidence had been splayed out like a neon sign telling me that they were six sneaky bitches, and I was a lonely fool who wanted friends.
I’d barely squeezed through the pitch-black hole punched into the door when the board slammed closed behind me.
In the second it took me to crawl back through the opening and sprint down the short span of the lightless atrium, they’d secured the padlock. I didn’t have the space for logic. Even if I had known that a shut padlock meant they couldn’t let me out even if they wanted, I only had one tool at my disposal, and it was my fear.
I didn’t waste any time with polite inquires or teasing calls to the girls who had posed as friends.
Panic was the only thing I knew.
I dropped all pretense of friendliness as my fists began to pound against the large, flat plank that had locked me into a perfectly dark, cold prison. I used the butt of the flashlight and the heels of my hands to beat the plywood with every ounce of strength I possessed. I screamed for them to let me out, begging them to open the door.
Adrenaline and frenzy suffocated me as their fading giggles floated through the door. I was dimly aware of sharp, horrible pain in my hands. I was sure that if I looked at them, I would see blood and splinters in my chewed-up palms. I choked on my tears as I screamed again and again and again.
Marlow, you need to breathe .
I didn’t need to breathe. I needed to tear my way out. I needed to escape.
Marlow, calm down or you’re going to pass out .
I didn’t need to calm down. I was going to die in here. It was dark, and it was haunted, and it was full of zombies and rabid animals and ghosts and horrible monsters that would gnaw the flesh from my bones and drink my blood and drag me into the basement where I’d never be seen or heard from again.
I rammed my entire body into the plank and cried out against the shooting pain as a numbing sensation shot up and down my arm.
You’re going to hurt yourself. Stop and breathe.
“I don’t need to stop,” I yelled at the voice inside my head between choking, smothering sobs. Every breath was like trying to gasp in bubbles of air while deeply underwater. There was no light. There was no escape. There was only the darkness, and the monsters, and pure, unadulterated fear.
Marlow—
“No!” I sobbed. I cried out as the pain in my hands cut through my panic. I struggled with trembling fingers to turn on the flashlight only to see fresh, wet blood dripping onto the wooden floor. I was going to die in here. Everyone who knew where I was had left me for dead. I lifted the shaking puddle of light to two smears of blood where my fists had pounded against the door. I sank against the door, flashlight pointed into the mouth of hell so I could see when the horrid zombies came for me at long last while I cried, and cried, and cried.
“Breathe,” the calm male voice said aloud.
I yelped, dropping the flashlight onto the atrium floor. I fumbled with the light as I grabbed for the torch amidst the debris. I wasn’t alone in the house.
“Who’s there?” I tried to call out, but wasn’t sure that more than a few disjointed, raspy syllables came out through my panic.
A brief moment pulsed between the phantom and me, patient, as if not to rush me. “I’m here. We’re going to take one deep breath. Inhale with me, and exhale. Are you ready?”
The light was all over the place. I couldn’t keep it still enough to remain fixed on the hole. The trembling took over my arms as panic consumed me. I was dizzy, I was choking, and I was going to die.
I’d been certain things couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong.
The unsteady light began to dim, its bright white fading to yellow, then to orange. “No, please no, please,” I begged of the flashlight.
“They gave you one with dead batteries,” said the voice. It wasn’t afraid, or warning, or accusatory. It simply was . “Close your eyes. The flashlight is about to die. Everything will be dark in a moment.”
“Please—”
“Close your eyes,” he repeated.
And because I didn’t know what else to do, I listened. I didn’t want to see the monster before it ate me. I closed my eyes as I tucked my face into my knees and cried with earthshaking force. I wasn’t sure how much time passed before panic surged through me once more as my worst fears were realized. The monster had reached me. My life was over and I was about to be eaten. The pressure of hands on my shoulders verified that this truly was the end.
“One breath in, and one breath out. You are not alone.”
I tried to ask him who he was, but I couldn’t get the words out.
“In,” he said, voice calm, and waited for a long time until at long last, I complied. “And out,” he said. “Good,” he said, gentle, quiet pride in his soft voice. “We’re going to do it again.”
And we did. Inhale, and exhale.
“It’s not safe down here,” he said.
“What’s down here?” I managed to ask now that I was calm enough to speak.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. Still no alarm. No urgency. Every word was picked with soothing intentionality. “We’re going to go upstairs. The windows aren’t boarded. It will be light up there. You can sit and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For your mother,” came his calm reply.
I wasn’t sure who he was or how he knew my mother, but some part of me understood the stranger holding my shoulders was right. My mom would be waiting for me to call. She would come looking for me. I wouldn’t die in here. There was a way out.
“Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “I’m going to get you upstairs, but you shouldn’t see what we’re about to walk through.”
“What’s down here?” I asked again, nausea piggybacking onto my fear as my stomach twisted. I knew the answer. I knew that ghouls tore their way through the soil and ate children. I knew that demons possessed women in white dresses and crawled across the ceiling like crabs. I knew that messages were written in blood by ghosts and that haunted houses had gateways to Hell.
“It doesn’t matter,” he repeated. I felt a thumb brush over my cheek as he wiped at my hot tears. His hand was so much colder than the warm summer day. Even despite the chilly, sunless air in the house, his fingers felt several degrees cooler. “Keep them closed. I’ll carry you up. Are you ready?”
I didn’t see any alternative. If I said no, I’d remain in the ink-dark atrium with the rusty nails and broken glass. Maybe the man speaking to me was a murderer, though he didn’t sound like one. Even if I was about to be killed, it didn’t seem worse to be killed by him upstairs than eaten in the atrium by the frothing, feral animals, or the dripping, decaying skin of the undead that would tear me limb from limb if I remained. I couldn’t bring myself to verbalize my answer, but he seemed to sense my response. I tucked my face against a shoulder as arms slipped under my knees and behind my back. I left the useless flashlight on the floor as weightlessness overtook me.
True to my word, I didn’t open my eyes.
I expected the squeaking of boards as the man carried me, but we ascended the stairs silently. I felt the light before I saw it.
“I can stay for a minute longer,” he said, “but you won’t be able to see me when you open your eyes. It isn’t time for you to know my face. Not yet.”
He set me down gently in a large room. A moth-eaten quilt remained on the ornate brass-posted bed. Family photos hung on the walls. A fur was mounted on the coatrack in the corner of the room. I looked about the room at the armoire, the chest, the desk, my eyes landing finally on a stained-glass window that overlooked the overgrown yard where a handful of my classmates had stood and laughed only minutes before.
“Are you real?”
“It hurts me that this happened to you,” was all he said.
I knew my face was still puffy and stained with salt. I stared down at my hands and wasn’t surprised to see they were swollen, red, and dripping with fresh blood. I sniffled as the dull throb from my wounds reached me. I looked in the direction of the voice, even if there was nothing to see.
“Why did they do this?” I asked. I didn’t know why I would ask my imaginary friend, but even if my mind had made him up, he was a grown-up, and he seemed nice. Grown-ups were supposed to know things. Maybe he was the part of my mind that knew things.
“This isn’t the first time people have been cruel, and it won’t be the last. Like calls to like, Marlow, and it will draw them toward each other and push them from you. The ones who did this to you are painfully human. They have the same goals, the same aspirations, and will lead similar, mundane lives.”
I didn’t like the implication that it was human nature to do something like this. I was human, and I would never have done this. I didn’t have to be an adult to know how dangerous it was to lock someone in a haunted house with monsters and glass and crazed, wild wolves. They had tried to kill me, even if they’d thought it was a funny joke.
“Thank you,” I said to him.
“Your mother will come,” the man said. “Make me a promise.”
I looked in his direction with both fear and confusion.
“When you’re taken down the stairs, close your eyes again.”
“What’s your name?” I asked, knowing that it would be useless to try to ask him what horrors remained downstairs. I no longer wanted to know. I would sit in the light of what was left of the day. I would look at the stained-glass rose. I would explore the time capsule of fur coats and old letters and abandoned trinkets.
“You don’t need me yet,” he said. “For a few more years, enjoy your time in the forest and playing with the fox in the woods.”
“You know about the fox?”
I could almost hear the sad sound of a smile in his low, quiet exhale. “I do,” he said. A moment later, invisible arms gathered me into a hug, and I was overcome with the fresh scent of the forest. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said.
And though I continued to try to speak to my imaginary friend, no further answers came.
I walked from room to room to see if he was hiding around the corner, but there was no one to be found. No evidence that anyone had been here but me. And if my imagination had helped me get upstairs, away from the darkness and into the light, then it had helped me in my time of need. I said a quiet prayer as I thanked my guardian angel for helping me escape the dark, scary basement, and I settled in, knowing it would be a while before I was found.
I read old letters in dense cursive writing marked with dates from before my great-grandma was born. I picked up a hand mirror and looked at my tearstained face. I picked through the mildewy old clothes as I looked for treasures, knowing I had nothing better to do. My stomach grumbled as dinnertime came and went. Though the upstairs had unboarded windows and natural light, I knew that I’d only have a couple more hours before these rooms and halls were as dark as the basement.
I wished the man would come back, but no matter how I tried to conjure him again, he wouldn’t come. Maybe if my imagination was this good, I’d be able to share it one day. I could write stories about mean girls and a brave heroine. I could tell magical tales of the brave, secret friend who helped her when she felt alone. I could grow up and fix everything, writing the sorts of fantasy stories that my mom had read to me in my books. In my fairy tales, no one would be stuck in a house. And if they were, the enemies who’d trapped them would be dealt with.
I wondered if my story would have a lion eat them, or a bus hit them, or a sickness sweep over the school where they all threw up so much that their stomachs ended up outside of their bodies and on the floor.
Then I smiled as I thought of a better end to the story.
I’d make the popular girls unimportant. Everyone would realize that the uncool girl was interesting, and pretty, and fun. And the characters in the book like McKenna and Chelsea would not have friends, or happy lives, or like who they were, because they knew the heroine was the true best person in the world, and that they were wrong and remorseful for hurting her feelings and treating her like zombie food.
As the sun set, red and blue lights filtered through the grimy upstairs window and flooded the house. I ran to the window and looked at three police cars and my mom’s small green car. Cracks and splinters erupted as boards were torn from their hinges. Shouts and exclamations filled the basement. There was the static and clicking of orders, of alarm, of policemen as someone cried my name. I turned over my shoulder at the sound of feet thundering up the stairs.
I was too alarmed to say anything as a man with a mustache found me. “I’m with the police,” he said. “You’re safe. We’ve got you. Your mom’s outside.”
Close your eyes.
And I did. I squeezed my eyes shut as the man scooped me up. I kept them tightly sealed as the creaks of wood and the popping of boards filled the air. I knew there were many people in the house, and that I didn’t need to see any of them. I kept them shut so tightly that stars burst on the insides of my eyelids. I hadn’t realized I was gripping the back of the policeman’s uniform until he began to lower me outside of the house.
I opened my eyes to my parents. My mother’s face was so much like the one looking back at me in the handheld mirror upstairs: puffy, red, and stained with tears. She crushed me in a hug that was only broken when a woman in uniform had her carry me to the back of an ambulance. They made my hands sting as they poured a burning liquid over them and bandaged them up. They told my mom I needed to go to a hospital, and my mom agreed.
The doctor would give me many shots. One for rabies, one for tetanus, and a few others I didn’t understand. They’d look in my eyes with bright lights, in my ears, and listen to my chest. I wasn’t a child, but I wasn’t big enough to understand half of the words. I didn’t know what an overdose was, but I knew about drugs, and I knew about death.
In the days following the slumber party, I stayed home from school. We heard about the abandoned house on the news, and about the little girl rescued from a well-known drug den. The mattresses on the ground floor of the house had the bodies of two missing teens.
My mom was furious, and rightfully so. Chelsea’s mom was equally furious. Even McKenna’s mom was in agreement. I was the victim, and the girls were in trouble. And while the principal and parents saw that I was worthy of justice, eleven-year-old girls saw things a little differently. I’d gotten them grounded for the rest of the year. They were kicked off the basketball team. I’d ruined their lives. And for that, I’d pay the price.
For the rest of the year, they played a game called Marlow Is Invisible.
They wouldn’t speak to me when I tried to see if everything was all right between us. They pretended they couldn’t hear me. They’d get up and move if I sat beside them. And I could only cry myself to sleep so many times before my parents decided that I needed to change schools. What had happened to me was bad in the best of lights. The ripples that echoed through my life following the haunted house showed the scars that wouldn’t heal, no matter how many elders prayed over me, or how many Bible studies I attended.
It was a month before I was in the car with my mom on the way to another doctor’s appointment in order to ensure I hadn’t contracted anything bad from my time in the haunted house.
“Mom?” I asked.
She didn’t look at me while she maneuvered her car into the hospital parking lot and began searching for a spot. She’d had to take the day off work to get me to my appointment, and the air between us was tight and strained. “Mmm?”
I swallowed and looked at the fading scabs on my hands as I asked, “Why did they make her drink pee? The girl at that party?”
My mom stiffened. She wordlessly finished her search and eased the car into a space. She put it into park and continued to stare out the windshield for a long time. She turned it off and we listened to the ticking of the engine as the summer day consumed the car, yet she remained motionless. At long last, she said, “Because she was different, Marlow. And people don’t like things that are different.”