Chapter IX. 2007 #2
Her heart sank, fresh tears stinging her eyes as she went to the sink, turned the tap to cold, and placed her hands beneath the water.
She ran her wet hands over her face, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, the coolness a temporary relief.
Brianna’s absence pressed in, the force of it threatening to crush her.
Every heartbeat was a painful reminder that it still animated her.
A reminder she would have to go back to the dining room and spend however many days her father deemed it necessary pretending to reform herself in the image he expected.
Her shoulders hitched as she tried to push her sobs into some subterranean part of her.
“Get it together,” she whispered to her reflection. Later, in the supposed privacy of her bedroom, she could break down, but not yet. Not when there was dinner and Pilates still to get through. If she wanted out of this place, she had to play along.
She was scrubbing at her face with a paper towel when the restroom door creaked open. Camilla paused, her brain tripping over her excuse for being in such an out-of-the-way restroom.
“You’re here. You’re actually here.” Brianna stood in the door, a shy, tight-lipped smile on her face.
She took a single step forward, and then Camilla closed the distance between them, not caring what had happened between them, not caring that Brianna was the reason she was here. She threw her arms around her friend.
“I’m so sorry. I just wanted you to understand. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. It’s like I’m the only one who sees it. How differently they treat us. How they treat me. It’s like I’m completely alone,” Brianna said into her hair. Camilla held her tighter.
“I should have listened to you. It was shitty not to. You were trying to tell me how you felt, and I wasn’t listening.” She pulled away and waved her hand at the room. “And, I mean, you were right after all. Here I am.”
Brianna laughed and wiped at the tears on her own face and then Camilla’s.
“I didn’t think you would get the note. You remember Robin Chatsworth?
She was a year ahead of us in school.” Camilla shook her head, and Brianna continued.
“She was in my Brit Lit class, and we made friends. She’s here, too.
Well, not here, but she works here. Robin said she would sneak it into your napkin, but leadership watches her, too, so I didn’t know if she could pull it off.
Even though she works for them, they don’t trust her.
I mean, they probably shouldn’t because she does things like help me sneak notes into napkins and tell me where the cameras can’t see everything. ”
Camilla wanted to keep talking. Hours and hours of just the two of them, chattering on about nothing and everything, but there would be eyes looking for them soon, and there was still so much she needed to explain.
“I saw them. The Dark Sisters,” she blurted. Brianna’s face went serious. “Twice now. The first time I was sleepwalking, so I thought maybe it was a dream, but the second time, I was awake.”
“Where?”
“At that weird tree. Where we had the party. The one that looks like it has chopped-off heads all over the bark. The same place they found Tania Fullerton.”
“They told us about that. Used it as an example for what happens when we falter in our walk with Christ.” Brianna shook her head, her lip lifted in disgust. “As if she was a lesson instead of a person.”
“My mom has seen them, too. She says she just imagined it, but Vera was trying to get her to admit it,” Camilla barreled on, not caring if any of it made sense.
She needed to get all of it out. “I think it has something to do with why she doesn’t want me to go to the Purity Ball.
I overheard her talking to Vera about that, too.
She’s convinced something bad happened, and that it will happen again.
It’s all…” She tried to order her thoughts, organize them into some semblance of logic, but they shifted and bent, one idea bleeding into the next, and she looked hopelessly at Brianna. “I’m not explaining it right.”
“Okay. Tania Fullerton died at the same tree where you saw the Dark Sisters. Your mom saw them too but doesn’t want to talk about it.
Not even with Vera. So the Sisters—whatever they are—are real, and maybe they’re the reason the women in Hawthorne Springs get sick.
And the Purity Ball. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just a ceremony, right?”
Camilla flushed. She’d forgotten she wasn’t the only girl who hadn’t participated in the Purity Ball.
Brianna technically hadn’t either. She’d moved to Hawthorne Springs after most girls usually participated, so maybe her parents didn’t see the point in having their teenage daughter involved with something meant for twelve-year-old girls.
Or maybe there was some unspoken rule that kept her from it in the same way it kept her family in that back pew.
“Right.”
Suddenly, Brianna grimaced, her hand flying to her chin as a thin line of blood trickled from her mouth. She shouldered past Camilla to the sink where she bent and spat, the spray a delicate pink.
Camilla listened to the sound of something clattering against the sink’s porcelain. She took a step forward, concern forcing her into movement. “Brianna?” Another step. “Should I find someone to help?”
Brianna did not move. Her hands gripped the edges of the sink, her head dipping toward the basin as she shuddered once. Twice.
Shuffling forward, Camilla looked past Brianna and into the sink. There, nestled against the drain, was a single molar.
Throughout her life, Camilla had known fear.
The bend and shape of its many forms. The childish fear of the dark; the monster lurking under her bed, ready to snatch her ankles if she didn’t jump far enough.
The fear of being caught doing something she shouldn’t and the punishment that came as a result of it.
And then the Dark Sisters. This new awareness that the nightmare from which they came had somehow found its way into the waking world.
Looking at Brianna’s drooping form, at her bloodied tooth in the sink, she came to know fear in a different way.
Loss had never truly touched her life, but she felt the vast finality of that fear. She did not think she would survive it.
Grasping Brianna’s shoulder, Camilla pulled her backward. With her left hand, she gripped Brianna’s chin. “Let me see,” she said.
“Don’t.” Brianna tried to pull away, but Camilla held her firm, the blood now as much a part of her as it was of Brianna.
“Damn it, Brianna. Let me see.” Her voice shook, but she tightened her hold. She needed to see it. To confirm what she already knew was true. Even if it meant more pain than she’d ever known. Fresh tears spilled down Brianna’s face, her gaze locked on Camilla’s as she opened her mouth.
Sores covered the insides of her cheeks. Her gums and tongue swollen with the weeping, blood-filled sacs. The tooth’s empty socket was blackened, and whatever rot had taken hold spread upward in thin strands.
Camilla dropped her hands. “How long have you been sick?”
“Since I got here. I’ve been able to hide it because it’s inside my mouth, but I don’t feel right, Camilla.
And I didn’t want you to know. Didn’t want you to be scared, but I knew I couldn’t keep hiding it.
” She drew in a shuddering breath. “At nighttime, I can feel it. Something inside me. Eating. And I keep thinking about Tania Fullerton. What if what happened to her, happens to—”
Camilla crushed Brianna to her. She didn’t want to hear the rest. Brianna couldn’t die. There was no world without her best friend in it.
“You’re going to be fine. We’re going to figure this all out, and you’ll get better, and you’ll get out of Hawthorne Springs and go to law school, and one day, when you’re a big hotshot lawyer, I’ll hire you to be the divorce attorney for my first marriage.”
Brianna hiccupped a laugh into Camilla’s chest. “I’ll charge you double my fee.” They stood there, locked together, the stolen minutes slipping by too quickly as Camilla let herself ignore the truth for a bit longer.
Her father may have used the Dark Sisters as a parable—a warning for girls and women of Hawthorne Springs to stay on the straight and narrow—but now, Camilla understood they were much more than that.
Demons. Ghosts. Witches. Whatever they were, they were the source of the illnesses in Hawthorne Springs.
The reason Tania Fullerton had impaled herself on that same tree. The reason Brianna was sick as well.
Resolve settled, hard and insistent in her chest. They had to get out. She had to get them out. She wasn’t going to let what happened to Tania Fullerton happen to Brianna.
“Listen, we’re going to get out of here, and I’ll get my mom to talk to me and tell me what she saw. If the Dark Sisters are real, if they’re the reason for this sickness, we can figure out a way to stop them,” Camilla said.
Brianna lifted her head and gestured to the room around them. “This place is locked down. There’s no getting out of here.”
Camilla cocked an eyebrow and grinned. “Sure there is. We’ll just do what we do best.” She stepped back to the sink, lifted Brianna’s tooth, and tossed it in the trash. “We’ll be good.”