Chapter Thirteen. Melanie
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MELANIE
I’m sitting at the table in the model home with Cat—I like to check in on her regularly, even if I have a to-do list a mile long when I get home. And I’m glad I do, because she’s just finished telling me about how Abel Sherman came by and smashed up all her cookies.
“He looks awful,” she says. “Have you seen him? Just awful.” Her eyes are fixed somewhere else, like she’s replaying the whole horrible thing in her mind.
She has a tendency to do that, to fixate.
Cat’s biggest fault is that she likes pressing on a bruise.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve told her, just like my Oma Greta used to tell me, to let sleeping dogs lie.
“He kind of scared me, Mel.” I watch the way her hand moves slowly to the side of her neck to scratch just beneath her ear.
An old habit.
When you love someone with an addiction, you’re always looking for little signs that they might be slipping up.
Cat started drinking hard in high school.
Little spritzers and fruity things we could stomach at first, but it wasn’t long until she graduated to the harder stuff without me.
It got so bad that I would follow her to parties just so I could make sure she made it home safe.
But luckily she met Mark, and he made her laugh, made her feel like she deserved to be happy.
We had a few good years there, the four of us—Mark and Cat, Waylon and me—barbecuing in each other’s backyards, Hannah and Olivia toddling through sprinklers in the grass.
She still had her moods about her, when fun party Cat would veer into sad, self-pitying Cat.
But I was always there to steer her back on course.
Then she got her wisdom teeth pulled. And whatever comfort I was bringing her by being her best friend was no match for hydrocodone. She told me the pills brought her a kind of quiet she’d never known.
After that, she’d disappear on us. We’d go months not knowing where she was, whether she was dead or alive. Then, out of the blue, I’d get a call from the Austin Police Department—Cat asking if I’d bring her some clean clothes or if I could help her out with some money for bail.
Waylon didn’t understand why I stuck by her.
But he didn’t know what we’d been through together, didn’t know the way our souls were intertwined. Blood sisters, Cat used to say. A little inside joke.
Sophomore year, I’d sat alone in the cafeteria.
Oh my God. What is that? Kennedy Claire leaned over my shoulder, pointing at the sandwich my mom had packed for me.
I’d just bitten into it and my mouth was full.
Mama got my favorite bread from the bakery, a hard baguette, soft on the inside, and loaded it with salami, relish, mayonnaise, and provolone cheese.
When she’d handed me my lunch that morning, she lowered her face to mine and told me she wanted me to have a really good day.
I wasn’t having a good day. The hard crust of the baguette must have scraped my gums, because the faintest bit of red blood dragged onto the soft white bread. Of course, Kennedy Claire had smelled it. I was about to be eaten alive. Yet again.
So I just kept chewing, staring down at the flower-printed shirt stretched over my belly, the one my Oma gave me the Christmas prior.
It’s blood, Kennedy Claire said, tone dripping with disgust, in that booming, stage-presence voice of hers. I could feel people turning our way, feel them turning to see what kind of freak bleeds on her sandwich, my ears growing hot.
Ingrid plopped down on the bench beside me and tugged the corner of my brown paper bag. The Little Debbie that Mama had packed slid out, followed by the extra one, the one to make sure I had a really good day. Ingrid looked from the cakes to Kennedy Claire, a mean little smirk pulling at her lips.
Maybe it’s better if she bleeds out, Kennedy Claire said. Before her blood sugar kills her.
The girls around her sniggered.
I didn’t have the courage to look up. I didn’t even have the courage to swallow. The mouthful of sandwich was gluey on my tongue. My Oma Greta told me that God answers every prayer. Sometimes at night, I prayed He’d send me an angel.
I didn’t see her at first. I smelled her.
The cigarettes off her black leather jacket as she reached over me, barging through Kennedy Claire’s school of piranhas, and grabbed the sandwich from my hands.
By the time I turned around, she was already face-to-face with Kennedy Claire.
Everyone was watching now, watching as Cat Dennis took a big old bite out of my sandwich, out of the spot that still had my teeth marks, my blood.
She chewed with her mouth open, inches from Kennedy Claire’s face, close enough that I knew she could smell the salami.
Kennedy Claire recoiled, a hand to her chest.
Damn, Cat said. That’s a good-ass sandwich. She handed it back to me without breaking eyes with Kennedy Claire. Fuck with her again, and I’ll turn your nose sideways.
She didn’t look like an angel, not like one of the porcelain figurines Mama collected, all pastel colors, serene egg-shaped faces, and feathered wings. But I swear, the fluorescent cafeteria lights glowed ethereally through the choppy ends of Cat’s shaggy bob.
For the first time in the recorded history of man, Kennedy Claire was not in command. Her eyes flicked from Cat to Ingrid and back. Come on, Iggy, let’s go.
Then Cat sat down and ate her lunch beside me. That afternoon, and the next and the next and the next. Like an alley cat that won’t stop showing up on your porch once it’s fed. She had claimed me as her own.
“I’ll stay the night with you,” I say to Cat now. Waylon won’t be happy about it. He’s probably already expecting me home, and the kids will be wanting supper. But I can’t take my chances with Cat.
Her hand drops from her neck and she shakes her head, refocusing on me. “I’m fine,” she says. “It just shook me up is all. Seeing Abel Sherman like that.”
“I’m not taking no for an answer.”
“I’m fine, Mel. Really. I can’t have you staying over and Mark and everyone else starting to worry. Seriously. I’m fine.”
I don’t like leaving her upset, but I can see that her eyes are clear, and I don’t smell any alcohol as I bring her in for a hug. “Okay, okay. You call me, you hear? If things are getting to be too much. Anytime. Don’t you do something stupid.”
“I promise,” she says, and I have to believe her.
“I’m proud of you,” I tell her when we say goodbye on the porch.
The sun is just beginning to set as I drive away, along the winding road that traces the river, past the skeletons of homes-to-be.
I don’t realize how tightly I’m squeezing the wheel until I release the tension from my fingers, and they ache for the shape they once were.
As I turn around the bend, the trees are cleared now.
The river opens, and I see it. The well where we used to gather as kids.
And the cave. I keep my eyes forward, refusing to look into the mouth of The Hollow.