Chapter 5 Above #3
She flashes a smile as she turns to close the door she came out of.
The business next door is a vacuum repair shop, but the door opens on a steep staircase.
She tugs it firmly shut and locks it. “It’s my studio,” she says at my curious look.
“I do most of my painting at home, but sometimes I need more space. Or just to get out of the house.”
“You paint?” I ask.
“Now and then,” she replies.
We both hover, like neither of us is sure how to end the conversation. “You know, I feel like I should apologize,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“For ditching you, I mean,” I say.
“Ditching me?” Understanding blooms. “You mean homecoming.” I nod. She gives a little laugh. “We were kids.”
“Still.”
She considers me. “Do you mind if I walk with you for a little bit?” she asks.
Surprised, I blink. “No. I guess not,” I say. Barry is already anxious to get moving, so I start again, and she falls in beside me. She walks with her head high, attention around her. Wary in a way I’ve never gotten the trick of, despite the steady diet of horror stories I nourish myself on.
“I was thinking about that night, actually,” she says as we walk.
We’d meant to go together, Janie and I, neither one of us having a date—-I hadn’t been asked; she’d made a show of turning down three boys in our grade—-but somehow, we’d ended up in Andrew Hill’s truck instead.
Andrew and Janie in the front, me and Emmie in the back.
Emmie was a grade below us, dressed in a girlish blue frock.
She had enormous eyes, I remember, and a shaky smile.
I didn’t know her well—-she usually kept to the shadow of her more gregarious twin, Liam.
Andrew was a senior that year. And a star.
And you didn’t get in cars with boys, but his little sister was with him, so how bad could it be?
We drove to the old lot where the Franklin Shopping Center had been torn down, after the big mall was built in the town over.
The crust of pulverized beer bottles and stubble of abandoned -cigarettes was proof of just how often it was used for gatherings like this.
Half the football team was there, along with a gaggle of female hangers--on, a random assortment of students, and a few guys who looked too old to be in high school.
Parts of that night are a blur, but moments flicker into focus—-“Aren’t we going to the dance?” I asked, arms crossed tight over me. I’d saved up my allowance for weeks to buy this dress—-off the bargain rack at JCPenney, admittedly.
“Only babies go to school dances,” someone said.
“Yeah, Oddity. Babies,” Janie echoed with a smirk.
And then there was the smeared light of the fire and my one taste of beer staining my whole tongue with a flavor that made me want to retch.
A girl pulling a boy away from the fire, winking when she caught me looking.
Andrew holding court, reenacting the highlights of his greatest plays with an empty bottle as a stand--in for a ball.
Emmie and Janie sitting shoulder to shoulder, between us the skittering flames of the small fire.
“Don’t we look like sisters?” Janie had asked.
An innocent question, except that nothing was innocent with Janie, and that day she was mad at me, and we were the ones who were supposed to be sisters.
But she was right. Two peas in a pod, my mother would have said.
Milky complexions, the hint of freckles on their cheeks, matching red hair—Emmie’s a touch more golden, Janie’s a deeper orange.
I heard those words and my stomach pinched, knowing they were directed at me. It was Andrew who got angry.
“You don’t look anything alike. Come over here.”
They went off together then, and the others had somehow drifted away as well, leaving me alone with Emmie.
We’d talked, I think, though I can’t remember about what.
I do remember the truck engine starting up.
Realizing what it meant. The truck peeled out of the lot, dust kicking up behind it.
Andrew saw us in the mirror and didn’t slow down, his hand threaded in Janie’s hair, her head on his shoulder.
One of his buddies threw a water bottle out the back window.
It didn’t hit either of us, but the message was clear.
“It’s my fault we got left behind in the first place,” Emily says now, and the present regains its footing.
“How’s that?” I ask, startled.
“Andrew was pissed that Melinda made him bring me along. I was his date. He was humiliated,” she says, sounding almost satisfied.
“I had no idea,” I say. I look away. “But it wasn’t just you. Janie and I were fighting that day. Every day, really, for a while, but that week it was intense.”
“What were you fighting about?” she asks, without any apparent embarrassment at being so probing.
I shrug. “I think I was finally realizing that I didn’t just want to do what she said.
And always be the ugly, boring friend who made her look better in comparison,” I say, and regret it immediately, like I’ve betrayed her all over again.
Even with Len, I’m careful not to say these things, and he knows what it was like.
He knows what I was like, the year after my friendship with Janie ended.
“Is that how you thought of yourself?” she asks. “It’s not really how I remember you.”
“Oh? And how do you remember me?” It’s a little bit shocking to be remembered at all. It startled me every time someone knew my name, even with a school the size of Franklin High.
“I remember that you talked to me like I was worth talking to. You gave me your sweater and asked me about myself,” she says. “You cared. Not many people do.”
“I left you,” I say. We’d walked from the lot to the bus stop.
We’d gotten there as the bus was pulling up, and I’d gotten on.
I hesitated, wondering if I should ask her to come with me, or make sure she had a way to get home.
But I’d just left her there. I went home and hid in my room and cried, and then I forgot all about Emmie Hill, because then Janie was knocking on my window (the almost--last time), and getting ditched at the lot was no longer the most memorable thing about the evening.
“You let me keep the sweater,” Emily says.
“How did you get home?”
“I walked.”
“That’s a hell of a walk.”
She shrugs. “I wasn’t about to call my dad. He didn’t want me going in the first place. I had to beg, and then Melinda was the one who actually talked him into it.”
“Are you and she close?”
She hesitates. It’s a complicated silence, full of thorns, and I regret asking immediately.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t pry,” I say.
“It’s just one of those things,” she says.
Maybe I know what she means. I have one sibling—-older brother, Camden.
He and my parents have always gotten along amazingly well.
They go on vacations together with him and his wife and his two kids, have a family chat I’m only nominally a part of, get together for dinner every other week.
He loves baseball, like Dad does; his wife loves gardening, like Mom.
I’ve always been the odd one out. A little too strange, a little too quiet, a little too sad for their perfect family life.
“What about Liam?” I asked. Her twin brother.
He’d been the darling of the drama club, for good reason.
I’d worked stage crew my senior year when he was strutting around as Mercutio.
Anyone could see his talent and his energy on the stage.
Not many got to glimpse the way he collapsed in on himself as soon as he thought no one was looking, as if exhausted by the performance of everyday survival.
I remember the way he would stare at the wall, emptied out, until it was time to go back onstage again, and he suddenly came back to life. “Is he still acting?”
“Not for a long time,” she says, words clipped. “Not since his last relapse.”
I blanch. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” I’m making a disaster of this.
“You shouldn’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault,” she tells me.
“Bad habit of mine.”
“I prefer not to apologize for anything,” she says. “It’s much more fun.”
We’ve come to the corner where I have to turn to get back to my neighborhood. Barry has the loose--legged walk that means he’s had his fill and is ready to return to his spot on the couch.
“I should let you get home,” Emily says.
“Wait,” I say. “Before you go—-do you know a girl named Meghan Vale?”
She seems to consider. “It doesn’t sound familiar.”
“She was in your woods,” I say. “Or your neighbor’s, rather. She took a photo of the witch beads—-they were hanging from a tree. Where we found Bryson.”
“You mean, where you almost got shot,” she says.
“Yeah.” I flush. “The thing is, she’s missing. The police think she ran away, but if she was out there, maybe Bill . . .”
She shakes her head. “Bill is paranoid, ornery, and entirely too obsessed with guns. But I don’t think he’d actually shoot a girl, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Not even in the dark, if all he saw was an intruder?” I ask.
Her brow furrows. “When did this girl go missing?”
“Mid--January.”
“Wouldn’t have been Bill, then. He’s just been watching the place for his brother now and then.”
“Who’s the brother?”
“Terry Butler,” she says. “He’s in the hospital right now. Heart trouble, I think.”
“What’s he like?” I ask, not backing down.
“He’s . . . not a good man,” she says carefully. “Bill’s got a survivalist streak, but Terry makes it his life. He’s always sure the apocalypse is two weeks away, max, and that he’s the only one smart enough to survive it.” She thumbs her lip. “She was out there. You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She looks away, lost in thought. When she speaks again, her voice is distant. “Your friend Janie. She told us the Jenny Red--Hands story that night, didn’t she?”
I nod. She’d made it into a performance. Made it, somehow, into flirtation. Threatening to take the teeth out of Andrew’s mouth as she tapped her finger against his lips.
“It wasn’t the usual version,” she said.
I think back. I’d been tuning Janie out at that point of the evening, but memory stirs.
“Everyone knows the story,” Andrew had said. “The scary witch does bad things to bad men, ooooh.” His buddies guffawed. Janie bristled.
“That’s not the real story,” she’d said, drawing herself up.
“The girls don’t all come back, you know.
The ones who stray into the woods to beg Jenny’s favor.
” The firelight cast a golden glow across her skin as she curled her fingers as if beckoning Andrew toward her.
“They make their offerings and carve her mark and pray she comes, but they ought to pray she doesn’t.
Because it was monstrous, what happened to her, and it made her into a monster.
They carved every soft and gentle part of her away.
So if you come to her and your heart is cold and sharp as steel, she’ll grant your vengeance.
But if she sees that you still have any of that softness, any of that gentleness—-” She was standing right in front of Andrew now, her fingertips trailing up his shirt, and suddenly she flexed her fingers, digging her nails in. “She’ll rip your heart out.”
Her eyes reflected the light of the fire, wild and bright. Andrew caught her wrist.
“You’d be safe, then,” he said, and Janie broke into laughter, head tipped back, until he pulled her into his lap.
I looked away then. I don’t remember what happened next.
“I’d forgotten that,” I say. I look to the side, old feelings roiling. “No one else is looking for her.”
“Meghan, you mean,” she says softly.
“Of course,” I say, not sure I’m telling the truth.
She nods slowly. “Come by my place tomorrow. If Bill isn’t there, I can take you out to look around. You know where it is?”
“Yeah,” I say. I pass the long driveway all the time, heading out toward the wilderness area to hike. “And thank you. I know there probably isn’t anything to find, but . . .”
“But you have to try,” she says, understanding. She reaches out to scratch Barry between the ears, and then she walks away without another word. She takes the corner wide. So she can see who’s coming, I think, and I notice again the way her eyes drink in every pocket of shadow.
What made her so careful? I wonder. Not, I think, lurid stories of murder piped in through earbuds. There’s something personal about the coiled tension in her body.
The Hills were all in the public eye, one way or another.
Melinda with her political career, Andrew with football and then the foundation, and Liam with his acting career—-there was a big stir in town when he was cast on City Rescue as the soulful--eyed Kyle, paramedic by day and street racer by night.
But there’s never been a whisper from the youngest Hill.
I think of the girl I walked with all those years ago.
How quietly she spoke. As if she assumed no one would listen.
I didn’t know then what I know now. Wouldn’t learn that lesson for years yet—-what happens when no one is paying attention. How quickly someone can vanish, even when they’re standing right in front of you.
I start up the podcast again, trying to banish the sound of Emily’s voice. And my pulse suddenly speeds up.
“At Franklin High School, the story of Jenny Red--Hands is alive and well. I asked a number of students about the most recent iterations of the story, and what it means to them,” the host says, and then the audio changes—-background chatter, a bird chirping.
“This is Meghan, a student at Franklin High. Meghan, why don’t you tell us about your experience of Jenny Red--Hands?” the host asks, and then a young woman’s voice speaks.
“I know Jenny Red--Hands is real,” Meghan Vale says. “Because I’ve seen her.”