Page 48 of House of Hearts
I could almost laugh if the situation weren’t so massively grim and messed up. Of course someone like Em would get herself into thismess. Using your heart over your head has always been a bad move in my book, and that’s all she did. Applying to this school was reckless and impulsive. She had starry-eyed dreams of opera houses and sold-out concerts. She was a dreamer, even if her life ended in a nightmare.
I clamp down on my lip and try to smother the thought of her terrified. For all our disagreements, she’d been like a sister to me, and I knew her better than my own blood.
I squirt some of my three-in-one gel into my loofah and scrub my skin with more force than necessary. Emoree knew I’d go to the ends of the earth to find the truth. Not for the first time in my life, though, I wish I didn’t have to. I wish my love didn’t need to be danced over hot coals. I wish I could live without the knowledge that I was put on this earth to look out for everyone around me at all times.
“You’re so grown up for your age,” Mom would say through sniffles when she’d use me as a glorified therapist at ten years old. “You always know what to do.”
“You’ll always protect me, right?” Em blubbered in the sandbox. “Do you promise?”
Everyone’s savior and yet I wasn’t able to save everyone. The girl who depended on me most is gone. Dead.
I growl under my breath at the same time I hear a shuffle of feet.
“Amber?”
No response. Okay, awkward, it’s not her. I shut my mouth and contemplate the minutes left for this mystery hair mask. Three? Would Amber even know if I washed it out early?
I brace myself for the stranger to blast music and start belting along to it. Honestly, with the rate my thoughts are going, maybe I need something to drown my mind out. I cast a quick downward glance at theopening at the bottom of my stall door. She’s barefoot. That’s a bit ballsy considering the chances of contracting athlete’s foot or ringworm.
The girl is intensely pale, enough to make my own pallid skin look like I’ve gotten a spray tan. She’s borderline translucent, a whole spiderweb of blue veins on display beneath the surface.
I’m aware I’m still staring as I decide to rinse my hair early.
As if she’s aware I was looking, she swivels to face me from in front of the shower barrier. It’s jarringly abrupt. One second she’s facing forward, and the next she’s directly facing my stall, her body unnaturally still as she stands there.
There’s absolutely no way she could tell I was looking at her. She’d have to be psychic or actually peeking above the divider, and she’s nowhere near that tall.
And of course she starts singing.See,I rationalize,she’s just a normal girl in the shower room, and I’m being incredibly rude staring.
Her song begins wordless, a soft vocalization in the back of her throat. It’s as hypnotic as the rest of her, a striking siren call between us. It’s only as I’m about to shut the water off that I hear the first lyrics.
“Goosey, goosey, gander, whither shall I wander?”
Weird start, but okay. I don’t think this made it on the Hot 100. But some strange, buried side of me seizes up like a gazelle at a watering hole, and I strain to not make any sudden movements.
My hand rests on the shower knob; I can’t bring myself to turn it off.
“Upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber.” Her singing voice is haunting in the echo of the empty room. It bounces off the walls and carries back to me like a choir. I recognize the nursery rhyme, a morbid little song with a gruesome ending. “There I met an old man who wouldn’t say his prayers. I took him by the left leg—”
I know where this goes, but I still wait in anticipation for the ending. My heart constricts painfully behind my ribs.
“—and threw him down the stairs.”
The song ends. She’s still facing me. I’m still facing her. My hand is still clamped tightly on the knob. We’re locked like that for way too long, and I’m no Em, but my mind’s run away from me. A horrific daydream plays out in my imagination; it starts with the water staining orange before deepening to a violent shade of scarlet. Blood circles down the drain, and I see her nails, long and black and talon-like, slip over the top of the stall and tap.
Tap…tap…tap…like a faucet with a leak. Then she peeks over the top and I see her and—
Nothing happens. We’re in this standstill for a moment longer before she twists away from me and leaves. I stay frozen until I’m positive I’m alone and finally shut off the water. It’s grown cold.
I square my shoulders as I leave the stall and force myself not to take the entire door down with me as I scramble out. I whip my head left and right, but I really am alone. She’s gone, but with the stall door swung open, I see she’s left something behind for me.
It’s scratched into the paint of the shower wall like knifepoint graffiti. I see a jagged letter carved by hand, one single message left behind for me.
O
Dear Diary,
What a silly notion Mother has, that a young woman might be deflowered. On the contrary, I bloom with Oleander’s touch. There’s ivy in my ribs and petals in my heart. I will always remember the two of us in the hedge maze, the sunset a bright peony pink overhead.
