Page 31 of Worse Than Wicked
“Okay, you don’t have to tell everyone how much it cost,” says an older girl with a dark complexion and dark hair who justemerged from the house. She pulls the girl little girl away from Duke. She’s probably the one looking after her, and even though I hate that it’s made Duke so insecure, it makes me like her a little more for being the kind of girl who protects kids.
“It’s not everyone,” Olive says, pouting. “It’s Dukey boy!”
“And all his haircuts cost that much too,” the older girl says.
“That’s crazy,” Olive bursts out, laughing and pointing to Duke’s head. “You hardly have any hair.”
“I’m Harper,” the older girl says to me, tipping her chin.
“Hi, I’m Mabel,” I say, reciting the words my parents taught me to say, so I didn’t embarrass them at parties and around strangers. “I don’t like to shake hands, but it’s nice to meet you, Harper.”
I smile, and she gives me an odd look, so I know I didn’t get it right despite my best efforts.
“Damn, it’s weird that we’ve never met,” she says. “I feel like I already know you.”
“Even if we’d met, it’s unlikely that you’d know me.”
The corner of her mouth twitches up. “Too true.”
I’m mystified, since she smiled instead of staring at me like a freak when I said something that most people probably don’t say when they meet someone, and when I said the proper words, she looked uneasy.
After an awkward pause, she says, “Let’s get your bags inside.”
“Thank you, but we’re staying at Summer House.”
I watch her momentary surprise melt behind a mask of indifference. This is Royal’s girlfriend. I’ve heard a lot about her too, but she’s as foreign to me as a single hair of unidentifiable origin at a crime scene. I wonder what he’s told her to make her feel like she knows me.
I wonder if she knows that once, her boyfriend was tied to a chair and bleeding, and he begged me to help him, and I walked away. I shiver at the memory, but I no longer feel ashamed. If there’s one thing the Dolces are experts at, it’s payback. Royal did far worse to me.
“What’s a summer house?” Olive asks, interrupting my spiraling thoughts.
“It’s a house where you stay just for the summer,” Duke says. “Like a beach house.”
“Summer House is the name of my grandfather’s house in town,” I say. “It’s not a summer house.”
“Do you have a winter house?”
“Yes.”
“Is it named Winter House?”
“No.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you name your houses?”
I stare at her a long second, trying to figure out what developmental stage her brain is in and how to explain it in a way she’d understand. This is why I never wanted children. I didn’t understand them, even when I was a child.
Except one.
A prick of pain, a soft gasp, a drop of blood. Dimpled knuckles, small fingers interlacing, palms meeting. “Now we’re sisters forever.”
Olive is still waiting, so I answer after a long pause. “So that, when the family is talking about property, we know which house we’re talking about.”
“How many do you have?” she asks, gaping at me.
