Page 44 of We Are All Villains Here

Probably just the whisper of wind sneaking in through the gaps in the walls or the holes around the windows.

Then—

‘Gigi…’

She drops the pen.

It lands on the pages of the open journal with the faintest of thuds.

Her heart seizes up, her stomach hardens to steel, her whole body locked up as though to move an inch would bring ghosts down upon her. Again, she hears it… a soft whisper, menacing, but… close. Nearby.

Her eyes grow big and wild. They swerve around the dim light of the bedroom as though searching for the source of the man's voice, one that sent icy chills up her spine to the prickling nape of her neck.

She sits in a heavy silence for a long while.

Pen gone from her hand, she grips nothing but air so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Her breath stays trapped in her tight chest as though releasing it will release something else entirely.

Slowly, she turns her head to look over her shoulder.

The room is empty, she knows that. And the doorway is dark. Just beyond it, the hall is a mystery. No lights on, nothing but pitch blackness.

She didn't turn the lights on when she came inside the house. She didn't need them. She knows the layout of this place better than she knows her own face, one that she sees not only in the mirror every day, but in her sister’s face.

Right now, there is no Tonya here to look at her, to be her reflection. There is only darkness—even under the dusty bedroom light.

There is no one here.

Logic—but also what she mentally tells herself, as if to convince herself of an obvious truth. She’s just… spooked. That's all.

Cletus was killed. The dangers of his line of work. And this old house, this fucking cabin that's falling apart at the seams, it talks. It's like the whisper thing, the secrets that shout in the dark, the house seems to creak and groan and moan so much louder when it's empty, when it's quiet. Even the skittering from the mice in the walls sounds like running track back in the days of school.

Gigi has decided,‘I'm just scarin’ myself. Workin’ myself up.’

Still, Gigi shuts the journal and locks it all the same. She isn't keen on sitting here much longer in this empty house. She'll finish up her diary entry another time. But right now, she's gotta go, grab some clothes for tomorrow, then pick up smokes from the gas station.

Even though the thought of staying the night at Grace Maxwell's house sickens her to her very core, turns her belly over and over and burns her throat with nausea, it's better than sticking around here alone.

So she rams the book and pen back into the plastic bag, the stuffs it into the hiding spot beneath the bunk bed. Her hands tremble as she pushes down the loose floorboard to cover her hideaway.

It's a funny thing, she thinks as she snatches up a knock-off Prada backpack from Tonya’s side of the room. All she wanted at Cletus’s vigil? To go back to her empty home, be left the fuck alone, and just write it all down. All that rage in her bones. Rage, not just at Cletus. The man who…rapedher. Right? Sure felt like it.

And yet—it'sthemshe's angry with the most.

It'sthemshe wants nothing more than to see behind bars and know thatshe'sthe one who put them there. The girls. Her friends. So called, at least.

All of them.

Sometimes, even Tonya. But she'll never do it, not to T.

It's not in Gigi, that cold-blooded evil note that lives within Billie and Kate. A hole that sucks in Carmine and Tonya, a hole that is all Gigi sees when she looks at the girls, or closes her eyes at night, and orbits around them, trapped in this hellhole of a town.

Heaving a sigh that deflates her like a balloon at a child’s party, abandoned and worn down, she lets her head fall back and she stares at the wood-slabbed ceiling.

‘Bitches,’ she mutters to herself. ‘Crazy, fucking bitches.’

With that, she yanks open the stubborn cheap zip on the backpack and wanders to the brown arched wardrobe.

Since she was little, she's been half-convinced that this piece of shit wardrobe was built way back when the early settlers built this town—then they left it here in an abandoned cabin in the poor end that never quite took off like they had hoped. Also, this piece of shit has a family of moths that live inside it.

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