The Babysitter Murders - By Janet Ruth Young Page 0,44

tennis-playing redhead from across the street.

“Got another win, did she?”

“No.” Her husband, Jonas, hands her the front section. The headline of the Beacon-Times says troubled teen goes missing. So this must be why the cruiser was there. She and Jonas had looked the other way to avoid causing embarrassment.

She remembers Big Red and her friend the brunette as children coming home from tennis lessons in their white outfits. She recalls how things were across the street when Beth’s husband moved to Colorado. The yard wasn’t maintained, but Big Red and her friend would connect the sprinkler and run through it, leaping over the highest weeds. When Beth brought Big Red for trick-or-treating that year she was a big girl, but she wore her princess costume from the previous year, which was too short and tight. Jonas tried to tease Big Red by saying there was no candy, but she saw the candy dish and opened the front door and went right for it. “That’s our Big Red,” her husband would say any time her tennis scores appeared. After a while Beth added the pool and the girls didn’t need the sprinkler anymore.

T H E B A B Y S I T T E R M U R D E R S

“Life can be very hard,” the woman says, handing the paper to her husband.

“It certainly can be,” he says.

“Poor Big Red,” she says.

Her husband turns to the next article. “Right for the candy dish,” he says, and they both chuckle.

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Shelley can’t wrap her mind around the idea of Dani being dangerous and psycho. It’s too extreme. Instead Shelley dwells on the fact that her best friend is gone, in one way or another, and Shelley can no longer talk to her.

Every day since they were little kids, Shelley and Dani talked, even when Dani took that trip to Colorado. There was always this person, a strong, reliable wall to bounce her thoughts off of.

Someone who could make her feel normal. I’ll talk to my best friend, Shelley told herself when something was discouraging or upsetting or just plain tangled.

That’s why, out of everyone in the world, Dani was the one Shelley came out to. She knew her parents were not the right people—they had left their previous church because the church voted to allow gay ministers. Her brother was not the right one—

he was just a little kid. GSA was all wrong, because even though it’s a gay-support group, Shelley considers it her safe place to hide. She hasn’t wanted to draw attention to herself there.

Being secretly gay had felt like a burden she needed to be rid of. She set a deadline for when she would tell Dani, but the condi-tions were never perfect. Dani was distracted by something else, they were interrupted, or someone might overhear. So Shelley she set a second deadline. And then she ended up blurting her T H E B A B Y S I T T E R M U R D E R S

secret in the courtyard at lunchtime just to get it over with.

When Shelley was little she told her parents she was going to marry Dani. Ha, ha, ha, they’d said, that’s not right. They had guests over, so they treated it as a joke, one of those funny mistakes kids make.

“No, it’s true,” she’d said. “I do want to marry Dani.”

“Shush,” her mother said angrily. “You can’t marry a girl. That’s wrong. You have to pick a boy.” Their reaction was so strong that Shelley never said anything like that again.

And actually, she was never attracted to Dani the way she was later to other girls. She had said it only because they were so comfortable together, true best friends. She was attracted to a different kind of girl—the flirty, social girls who put their looks out there more than she and Dani did.

At first she tried to convince herself that she merely admired or envied these girls. She paid obsessive attention to the girls she thought were pretty: the clothes they wore, the friends they had, the boys they dated. She could try to imitate them if she wanted.

She could try to look and act they way they did. But then she had to admit that she didn’t want to be like them. She wanted to be with them.

Of course I’m not gay, she told herself many times. Both boys and girls like to look at girls, because girls look better. They take better care of themselves. They