The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters Page 0,36

Mom had eight pieces of bread spread out on the counter, four with peanut butter already smeared on.

“Thank you,” Mom said, bumping Becca’s hip with hers.

“Do you need bags?” I asked Mom.

“Sure.”

I pulled four out of the box. I didn’t get a hip bump, and it felt like a tiny punch in the stomach. Right that second I wanted Becca to leave. I was sorry about her crappy mom, but she couldn’t have mine. But that made me the worst best friend in the world, so I threw a goldfish on her side of the table and stuck out my tongue. She did, too, almost her normal self again.

Once Mom finished, we loaded the sandwiches in our picnic basket, along with a bunch of Hi-C Ecto Coolers, which she called the most disgusting drink ever. Me and Becca took turns carrying the basket and a blanket. It was bright and sunny today and not too hot.

We got to the field before Rachel and Gia and already had the food on the blanket when they got there. When we were mostly finished eating, Becca slurped the last bit of her drink. “Who wants to hear another story?”

“Can we talk about something else? You’ve been telling stories about her all week. And they’re all kind of the same. Somebody asks her for help and she does. Then they have to give something up like their eyes or a leg or something. They’re getting boring,” I said. It was partly true and partly not. I didn’t mind the stories that much, but I hated that she was all Becca cared about. Hated that Becca acted like she was real.

Rachel and Gia wide-eyed each other.

“This story isn’t the same at all, but you can leave if you want.” Becca’s voice was quiet, her words piercing.

She was my best friend in the world, but right now she looked like she hated me.

“I-I don’t want to leave,” I said.

Becca’s face was unreadable, Rachel blinked fast, and Gia frowned. All three kept staring at me, and my stomach tightened.

“Okay,” Becca said finally. “There was this town in the middle of nowhere, and there were three girls, older than us, who heard about the Red Lady. And they hated their history teacher. He was tough, and most of the time they failed the tests he gave them. Sometimes he’d give them a test on things he didn’t even teach. All the kids hated him, but the girls hated him the most because he accused them of passing a note in class and said they were cheating. They got Fs on the test and suspended for three days.

“They all got punished, too, so they couldn’t watch TV or talk on the phone for a month. But one girl got punished for two months, and every night she sat in her room, getting angrier and angrier. See, they hadn’t been cheating. She was giving her friend a tissue for her runny nose. The teacher even saw what it was when he took it, but he didn’t care. Since he thought they were passing a note, he pretended it really was one.”

“Jerk,” Gia said.

Who cared about a teacher and cheating? I played with my shoestring, flicking the plastic end against my shoe until Gia elbowed me.

“Right? So they wanted to get back at him, but they knew the Red Lady didn’t care about cheating or suspensions. She cared about important stuff. So the girls decided to make themselves believe the teacher had done awful things, sex things, to them. They wrote it down and read it aloud. They told stories over and over until it was like he really did it all. They pretended they were too afraid to tell their parents or anyone. And when they asked the Red Lady for help and she came, they wanted her to kill the teacher.

“But she knew the girls were lying. It made her remember how the villagers came to her for spells and then turned against her like that”—Becca snapped her fingers—“so instead of killing the teacher, she followed the girls. She wanted them to admit they lied, but they wouldn’t. So she’d hide underneath their beds and thump her stumps against their mattresses, press her bloody mouth against their favorite shirts, whisper their names.

“And they still refused to say they were lying. They told their parents what the teacher supposedly did and they called the police. The teacher was arrested, and it made the Red Lady angrier, because even though the