The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters Page 0,4
and pull of our bodies. Afterward, he curls in a comma behind me, hand resting on my hip.
“In a scorched landscape,” he says, “she plunges into danger to save the lives of two children. Panic and faulty wires abound. Will she succeed? Will she fail?”
“Mmmm,” I say, nudging him gently with an elbow. “Not fair, taking advantage of me when I’m falling asleep. Can I have a hint?”
“Already?”
I growl but play his words over in my head, trying to match them to a scene in a movie. The first time we played our game, we’d been dating for about six months. No lead-in, nothing. Walking out of the restaurant, he leaned close, dropped his voice, and said, “Two faces, a blind attorney, and his ex-lover get tangled up in what could be a real estate investment deal gone wrong.”
I was equal parts confused and amused, and even after a dozen hints, although he said I would only get three—“What’s the point if it isn’t hard?”—I gave in. It was Primal Fear. I argued his initial clue wasn’t fair. He cited Agatha Christie, said I had to read between the words.
He usually wins. He has an uncanny ability to remember nearly everything from a movie the first time he sees it: side characters, subplots, lines of dialogue. Even if we’ve watched the flick more than once, I can barely recall a main character’s full name.
The rules are easy: three hints (one of which, if I’m lucky, will be a quote I recognize); no searching online or the movie collection in the family room; no asking anyone else for help. The only rule I’ve ever set: no horror movies. A boyfriend once tried to trick me into watching one, even after I told him I hated them. He thought it would be funny. Five minutes in, a killer was chasing a woman through the woods and I was breaking up with the boyfriend.
Now, I tick movies off in my head, knowing there’s a better-than-average chance I’m searching in the wrong direction. Aliens? Only one child. Same with The Terminator. The volcano movie with Pierce Brosnan, the title of which I can’t remember, is a potential choice because it has two kids, but I don’t remember any faulty wires. Jurassic Park? Two kids, yes, but Sam Neill’s Dr. Grant saved the kids, and does technical sabotage count as faulty wiring?
“Yes, I already need a hint.” I say. But he’s asleep. I wiggle free from his grasp, turn off the bedside light, and stare at the ceiling. My guess is it’s an old movie. He stumps me with those, having watched legions of them with his paternal grandmother. Such a silly thing, the game. Silly, yet monumental. Part of the scaffolding of a marriage, along with the knowledge you collect over the years: the way your partner takes their coffee, their shirt size, whether they prefer onions in their salad or not. But no matter how well you know a person, there’s always something they hold back, something they never tell anyone. I try not to wonder what secret he keeps, but I know it’s nothing like mine.
He doesn’t know a thing about Becca, not even her existence in my life, and he never will. “Honey, when I was twelve, I killed my best friend” isn’t scaffolding. It’s a sledgehammer.
I hold up my hands, turning them from palms to backs. Short, neatly trimmed and unpainted nails. Long, slim fingers. Piano fingers, Nana called them. No marks or scars. Not that a murderer’s extremities should look a particular way.
In stories, blood smells of old coins. An apt description. What those stories fail to mention is that the smell lingers, not on your skin, but in your memory. You can’t ever wash it away.
The shadows in our room are too big and I’m drowning. Drowning in the darkness, in the quiet, in the after-love haze, in the fear that the necklace’s appearance signals the beginning of the end of everything.
I skim the hollow between my collarbones, remembering how the heart nestled there once upon a time. I bite the side of my thumb to keep from laughing or crying or both and slip from the bed. In the hall bathroom, I squirt soap into my palm and work up a thick layer of lather. Rinse, then soap again.
“Out, damned spot,” I say, the water masking my voice.
I don’t view my reflection in my mirror. And I don’t cry.