on the pavement. “Anyway, nothing happened. There was no one else in the basement. Don’t know why you’re making it such a big deal.”
She stepped close enough for me to feel her breath. “Because it’s important. I wanted you to feel her, too.”
“Gia and Rachel did. Isn’t that good enough?”
She got even closer; this time I pulled back a little so our noses wouldn’t bump. “But they’re not my best friend. You are.”
“Just because nothing happened to me doesn’t mean I’m not your friend. Best friends are more important than stories,” I said.
She had a funny expression, not angry or upset, but a little sad. “She’s not just a story. And you know it. She talks to me sometimes.”
“Who?”
“The Red Lady.”
“You’re so lying.”
“You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want, but she is real.”
“Believe whatever you want,” I said, turning on my heel and going inside. When I peeked out the peephole, she was gone.
* * *
I didn’t talk to her again for three days, then she called and told me to come to the elementary school playground. I almost said no but didn’t want to be left out.
Rachel and Gia were sitting on the wood chips beneath the monkey bars; Becca showed up a couple minutes later, blinking a few times when she saw me. I dragged my fingers through the wood chips to the dirt below. If she didn’t want me here, she shouldn’t have told me to come. But she slipped through the metal bars and sat down next to me, so maybe she’d just had the sun in her eyes.
“Did anyone else have a weird dream last night?” Becca asked, pulling strands of her hair over to help cover the bruise, now the color of a plum.
Rachel and Gia both nodded.
I chewed my fingernail. “I don’t know. If I did, I don’t remember.”
Becca’s mouth made a funny shape. She could not believe me all she wanted, but I was telling the truth. I’d woken in the middle of the night, dizzy and with a gross taste in my mouth, but I didn’t remember any dreams.
“If you had one like mine, you’d remember it,” she said. “I was being buried alive.”
Rachel said, “That’s what I dreamed, too.”
Gia nodded a bunch of times. “And there were people laughing.”
“Like it was the best thing they ever did,” Becca said. “I could taste the dirt and I tried to scream—”
“But you couldn’t because …” Rachel twisted the bottom of her T-shirt. “You couldn’t talk.”
“Because your tongue was gone?” Becca asked.
“Yeah,” Rachel and Gia said at the same time, their voices too loud.
Rachel scrunched her nose and said, “But how could we have had the same dream?”
Becca traced her teeth over her lower lip. “Because the Red Lady wants us to. She wants us to know how scared she was and how awful it felt. So we don’t forget it, so we don’t forget her.”
“I won’t ever forget,” Gia said.
“I don’t want to dream about it ever again,” Rachel said.
They sounded like soap opera actors and I wanted to laugh, but their faces were serious. Maybe they weren’t lying, but if they had dreamed about her, it was on account of the ritual and what they imagined happened. Nothing magic or mysterious. I remembered the phantom pain in my side and the way the carpet had turned bumpy, but I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. Then that reminded me of the smell, and I grimaced.
“What?” Becca said.
“I bit my cheek,” I said. “See?” I stuck out my tongue.
“Gross,” Rachel said.
I hooked my knees over the monkey bars and swung upside down, reaching out and making monster groans with my bloody tongue sticking out. Rachel shrieked and pulled away. Becca hung beside me, fingers bent into pincers, snagging Gia’s shoulders every time she got close. And for a little while, everything seemed normal again.
CHAPTER NINE
NOW
I drive to Silverstone through a mist of rain, the day as gray as my mood. Nicole’s door is open, and when she glances at my empty hands, I say, “I’m sorry. I stayed up too late last night, it was raining when I left, and I wasn’t even thinking.”
All three are truths, two in a manner of speaking. I couldn’t fall asleep, and although I left in time to stop at Starbucks, I was thinking of other things: of strange phone calls, of brunch this Sunday with Gia, of a half-heart necklace that once belonged to my best friend.
She waves