The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters Page 0,7
pointed to a metal peg holding an enameled butterfly pendant.
“Maybe they moved them. We could ask.”
But the woman behind the counter was all scrunched forehead and squished-together eyebrows, like we were planning to steal.
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s not.”
Becca scanned the lower section of the case. I took the top. We went peg by peg, and when we were down to the last few, she said, “Found it! The last one, too.”
Becca worked the cardboard square free from the peg and inspected the hearts, chains, and clasps, her lower lip caught between her teeth. I checked, too, but if anything had been broken she would’ve spotted it.
The clerk sighed when I pulled out my wadded-up dollar bills. But I ignored her. After Becca had the bag, she said, “Have a nice day,” all syrup-sweet.
Outside the store, Becca unwound the necklaces and hooked the right heart around her neck while I tried to do the same with the left. My hair kept getting in the way, and Becca ended up helping me.
“Forever,” she said, crooking her pinkie.
I fitted mine into hers. “Forever.”
My eyes got hot and watery for a second, which was silly, so I bit the inside of my cheek until it stopped, and said, “Bookstore?”
“Definitely.”
We took the steps to the second floor two at a time and split up in the bookstore. Horror was my favorite, but I read science fiction and fantasy sometimes, too. Becca read anything about mythology, true crime, and anatomy. At home, she had one book with photographs, and all the shiny wet purple-pink-red organs and yellow globs of fat made me gag.
The new Stephen King book wasn’t coming out until August, so I flipped through a bunch of others. Nothing seemed very interesting, but I didn’t have enough money left anyway. My mom hated most of what I read but said she’d rather have me read morbid books than not read at all. My dad, on the other hand, swiped them when I was done or read them first and passed them to me.
When I found her, Becca was sitting cross-legged in an aisle, back to the shelves, a book open on her lap.
“Whatcha reading?”
“Look,” she said, holding up a page showing a big pair of metal pincers that reminded me of tongs my dad used on the grill. “They used these to rip boobs off women they thought were witches. They did it super slow, so it would really hurt.”
“That’s gross,” I said, hunching forward.
“Right? And …” She turned to another page, holding up a picture of a spike with a big metal pyramid on top. “They made people sit on this.”
“La-la-la, I can’t hear you,” I said, but I sat down next to her anyway.
She read to me about people strapped to wheels, how their arms and legs were hit until they broke, about people boiled alive, about people with sticks shoved under their nails. I kept making little yip sounds, trying to keep them muffled so no one would come and kick us out for making noise.
When she closed the book, she said, “Why are you so grossed out? Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were way worse.”
“Yeah, but …”
“We talk about stuff like this all the time,” she said.
She was right. We’d been talking about serial killers for years. Then she’d come up with the idea for the Dead Girls Club last summer, after she saw one of my books about a bunch of kids with a club in a secret hideaway. We didn’t have a treehouse or anything. Nowhere special—yet.
The name came from all the true crime books Becca read. Her basement was full of them, and they were always about dead girls. This year, a woman named Aileen Wuornos had been arrested for killing six men, but most of the time, it was men who killed and girls who got killed.
Some of the books had pictures, too. Sheet-covered bodies and bloodstained floors. Knives, baseball bats, and handcuffs. Big metal barrels and crawl spaces underneath houses. Photos of killers before and after they were caught. The worst one was Ted Bundy because he looked normal, but he did gross things to the women’s bodies after he killed them.
There were so many killers, I didn’t think we’d ever learn about them all. Sometimes Becca read us their stories; sometimes she told us about stuff from the news. Sometimes she told scary stories. I never liked them as much, though, because real people were always scarier.