The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters Page 0,8

people. Remember about Ted Bundy and the bottle and the other stuff? What he did? And the two guys with the van and the tools?”

“Yeah, but they did stuff like that because they were messed up in the head. The people doing the torture thought they were right.”

“Maybe they were. We weren’t there, so how do we know? Maybe they were saving everyone by doing what they did.”

“Doesn’t make it right.”

She got to her feet and slid the book back on the shelf. “Doesn’t make it wrong, either.”

I pulled a face. “Come on, my mom’ll be here soon and we still have to get your stuff. Maybe we can get her to order pizza.”

* * *

My mom waited outside while Becca packed up for spending the night. Her mom wasn’t home, so her house was super quiet. She lived in the same kind of row house I did, only on a different street. We had the same middle bedroom, too, but Becca had a twin bed, not a double.

While she got her underwear and pajamas, I plopped on her bed, knocking off one of her sketchbooks. A waterfall of loose pages dislodged, all pen-and-ink drawings: people in old-fashioned clothes, a little girl with ribbons in her hair, an older girl with her hands on her cheeks like the kid in Home Alone, a woman on her side, hair covering her face.

I bent to pick them up, but Becca said, “No, I got it,” as she rushed over to sweep everything up into her arms.

One slipped free from the others, and I caught a glimpse of someone with long hair like mine, but Becca snatched it away, turning it over.

“Just wanted to help,” I said.

“I know, but I want to keep them in order.”

She patted the edges until they were in a neat pile and put the stack on her desk underneath a Lisa Frank notebook, one with a rainbow kitten cover.

“How come I can’t see them? You always show me.”

“They aren’t ready yet.”

“I bet they’re still good.”

She swiped her hair back. “You can see them when they’re finished.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

Becca could draw as good as a real artist. When we were little, we’d made construction paper books—I wrote the stories and she drew the pictures—and tried to sell them to some of the neighbors. They were monster and ghost stories and were supposed to be creepy, but we were too little to know how to make things scary.

I had one of her drawings hanging over my bed, a picture of my dog, Roxie. My mom said when I was a baby, Roxie slept on the floor next to my crib. I cried for practically a month straight when she died. Becca’s drawing was perfect, down to the spots on Roxie’s nose and her goofy bat ears. She made it for me right after Roxie died and didn’t even have to use a photograph.

While she was in the bathroom getting her toothbrush, I tiptoed to her desk. The picture wasn’t of me, but a woman with hair so long it curled on the ground. Her eyes were colored in black, her arms wide open. I knew the drawing was finished because it had Becca’s signature in the bottom right corner, a big B and then a curlicue. It didn’t look like it, but it was supposed to be her name.

“Every artist has a signature. This is mine,” she’d said when I asked about it.

Why had she told me it wasn’t finished? Her footsteps clomped in the hallway. I put the drawing back fast and sat back on her bed. She gave me a funny look, lips all pushed out, when she came in but didn’t say a word.

My mom didn’t order pizza, but she made stuffed shells and garlic bread, which was almost as good. Dad and I play-fought over the last piece of bread, earning a “Please, Joe” from my mom. He won but tore it in two pieces for me and Becca.

“Thank you, Mr. Cole,” she said.

“Thank you, Dad,” I said, but I’d taken a bite of the bread, so I had to talk around it. My mom shot me a look, and I tried to look sorry, because I wasn’t showing my chewed-up food on purpose. When she wasn’t paying attention, my dad winked.

He started telling Mom about work, which was always boring, until he told her about an accident at a job site with a crane, not one he was driving. The guy busted his head open falling in