The Dead Girls Club - Damien Angelica Walters Page 0,86

DAUGHTER?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THEN

I stood on Becca’s porch, arms at my sides after knocking. She might not even answer. Might not even be home. But the door creaked opened a few inches and she peeked out. Her hair was grease-slicked to her scalp and her clothes hung loose on her frame, like her bones were a cheap hanger twisted out of shape. Her gaze flitted from right to left behind me, then settled on mine. Her pale eyes appeared almost colorless.

“Becca?”

“Duh,” she said, moving aside so I could come in. “Who else would I be?”

As I passed by, I smelled her, sour and biting, but I kept from wrinkling my nose. “Are you okay?”

“Come on up,” she said, not waiting for me to respond before she took to the stairs. “She’s not home.”

She was barefoot, the soles of her feet grubby. The curtains and blinds in her room were closed, and the overhead light was off.

“Sorry,” she said, flipping the switch.

In the bright, she looked even worse. Her skin was pasty-white, her lips cracked, and sleep grit was collected in the corners of her eyes.

“She said you’d come,” she said.

Even her voice sounded wrong. Raspy, yet barely there. Unused.

Before she’d had a few drawings on her walls. Now they covered almost every space from floor to ceiling in a chaotic, overlapping wallpaper. All the Red Lady. And more were on top of her bed and her desk, piled haphazardly.

“What’s all this?” I said.

“Just drawings.”

“Becca, this isn’t just drawings. It’s, it’s—”

“I know you’re still mad at me. I know you’re only here because she told you to be. I didn’t think you’d come, I really didn’t, but she was right. She’s always right.”

Sweeping one foot back and forth, I fought the urge to run back downstairs and out the door. I tried to ignore the drawings, but from every direction, black eyes bored through me, arms outstretched and ready to grab.

“That’s not true,” I said, but my words didn’t sound convincing, even to my own ears. I picked at a cuticle. “I heard about Rachel and Gia.”

“Doesn’t matter. They were never important.”

I rubbed the back of my ankle with the toe of a sneaker. “What do you mean?”

“They were only my friends because of you.” She paced from one side of the room to the other, her movements strange and jerky, a puppet on invisible strings. “I never took mine off,” she said, lifting the half-heart. “See? I don’t blame you, though.”

Cheeks burning, my fingers inched along my bare neck. She kept moving, patting things along the way with her fingers. Desk, headboard, nightstand, dresser, and the same in reverse.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“You have to swear not to tell. Do you?”

“I don’t—”

“No! You have to swear. Swear on your mom and dad’s lives. Your life, too.” She didn’t stop moving, and her words mushed together. “You can’t ever, ever tell. You promise. You swear you’ll never tell. I’ll know if you do.”

“But I don’t—”

She stopped. “Not ever,” she said.

“I swear I won’t tell.”

But in the back of my mind, I was trying to figure out how I’d tell my mom what was wrong when I didn’t even know. Becca seemed like an alien or a pod person, not like Becca at all.

“Good,” she said, raking her hair back. She turned and lifted her shirt. Bruises ran left and right and up and down, underscored with several thin scratches in varying states of healing. She pushed up her sleeve, revealing bruises on her upper arm, too, in the shape of fingers.

I gasped. I didn’t want to look at the marks, the bruises, but I couldn’t look away either.

“Lauren did it,” she said. “She’s worse than ever now. As soon as she comes home, she starts drinking. Then she gets mad and tells me everything’s my fault. It’s not so bad on the weekends because she drinks until she passes out, but during the week she’s angry all the time and I don’t even know if she knows she’s hurting me. But she is, Heather. She hurts me a lot here”—she held out her arm—“and here.” She pointed to her chest. “And there are other things, too, but I can’t tell you—”

I blinked a bunch of times. Her mom did that to her? But moms weren’t supposed to hurt you like that. It was wrong. “We have to do something,” I said. “We have to tell my mom.”

“No! You swore you wouldn’t.” She came right up to me and pressed two fingers gently against my