Envy (Fury) (18 page)

“Hello?” she called out. No response.

Creak.
The front door swung open at her touch, and she stepped cautiously into a large, empty foyer. An acrid smell immediately seeped into her nose. It was the smell of burnt hair, like when Gabby left a tendril wrapped around the curler for too long. Em fought an impulse to gag, and instead brought her sleeve to her nose and breathed through it.

She looked for a light switch by the door reflexively, and then shook her head. Like there would be electricity in a place like this, which looked torn from the pages of her history textbook. She could practically feel the presence of mice in the walls, termites nesting in the wood: a house crumbling to decay.

The moonlight trickling in from outside was enough to illuminate rooms off to either side of the grand staircase. She took a tentative step into the one on her left, digging her cell phone out of her pocket and using it as a makeshift flashlight. This room was empty too, except for a wooden chair and a drop cloth laid below a wall that was covered in a garish shade of red paint. The
paint reminded Em of something, but in her distraction, in her fear, she couldn’t put her finger on what.

Beyond that: a kitchen with a swinging oil lamp hanging over a rickety table. Em circled around, taking in the layer of thick dust on every window, the black smudges that crept up every wall. The odor of ash and burnt wood was everywhere—but this wasn’t like the bonfire she’d left at the party. No. This was different—sharper, fouler. She saw the remains of ivory curtains, just shreds, their edges curling and brown. There had definitely been a fire here, a bad one.

She forced herself to walk farther into the house.

The stairway banister was singed and crumbling. She could practically see the flames licking at the mahogany, the heat engulfing the staircase. Her toes curled in her boots. There were no dirty footprints on the stairs. No sign of Ali or Ty or Meg. But there was still the second floor—maybe there were clues up there.

Ever so lightly, she put her foot on the bottom step. Then, with deliberate motions, she climbed upward, taking only the shallowest breaths, trying to make as little sound as possible. She prayed the stairway wasn’t rotten; she imagined it collapsing underneath her weight, sending her tumbling into a pile of splintered wood and fire-ravaged debris.

At the landing she paused, debating which way to go. She thought she saw a light turn quickly on and off in a room to her
right. Her first instinct was to run. But she clenched her fists and stepped cautiously forward.

“Who’s there?” Her voice was shaky. She cleared her throat.

She went into the room where she’d seen the light. Nothing. Had she imagined it? For a moment she saw herself as someone else would: alone, in a strange, dark, fire-damaged house in the middle of winter, looking for ghosts.

The Furies will drive you crazy.

Turn around,
she told herself.
Turn around and go back to the party.
But she couldn’t. She was still overwhelmed by the presence of evil nearby.

There was a scuffling noise behind her. Em whirled around, terrified, her breath catching in her throat and her arms going up as if she would defend herself.

An enormous rat, its long tail dragging through the dust on the wooden floor, scurried out of the room.

Em recoiled, then released her breath, letting her arms drop to her sides. She went back into the hall, which was dimly lit by a large, half-moon window set high in one wall. Turning to look behind her after every step, she walked farther into the house. Her footsteps echoed as her boots fell against the old floorboards. There, in front of her, was a closed door. She reached out, her fingers shaking as they neared the smooth metal doorknob.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”

Em spun around, her heart pounding.

Ty had materialized behind her, between Em and the stairs. She was watching Em with calm, wide eyes.

“You did something to your hair.” Stupidly, it was the only thing that Em could think to say.

Ty smiled. “I wanted it to be like yours,” she said. “You know, you really have a lot going for you, Em. You should be enjoying yourself instead of obsessing over me. I know
we’re
having fun.”

“I’m sure you are,” Em shot back.

“It was wonderful of Sasha to invite us back to Ascension!” Ty said with sickly false innocence. “There are
so
many interesting people here. There always have been. . . .”

“Is that why you’re here? Because of Sasha?” Em asked. She thought of the book about the Furies—the one Crow had said was in Sasha’s possession when she died. Had she somehow
conjured
them?

“Right now I’m here to chat with you,” Ty purred. “It doesn’t seem like you have many people to talk to right now.” The pout on her face made Em’s fingers clench into fists.

“You’ve turned JD against me,” she said, looking anxiously behind Ty, trying to gauge whether or not she could slip by her, down the stairs, out into the night.

“JD? Oh,” Ty said, her voice fluttering with laughter. “Funny how people’s memories are so malleable, isn’t it? Because I remember that you ditched him on the night of the pep rally so you could meet up with someone
more
your speed
. And I also
remember that you told him he had no chance with you. I think he remembers that too.” She gave Em a knowing smile. So these were the fictions the Furies had told JD.

For a moment Em saw through Ty’s beautiful exterior. The . . . figure standing before her was hideous, old, withered, with eyes like coal. Em felt herself choking at the horror of it. “You took the only thing that mattered,” Em croaked out. The room seemed to be pulsing, wavering in and out.

Ty shook her head and looked vaguely troubled. “We don’t take,” she said.
“You choose.”

“You punish people,” Em said, growing increasingly angry. She felt like there was black smoke inside her, billowing, slowly settling in her veins. “You punish people even when they’re sorry for what they did. Even when they want to take it back.”

“Ah.” A small, sad smile played on Ty’s lips. “But you can’t take it back, can you? Isn’t that the lesson to learn?”

“It’s not up to you to play teacher,” Em shot back. There were only three feet between her and Ty. If she took one step forward, she could touch her. Em felt the urge to lunge for Ty’s neck.

“The world is a very unfair place,” Ty said, a calm coming over her face. “We just want justice.”

“You don’t care about justice. You just want revenge.” Em’s voice was a low growl.

Ty smiled again—this time, it was both beautiful and terrifying. “I guess we take what we can get,” she said.

And then Ty was gone. As though she’d turned to ashes and scattered, dust blew around the room for a second and then settled.

Em was left alone, gasping as though suffocated by smoke and fire.

In the cold light of day—the air had literally cooled to a seasonal thirty-five degrees—Skylar knew that Gabby wasn’t to blame for any of last night’s disasters. It wasn’t Gabby’s fault that “Dot-Crotch” was still ringing in Skylar’s ears; it wasn’t Gabby’s fault that when Skylar had looked up after tripping over the log, all she’d seen were faces distorted by laughter, like reflections in a fun-house mirror. But that didn’t stop Skylar from obsessively recalling Gabby’s face shining down through the shadows, full of pity. Every time Skylar pictured it, she wanted to puke.

Which was why she’d been screening Gabby’s calls all day. She’d slept as late as possible, and then watched several hours of bad television while Aunt Nora was at the indoor farmers’ market and running errands. Every time she finally started to
relax, strains of “Let Me Entertain You” would seep back into her consciousness.

And out of her humiliated haze, she remembered Em talking to her. Her memories were fuzzy and Em had seemed to be babbling, but some of the words stuck with her—something about Meg and her cousins being dangerous? Something about them knowing her secrets?

She squirmed on the brown suede couch, finding it impossible to get comfortable. The question rang in her mind: Meg couldn’t possibly know the full story of her Dot-Crotch past, right? No one could. It must have been a coincidence that those boys had somehow found that old video. . . . A terrible, humiliating coincidence . . .

She just needed to lie low for a few days. Figure out how to do damage control. Maybe if she called Meg and asked her a few veiled questions, she could figure out how much people knew. . . . But when she dialed Meg’s number, there was no answer.

•  •  •

She still hadn’t heard from Meg by Sunday evening, nor had she picked up any of Gabby’s calls. Or showered. Or changed out of her sweatpants. Or thought about her homework. Earlier Aunt Nora had tried to figure out why Skylar had been moping for a day and a half. “Anything you want to talk about, sweetheart?” Skylar had answered with a curt
“No.”

As her aunt continued to pry (“Did you go to a party last
night?”), Skylar’s eyes fell on the turquoise pendant that hung around her neck. Guiltily, she found herself wondering whether Nora had noticed that some of her other necklaces were missing. If she had, she hadn’t said anything about it.

“I hope you’re hanging out with the right people, Skylar,” Nora said. “I’ve been meaning to ask, have you run into a girl named Drea? Drea Feiffer? Her mother and I used to be friends—”

Skylar interrupted. She didn’t need her aunt’s social charity. “I have enough friends, Aunt Nora. I just need some space.” Now her aunt was out cooking meals for an elderly neighbor, something she did every Sunday. Skylar was grateful for the silence. She was heating up a can of tomato-basil soup on the stove when the doorbell rang, interrupting her self-pitying reverie and causing her to drop the ladle with a clang.

She peered through the lace curtains that bordered the front door. Gabby was standing on the stoop, juggling her purse and a giant tote bag. “Let me in,” Gabby mouthed. Skylar hesitated, but only for a second.

Then she opened the door a crack, finding it difficult to make eye contact and wondering vaguely what her hair must look like. “What do you want?”

“I was worried about you, Sky,” Gabby said, pushing her way in the door and down the hall. “You haven’t answered my calls.”

“I’ve been . . . busy,” Skylar mumbled.

Gabby raised her eyebrows, and Skylar could feel her eyes sweeping over the sweatpants, the ratty sweatshirt, the mussed-up hair. She knew she looked the opposite of busy.

But Gabby just chirped, “Are you cooking something? It smells good.”

Skylar trailed Gabby into the kitchen, suddenly having lost her appetite. “Soup,” she said sullenly, noting that Gabby, too, was wearing sweats—only hers looked fresh and stylish, like she’d just come from a clarifying yoga class.

“Skylar, babe, look at me,” Gabby said as she unloaded her things onto the kitchen table, dropping her voice the way she did when she wanted to be taken seriously. She put her palms on the table and leaned forward. “I know why you haven’t been picking up my calls. But listen. Do not give the party—or anything that happened that night—another thought.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Skylar choked out, turning off the stove as she smelled the soup starting to burn.

“I promise that everyone will forget about that video . . . and everything else . . . soon,” Gabby said, coming up behind Skylar to peer into the pot. “Yum. Do you want me to dish some out?”

“I’m not that hungry anymore,” Skylar said. Out of habit, she moved her hand down her arm to fidget with her silver watch. But she wasn’t wearing it, so she was left awkwardly holding her wrist and staring at Gabby expectantly.

“Well, how about a bevvy instead?” Gabby said, walking
back to the table and digging in the tote, from which she pulled a half-full handle of Malibu rum and a carton of pineapple-orange juice. “Your aunt’s not home, is she? Let’s have a cocktail and relax. It’s been a crazy weekend. Is that okay? I brought these just in case.”

Skylar glanced at the clock. Nora wouldn’t be home for at least two hours—she cooked at Mrs. Davis’s house and usually took a long time dividing various casseroles into meal-size portions and labeling them for the elderly woman, who had lived right down the road for more than seventy years.

“No, but I have a lot of homework—”

Gabby cut her off. “So do I,” she said with a grimace. “But we can do it later. I was thinking we could brainstorm about the dance a little bit. You know, get the creative juices flowing. I brought over this old scrapbook of other dances. So that you could see what we’ve done already?”

There was something so earnest, so undeniably sweet about Gabby’s proposal, that Skylar couldn’t say no. “Okay. But not for too long.” She knew it was important to have Gabby in her corner. And if Gabby could overlook her embarrassing past, so could the rest of Ascension. She hoped.

“Yay! Good choice,” Gabby said, opening up the cabinet next to the sink in a hunt for glasses. Skylar watched her pour, trying to figure out what was different about Gabby this evening. She seemed smaller than usual, and not just because she was wearing
one of her few pairs of sneakers instead of platforms.

They brought the drinks—syrupy and sweet, “like summer,” Gabby kept saying—into the living room and settled into the couch, placing the pint glasses on the coffee table in front of them and propping the scrapbook between them on their knees. Gabby took Skylar on a chronological tour of last year’s homecoming, Spring Fling, and Valentine’s Day dances, with a few nonschool holiday parties and summer beach bashes thrown in for good measure. Skylar noticed that she sipped from her glass after almost every page.

“Oh yeah, I remember when Fiona wore that dress—it had the coolest back.”
Sip.
“See how the band was right in the middle of the gym at this one?”
Sip.
“Oh my god, I cannot believe I kept this picture in here, I look like a
whale
!”
Sip.
“I think last year’s Spring Fling was the best one. My crowning achievement so far. . . .”
Sip.
Until her first drink was gone.