Slice Of Cherry (24 page)

Kit had somehow made her fists larger than normal, like sledgehammers, so he flew six feet through the air, then dropped to the mat like a bomb. Though the godfather somehow climbed to his feet, he didn’t stand a chance against Kit’s new fists. When she was done with him, he looked like a man who had been stung by the residents of an entire beehive. Kit did a little Mexican hat dance all around his swaying figure, to the merriment of the crowd, who shouted, “Olé!” When she was done, she bowed again and accidentally on purpose knocked her butt into the godfather, laughing as he dropped, unresisting, to the mat. He didn’t get up again.

As he lay on his back, Kit knelt at his feet and, starting at his toes, began to curl the godfather as if he were a tube of toothpaste and she were determined to get every last drop. Doyle was actually standing on his chair, cheering deliriously along with the rest of the crowd. After Kit finished literally
squeezing the life from the godfather, she stood and tucked his rolled hide under her arm. The sparkling announcer reentered the ring and slipped in the godfather’s remains as she thrust Kit’s arm in the air and declared her the champion.

After that it was pandemonium. The crowd went wild, stamping and clapping and photographing Kit using old-fashioned cameras with huge, noisy flashbulbs. Tuxedoed men and décolletaged women rushed the ring to be the first to congratulate Kit, Doyle included. Doyle was little enough to dodge through miniscule gaps in the crowd. Fancy tried for a while, then gave up and went back to her front-row seat. Let Kit have the attention; she liked that sort of thing.

Kit wasn’t out of place among all the finely dressed happy-place people. Even in her boxing shorts, she looked natural and, most of all, comfortable. Fancy had always thought Kit was pretending when she acted bubbly and
how do you do
with everyone she met. But it was no pretense. Fancy didn’t want to suck up to people the way Kit did, but it seemed unfair that Kit should be so much better at it.

While people clamored for Kit’s autograph, Fancy waited it all out in her seat alone. Alone until Franken plopped beside her, his scars livid against his pale skin.

“Why do you keep coming around?”

“I’m surprised I can, seeing as how you’re so bent on killing me.”

Fancy couldn’t believe that the boy who’d been locked in her cellar was now mouthing off to her.

“I know you poisoned that cake.”

“All it did was make you sleep,” she said. “But if you want me to poison you—”

“Why do you hate me so much?” He had been in the happy place for such a long time, and yet he still looked incredibly miserable.

“I don’t feel any way about you. Neither does Kit. It’s best you get on with your life.”

“Without her?” He looked downcast, gently petting his stitches as though each one were precious to him. “Could you?”

“She’s my sister.”

“You can’t get any closer to her than I can.”

Fancy frowned at the crowd hiding Kit from sight.

A woman wearing a sequined gown stood at the edge of the crowd directly in front of Fancy, so she concentrated on the sequins, and soon Kit’s image in the ring came into focus along the woman’s back and rear end.

As the cameras snapped in great blinding flashes, Kit posed next to a young man with no head. He had a head, but he was holding it in his arms, like Kit had done in the ring, only for him it was permanent.

“Who’s that with Kit?” Fancy asked.

“Lorne,” said Franken. “One of the headless.”

Fancy saw them fanned behind Kit, a crowd of gorgeous people carrying their heads in their hands, sharing the spotlight with her. Their heads had not been severed—there was nothing gory or ghoulish about them. They had simply been born in two pieces.

“They’re like celebrities,” Franken continued, watching them stroke their own heads with a fawning affection typically reserved for spoiled lapdogs. “Like models. People are always wanting to paint them or photograph them.”

“Or sculpt them,” said Fancy, thinking of the statues in the happy place. The headless people were beautiful in a way real people never were. Even models had to be airbrushed. The headless were beyond even the idea of flaws. Unless their headlessness could be considered a flaw.

“Lorne’s one of the more sought-after ones,” said Franken. “A real hit with the ladies.”

What amazed Fancy was that Kit wasn’t sizing up Lorne or anyone else as a potential victim the way she usually did; she was just having a good time, was actually
flirting
with him. When Lorne held his head up to Kit’s face, she kissed his ear and then laughed as everyone around her went wild whistling and snapping photos.

Fancy shot out of her seat, and when the camera flashed again, Lorne’s brown eyes exploded.

The silence lasted one shocked second, and then Lorne screamed, holding his head to his chest, ruining his tuxedo shirt, and feeling the damage done to his eyes with his free hand.

Fancy lost the view as the sequined woman turned to face her.
Everyone
was looking at her, stunned and silent. When Fancy stood, they parted before her until the ring was visible and Kit’s shock plain to see. Fancy joined her sister in the ring.

Kit pointed to Lorne’s empty sockets, her hand trembling. “Why did you do that?”

“Why should he see you when I can’t?” “Take it back!”

“No.”

“I can’t help it if people like me!”

“
I
can help it. Where do people get off liking you anyway? They don’t even know you.”

“Fix his eyes, Fancy.”

“With what? I don’t have an extra pair of eyes in my pocket.”

Doyle stepped between the sisters, referee-like, and reached for his godfather’s rolled skin, still tight under Kit’s arm. He peeled back the godfather’s swollen eyelids to reveal those striking gold irises. “Do you want these?” he asked. “You can use ’em. He don’t need ’em no more.”

Fancy didn’t want to do anything nice for Lorne, but she didn’t like the way Kit was looking at her—like she was rabid—so to prove she could be reasonable, Fancy plucked the eyes from the godfather’s head and pressed them into Lorne’s empty sockets. After they’d popped into place, Lorne blinked and, cradling his head to his chest, wiped the residue of his old eyes clear. He was even more beautiful than before. The other headless gathered close, exclaiming over the pretty change in their friend.

“You want any other alterations?” Kit asked, noting how pleased he seemed, even as she glared at her sister. “You deserve it after what Fancy did to you.”

“No,” Lorne said quickly, glancing nervously at Fancy.
“Though I am thankful for the replacements—an improvement, some would say.” The crowd murmured its agreement, fully aware that Fancy had hurt him. And yet in awe of her too. The way everyone here behaved around her no matter what she did. Unlike Kit, who had never before disapproved of her.

“You can go now,” Fancy announced, sick of their toadying. “All of you.”

The crowd cleared away so fast it was as if they’d never been there.

The sisters and Doyle left the ring and passed the one person who’d stayed behind. But Kit stalked past Franken without speaking to him, and Franken was too crestfallen to call after her.

Fancy trailed behind Kit and Doyle as they made their way back to the garden. Once there, Kit tossed the godfather skin at Fancy without looking at her. That was fine with Fancy; she didn’t particularly want to look at Kit, either. She took the skin to one of the stone circles, grimacing at the empty, floppy feel of it, and tipped it into the soft soil, wondering what manner of tree the godfather would produce.

“I thought you said
she
was the witch,” Doyle said to Kit as they sat together on the platform. “How did you make
Godfather curl up like that? And how’d you make your head come off and your fists get so big?”

“I just think about it and it happens.”

Doyle looked at his own hands, thinking furiously at them to no avail. Kit demonstrated, her fists growing to the size of catcher’s mitts. The extra weight tipped her forward onto her face. When she rolled over, her hands were again normal-sized, and Doyle fell next to her laughing, the light, giddy sound of a boy without any threat of violence hanging over his head.

Before long, the den in Doyle’s house reappeared around them. Kit made Fancy give Doyle back his seven dollars, and then Kit gave him another twenty and laughed when he ran into his godmother’s waiting arms.

“Never gone get to the South Seas if you keep giving our money away,” Fancy muttered when they were back in their room, bugs bumping against the screen.

“Why you wanna leave?” Kit sat in front of the vanity, applying deep red lipstick. “When there’s so much here to stick around for now?”

“So much of what?” Fancy flopped onto her bed and grabbed Bearzilla from the shelf overhead. “Headless boys and wicked old men like the godfather? And what’s up with you
kissing every boy you see? You’re so . . . indiscriminate.”

Kit touched her fingers to her mouth and stared at her red lips in the mirror. “You know what I think, Fancy? I think we need to spend time apart.”

“Apart?” The word was so foreign and strange, Fancy had to say it again.
“Apart?”

“Yes. That way when I’m indiscriminate with people, you can’t
make their eyes explode
!”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, wondering what Kit’s problem was. The old Kit would have giggled at the sight of a boy’s eyeballs exploding. “It doesn’t even matter. Happy-place people aren’t real.”

Kit said nothing, just continued to bury the old Kit under cosmetics and crap. “Don’t forget to turn the oven down to three-fifty at six o’clock.”

“Why do I have to remember?”

“Because I won’t be here.”

“But it’s almost dinnertime!”

“Madda knows about it.”

Fancy squeezed Bearzilla to her chest. “Where you going?”

“Amelia Dandridge wants to take me to dinner to thank me for telling her about Greenley.”

“About who?”

“
Greenley
. The first corpse I raised. But really, I just think Amelia’s lonely and wants to talk or something.”

“And you’re the shoulder to cry on?”

Kit looked offended. “What’s wrong with my shoulders?”

“What did I just say about being indiscriminate?”

“Amelia’s a real person, Fancy. Or can’t you tell the difference anymore?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I worry about that,” Kit said, staring at Fancy in the mirror, her eyes sad. “About how one day you won’t be able to tell the difference between real and unreal. Because that’ll be a bad day, Fancy. A bad, bloody day.”

I
SAW A TREE FULL OF BRIGHT RED FRUIT.
I
PICKED ONE TO TAKE HOME AND SHARE WITH
K
IT, BUT
I
COULDN’T RESIST TAKING A BITE JUST TO SEE IF IT TASTED AS GOOD AS IT LOOKED.
I
T DID.
B
UT THE LOUD CRUNCH ATTRACTED A PACK OF DOGS.
I
HID THE FRUIT IN MY POCKET BUT THE DOGS SURROUNDED ME, SNIFFING ME AND NIPPING MY HIPS AND MY THIGHS, SO
I
BROKE FREE AND RAN.
B
UT THEY CAUGHT ME, AND WHEN THEY BIT INTO ME,
I
MADE A CRISP JUICY SOUND.

Kit sat at the tea table in a pink slip, flipping through Fancy’s sketchbook, a studious frown marring her forehead. It was the most attention Fancy had gotten from Kit in a while. Since the godfather incident Kit had been gone a lot, and even when she was home, she was often preoccupied, and she’d developed an annoying fixation with love songs— “Mr. Sandman,” “Earth Angel,” “I Only Have Eyes for You”—the sappier the better. But today she seemed almost normal.

“What do you think?” she asked when Kit had finished mulling over the India ink and watercolor renderings of fruit bowls and articulated dummy limbs.

“You got an eye for color. There’s a certain intensity.” Kit shook her head and closed the book. “But mostly you suck. I can’t even tell what half this stuff is. Maybe you should get glasses or something.”

“Thanks.” Fancy threw Bearzilla at Kit’s head and then finished writing in her diary, admiring the neat penmanship. Usually she wrote her dreams while she was still half asleep, and the words scrawled all over the page and all over each other and she had to work really hard to decipher them. But this one she’d remembered clearly upon awakening, her thighs still tingling from the dream bites.

“What did you dream about?” Kit asked, as Fancy shoved the dream diary under her pillow.

“Dogs chasing me.”

“I dreamed
I
was being chased. Not by a dog, though. By a boy.” Kit smiled in a way Fancy hated. “He had laser eyes, and even in the dark I couldn’t hide. Wanna know what happened when he caught me?”

“Wanna watch me puke all over myself?”

“Why write down your dreams anyway?”

“Dreams are a reflection of one’s inner landscape.”

“You get that from a fortune cookie?”

Fancy was unamused. “It’s important to know what you’re like on the inside.”

“What’re you like?”

“Weird.”

Kit laughed. “I coulda told you that.”

“I might not stay weird.”

“Is that what you hope? That one day you’ll start to dream about the prom or getting married or . . .” A folded page fell out of the sketchbook. Kit unfolded it and gasped. “What is this? Is this you and Ilan?
Kissing?
”

Fancy would have hidden under the covers, but it was too hot and she had long since kicked the covers from the bed. She had to settle for busying herself with the phonograph, grabbing the first record to hand: “Hello Stranger.”

“Ilan had to do that for an assignment.”

“And you had to keep it? He draw this from memory?”

“No!”

“Still never been kissed.”

“No,” she gritted, prickling at Kit’s patronizing tone.

“You should take Ilan for a test spin. Looks like he’d be good at it.”

Fancy snatched the drawing from Kit and then refolded
it carefully and shoved it back into her sketchbook.