Slice Of Cherry (26 page)

“No, you’re not. Remember what I said? I love you. I know you think there ain’t room enough for you and other people, but there is. I swear. Gabriel’s a good guy. He even goes to church! But he’s not scared of me or freaked out by me. He loves me, Fancy. And if a boy like Gabe can love me, there must be something in me worth loving. Something good in me.”

“And you think I’m so evil and tainted that my love doesn’t count?”

As she spoke, the happy place seemed to ooze out of the mirror, sliding along the walls.

“Fancy,” said Kit. “What’re you doing?”

“All of a sudden I’m not good enough for you? Why can’t I be enough for you?”

“Because I don’t wanna
be
with you! Don’t you get that? I wanna be with Gabriel!”

Fancy looked away from Kit, the realization that she had been making a scene in front of strangers heavy in her mind. Ilan and Gabriel. Staring at her like she was a particularly good show on television. She saw the Ray Charles record on the dresser. “I Got a Woman.” The one she’d been looking all over for.

“I loaned it to him,” said Kit, following her gaze. “Fancy, look at the walls. Are you doing that? Without the scope? How is that—”

“You loaned it to him because you wanna be with him. Give him things. Even my things.”

“Our things.”

“
My
things!” Fancy broke the record against her knee. And hurled the pieces at Kit. “You wanna
be
with him? After I take his head, you can keep it in a jar and have him all to yourself and be with him
all the time
.”

The happy place took over the room, consumed it.

I
DIED.
I
DON’T KNOW WHAT OF.
I
WAS IN A CRATE IN THE
P
IKACHU COSTUME
I
WORE FOR
H
ALLOWEEN WHEN
I
WAS SEVEN.
K
IT WAS DRAGGING ME FROM HOUSE TO HOUSE TRYING TO GET SOMEBODY TO TAKE ME IN AND BURY ME, BUT NOBODY WOULD.

The happy place was almost unrecognizable. Clouds hung low and heavy and reddish like blood clots in the sick-yellow sky. The light that colored the clouds also touched the statues with a red glaze, so their heads seemed to have been lopped off in some bloody massacre. The trees creaked in the wind, only the creaking sounded like shrieks of pain. A smell of rot soured the air, wafting from the flamingos lying dead on the grounds.

It was as if they’d entered an alternate world where the happy place was run by a lunatic instead of a young girl. A sweet young girl with a wicked, deceitful, faithless sister.

“What did you do to this place?” Kit whispered, staring wide-eyed at the garden.

Fancy reached into Kit’s pocket and grabbed her switchblade. Then she leaped on Gabriel and brought him to the ground. “After I cut his head off, you can keep it in a jar and have him all to yourself and be with him
all the time
.” She released the blade and went for Gabriel’s neck.

People were screaming, but Fancy felt more calm than she had ever felt. Her purpose in life had been reduced to one simple goal: remove Gabriel’s head.

Someone grabbed her arm and kept her from jamming the blade into Gabriel’s throat, so Fancy leaned forward briefly and then whipped her head back hard. Ilan groaned and dropped to the ground beside her. Fancy didn’t pay him any mind, too busy jabbing the knife toward Gabriel’s—

Fancy was yanked to her feet, the switchblade snatched from her hand. “Have you lost your fucking mind, Fancy?” Kit pushed her aside and helped Gabriel to his feet. Stay away from him. Stay away from
us
.”

Fancy tried to grab the knife again, but she tripped over Ilan’s unconscious body. As she stumbled Kit caught her, and this time, she slapped Fancy across the face.

“Slap me again,” Fancy said. “Might as well get all that anger out now, cuz Gabriel’s
dead
. I’m going to kill him, and
you can’t stop me.” Fancy waited, but Kit didn’t hit her again.

“I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“Too late!” Fancy screamed, and it was too late. She felt like one big bruise from head to toe.

A stone circle, full of earth, pushed up through the ground near Kit and Gabriel, causing them to stumble into each other. The circle was right in the center of the platform, a showcase spot. And Fancy knew exactly what she wanted to showcase there. She was sure Gabriel would make an especially handsome tree.

Fancy ran forward and shoved Gabriel backward into the dirt, and smiled when it swallowed him up.

“No!” Kit dove into the stone circle, but instead of bouncing off the dirt as she had before, she sank into it, disappearing the same way Gabriel had.

“Damn it.” But despite her annoyance Fancy felt a warm curl of pleasure that Kit was finally beginning to accept that the happy place was just as much hers as it was Fancy’s.

Fancy held her nose and then jumped in after her sister. She swam through the moist cakelike earth, batting the worms away, and crashed into a dark coffin. She ripped open the lid, struggling to keep her hair and the earth out of her
eyes and throat, but when she saw Gabriel lying inside the coffin, looking at her with a nervous grin, her focus narrowed to just one thing—choking that grin right off his face.

Fancy reached for him, but Kit shoved her away and slammed the coffin shut; she floated over it protectively.

Fancy tried to push Kit aside, but Kit would not be moved.

“I’m not one of your happy-place subjects,
maharaja
. How many times do I have to tell you that you are not the boss of me? Now get outta here.”

“I’m not leaving you down here alone with that—”

“GET OUT!”

Fancy shot out of the grave, the force of Kit’s anger lifting her so high in the air that she could have touched the neck of one of the statues. So high that when she finally hit the ground, Fancy was sure she would break against it like an egg. But this was her place. When she hit the ground, it made itself as soft as down. So unfair that the ground cared more about her than Kit did.

When someone stumbled over Fancy’s ankle, she sat up. The platform was full of mourners in black, weeping. She hadn’t authorized this.

Fancy shoved through the crowd, a sick feeling in her stomach as she reached the center of the platform, where she’d raised what she’d meant to be Gabriel’s grave. Instead of a tree sprouting from it as she’d planned, a tombstone jutted from the soft earth with an inscription that read:

The headless people filed into the garden in a long, sad line. One by one they each placed a single flower on Kit’s fake grave. Fancy watched angrily. How could they play along with Kit’s idiot fantasy?

“I can’t believe she’s gone.” Franken stood beside Fancy, tears in his eyes, scars bled white with shock. “I was so sure I’d go before she did. I thought she’d see to it.”

“You’re all a bunch of idiots.”

The mourners started weeping. Lorne looked at her nervously
with the godfather’s old gold eyes and switched his head to the crook of his other arm, out of her reach.

“We’ve only come to pay our respects,” he said, “but if you don’t wish it—”

“What do I care? Dance on her grave, if you want.
Break
-dance on it.”

They stared at her as though she’d cursed in church. She felt the sacrilege more than they did. “Just get out of here. Get out before I throw all of you down there with them!”

Everyone left the garden except one person.

Ilan, his forehead bloody, walked dream slow toward the stone circle, as if he didn’t trust each step to land him on solid ground. His eyes crawled over the tombstone inscription.

“It was the mirror,” he said. “It brought us through. Just like . . . You opened a door.” He was trying to digest everything, but it was sitting hard inside him, hurting him. He looked at Fancy. “You did this. You killed my brother.”

“Your brother’s not dead. Him and Kit are down there snuggled up, laughing at me.” She put her mouth close to the stone. “I hope you get eaten by maggots!”

“You’re
crazy
.”

Fancy straightened up and smoothed down her hair in an
effort to look less insane. “Kit, come up so Ilan’ll stop thinking I killed you and his disgusting brother!”

The tombstone inscription changed.

“Gabe?” Ilan put his hand to his head, maybe feeling the urge to smooth away some of his own craziness. “Is that really you?”

“How are you doing that?” Fancy yelled at the tombstone, at Gabriel. “How are
you
able to change things? Kit! Are you the one changing the tombstones?”

“Gabe,” Ilan said, shoving Fancy aside so he could get closer to the stone. “I know you and Fancy don’t get on, but this is stupid. Come up and let’s just deal with this.”

“
I don’t need to calm down.
This is my happy place, and I can do what I want, including not calming down!”

“Fancy, wait a minute, okay? This is freaking me out.” Ilan no longer looked ready to kill Fancy. He no longer looked ready to do anything except lie down and take a nap. “We need to talk about this.”

“I don’t wanna talk.” Fancy screamed at Ilan. “You think you can tell me what to do? You’re nobody in here. Just another victim. You hear that, Gabriel? Stop hiding under my sister’s skirt and come face me, or I’ll send your brother down to you in pieces!”

Fancy didn’t move—
couldn’t
move, she was so furious—but a pack of dogs entered the garden through the hedges. They were lean and pale, even in the bloody light suffusing everything. They leaped onto the platform and closed in on Ilan as swift and eerie as ghosts, their jaws open, growling.

Ilan’s reaction to the dogs was surprising—impatience instead of fear. “Look,” he told Fancy, “I decided a long time ago not to let anybody push me around. Not ever again. I’m not that person.”

“Who are you, then?”

He eyed the salivating dogs. “Tastiest boy in the world, looks like.” Ilan held out his arms to them, as if for a hug. “Want a piece? C’mon.” The dogs rushed him, snapping. He stayed still while they bit him, grinning in the face of such ugliness, a horrible grin that masked something even uglier. It flickered in his eyes like downed power lines no one could get near enough to fix.

The dogs bit him, and he
let
them, grimacing but not swatting them away. Fancy felt weirdly jealous of the dogs, at the intimacy Ilan was allowing them.

Until one by one, the dogs stopped biting him. They backed away, first whimpering, then foaming at the mouth, then puking, then dying.

“Who else?” Ilan was bloody and ravaged. And grinning. He walked past the dead dogs, offering himself to the ones still left. “I could do this all night. Any takers?” The remaining dogs looked at one another and whined.

Ilan lowered his arms. “Smart.”

He removed a few wet wipes from his pocket and not only wiped away the blood from his wounds, but the wounds themselves. Fancy was beyond impressed. He could change things too, the way Kit could. As though a part of this place belonged to him, too. The thought didn’t upset her.

“How did you do that?”

“You’re asking me?” Ilan said. “You said it was a happy place. I thunk happy thoughts.” Ilan squatted and petted one of the dogs. “Good boy. I know I look good on the outside,” he told the dog. “But on the inside? Pure poison.”

The dog licked his chin and rested its head against Ilan’s chest when Ilan leaned back and propped himself against one of the dead dogs behind him. Ilan stared at the bloody sky as the other dogs crowded close to him.

Fancy entered the circle of dogs and sat before Ilan and really looked at him for the first time, noted the dark, smiling weirdness behind his eyes. He let her watch, not bothered by her.

“This is where you do it,” he said. “Where you kill people. I been hearing that you and Kit were helping to rid Portero of bad guys on the sly. But it’s not about that, is it? It’s about
you
and how you need to control everything, who lives, who dies, who your sister can hang out with. Even trying to control your own development”—he batted one of her pigtails—“like hair ribbons’ll keep you young forever.”

She shrank from him. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum when I see one.”

“Fine. I’m a brat and I wanna control everything but I can’t cuz I snap over the littlest thing, right?”

“Right!”

“Like losing my sister to a boy so worthless his
own brother
pushed him down a flight of stairs?”

He didn’t even look guilty about it. “You know about that?”

“
All
about it.”

“So you think you know me?”

She found herself wanting to fill the silence with an apology, but what was the point? Cordelles + Turners = Disaster. Daddy had solved that equation long ago.

“Why would you try to kill me with dogs anyway?” Ilan
asked. “Seems like if you really wanted me dead, you’d do it yourself, with your bare hands, chop me into pieces, like you said.”

“I didn’t want to get your blood under my fingernails. It would have made me feel bad.” It seemed silly not to be truthful with someone you had just tried to kill. “Gabriel’s blood under my nails, though? I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

“Would it be worth losing your sister?”