From Where I Watch You (27 page)

What will you cross off my list?

29. Drizzle before it hardens.

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Everything is slow motion when I turn toward the kitchen. My feet slog across a floor that sticks and pulls and tries to suck me into it, and I can barely get my body through the swinging door. There’s only one person who could write this note.

But it can’t be.

Charlie’s filling the sink with water and bleach, and he turns with a towel clenched in his fists. Raising it over his head, he smiles and pulls it tight like he’s doing some sort of stretch.

The smile fades and he shakes his head, looking puzzled. “Sprinkles?”

I can’t speak. Charlie steps closer to me and I step backward.

“Kara, what’s wrong?” he asks, grabbing my wrist, pressing his thumb into my veins and it hurts. He spins me around and grabs my waist with the other hand while he leans down into my face. “What is it?”

“Oh!” Mom appears out of nowhere, grinning and slapping her hands together. “Patched up have we? Oh thank you, Jesus!” Charlie’s thumb pinches my wrist even more. Mom’s face turns serious. “But very soon I will sit down and have a serious talk with the two of you about sexual boundaries. Not today, I have too damn many errands to run.”

“Okay,” Charlie stares at me now that Mom is gone. He blinks hard. “What is going on?”

It can’t be him.

He can’t be back.

Nick.

My mouth hangs open, my tongue touching the inside of my top teeth, but I can’t say his name out loud. The words I want to say to Charlie are stuck there, and I can’t speak or swallow.

Mom comes back out of her office and I don’t want her to see my face, so I shake off Charlie’s hands and rush for the apartment.

I’VE LAIN IN BED
for an hour, staring at the ceiling. For the first twenty minutes Charlie called or texted every other minute. I shut the phone off because I don’t know what to do, so how can I talk to anyone? Charlie knows my secret so I know I should tell him. But he’s still working right now so I have to wait. Or maybe I should call the police?

But then I’d have to tell them what happened back then, and Mom would find out, and I’d have to tell her that Kellen did nothing about it. And she’s happy now, she doesn’t need that. She doesn’t need to know about this. The only person I should tell is Charlie.

When I flop over on my side, there’s Kellen, sitting on the edge of the windowsill.

She kicks her legs back and forth while she stares at me.

Her face usually looks the same and she rarely moves a muscle of it. But there’s a difference today. A glimmer in her eye, and I hate it.

I stare hard and blink harder, like maybe I can blink her away. But she’s still there.

“Do you even know how much you hurt me?” I whisper. “Do you know that you hurt me more than he did? By turning your back on me, abandoning me? If you were the kind of sister I needed then you’d know that your thirteen-year-old little sister had never dated or even been kissed. You’d know that she didn’t even know how to kiss a boy, let alone seduce one who was four years older.”

Kellen stares in the direction of my closet, like she’s done before. I’m ready to break something, a window maybe.

“Look at me you dumb, dead bitch!”

She can’t hear me. Or if she can, she chooses not to. She just eyes the closet.

“He practically raped me, Kellen, and you did nothing. And then you have to go ahead and be so stupid and die? You poison yourself with so many drinks that you end up drowning? How could you do that to Mom? You are the most selfish person I’ve ever known, Kellen.”

She stares hard in the direction of the closet, and I wonder if she hears me at all. “Yeah, I know about your pot, I smoked it. Your stuff is mine now and I think I’ll have a good-riddance bonfire with it. I’ll let the ashes sink down into your grave and cover your bony, rotting face. Good-bye and good riddance to you forever.”

I throw my fake Ugg boot at her, but she’s already vanished.

I turn to the closet.

Eleven-Year-Old Carrot

These mean girls from school keep walking by my house on their way home. They stop and point up at my window and laugh. I try not to peek, but it’s hard not to and every time I do they somehow always see me. So embarrassing. I hate them.

Gaby and I had a fight and then she blabbed my big secret about starting my period. These girls that laugh at me found out somehow, and every day for the past week they’ve stopped in front of my house. I don’t know what’s so frickin’ funny about starting your period. I’m eleven—that’s not too early to get it, right? I hate them laughing at me. Last night I cried myself to sleep about it. I hate them.

I get off the bus fast so I can get into the house and pull down the blinds before they pass. But today I stop as soon as I get to our walkway.

There are signs on the windows, and I stare in confusion until I hear something above me in the tree. Kellen hisses at me from above, on the tree branch. She is sixteen and so bossy all the time. I’m really sick of her these days.

“Carrot, get in the house right now.”

I stare up at her. She’s holding a tampon by the string—without its shell—in one hand and a big can in the other. A big pink tampon box sits next to her on the branch. My sister’s shelling tampons, and the shells are all around the tree, a couple of them rolling with the breeze. She whispers again and her face means serious business. “Carrot, go, run into the house, NOW!”

So I do. I run all the way to my room and peek out my window at my sister in the tree and not long after, I see those two horrible girls. They giggle and stop in front of my house like they have every day, laughing and pointing. But they quickly stop because they see the signs across the windows.

The smiles fall from their dumb faces as they read the posters taped there:

what

is

so

funny?

did you see

your reflection

in my window

you ugly bitches?

The girls look at each other, confused.

Things fall from the tree.

The girls jump, moving and batting at their shoulders and heads because things are falling on them and they are screaming. Tampons, bright red and dripping from whatever Kellen is dunking them in, are dropping from the tree branch. Falling on their heads, shoulders, feet and splattering and rolling all over the ground, and I see one, sliding down the back of the meanest girl, leaving a bloody red trail on her pretty pink coat. This makes me giggle.

The girls stand there because they are too dumb to get out of the way. They scream and look up and one gets a red, gushy tampon in the face. Then suddenly, Kellen drops from the tree and they start running and she runs after them, pelting them with bloody tampons.

Kellen runs into the house soon after and we laugh together for an hour. But the parents of one of the girls end up threatening to call the cops on my sister. So for all this Kellen gets her car keys taken away for a month and Mom won’t let her go to the junior prom.

30.
Knead and work it thoroughly.

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After dragging the big box out of the closet, I sit down and trace the words Kellen’s stuff with my finger.

The rest of my sister’s boxes are in storage, but these were her college things, still warm with Kellen’s life, waiting for her to come back. Mom refused to look at this box. Kellen’s roommate literally shoved everything in there, including a half-empty package of Oreos and an unopened can of Red Bull.

What a fucking idiot. What kind of person thinks a grieving family needs stuff like that?

I pull the giant box between my legs and sift through it. The last time I did this I found her diary and the tampon box of weed. I’m hoping for more weed. I really need it right now.

I pull out Kellen’s toiletry bag. I remember admiring it on the kitchen table after Kellen and Mom went dorm shopping. It contains her makeup, toothbrush, toothpaste, and her birth control pills.

I snap open a case of eye shadow. The dark colors are worn down, showing the mirrored pan underneath, and I wonder about the last thing my sister saw before she died. I wonder if this eye shadow was on her dead eyelids. The case goes back into the bag.

My hand plunges back into the box. This time I pull out a Washington State University pom-pom on a long stick. Something sharp pokes into my palm, startling me, and I feel some velvety fabric. It’s a drawstring bag.

Knitting needles. Ten rows of loops are attached to one needle, leading to a big ball of lime green yarn. She took up knitting. Weird.

The official police report stated that Kellen went with friends to a Halloween party and that she started drinking as soon as she got in the car. Some concoction in a huge water bottle that a friend of a friend made up for her.

Once at the party, her friends lost track of her after she hooked up with some guy. A good guy. A trustworthy one she knew, everyone said so. Her friends left her at the party and drove back to campus because they couldn’t find her.

No one could find her.

But the next morning someone did find her. In the pool. She had hit her head and drowned. And the police say if she hadn’t been high, or drunk, she might not have fallen.

I know what the report said because Mom made me read it when she started talking again. She wanted it to be a warning to me so I didn’t end up like Kellen.

More items come out of the box: Kellen’s iPod, a small alarm clock, greeting cards from Dad telling her he loved her and missed her and to stay out of trouble. There were some boxes of Tic Tacs, some socks, some cash—not much—a few pens and chewed pencils, some flash drives, actual tampons, gum, hair scrunchies, black glittery nail polish, a calculator, and a half-burnt vanilla candle. There’s a pocketknife, too. Hot pink. Weird. I put it back in the box but then change my mind and toss it onto my bed.

The bottom of the box stares up at me without any weed. Only her coffee travel cup and some more toiletries.

Her friends from home had decorated the cup for her before she went away. All of the pictures show Kellen and her skanky best girlfriends holding red Solo cups.

I unscrew the lid, betting on smelling some putrid trace of the hazelnut lattes she loved.

But when I peek into the cup I see a big wad of rolled-up paper. I sniff into them just to be sure, before I try dumping the whole lot onto the floor. They won’t budge so I stick my finger into the middle of the wad to try and pry them apart. Slowly the bundle comes out, exploding onto the floor. It’s a bunch of envelopes.

The thick paper feels rough in my fingers. They don’t start shaking until my brain registers the familiarity of what I’m seeing.

The first thing I notice is the K on Kellen’s name, written with the monstrous K that looks as if it’s trying to eat the rest of her name.

The way the Ks in my name are written.

On the notes from my stalker.

I hold an envelope out in front of me and pull the paper from it.

Girls who tease should never walk alone at night.

A note for Kellen?

I’m on my feet too fast and the room tilts and swings as I run to the bathroom. My hip bangs into the corner of my dresser, but I make it to the toilet in time.

After I clean up I carry a glass of water back to my room. I want to close my eyes and lie down but I need to keep reading.

I race through each note, all on the same thick, buttercream paper. I read each one, and then pick them up and read them again. Every note looks just like my notes.

Who will hear you when you scream?

Do you know where I hide?

I’m going to take you.

I dream of your blood on my hands.

Did you feel my fingers in your hair when I watched you sleep last night?

I will make you suffer.

I still smell your skin.

Soon you will know my face.

Soon you will die.

My heart pounds in my ears and I feel like I’m underwater.

I want my sister back to tell me about the notes—and when and where she got them. Obviously they came from school. The whole box came from school.

Her diary. Where did I put the diary? I tossed it somewhere, too grossed out over her detailed sex life to read it.

I’ve never wanted my sister to visit me so badly, to show me the way.