Paper Valentine (15 page)

GROUNDED

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

T
he next week is probably the longest of my life.

I’m allowed to go to work because I’m Kelly’s only summer help, and my mom believes that it’s important for me to honor my commitments, but I have to come right home afterward, and Decker has to take time off to drive me. Mrs. Ortero or one of Pinky’s brothers has to go over to Harris Johnson every day to get Pinky and Ariel.

I focus on collecting papers, magazines, anything I can find that might have something to do with the murders. My ears feel funny. They buzz and crackle, ringing constantly like a faraway alarm, or like the wind is always blowing. I can’t tell if it’s something I’m imagining or just a natural consequence of the heat, of being shut in. My skin feels too tight for my insides, and I can’t help thinking that maybe these past few weeks are just what a nervous breakdown looks like. You throw out all your better judgment and your inhibitions and leap headlong into recklessness with the biggest, roughest boy in school and disappoint your mother. You start spending every stupid minute on your floor, cutting up newspapers and old advertising circulars until none of the pieces even make sense anymore.

Even though it’s almost four in the afternoon, I’m in my shorty pajamas with my rag rug rolled back and my papers spread out in front of me, thinking about Finny and how the last time we saw each other was like the best, most perfect thing that had ever happened in my life—and now it’s been so long that it’s not like anything.

He hasn’t called, which is disappointing even though I don’t know what I expected. He doesn’t seem like the kind of boy who really calls people. I don’t even know what this is or what he thinks it is. Maybe it’s nothing.

For a little while on Tuesday, I considered calling Angelie to confess to her about my weird, ongoing thing with Finny, or to ask if when boys ignore you, it ever means they really, really like you. But even before I hit speed dial, I knew it would be a bad idea. There’s just no way a conversation like that would end with anything good. Anyway, lately she hasn’t exactly tried to get ahold of me either. She usually calls in the afternoons, when she knows I’ll be home from the photo shop. But ever since our conversation about Hailey Martinsen and about how much it sucks being stuck at home, we haven’t really talked.

And Lillian is no help.

On Thursday, when I finally try to tell her how Finny kissed me in the backyard, she just stares down at me from the edge of my desk and says, “Yeah, because that’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

If this were some other summer—last year, maybe—we could at least talk about it. I could whisper to her in the dark, under the sheets with a flashlight between us, or lying side by side in the hammock. I could tell her everything.

Except I couldn’t really. Because even before all this, before she got sick, she would never tolerate the idea of me going around with someone like him.

It’s weird to realize that I have something Lillian doesn’t now, because she was always the confident one. She used to know so much more about boys and dating and sex than I did. She knew so much more about everything. But then Trevor happened, and now the boys who brought her lilac twigs or mix CDs have all moved on, gone before she was even actually dead. Because none of them wanted to date a girl whose bones showed through her skin like it was made out of paper.

Time’s kept going, and I’ve finally done something she hasn’t.

Lillian only sighs and shakes her head, flopping down into my desk chair. “I can’t believe you actually want to be with him. With him. Don’t you worry about how you’ll look to everyone else? Don’t you ever think about what people will say?”

“Like what?”

She shrugs listlessly. “Oh, I don’t know—maybe like, ‘Look at Hannah, she’s totally lowering herself. She’s wasting her whole summer hanging around with some loser.’”

I understand that she’s finally getting right down to the heart of something real and ugly, and it sort of surprises me that it’s taken her this long to say it out loud. “Are you sure you don’t really mean that you worried people might be saying, ‘Look at Lillian’? That you worried so much about what everyone thought?”

“It was all that mattered,” she says softly. “All I really cared about. Isn’t that funny?”

I kneel over my stack of newspapers with the scissors clenched in my hand. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

Lillian sighs and rolls over so she’s lying on her back with her head hanging limply over the side of the desk. “It didn’t happen all at once,” she says.

I look at the bones in her face, remembering how she shrank so slowly that the difference wasn’t daily or obvious. It only really showed up in pictures. “No kidding.”

“I mean, I didn’t think, ‘Today I’m going to starve myself until I die.’ I just thought, ‘Maybe I’ll try to lose a couple pounds. Maybe a size smaller. Just one size—that’s not so much.’”

“What happens then?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you can go down a size, what happens then? Why is it important?”

“Because if I could just drop a size, then I’d be happy.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I wish my voice were kinder. “That worked out well for you.”

“Hannity, I’m not trying to make excuses. It wasn’t rational. I’m just saying what I thought when I was in it.”

In it. Like a holiday play or a swimming pool, when what she really means is she dove straight down the rabbit hole after it. I shake my head, staring down at the stack of cut-up newspapers in front of me. “What you thought was that people were paying attention to you.”

It just comes out, spilling off my tongue before I can stop it. Too vicious, too mean. I know that but it’s too late to take it back, and the voices in my head won’t stop. They’re shouting it now, chanting along, singing it like a jump-rope rhyme, pay attention, pay attention. It’s maybe the meanest thing I’ve ever said to her.

At first I think I might as well have slapped her, but then she tugs her hair and nods. “Yeah, sometimes. Maybe it was for attention sometimes. On days when I felt like I was invisible, or when my mom was on some rampage about how I should join drama or choir and kept telling me if I just got a little smaller, I’d be really pretty. It was like—it was this hobby I had.”

But after that it was a monstrous, ugly thing. There must have been a window between well and sick where it became undeniably clear that starving was a black hole and not a toy. “Back then, when it was a . . . hobby, what made you want it, though? Why did you hold on to it?”

Lillian looks down at me over the edge of the desk and her face is so unbearably miserable. “Because it made me special.”

I curl over my bare legs, picking at the scrape on my knee. When I peel up the edge of the scab, I see a little pink sliver of new skin, raw and tender. It itches. “Why couldn’t you just be special in a normal way?”

She crouches over me, and I hate the way her mouth always looks so superior when she’s annoyed. “Come on, you don’t believe that unique-snowflake bullshit, do you? That everyone’s special in their own way? That every tiny microscopic flower is precious? It’s not. I wanted to be unique or important. To matter.”

“You did matter.”

“To who? To Jessica and Carmen and that bitch Angelie Baker? To my mother? Please, she spent the last three years drinking a perfectly decent chardonnay on the couch and waiting for me to stop being so dramatic.” She says the last word like she’s swinging a hammer at me.

“You were special to me.”

Lillian grins, skull-faced and nasty, which is this new smile she got after she started looking sick. “You think drooling rejects like Finny Boone are special. You think people are important just because they exist, or that everybody matters. But they don’t.”

The room goes perfectly silent, so still I think it’s gathering dust. And then the voices rush back in, thudding in my ears. Special special special.

Hands shaking, I flip through a glossy insert full of hardware ads and coupons for laundry detergent. With quick, uneven strokes, I cut out a big cherry-red special! It’s printed in a bold, chunky font, surrounded by lightning bolts and stars. I swipe the back of it with the glue stick and stick it to my floor. The flood of whispers stops, goes still and slow, and trickles away. The word sits there next to the end of my bed, bright and ragged on the varnished wood.

Lillian laughs a dry little laugh and rolls her eyes. “Nice. Your mom is going to love that, gunking up her hardwood with adhesive.”

“It’s water soluble,” I say automatically, staring at what I’ve done. All that matters is, for the first time this afternoon, the voices have tapered off, faded out.

The silence lasts for only a few seconds, though. Then the noise is all around me, the chorus of whispers buzzing and hissing, crashing in my ears like waves. And this time, I can almost make out the clearest word, repeated again and again. It sounds like memorial.

I hunch forward and sort through the stack of clippings, shuffling around for a photo of the memorial for Cecily Miles on the corner of Muncy and Vine, near the meadow and the culvert. I stick the picture carefully to my floor, just under the bright red special, ignoring the way I can feel Lillian’s eyes boring into my back.

She hops down from the desk and crouches next to me. “Why did you do that?” she whispers, and her gaze is so intent and so steady that I think she must be looking at someone else. Not at the awkward little girl who followed her everywhere and did everything she ever wanted. Not at me.

I ignore her and paste down another scissored word and then another. The only thing that quiets the storm of whispers is finding the words and cutting them out. I hunch over the stack of clippings and glue them down, plastering my floor in headlines and photos, a big capital P, dead and love and look.

Lillian watches with her chin in her hands.

“This is getting kind of out there,” she says, and I know I must be scaring her now, because her voice is very gentle. It dawns on me how backward that is—that I’m the one scaring her. I can’t stop.

She sighs and leans closer, like she’s trying to see past the curtain of hair that hides my face. “It’s really hot up here. Maybe you should get a drink of water. Or go down and see if Ariel wants to play cards. You could make ice pops or paint your nails.” She reaches out, using her fingertips to turn my chin and make me look at her. “You haven’t put up your hair or worn makeup in days.”

Her fingers are cold when they touch my skin, and I can feel the chilly gust of her breath on my cheek. When she was alive, I could tell if she hadn’t eaten by the way her breath smelled. There was always a reek of sickness to it, like something dying. Now that she’s dead, it doesn’t smell like anything.

* * *

Later, when the house is dark and everyone’s asleep, I lie in bed with my covers thrown back and my window open, restless with the way the room still seethes and clatters around me, the way it pulses with whispers. The heat radiates from everywhere, pressing down. Lillian looms over me, balanced in her familiar place on the footboard.

“I think I’m being haunted,” I say, and the words sound small and helpless in the dark.

She shakes her head and laughs. “Did it really take you half a year to figure that one out?”

“Not by you,” I say, and she goes absolutely still. “There are these . . . voices now, all the time. I hear them whispering, but I can hardly ever tell what they’re saying. And other things too. A couple times, I’ve seen things.”

Now Lillian is paying close attention, staring down at me in the dark. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

I shake my head, fighting to find the words, struggling to describe the bloody reflection in Finny’s kitchen and the day at the river. I try to explain the white, sunken face staring up at me out of the water. I don’t tell her the simple truth—that I didn’t say anything because I wanted so, so badly for it not to be real.

She listens with her head up and her hands clasped between her knees. “And they’re like me? You’re sure?”

I fold my hands on my chest and nod, even though I’m not sure if she can see me. “Why is this happening?” I whisper, and I mean all of it—the murders and the crime scenes and Lillian dying and the rotting drifts of birds and the heat and everything.

She makes a low, thoughtful noise, hugging her own shoulders. “Maybe it’s something particular about you. Maybe they know something that ties you to them.”

If I had to guess, though, I would pick something simpler. I think they might just be looking at me because for the past month, I’ve been looking at them. “I think they want me to help them,” I say. “Not just read the papers and fill the scrapbook like I’ve been doing, but really help them.”

Lillian is quiet for a long time before she speaks again. “Okay, let me ask you one really important question. You seriously don’t think it’s weird that both times you saw them, you were with Finny?”

I stare up at the dark ceiling, the gently fading stars. I can feel her watching me, holding very still. I don’t want to think about the answer to that.

“Okay,” she says finally. Her voice is tiny and dry, a tacit agreement not to force the issue. “But how will we be able to help them if they don’t show up for more than a few seconds, and when they talk you can’t understand them?”

“The same way you and I did that other time, maybe. Like with Monica.”

“Okay, but we don’t have a board.”

“No,” I whisper, feeling cold all over. “We do.”

When I turn on the lamp, the light makes a dull yellow circle that splashes over my walls. I slide out of bed onto the floor and pull back the braided rug in front of my bed, uncovering the collage of scissored-out letters. It’s an alphabet of mismatched consonants and stray vowels, pictures arranged haphazardly on the floor, pasted in a sloppy arc. It’s scary to really look at what it is I’ve made—not a spirit board, but a brutal gallery of chaos and confusion and sadness.

Lillian just sits on the footboard, hugging her knees and looking at my handiwork like it’s the big reveal in one of those movies about psychopaths. “That’s pretty intense, Hannah. I’ll give you that.”