Within These Walls (8 page)

10

V
EE STOOD DEEP
in the orchard, her phone held aloft and the camera app focusing in on a straight column of trees. It was a great shot, one that would get her at least a few likes and comments on Facebook and Instagram. She texted the shot to Heidi.

Cherry orchard behind the house.

At least it’s pretty here. But boring! What’s up?

She considered cutting to the chase and asking about Tim, but she didn’t want to be obvious about it. Vee was pretty sure her best friend knew she had it bad for her brother, but to Vee’s relief, Heidi hadn’t ever brought it up. Then again, it would have been nice to have someone keep an eye on Tim for the next two months, keep her in the loop, let her know if anything weird was going on. It wasn’t as though Vee and Tim were a
thing
, but she had her hopes. He was the first boy she daydreamed about. She’d even practiced kissing her pillow, though she’d take
that
little detail with her to the grave.

Her phone blipped in her hand.

Cool, but looks like the boonies! LOL

Not much. Going 2 the movies 2nite.

Vee frowned at the text. She bet Heidi was going with Clara and Laurie. Maybe, since Vee was missing, they even invited Jenn along even though Jenn was a total drag. Jenn was the type of kid to rat on her friends if her parents so much as
suspected
she’d been doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. It was why the girls tended not to invite her to hang out. Clara liked to curse and Laurie loved dirty jokes, and both Vee and Heidi were “weird” with their dark clothes and choice of music. It wouldn’t have taken much for Jenn to blab to her mother after hanging out with a motley crew like them.

What movie? With Tim?

She bit her bottom lip and busied herself with Instagram while waiting for a reply. So what if Heidi knew Vee liked Tim? Wasn’t that what friends were for? If she and Tim ended up going out, it would just be an excuse for Vee to spend even more time at Heidi’s place. Heck, if she and Tim ended up getting married, she and Heidi would kind of be like sisters, and that would be pretty cool.

Don’t know yet LOL

Vee glowered at the screen.
Don’t know what
? she wanted to know.
Don’t know what movie you’re going to see, or don’t know if Tim is going?
Didn’t Heidi get that this was important? Vee was an entire country away, nothing but her and her dad—a father that, sooner rather than later, would forget all about her, lost in his work—and all Heidi could do was reply with her stupid LOLs. Vee squeezed the phone tight in her hand, attempting to subdue her mounting frustration, then began to type up a response:

Don’t know what?

Delete.

Don’t be a jerk.

Delete.

Why can’t you just answer?

Delete.

Stop being such a bitch!

No.

She closed her eyes and counted to five.

It’s going to be fine. Just write him an email in a few days. Take some creepy pictures and post them on Tumblr. Give him a reason to remember you. Give him a reason to
miss
you, Vee.
Maybe the fastest way to most men’s hearts was through their stomachs, but the fastest way to Tim’s heart was through mystery. For all he knew, she was having a blast in Washington. Heck, for all he knew, Pier Pointe was full of guys twice as cool as him. Tim who? Oh, Tim
Steinway
? He was okay, she guessed, but the Washington boys were better. Darker. Way more dangerous.

The sky rumbled overhead and she sighed, tipping her face up to stare at the dark clouds above. If it kept raining, she’d be stuck in the house all summer. She’d never meet anyone, let alone any boys. Not that her dad would mind. Rain was a convenient excuse for staying in rather than going out. Except that when Vee tipped her chin away from the sky, she came face-to-face with a wide-eyed kid standing at the edge of the trees. She blinked at him, startled by his sudden appearance, perplexed by where he had come from. He looked older
than Tim by at least a few years—probably still a teen, but definitely out of high school. Vee peered at him, waiting for him to speak. But rather than talking, his mouth curled up into a grin that gave her the creeps. It was a crazed sort of smile, the kind only a serial killer wore. Disturbed enough to take a single backward step, with her movement she seemed to shake him from his otherwise static state. And yet, despite the chill he’d sent down the backs of her arms, when he turned and bolted out of view, she yelled out after him.

“Hey!” She was too curious not to follow. Rather than turning back to the house, she dashed to the end of the orchard’s row. Someone whooped in the distance. Had it been the creepy wide-eyed boy, or someone else? She could hear girls laughing. No, there was more than just the boy. There was a whole group of them, people out in the forest beyond the house who she could only assume shouldn’t have been there.

“Hello?” She waited for someone to respond, for someone to surface. There was another round of laughter. Then, a scream.

Vee froze. Blanched. The cry sounded terrified, a yell she imagined emanated from the throat of someone who had stumbled onto a dead body in the heart of the woods. She hovered at the edge of the trees, wondering whether she should investigate or go get her dad.
Forget it,
she thought.
You don’t need him.
For a guy who had once pretended to be a vampire in his spare time, her dad could be really lame. He tried to come off as hip with his music and cool because he didn’t have some boring office job, but in the end he was just like every other adult: Dull. Ordinary. Totally boring. If Vee told him she heard screaming in the woods, she doubted he’d jump up and announce they were going to investigate. He’d just say it wasn’t any of their business and call the cops.

But Vee
wanted
it to be her business. This was her home, no matter how temporary, and that weird-looking guy had stared right
into her eyes before taking off into the trees. What if he knew Vee had overheard that scream? What if that guy had been a lookout, and now Vee was a witness to some sort of crime? True, she hadn’t
seen
anything, but maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe just hearing the cry made her a target.

The mere idea of it should have scared her, but it ignited a flame of exhilaration inside her chest instead.
Wait until Tim finds out,
she thought. No girl would be able to touch her, not if she could lay claim to hearing a murder take place. Not if, perhaps, she had seen the killer before he’d plunged a knife into his victim in the thick of the forest behind her summer home.

She cast a quick glance over her shoulder toward the house, then looked back to the wooded area a dozen yards away. She wouldn’t go far, just a few feet in. But before she could duck into the pines, the sky cracked open overhead.

The rain came fast and Vee yelped as the cold deluge soaked through her pajama top. “Crap!” Cradling her phone against her chest, she did an about-face and ran for the house, desperate to keep her tether to the outside world dry. By the time she bounded into the kitchen, the rain had soaked her through.

She dashed across the living room, sprinted up the stairs, and, shivering, veered into the room she had designated as her own. It was still Spartan; just a mattress pushed into the corner, the furniture her dad had bought for her still dismantled, and her boxes of stuff lined up against one of the walls. She’d been careful to mark all her moving boxes with a giant
V
across the top flaps, not needing her dad “accidentally” rifling through her stuff. Her ghost books were in there. She’d even managed to get ahold of an old copy of
The Exorcist
at the library. It was so tattered that she’d shoved it into her backpack and walked out with it, convincing herself that nobody would miss it.
It was just a ratty old paperback, too worn-out to be of use to anyone. That book was her summer reading, perfect for stormy nights.

The majority of her things were still in her room in New York. She hoped that her mom wouldn’t decide they had to leave the house in Briarwood—Heidi’s place was within walking distance and her school was only a couple of blocks away. But eight weeks in Washington was a long time, and she’d brought enough with her to turn her space into a livable bedroom. She didn’t want to think about the fact that this place may very well become her father’s permanent home. Yet if she was going to be bouncing back and forth between Briarwood and Pier Pointe, she had to make her bedroom comfortable. Her parents must have thought so, too, otherwise they would have argued that she had packed too many things for such a short trip.

With her pajamas cold and wet against her skin, she tore open one of the suitcases that had made it out of the truck the night before. It housed the clothes her mother had deemed vacation-­appropriate. Suspiciously, most of those vacation-appropriate selections were the clothes her mother hated—black band T-shirts, tattered jeans. Vee imagined her closet back home was perfectly respectable now, not a shred of her dark period in sight. Pulling out a shirt and pants, she made her way to the bathroom next door.

The bathroom was hideous—pastel blue as far as the eye could see. But Vee had been sharing a bathroom with her parents since she could count to three. This bathroom may have been super-ugly, but at least it was hers. Stepping into what she’d already dubbed in her mind as the “blue room,” she shut the door behind her and peeled off her soaked pj pants, dropping them into the sink with a plop.

Uncle Mark yelled something downstairs—an exclamation of distress. Vee pictured him carrying a box that was either way too big
or way too heavy. Her dad replied with a laugh, and she smiled to herself as she pulled her wet sleep shirt over her head and replaced it with a dry one. But her smile was short-lived.

She liked seeing her father happy, yet she couldn’t help but wonder just what he had to be happy about. Neither he nor her mom had said much about their separation, but she knew they were going to get a divorce. Bouncing between coasts would become the norm. She’d get to live in two separate houses—one where her dad would be lonely all by himself, and one where Kurt Murphy hung around like a plague. Unless her mom decided to move in with Kurt.
Oh my God.
She’d just about die if
that
happened. Living under Kurt’s roof would mean she had to respect him. How was she supposed to respect a guy who was responsible for tearing her parents’ relationship apart? For ruining her life?

And then there was her social life. Would her dad expect her to spend every summer in Pier Pointe? What would that do to her relationships back in New York? Or, worse, what would happen if she met someone she liked
here
and couldn’t see them for nine months out of the year?

She stared into the mirror of the medicine cabinet and narrowed her eyes. Maybe
she
was part of the problem. The brooding. The attitude that infuriated her mother. She had rebelled against her parents’ constant fighting by putting on a cold and callous disguise. She’d hidden herself away as a form of protection. But perhaps it was her very hiding that had brought Mr. and Mrs. Graham to this point. Now her mother loathed Vee’s dad so much that only an entire country separating them would do.

Vee turned her eyes away while a familiar pang of shame scratched at her brain. Tugging on a dry pair of undies before pulling on her jeans, she stared at her sopping top and pants lying in the sink. She hadn’t seen a clothes dryer in the house, and even if there
was one, she wasn’t about to crawl into a creepy old basement during a rainstorm just to get her pj’s up to spec. Especially not after seeing that guy outside. His weird smile was still lingering at the back of her mind. That scream was still a worry. What if she went down to the basement only to find him waiting there for her? He had appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the orchard, so what was to keep him from appearing out of nowhere inside the house? Wringing her clothes out in the sink, she turned to the bare tension bar that ran across the top of the tub. If she hung them there, they’d be dry by bedtime. The basement, if there even was one in the house, would be altogether avoided.

As it turned out, she wasn’t tall enough to reach the rod; even when she went up on her tiptoes she couldn’t reach the bar. Pressing her left hand flush against the tiled wall, she carefully placed her bare foot along the edge of the ugly blue tub. It was a maneuver her mother would have screamed at her for even considering, let alone going through with.

What if you slip? You could break your neck!

And what if I did?
she wondered.
Would it be enough for you to forget everything that’s happened? Would it get you both to love each other again?

With her feet teetering along the bathtub’s ledge, Vee flopped her pajama pants over the bar. She tried to arrange them in a way that would lend to quick drying, but she stopped short of tossing her shirt over in the same way. She froze where she stood, poised like a tightrope walker, her gaze fixed on the reflection in the medicine cabinet’s mirror.

“What . . . ?” The word slipped past her lips, a mere whisper. Because while she could see the lip of the tub, the tension rod, and the blue tile that lined the wall behind her, she couldn’t see
herself
. Her brain immediately screamed
vampire!
She had yet to read
Dracula
,
but Tim had. As soon as he discovered Vee had read the likes of
Twilight
, he’d schooled her in classic Nosferatu folklore. Real vampires could shape-shift. Their shadows could move independently from their owners. They didn’t spend eternity going to high school, didn’t sparkle, and, most importantly, they had no reflection because they had no soul.

She blinked hard, convinced that if she squeezed her eyes shut for long enough, her brain would trip back into what it was supposed to see. There she’d be, reflected back at herself.

But instead of seeing herself, she opened her eyes to a girl staring back at her—a person that most definitely was
not
Vee.