The Haunted Page 3

  “It does look nice,” he said, handing Hendricks the muffins. “Your parents must’ve put a lot of work into this place.”

  Hendricks closed the door and followed them into the living room. “What do you mean?”

  “It used to be different,” Connor explained. “Nobody lived here in a long time, and it was pretty dangerous to come inside.”

  Portia snorted. “Yeah, we all thought the walls might fall down on you or something. But it sort of looks like a real house now.”

  Her eyes narrowed on the hall closet and she pulled it open—quick—like she expected there to be someone waiting for her on the other side.

  “Looking for something?” Hendricks asked.

  Portia shrugged, seeming disappointed as she closed the door. She pulled out her phone. “I thought that led to the basement.”

  “There isn’t really a basement, but the storm cellar door is outside.”

  “Right,” Portia said, distracted. “I knew that.”

  And, again, that feeling like she was missing something. Hendricks frowned. “How did you know that?”

  “I told you, this place was empty for years and then, out of nowhere, your parents buy it and fix it up.” Portia hesitated, her eyes moving around the room. “Or, you know, tried to fix it up or whatever—”

  The phone in her hand vibrated, cutting her off. She zeroed in on the screen again, chewing on her lip. “You said your parents were out, right?”

  Hendricks heard an ominous chime.

  “Yeah,” Hendricks said. “Why?”

  Portia’s thumbs flew across the phone screen, and a whoosh sound told Hendricks she’d sent a message. “Some of our friends wanted to check out your place.”

  Hendricks felt a sudden sinking in her gut. “So?”

  “We thought since you couldn’t come out to meet everyone, we could invite them over here,” Connor said.

  His face had transformed into another megawatt smile, and, once again, Hendricks felt like the funniest, most charming person in the room.

  Dangerous, she thought. The ones who made you feel like the only person in the room were the ones you really had to watch out for.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Hendricks took a sip of beer, hoping it might calm her nerves, but the beer just sloshed around her stomach, making her feel worse. She bit the inside of her cheek so she wouldn’t make a face.

  She couldn’t even remember who’d brought the beer. It’d just appeared in her kitchen, along with three other Drearford High students whose names she’d immediately forgotten.

  “And this is Casey Claire,” the girl beside her was saying, pointing to a blurry photo on her phone. Hendricks nodded, trying to keep her expression politely interested. The girl she was talking to was Asian and beautiful, with thick, waist-length brown hair with bleachy blond highlights and eyeglasses shaped like octagons.

  Hendricks struggled to remember the girl’s name. It was some sort of bird. Robin, maybe. Or Sparrow.

  The girl kept talking. “Casey laughs like a drunk hyena, but her mother is sleeping with the volleyball coach, so you have to be nice to her if you want to make the team.”

  Wren? Hendricks thought, pursing her lips. Goose?

  “Hey, Raven! Toss me another beer!”

  Right. Raven.

  Raven removed a Natty Light from the cardboard box on the marble island and tossed it across the kitchen to a dark-skinned boy with thick black hair and the kind of perfectly straight teeth people paid six hundred dollars a cap for.

  Hendricks didn’t have to strain to remember his name. Blake. He looked like a Blake. Pretty and dumb. The captain of some sports team. Baseball? Lacrosse? Raven had mentioned that, too, but it’d already slipped right out of Hendricks’s mind.

  He stood beside another boy, this one good-looking in the exact same way that Connor was good-looking. Hendricks thought they must be brothers, and her suspicion was confirmed when the boy curled an arm around Connor’s neck, putting him into what seemed like a friendly headlock. If headlocks could be friendly.

  Hendricks frowned, watching the two boys wrestle around her kitchen. Brothers did that, right? Or should she be concerned?

  She anxiously twisted the tab on top of her beer can, eyeing the staircase that led to the second floor. She’d already checked on Brady—twice—and she knew he was fine. But all the noise still made her feel guilty.

  Finally, Connor said, “Come on, Finn, knock it off!” and awkwardly untwisted himself from the headlock. His hair was mussed, his cheeks pink from the exertion. “The new girl’s going to think we were raised in a barn.”

  Finn stumbled back a few feet, colliding with a kitchen counter. He straightened, looking embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said to Hendricks.

  “It’s okay,” she said, but her stomach gave a lurch. She looked down at her hands, which were clutching her beer can like it was a lifeline.

  Everyone was being totally nice, so why did she feel like everything she’d eaten that day was moving around inside of her, floating on a sea of warm beer?

  Maybe it was just that it felt like things were happening very fast. It was only her first day, and already she was surrounded by people who claimed they wanted to be her friends. It seemed too easy. There had to be a catch.

  A lump thickened inside her throat. Could they know about what happened to her? Her old friends had done this, too, acting too nice, like she was something that had to be handled delicately. It was one of the reasons she’d been cool with moving away. No one wanted friends who treated you like something that could be broken.

  Her brain raced, wondering how anyone in Drearford might’ve found out. There wasn’t anything online, she’d made sure of that, but Philadelphia wasn’t far away. Maybe someone here knew someone from her old school, someone who’d been at the party . . .

  “Are you cool?” Raven glanced up from her phone, frowning. “You look a little overwhelmed.”

  Overwhelmed. That was a good word for how she felt.

  “Maybe a little,” Hendricks admitted, and she tried to hide her nerves with another swallow of beer.

  “I hear that.” Raven slid her phone into her pocket and leaned against the counter. “I was new last year. It’s the worst.”

  Hendricks raised her eyebrows. “You’ve only been here a year?”

  Raven seemed so settled. Hendricks assumed she’d grown up here like everyone else.

  But Raven was nodding. “My family moved up from Brooklyn at the beginning of sophomore year. The small-town thing isn’t really my scene, so I figured I’d totally hate it, but then Portia convinced me to try out for cheerleading. She said it would do amazing things for my brand.” Raven lifted her eyebrows. “I’m not even kidding. My brand. She actually said that.”

  Hendricks snorted. Raven was currently wearing a pair of ripped-up jeans over black tights, topped with a little-boy’s summer camp T-shirt that looked like it came from the Goodwill, and a chunky, beaded necklace. Her octagon-shaped glasses made her dark eyes look big and round.

  Everything about her screamed artist. She was about the last person you’d expect to be a cheerleader.

  “Well?” Hendricks asked. “Did you?”

  “Yeah.” Raven dragged the word out, turning it into two syllables. “I did. And you want to know the most batshit part? She was completely right. Cheerleading might be basic or whatever, but it’s also dance. It’s creative. I . . . sort of love it.” A shy smile flicked over Raven’s face.

  “You’re right. That is batshit,” Hendricks said, and Raven laughed out loud. She laughed like a little kid—mouth open, head thrown back, no self-consciousness at all—and it made Hendricks grin in return, relaxing a little.

  “Are you talking about the cheerleading thing again?” asked Portia, appearing beside them. “All I did was make one tiny lit
tle suggestion. And if I hadn’t, you’d probably be like that Lauren Groggin chick.” To Hendricks, “She performs spoken-word poetry at the coffee shop every Friday night and wears a cape unironically.”

  Raven snickered and said, “Hey, some of her poems are sort of good.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want to hear them while drinking my cold brew.” Portia’s eyes twinkled. “So how are we going to help the new girl?”

  It took Hendricks a second to realize they were talking about her again. “What makes you think I need help?”

  Portia flicked a hand, dismissive. “Everyone needs help,” she said, which Hendricks had to admit was sort of randomly deep.

  “We could use another cheerleader on the team,” Raven offered, turning the tab of her Natty Light. “Cassidy fell last week, and she says she only twisted her ankle, but I think—”

  But Portia was already shaking her head. “Hendricks isn’t a cheerleader.”

  “Why not?” Hendricks asked. She couldn’t be sure, but that had sounded like an insult.

  Portia rolled her eyes. “Ugh, no, I didn’t mean that to be bitchy. It’s just . . . you’re sort of weird.”

  Raven snorted.

  “I meant good weird,” Portia insisted. “Like an alien from a planet where teenagers wear a lot of oversized sweaters and forget to brush their hair but have unfairly clear skin.”

  “And at least fifty percent of that was a real compliment,” Raven pointed out. “I think that’s a personal best.”

  Hendricks was momentarily at a loss for words. She’d never really liked that expression before, loss for words, as though the words could just fall out of your head and be gone forever, but it was an accurate description of how she felt. She knew there was a normal thing to say in this scenario, and there might have been a time when she could’ve figured out what it was, but for now all she could do was open and close her mouth, like a fish.

  “Maybe I don’t even mean weird. You’re more different. Like, I can’t figure out your deal at all, and normally I’m really good at that,” Portia said.

  “My deal?” Hendricks asked.

  “Who were you at your last high school? I need a cliché.”

  Hendricks’s eyebrows drew together. “I don’t think I was a cliché.”

  “Everyone is some cliché. Like, Raven’s the arty chick, and I’m sort of the queen bee mean girl. Except I don’t think I’m mean—”

  “You’re more blunt,” Raven said, thoughtful. “Tactless, sometimes.”

  Portia flapped her hand, like tact was a silly, quaint idea she didn’t care for. “So what cliché are you? A jock? Or, maybe, one of those overachieving honor student kids?” When Hendricks didn’t answer, Portia’s eyebrows went up. “Come on, give me something to work with. Shy and deep? Moody bad girl?”

  Hendricks tugged at a cuticle. She’d never been part of a clique, never thought of herself as a cliché. She’d started dating Grayson freshman year, and then his friends became her friends, and the girl she’d been in middle school—the girl who wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone, to try anything—sort of . . . faded.

  It had never seemed weird to her before. But now she thought of it and felt a strange churning in her chest. Who was she? Just someone’s girlfriend. And now she wasn’t even that anymore.

  “Of course, Connor likes you, which will help,” Portia continued, lowering her voice. She glanced across the kitchen, where he and the other two boys were engaged in a conversation about some sort of team sport, and said, “Connor liking you is, like, a stamp of approval at Drearford.”

  She nudged Hendricks with her elbow, eyebrows wagging.

  Hendricks swallowed, her eyes darting to the boys, and then back to Portia. This was the beginning of a longer conversation, and the kitchen didn’t seem like a private enough place to get into it.

  Portia took her silence as a cue to continue. “In the interest of full disclosure, Connor and I dated for a few months back in tenth, before I came out. Now we’re just friends, so you totally have my blessing.” Turning to Raven, she asked, “Don’t you think they’d be cute together?”

  “Blessing?” Hendricks repeated.

  Raven pursed her lips, like she was thinking this over. “Yeah, I see it. Portia’s whole thing with Connor was that he was too laid back and easygoing, while she’s this crazy, mega-achieving super student, you know?”

  “And also, he’s a guy,” Portia added.

  Raven cocked her head, considering Hendricks. “But Hendricks looks like she could use a little fun.”

  Hendricks chewed on her lower lip, amazed that Raven—and Portia, apparently—had picked that up in just a few minutes of knowing her.

  “My last school was pretty intense,” she admitted. Understatement of the year. “But I don’t know if I’m up for dating anyone right away. I kind of just want to . . . date myself.”

  Date myself?

  Did she really just say that?

  “See what I mean? Good weird,” Portia said.

  “Oh yeah,” Raven added. “She’s the best weird.”

  Hendricks took another sip of beer, trying to relax.

  Across the room, Connor caught her eye and dazzled a smile at her. Hendricks smiled back, but her heart gave a complicated tug inside her chest. For a second, she imagined answering Portia’s question honestly.

  Who am I? I’m the popular jock’s girlfriend. I define my entire personality around him. It was so pathetic that it made her blush, even though she hadn’t said any of it out loud. Some clean slate. She pictured a rock rolling down a hill, moving too quickly, gathering mud and moss and debris—

  And then slamming into a tree and breaking into a million pieces.

  CHAPTER

  4

  It wasn’t until her new friends had gone that Hendricks realized how long this night was going to be. It was January dark outside, not even seven o’clock, though it looked much later. The stars hadn’t come out yet, but streetlights winked through the trees.

  She drummed her fingers against the counter. Her parents weren’t going to be home until midnight, at the earliest.

  What was she supposed to do here for five hours?

  Her eyes fluttered closed. She sucked down a lungful of air and held it. She was all too aware of the sounds of the house. The groaning walls, the creaking windows . . .

  And were those footsteps again? Or just her heart pounding in her ears?

  Hendricks’s eyes popped back open. For a moment she forgot how to breathe.

  She grabbed a beer and Brady’s baby monitor and headed out the back door.

  Outside, everything was black and bright with cold. Hendricks’s breath hovered in a cloud before her lips after she exhaled, and her skin grew rigid and coarse with goose bumps, but at least the noises were normal. The wind wasn’t nearly as spooky when it wasn’t tapping at her window.

  Out of nowhere, a voice said, “Hey.”

  Hendricks started, her heart jackhammering. “Who’s there?”

  “Calm down,” the voice said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

  Hendricks squinted and stepped into the dark . . .

  A guy sat at the edge of what was supposed to be a pool, legs dangling over the sides. The tarp that’d been covering the empty hole lay crumpled in the grass. His clothes were black and slim-fitting. Hipster cool, but Hendricks doubted that was the look around here. He wore his hair short on the sides and longer on top. It was a city trend, a sort of throwback to the fifties. Like Elvis, or James Dean.

  Hendricks frowned, recognizing him from this morning. He was the guy who’d been smoking outside the school when she’d walked in to meet Portia. “What are you doing out here?”

  He held up his hand, and she saw a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Silver smoke curled into the sky.

  �
�Oh.” Her shoulders relaxed. “Are you looking for Portia and those guys? Because they already left.”

  His expression went stony. “No,” he said, his voice landing hard on the word. “I’m not.”

  He brought the cigarette to his lips. It was too dark to see him clearly, but the smoldering red embers illuminated a full mouth and hooded eyes.

  “Then why are you here?” The question came out sounding more accusatory than she’d meant it to.

  If the boy was offended, he didn’t show it. “I live just through there.” He jerked his head toward the trees that separated their backyards. “This place used to be the perfect smoking spot, before you moved in.”

  He said this easily, but there was something going on in his eyes that made Hendricks think there was more to the story. She found herself wondering where he existed on the social totem pole of Drearford High. She doubted it was very high.

  “Anyway,” he continued, his tone light enough to make Hendricks think she’d imagined the moment of weirdness. “I’ll stop coming over now that you guys have moved in.”

  He put his cigarette out on the heel of his boot and pushed himself to his feet. He looked at her for a long moment. It felt like a look of pity mixed with something else that Hendricks couldn’t place. She had the sudden urge to say something to get him to stay, but all she came up with was “Yeah.”

  “What’s up with your yard, anyway?” he asked.

  Hendricks looked around. The yard was going to be beautiful, someday. Her dad had spent months planning the landscaping: a patio surrounded with trees, stone pathways twisting around bushes and flowers. The cement had been poured, the stones set, but they couldn’t start planting until spring. The pathways curled around empty plots of fresh dirt. Lights surrounded the perimeter of the pool, but there were no bulbs, and, anyway, Hendricks didn’t think the electricity out here was set up yet.

  “We’re renovating,” she said.

  The boy pushed the hair off his forehead. “Weird. I’d figured whoever bought this place would knock it down. Build something new.”