“I’d go out for five minutes and it was where’d you go, who’d you see, who saw you, why’d it take so long? Daddy’d ask me about boys I knew or boys he thought I might know and whether I’d ever let them do this or that to me, all these detailed questions. Guys ask me all the time, where’d you learn to fuck like that? I tell them, from my father. He gave me a lifetime of great ideas with all his questions.”
It was like free-falling through slime just listening to her, so I couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling. I would have taken her hand, but she was still hiding them.
“Grandpa … he molested you?”
“No,” she said, her voice disturbingly wistful. “But maybe he should’ve. Maybe then he wouldn’t’ve hated me as much.
“But he didn’t like me like that. He didn’t want anybody to like me like that. I had to sneak out if I wanted to be with anybody, and I always got caught.”
She was shivering, goose bumps popping out on her arms, despite the heat. “I thought it’d be so great when I finally escaped that house, but it’s like I’m still trapped in the back room alone and—”
I stood before her and blocked her view of the house—its view of her. “You’re not alone anymore. You’re not trapped. Or should I burn down that house to prove it to you?”
She was so startled, she dropped her hands. “Don’t talk crazy.”
“I am crazy. That’s the point; I have a ready-made alibi.”
The thought of fire thawed the cold cast of her face and lit the dark oil of her eyes. “Would you burn it down?”
“Got matches?” Her interest was firing me up. “Because if that’s what you need, I’ll do it.”
She wanted me to do it. I could see it. Just ask me.
Ask me!
She opened her mouth. I was prepared for anything, except the shrill voice that interrupted.
“Hey! Rosalee? Is that you?”
A dried stick of a woman stood on the porch of the house next door to Rosalee’s childhood home, a woman with inexplicable old-lady hair, parted on the right and slicked to the side in a weird white bouffant.
“Hey, Miz Holly.” Rosalee had regained her balance, all the burning anticipation of arson drained out of her; her hands came to rest lightly on her hips. “Ain’t seen you in a long time.” She didn’t sound upset about it.
Miz Holly pushed up her glasses, all the better to see me with. “This the daughter I been hearing about?”
“Yes’m.”
“She’s so pretty. Just like you. Hope she only takes after you in looks. Or is she running wild in the streets the way you used to?” To me, Miz Holly said, “I could tell you stories about this one—”
“G’night, Miz Holly,” Rosalee said, bright and mean. “Tell your son I said hi. And your husband.”
“I … okay.”
We walked back the way we’d come. “I guess we won’t be sending her a Christmas card,” I said.
Rosalee threw an evil look over her shoulder at Miz Holly. “She was always ratting me out to my folks.”
“So you got back at her by sleeping with her son and her husband.”
Rosalee’s laugh was as evil and gorgeous as a serpent’s tooth. “Am I that transparent?”
“It’s what I would have done,” I admitted. “When I was back in Dallas, I decided to sleep with all the boys in my class in alphabetical order, and they totally went along with it. It’s like you said—it’s easy to fascinate men.”
She looked at me, half-shocked, half-amused. “You went to bed with all the boys in your class?”
“I never even got to the Bs,” I said, swinging the bag of peaches. “Too many As for little ole me. I got bored after Armbruster and called it off.”
“You’re definitely my daughter,” said Rosalee, chuckling, halting conversations midsentence as people marveled at the sound of her laughter.
I wanted to burn something for her so badly I felt sick with it. I wanted to tell her I’d do anything for her, but my heart was too full to speak.
I was her daughter.
Definitely.
Chapter Twenty-five
On Wednesday I tried not to think about the trip to the shrink all day, but after school, when I could no longer avoid it, I began to shake. When Wyatt asked to drive me home, I let him, but a few blocks from my house, I made him detour into an empty lot so I could drag him into the backseat.
I wanted to eat up some time before I had to go home, but not much time was eaten.
“That didn’t take long,” I griped, retrieving my discarded underpants from the footwell.
Wyatt zipped up his pants, grinning and sweating and vibrant beside me on the leather seat. “Wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “Afternoons and backseats are for quickies. Everybody knows that.” He slung his arm around my shoulders and kissed me hard on my throat, hard enough to stop my breath for a second. “I like your neck.”
The way he said it made me smile, as though he were admitting a shameful secret. “Really?”
“Mm.” He kissed my jugular. “It’s swanlike.”
“I love swans.” I pulled away from his admiring kisses and rested my chin against the top of the backseat, staring out the rearview window at the high yellow grass and pine saplings bending in the gusty wind.
I watched the gray sky and prayed for a tornado. “If I were a swan, I wouldn’t need a tornado.”
“What?” He was no longer touching me, but he watched me, waiting for that after-sex wall to come down.
“If I had wings I could fly away.”
“Why you wanna fly away?”
I looked at Wyatt, shocked by the sting of tears in my eyes. “I don’t want to go home yet.”
The threat of my tears didn’t worry him—he was beyond worry. Something bright and irrepressible crackled deep in his eyes, like fireflies in a beer bottle. “I don’t aim to take you home yet. I wanna show you something.”
He pulled me out of the truck, and the wind nearly stripped off my dress. The air was moist and unstable and promised rain. I stayed by the truck, trying to keep my hair out of my face while Wyatt surveyed the lot.
“There,” he said, and ran through the brilliant yellow grass to a flailing sapling ten yards away. When he reached the tree, he turned to face me and stepped sideways into the wind … and disappeared.
My first thought was of Runyon’s daughter and how she’d vanished off the sidewalk one day, vanished and was never seen again.
“Wyatt!” I ran forward, screaming, and when he reappeared in mid-sideways step, I ran smack into him. We both hit the ground on our butts. Unlike me, Wyatt was laughing.
“How cool was that?” he said.
I crawled through the yellow grass toward him, my right elbow jingling and jangling as I clutched the front of his green shirt. “You used the hidden doors, didn’t you?”
“They finally showed me how,” he said, so full of good cheer I wanted to shake him. “I only just got the hang of it.”
I shook him. “You scared the shit out of me! And do you even know how many laws of nature you just totally destroyed?”
“Not nature as I know it!” He lifted me off my feet and twirled me around the lot.
“Is this a happy dance?” I yelled, not wanting to laugh, but laughing anyway. “This is so transy. I’m telling everyone.”
“Tell ’em!” Wyatt set me back on my feet and kissed me all over my face. “When they start clowning me, I’ll just make my escape.” He slid to the right with a flourish and vanished. Seconds later he reappeared, sliding to the left. Then he started strutting around like he owned the planet.
I smacked the back of his head. “Stop showing off.” But I was grinning as I said it; his excitement was catching. “How are you able to disappear like that?” I asked as the happy dance worked itself out of his system.
“I didn’t disappear,” he corrected. “Not the way you mean. I didn’t pop out of existence. It’s more like … taking a shortcut. But instead of going
down an alley, you go through a door.”
“A hidden door.”
“It’s funny, though, cuz they’re not hidden.” He was crazy excited, like a lit firecracker before the moment of explosion. “They’re everywhere.”
“But why do you have to go through them sideways?”
My cluelessness prompted him to give a demonstration.
We walked back to his dusty green truck, and he opened the driver’s-side door. “If you tried to go through this door like it was the front door of your house, you couldn’t get in. To get through this truck door, you gotta climb in. Hidden doors are the same way; they’re all doors, but they ain’t all shaped the same. Some of ’em you can only go through sideways, like that one over there.”
He gestured toward the sapling where he’d disappeared, obviously seeing something I couldn’t. “Or for that door”—he pointed past the front of the truck at thin air—“you’d have to fall through.”
I scanned the city-block-size lot, empty except for Wyatt’s green truck. “Are they all over the lot?”
“There’s six here, just in this one bit of space.” He shut the truck door and leaned back against it, regarding me with eyes as electric as any lightning bolt. “You know how many times I been dead-ended by some nightmare-looking thing and had to fight my way free? Fight to the death? But now I know—there’s always a way out.”
“There always was for you. It’s in your blood. In your bones, anyway.” I settled next to him and pinched his side, because I could. Because he was there and because he was real. “Have you ever left the world the way Anna did?”
He pinched me back, smiling. “I don’t aim to go out of the world. The last person who did was that prick Runyon. To hell with that.”
“Do the hidden doors lead to weird places? Weird flying-leech places?”
“The elders told us to watch out for the doors near the Keys, cuz doors near that much power could lead to any damn thing. The other ones, though”—he waved his hand around the lot—“they just lead to places around Portero. The Mortmaine’ve mapped ’em over the years, but I don’t exactly have ’em all memorized.
“The door by the tree led upsquare to Torcido Road. But that one …” He was pointing beyond the front of his truck, a teasing glint in his eyes as he turned to me. “You wanna see where that one leads?”
To his startlement, I grabbed his hand and pulled him around to the front of the truck. Hell yes, I wanted to see where it led: Fountain Square, Detroit, Narnia. Any place was better than therapy.
He laughed. “Atta girl.”
I thought of the time Shoko had taken me home. “I hope I don’t hurl this t—” I gasped and grabbed my elbow. It didn’t hurt, but it was crawlingly uncomfortable.
Wyatt put his hand on my shoulder. “Feel like something just whacked your funny bone?”
“Yes! It’s been doing that ever since the hunt.”
He smiled knowingly. “The night you made a wish—the Key changed something in you. You’ll get that tingle every time you pass a hidden door.” He pulled me back, away from the door I couldn’t see, and the tingle became easier to bear.
“Holy shit, Hanna.” He looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. “If you were marked, you could probably go through a hidden door on your own.”
He showed me a fresh, almost wet-looking glyph on his well-defined upper arm, a green tattoo of a door with an eye in the center.
“No, thanks. I prefer my skin smooth and untouched.”
He bit my lip. “Liar.”
“Stop that.” I pushed him away, laughing. “Or did you change your mind about the door?”
“Hell, no.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me into the horrid tingling. “Step forward on three.”
My hand trembled in his as I gazed at the yellow grass whipping against our legs and the hidden door only Wyatt could see.
“One, two, three.”
We stepped forward and fell through the grass.
Everything went black for a second, my stomach in free fall … and then my knees buckled as gravity caught up with me on a sidewalk somewhere downsquare.
Definitely downsquare, I decided, noting the seedy shops in need of paint squatting next door to saggy-porched houses. The people looked as worn and lived-in as the shops and were wholly unimpressed with our sudden appearance.
Except one girl, halfway down the block.
She’d fallen against the beige wall of a dollar store, holding her hand over her chest as she watched us with bugged eyes. I took her in at a glance: yellow shirt and blue jeans, no visible scars, innocent eyes.
“Stupid transy,” I said gleefully, when she turned and ran. At least I was no longer that person.
“I know where this is,” Wyatt said, looking around. “There’s Gourmandise.” I followed him across the street to a sweetshop, whose display of sticky treats and chocolate confections made me want to press my nose to the window and lick the glass.
Wyatt dragged me around to the back of the shop. “I saved the owner’s nephew once,” he explained, “and so she gives me free goodies. But she don’t want people seeing her be nice; it’d kill her repu—”
His words died away as we both beheld Petra on the back stoop of the sweetshop, kissing a boy.
The spark that had been blazing in Wyatt’s eyes all afternoon fizzled out. “Pet?”
Petra came up for air, flushed and merry; she became even merrier at the sight of Wyatt’s shock. “Well, hey there,” she greeted him. “The freaks don’t only come out at night, I see.” She looked at me. “Or the loonies.”
I sighed. “Hi, Petra.”
“God, curb the enthusiasm, Hanna.” She turned to the huge brick of meat in the floury apron she’d been making out with. “Babe, that’s Wyatt and his girlfriend, Hanna. Guys, this is Francis Allen, but call him Frankie. Otherwise he gets pissed. And Frankie, watch out for that one.” She pointed at me. “She’s got a few screws loose.”
Frankie was a real bruiser, at least six feet tall, with hands big enough to palm the moon. He looked at me with interest, his eyes small and penny-colored. “Loose screws, huh? What are you? Schizo?”
“Manic-depressive,” I told him.
Frankie turned to Wyatt. “You don’t mind that your girlfriend’s got loose screws?”
Wyatt didn’t even look at me; all his attention was focused on Petra. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
Each word fell on me like a whip, each syllable laid open my skin.
“That’s smart,” said Frankie. “Commitment is for old married people. Pet here knows I’m just using her for sex.”
Petra gave her man a fond squeeze. “You’re such a bastard.”
“Girls are like the ice cream at Baskin-Robbins,” said Frankie, enjoying his bastard role. “You have to try ’em all before you can pick a favorite.”
“I know Wyatt’s favorite flavor,” said Petra. “Chocolate-vanilla swirl. With nuts, right, Hanna? Uh-oh. Frankie, look at her. See the steam coming outta her ears? Go get us some lattes, quick! That’ll cool her down.”
“We don’t want anything,” said Wyatt, feeling free to speak for me.
“Your loss,” said Frankie. “One latte coming up, babe.” He hustled into the shop.
“Why’re you being so rude?” Petra skipped down the stairs toward Wyatt, ballerina-like in her black tights and flat shoes. “Frankie works here. He can hook us up.”
“Where’d you find that guy?” Wyatt asked heatedly. “Under a rock?”
“He just likes to kid,” she said, her eyes lighting up at the mere thought of him. “Frankie’s really very sweet.”
“As toe fungus. Why don’t you just admit you’re trying to make me jealous?”
Petra laughed in his face, a good long laugh that knocked Wyatt down a peg or three. “Like I knew you were gone come sneaking around in the alley behind a shop where my boyfriend works. Qué una ego, Wyatt. I am so over you.”
Wyatt tried to pretend he wasn’t
hurt. “Be over me, but I hope you don’t think for one second that that prick is gone look after you.”
“Which prick would that be?” said Frankie. He stomped down the steps; the latte in his giant fist looked like a sippy cup. “This prick?” He passed the drink to Petra and hauled her to his side, where she posed like a little kid next to a mountain. “You need me to squash this guy?”
Petra tut-tutted. “Wyatt ain’t easily squashed, babe. Besides, Hanna’ll do a better job than you ever could.” The two of them looked at me.
But not Wyatt, still not Wyatt, who was frowning at the gray sky stretching over the alley. “You hear that?”
Frankie looked up, alarmed, like he could hear it too. Whatever it was. Petra and I exchanged clueless looks.
“Hear what?” she asked, sipping her latte.
“A flapping,” said Wyatt, straining to hear. “Like wings. Like—”
“Blech!” Petra spat out her drink and dropped the cup; its contents exploded redly onto the ground. “The fuck.”
“Sorry,” said Frankie. “I must’ve given you one of the red teas by mistake.”
“That didn’t taste like tea! It tasted like bl—”
Frankie kissed her. For a bruiser, he had an intriguingly delicate technique. “I’m sorry,” he said, cuddling her close, their blond hair tangled in a windblown knot. “Next time I’ll let you make it. Okay?”
“Okay,” Petra said, in this blissed-out tone. As she pulled Frankie back for more kisses, the strong wind blew her cup to my feet. The liquid coating the paper cup was pale and frothy, not at all red like I’d seen. Or imagined.
When Wyatt looked away from the sky to find Petra and Frankie all over each other, he grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the alley back to the hidden door that—oddly—we had to drop through again.
Back in the lot with the yellow grass, we climbed into Wyatt’s truck, and the whole time he didn’t say one word to me. He just drove me home in silence, smoldering volcano-like on the edge of eruption.