The air conditioning is on full blast in the bowling alley. It feels amazing in contrast to the hot sticky climate percolating outside.
Gage insists on giving me a tour of the kitchen. Large stainless appliances line the back wall. A long center island cluttered with bowls and utensils is bustling with a pair of busy workers preparing the orders streaming in.
He leads me over to a large metal door, and a white fog billows out when he opens it.
“Walk-in freezer. Hang out in there a few minutes and it’ll really cool you off.”
“Can you get locked in?” I’d be afraid to work here for that reason alone.
“Nope.” He slides his hand up and down the smooth inside of the door. “Shuts just like a refrigerator.”
Logan comes back and walks past us as he pulls down a giant sleeve of hotdog buns.
“Are you ready to work for me?” His brows twitch in a flirtatious manner. Logan’s eyes are the most amazing amber color I’ve ever seen. There’s something wild about them, almost primitive. I’m fascinated by how they glow.
“Maybe I will. I think I’d enjoy working with Gage,” I say, just to piss him off.
His expression sours.
“Him I’m about to fire,” he remarks, taking his bag and heading back into the kitchen.
“You guys usually get along?” I have a feeling the riff is a new thing, and it’s all my fault.
“We’ve fought before.” Gage leans into the kitchen with a dark expression.
“Over Chloe?”
His lips pull into a line.
I don’t know Gage as well as Logan, but it seems to me in a lot of ways they’re opposites. I’m starting to wonder if Gage is better boyfriend material than Logan. Gage told me he’d never do the things Logan was doing.
“Why does Michelle have Chloe’s diary anyway?” I pull back and spy on Logan as he works the food line. You’d never know he runs this place. He’s right in the mix with the rest of the employees pulling all the hard jobs, not bossing anyone around. Brielle’s forever telling me she loves working here.
“She says her mother gave her a box of Chloe’s things. She found it.”
“I bet she read it cover to cover.”
“You’d think.”
“So were you and Chloe pretty close?”
“We went out a few times.” He socks his fist softly into a metal shelving unit.
A loud hiss comes from the corner of the kitchen and the noxious odor of burning tortilla chips permeates the air.
Gage bolts back into the kitchen and attempts to put a lid over the fryer, but a tornado of flames shoots up out of it and runs halfway across the ceiling.
“Skyla!” Logan shouts from the other side of the counter. He jumps through the service window and rushes over to where I’m standing, frozen.
The kitchen drains of employees as Logan commands them out. I turn to move and knock something solid over with my foot causing a gush of liquid to rush around my feet.
“Get out now!” Gage shouts as he struggles to pull me in his direction.
In nothing more than a quiet whisper, the floor ignites in flames. Tall spears of fire separate me from Gage. An entire barricade forms and a huge rushing wall erupts between Logan and me.
I try to move, but it feels like my tennis shoes are being suctioned to the ground. The first air-brained thought that whizzes through my mind is that I must have stepped in gum. I lift my shoes and it looks more like I stepped in a pile of marshmallow fluff, only what’s really happening is the cheap tennis shoes my mother bought are melting right off my feet.
“Help!” I choke out the word. A dense smoke fills the kitchen. A loud blowing noise drills in my ear. It forces the flames down, extinguishing them into a sea of white clouds.
My eyes seal shut from the smoke. An arm reaches under my knees and lifts me off the ground. I push my face into the shirt of whoever has me and desperately try gasping for breath. We move outside in a fury. I take in the fresh air, choking out what’s left of the smoke.
“You’re OK.” A kiss drops down on the top of my head. It’s Logan’s voice I hear.
“Logan!” I circle my arms around the back of his neck. “What just happened?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never had anything like that before.”
“Skyla.” Gage walks up gasping for air. His face is blackened from soot illuminating his eyes like twin beacons. “You OK?”
Logan replaces me on the ground causing my shoes to stick unnaturally.
“I’m fine.” I try to dust off the soot from my jeans only to smear it into long black streaks.
The shrill cry of a siren drills through the air.
“I checked the temp, and the oil was fine.” Gage gives a quizzical look. “Do you think?” He doesn’t finish his thought.
“I know,” Logan breathes the word.
The two of them lock eyes in an immovable gaze.
“What?” I yell. “This involves me. I was in that fire.”
“Fire is the only sure way to kill a Celestra,” Gage says.
“Fire?” My father died in a fire.
Logan opens his mouth then shuts it as Brielle dives in on top, blanketing me with a hug.
“I can’t believe you survived! They made us run out the back. I had no idea you guys were standing out here. The entire kitchen is destroyed.”
“I’m sorry.” I direct it at Logan. It’s because of me. Whatever it was, it wanted me.
36
Smash
Mom and Tad are frantic when they pick me up from the emergency room. The doctor on duty assured them I had no signs of damage to my lungs, and my blood oxygen level was perfectly normal.
After I shower and dress, my mother makes me lie down in the family room where she covers me with a blanket and makes me try to eat disgusting day glow yellow chicken soup from powder and drink bland tea.
“I almost burned to death. I don’t have diarrhea.” I’m quick to remind her as she ups the ante and offers to make me toast.
She holds her hands up near her temples and shudders.
“I can’t lose you Skyla. Too much has already happened here. I’m starting to think moving was a very big mistake.”
I toss the covers off. It’s stifling in the house, and her last comment sends a heated rush of adrenaline through me.
“I think moving here was the best thing that’s happened to this family in a really long time.” Like before Dad, but I don’t say that part.
“You think the best thing about moving here is named, Logan,” she says his name like it’s the plague.
“I’m sure there are boys named Logan everywhere.” I try to appease her by making it sound as though I could have fallen for someone anywhere, but deep down inside I don’t believe a word. “You met Tad at work.” I shrug. They both worked for the same design firm in L.A. The way Tad whooped about opening his own division on Paragon you’d think he won the lottery. I think my mom assumed she’d be an equal partner, but from what I’ve seen, she’s nothing more than his secretary.
Tad walks by and breezes into the kitchen. We watch together as he inventories the refrigerator then slams it shut with disappointment.
“Lizbeth, there’s no food in this damn house.” He says it in such a comical way I think he’s half joking. Who talks to my mother that way? My dad would shoot him if he could. He’d probably want me to do it for him. Sure my mom and he fought, but he never addressed her that way, at least never around me.
In less than ten minutes my mom and the Gestapo are doing a grocery run. Unfreakingbelievable.
Drake and the girls are quiet upstairs so I head on up to grab my phone so I can chat with Logan. My jealous rage toward Michelle seems to have subsided for the moment. I mean he did pull me out of a burning building. He did kill a Fem for me. And then there’s Gage who lifted Logan’s truck out of the way of oncoming traffic.
A cold chill descends upon me as I climb the stairs. I rub my bare arms running up th
e final steps. It’s freezing up here. Drake’s door is shut and so is the girls. The hall window is fixed so it can’t be coming from there. I lay my hand across the glass, warm like the weather outside. So where’s this cold air coming from? Neither the heating nor the AC works in this place. I have a feeling the blue light special had a little more to do with this defunct lemon and all of the broken amenities, than it did the disappearance of one of its residents or any so called ghosts.
The air continues to become more frigid as I move down the hall. I bypass my bedroom with my hands extended before me like a zombie.
“Oh my gosh,” I whisper in disbelief. A light fog fills the hole of my parent’s bedroom. I walk in, treading with caution. It looks remarkably normal. The comforter is drawn tight over the bed, and a hundred microscopic pillows sit neatly arranged in rows. “Please, God, kill me if I ever live like this.”
I head in a little deeper into the heart of the sharp, glacial chill. It’s so cold it stings my flesh like a sunburn.
“What is this?” I ask out loud as though I might get some sort of answer.
The door to the closet is open. I’m immediately attracted in a morbid way to the dark gaping hole. It’s an icebox in here. You could hang meat. I pull the string dangling from the center of the walk-in and turn on the light. My mother and Tad have divided the closet down the middle. My mom’s clothes are arranged in no special order with the exception of long dresses toward the left, but Tad’s side reeks of anal. Dress shirts are scaled from black to white in color order. Who does that? Maybe a girl would do that—maybe a thirteen-year-old girl would color code her wardrobe, but a grown man? His pants are laid out the same way, even his shoes fan out in a depressed rainbow of color.
An icy bite of air circles around my left leg. It’s as though it’s speaking to me, telling me something. I crouch down and feel with my hand until I hit the back wall behind Tad’s shoes. It’s dripping wet. My fingers snag on a small lever. I pull it down opening a small door in the wall. I pat my hand around blindly and come up with a stack of paper.
I riffle through it, and my heart feels like it’s going to seize up, not to mention this piercing cold air has me feeling lightheaded.
A stack of hundred dollar bills—fifty, hundred dollar bills.
Shit! I never want to hear him harp about not having two dimes to rub together, again. The next time he does this, I might just say, no dipshit—we have Benjamin’s.
A waddle of newspaper clippings wrapped in a rubber band vies for my attention. I go to loosen the band, severing it accidentally.
Great.
I open them up and flatten them out with the palm of my hand.
A bunch of these are about Dad’s accident. The other three are clippings of a missing West Paragon High School girl. Chloe. Another one from last October, about this house being haunted.
I scramble putting everything back together the way I found it and shut it back in the tiny compartment.
I get up and start heading out of the room and run smack into Tad himself.
37
Secrets
“Get a small bottle or plastic bag and collect some of the moisture,” Logan instructs me over the phone.
I consider this a moment. Perhaps calling Logan with the odd news of what I discovered on Tad’s side of the closet wasn’t the best idea. Plus I had a mild heart attack when Tad walked back in to get his wallet. I told him I was just borrowing Mom’s hairspray and he didn’t bat a lash.
“You don’t get it,” I say. “The clippings were just weird. He’s psycho! I’m living with a lunatic.”
“I agree with you. The clippings are strange. But Skyla, listen to me—go right now and find something to capture that moisture. I’ll give it to my uncle, and he’ll analyze it.”
“Analyze it? It’s water.”
“It may be something more than that.”
“Like ghost water?” OK, that made no sense.
He expels a heavy sigh into the phone.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“You did nothing wrong. Listen, I’m coming over.”
“You can’t come over. My parents will kill me.” And it kills me that I just referred to Mom and Tad collectively as, my parents.
The line goes dead.
***
Logan arrives seemingly on foot. He parked somewhere below Brielle’s driveway and appeared at the backdoor of the kitchen.
I give a small yelp when I see him waving. My hand flies up to my throat as I jump backward into the sink.
“You know I’m afraid to look out this door,” I scold as I let him in. Mia and Melissa are in the back practicing how to play spin the bottle for a party they’ve been invited to. I’ll have to teach them later how to manipulate it just perfectly, so the bottle lands square on the boy you want to kiss.
Logan and I head upstairs. He pulls a small glass vial from his pocket just like the one he took my blood in.
“You get a bulk discount on those?” I say sarcastically.
“With you around I might have to.” He gives a slight grin.
I take him straight into my parent’s closet, turn on the light and orient him to the exact area. It’s not so unearthly cold in here anymore. Before I can ask if it’s good. I hear my mother shout from the bottom of the stairs.
“Help unload the car please!” Her voice carries up the stairs.
Without thinking, I bolt out of the room and head downstairs in an effort to keep them from heading up. It would have been nice if I informed Logan of my plan. But he’s a bright boy. He’ll figure it out.
“Don’t just stand there like a statue. Get out there and grab some groceries,” Tad barks as he heads through the door.
A part of me wants to listen and run out to the minivan, but it’s parked so far away, and by the time I get back Tad might already be upstairs changing.
Mia and Melissa each come in with an armful of bags. Funny, I don’t see Drake in the familial equation. He’s probably upstairs with Brielle, bathing, or playing hide-and-seek, or whatever the hell it is they do. Drake is clearly the golden child who can do no wrong.
“Hey, young lady.” Tad snaps his finger toward the van.
“Oh God,” I mouth as I sprint down to the open trunk and grab the last of the paper bags. I make a mad dash up the porch and spill half the contents of a bag full of loose fruit. Who puts loose fruit in a paper bag?
I run the bags to the entry and place them on the floor in an effort to bolt back and gather the rolling apples and pears. I spot a bunch of bananas that have managed to fall under the slotted stairs. Shit! It’s going to take an entire millennium to scurry up the slope and retrieve them. I decide to ignore them and head inside.
I unload my bags onto the kitchen counter as Mom and Tad bitch about the lousy job the guy at the grocery store did of bagging up their stuff. Little do they know there are much bigger things to bitch about such as the boy I left stranded in their bedroom. I toss the fruit in a glass bowl mom has set out with a few heavily puckered apples already in it.
I fold the paper bags neatly and put them away, then stretch my hands out and yawn dramatically.
“I think I’ll catch a nap.”
“And where the hell are the bananas? I know I put them in the cart,” Tad complains as they both ignore my spontaneous monologue.
I take the stairs two by two and head straight into their bedroom. It’s not cold anymore. In fact the air is stuffy and stale like it usually is in here. I whip open their closet.
“Logan?” I hiss.
Nothing.
I take a peek in their bathroom, and that’s when Mom and Tad decide to walk in. He’s got his hands cupping both her breasts outside her shirt, and she’s laughing like she actually enjoys that perv touching her.
It’s a real deer in the headlights moment, with Tad’s hands dropping straight to his side as the expression falls right off Mom’s face. A small bit of vomit rises to the back of my throat.
“Just borrowing the hairspray,” I say, afraid the image will engrave itself in my brain as I walk past them.
Too late—already has.
38
Passage
He couldn’t have left, I would have seen him—someone would have seen him.
I lock my bedroom door. It looks as though there’s a body underneath my covers, but then again it always looks like that because I never make my bed.
“Psst?” I hiss walking carefully as though he might pop out at me. “Logan?”
A small sliver of light emerges from the line under my closet door, and I head on over.
I find Logan inside sitting Indian style, reading a book. Everything about him is perfectly serene. You could easily exchange the surroundings for a library, and he would fit right in.
“You should really consider putting a nice comfy chair in here. It’s a great place to take your mind off things and relax.” He tosses the book behind him. “Maybe a bean bag?”
“Funny.” I slide a pile of shoes to the side with my foot. “How are we going to get you out?” I well up with fear at the prospect of Logan becoming forever trapped in my closet.
“Don’t worry.” He hits the air brakes with his hand. “I’m sure you’ll bring sustenance when needed. And we can do this.” He pulls me down over him and presses in with a long searing kiss. “I want to show you something.”
“What?” I rub the palms of my hands across his chest in a series of small circles. The scent of laundry softener lights up my senses.
“Not that, but it’s a good idea for later.” He pulls us both to our feet. “Up there.” He points to the top shelf toward the back. “You have a chair we can stand on?”
I haul in the rolling desk chair that glides around like it’s on ice.