“Open it back,” Camilla said beside me. Her voice slipped higher up the register. “I can’t see a thing.”
I scrambled for the handle. At first I couldn’t find it, and my panic mounted. Then my fingers found purchase, and I pushed the door open to let in a sliver of gray.
“Use your shoe to prop it,” Camilla said.
“Use your shoe,” I said, still feeling freaked and hoping it didn’t show. But my shoes, safe in my backpack, were delicate silver sling-backs. Hers were some weird kind of sneakers involving velour.
She made as if to return to the main hall. “Fine. Guess it’s not that important to you after all.”
“Wait,” I said. I fumbled in my pack, pushing my shoes aside, and grasped the teddy bear. I jammed it between the door and the frame.
The corridor was still dark, but not as dark, and the quality of the light gave the night a kind of dreamlike unreality. I hesitated, then walked to Lurl’s office. I really didn’t want to do this, but I had the dreadful sense that it was the only way.
I drew the key from my pack. “Okay,” I said. “Here goes.”
“Here goes nothing,” Camilla said.
I turned the key in the lock. I twisted the knob.
A yowl pierced the air, and a mass of fur and muscle drove into my chest. I yelped and tried to get it off me, but its claws dug into my quilted vest.
“Help!” I cried. I pried one paw free, only to have the cat latch back on and climb higher on my shoulder. “Camilla! Do something!”
The cat howled. I shoved. Digging my hands under its front legs, I flung it to the floor. It scrambled to its feet and trotted back over. It meowed and butted my leg. A rumbling purr started up in its chest.
“He likes you,” Camilla said.
I breathed hard and examined my vest, now scratched and ripped. “This would have been my skin,” I said. “I would have been, like, shredded.”
Camilla strode into Lurl’s office and flicked on the lights. One of the bulbs popped and went out, leaving us in half-lit dusk.
“So where’s the great mystery?” she said, scanning the barren room. “You better not have dragged me here just for this.”
I moved forward, but the cat twined between my legs and made me trip.
“Goddammit,” I said.
The cat stretched on its hind feet and attempted to scale me. I winced as it pawed my bruised shin.
“Quit it. I mean it—quit it!”
“I don’t see anything,” Camilla said. She turned to leave.
“Will you just give me a minute?” I snapped. I shook the cat from my leg and tugged the J pendant out of my pack. I jerked the cord, and the J danced. The cat meowed and batted it with its paw.
“You want this?” I said. “Huh?” I dangled the pendant down low and dragged it across the floor. I slung it down the hall, and the cat skittered after it. I closed the door.
“Okay,” I said. “All right.”
“All right, what?” Camilla said.
I pointed to the office’s rear door, the one that led to what I knew must be an empty storage room. Or who knows, maybe not so empty. “In there. It’s got to be.”
“What’s got to be?” she said. But she crossed the room, and I followed. For a moment, she wavered. Then she opened the door.
“Holy shit,” she said.
My blood reversed directions in my veins. Staring from the shadows were corpses, mute and still. Then my brain caught on, and I realized they weren’t corpses—of course not corpses, why had I thought corpses?—but lifesize goddess figures. The room was packed with them. A rough stone goddess with arms out-spread stood by a marble goddess with a swollen belly. A black Aphrodite. A lifesize Kali, goddess of death and resurrection, with her ever-present string of skulls around her neck.
“What the hell … ?” I whispered. The light filtering in from Lurl’s office wasn’t much, but as my eyes began to adjust, I made out bits and bobs of brightness in the gloom. A butterfly barrette sparkled from an ivory snake goddess. A tiny mirror was tucked among the skulls on the figure of Kali. A heavy-breasted goddess held Alicia’s lip balm in her upturned limestone palm.
“Do you believe me now?” I asked. “Can we get out of here?”
Camilla was pale.
“That’s my headband,” she said. She snatched a creamy suede headband from a statue sculpted to look like the Egyptian goddess Isis. “And that’s my necklace! I looked everywhere for that necklace!” She ripped a chain off the tip of a crescent moon, which an alabaster goddess lifted to the heavens.
“Camilla,” I said. “Come on, don’t mess it up.”
She stared at me incredulously. She strode across the room, careless of the offerings she knocked out of place, and reclaimed a silver bracelet. From its links dangled a heart-shaped charm, etched with a B for ballet.
“Stop,” I pleaded. “This isn’t cool.”
“Is there anything else?” she demanded.
I thought of the bobby pin. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“There’s nothing else, I swear.”
We heard a noise, and both of our heads swung toward the source. There. A stain in the darkness.
Camilla rejoined me in a series of jackrabbit steps. The Isis figure tottered as she passed, and a collection of bracelets clinked to the floor.
“What’s over there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How should I know?”
Our voices were strained.
“Go look,” she said.
“What? You go look.”
We stared into the shadowy corner. A shape shifted almost imperceptibly. There was a muted thump.
My heart rose in my throat, and I whispered, “Where’s the light? There’s got to be a light for this room, too.” I turned from the shape and found the switch. I flicked it, but nothing happened.
“It’s a cradle,” Camilla said.
I faced it again. Terror fluttered in my chest.
“Go look,” she commanded. “Or I will.”
Everything inside me grew dizzy, and I blamed her. Who was she to throw out a dare? Who was she to imply that she was the one in charge?
I forced my feet to move. The goddess figures seemed to watch me as I approached—it was like being in a room filled with menacing strangers—and the air grew unpleasantly warm. I smelled cat shit and old pee. I stepped closer, and the shape in the corner gained definition. Yes. A cradle, small and worn. A thump as its rockers met the floor.
I peered inside.
A litter of kittens nuzzled against their mother, kneading her torso, butting their heads on her abdomen, suckling her belly.
No.
Not suckling.
A kitten shifted its body, and I saw a flap of the mother’s fur. Another kitten tugged at the flap, and it came off way too easily. Tiny teeth dug into the flesh below.
My eyes strayed higher, and I spotted the incision across the mother’s neck. I must have cried out, because a snow white kitten lifted its head and looked at me. Its pupils were vertical slits. It returned to lapping the clotted blood, and a littermate nosed closer, eager for its share. The cradle rocked harder. A thump and a thump. And under the thumping, something else. A growl, low and menacing. It seemed to come from the walls.
I stumbled back the way I had come. “Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”
I fled Lurl’s temple and retreated through the outer office. I knew I should go back and put everything in order, but all I wanted was to be gone. Gone, gone, gone—and away from what I wished I’d never seen.
“Could you maybe speed it up just the tiniest bit?” I said. I jiggled from foot to foot. Camilla was too far behind me.
“Could you maybe relax?” she retorted. “This was your idea, in case you’ve forgotten.”
She flipped off Lurl’s light and followed me into the hall. She slammed the door behind us.
In the Range Rover, the reality of what I’d done sunk in.
; “You can’t tell anyone,” I told Camilla.
She pressed down on the accelerator. “Who would I tell?”
“I’m serious. What you saw is, like, top secret. I will be in so much trouble if you blab.”
She didn’t respond. I hadn’t articulated what I’d seen in the cradle, and I wasn’t about to. But the rest—the goddess figures, the offerings, the low growl which Camilla must have heard—that knowledge alone was enough to make Camilla dangerous.
My fingers found the ripped part of my vest and closed around it. I tried to think without freaking out. I tried to think how to make this all be okay.
“And don’t worry about … you know,” I said. “Because I’m going to fix things. Fix them for you, I mean. I’ll tell Bitsy that she can’t steal from you anymore—but only if you promise not to mess things up.”
She glanced at me skeptically.
“Plus, now you know to be on the lookout, so she wouldn’t be able to steal from you even if she tried.” I lifted my chin. “So you pretty much owe me.”
She pulled up in front of my house. She gazed out the driver’s side window.
“Why does she hate me so much?” she asked.
“What? She doesn’t hate you. She just …” A prickle of heat spread on my neck. “She doesn’t hate you.”
“You don’t have to lie. Anyway, I hate her, too, so we’re even.”
I fidgeted. They were hardly even.
“When you hate someone, you think about her all the time,” Camilla said. She traced a faint white line of bird shit on the other side of the window pane. “You become obsessed.”
Oh, just shut up, I thought. But what I said was, “Well… that’s all over, because like I said, I’m going to make it stop. It’s all going to stop.”
She turned to face me.
“So do you promise you won’t go tattling to the whole school?” I said. “Not that anyone would believe you.”
An opaque look appeared in her eyes, then slid away. She released her breath in a slow letting go. “I won’t go tattling.”
I felt a tremendous gush of relief. Gratitude, even, despite the fact that she was the one who should feel grateful to me.
That night I dreamed of a mouthless kitten. As in, no mouth where the mouth should be. Just a knob of fur. I reached to pet it—poor little thing—and a mouth yawned into being with a terrific snap. It latched onto my hand with tiny sharp teeth, and I couldn’t shake it off. Its body was warm and pulpy.
I awoke with a gasp and knew I had to go back. I didn’t want to, more than anything I didn’t want to, but I knew I had no choice. I had to return to Lurl’s office and straighten everything up, and hopefully Lurl wouldn’t notice that Camilla’s things were missing, at least not right off the bat. Then I would leave, and it would all be behind me.
So after breakfast—during which Mom asked if I had a good time at the Fall Fling, and I answered, “Uh-huh”—I dumped out the contents of my backpack to find my key. But the key wasn’t there. My pulse accelerated, and I riffled through the contents again. Kleenex, a smushed Mike and Ike box, a couple of tarnished pennies. But where else could it be? I’d unlocked the door, the tomcat had attacked, and—shit.
I must have left the key in Lurl’s lock, where it would be sitting in what was now plain daylight. Yet another reason to get over there before anyone else came along.
I dragged my bike out of the garage and pumped hard all the way to school. I used the basement door, same as before, and rushed up the stairs to the third floor. It was easier with the sun streaming through the windows. It was easier, in the light, to push aside thoughts of cats in the walls.
I opened the heavy door that led to the rarely used corridor, and by the baseboard I spotted my teddy bear. I scooped it up and scanned the floor for the J pendant, but the floor was bare. The cat must have run off with it.
I approached Lurl’s office, and I felt a sudden hollow rush in my chest. No, I prayed. Please, no.
The door was locked. My key was gone.
My first thought was Bitsy. She’d one-upped me again, and now she was going to hold it over me to make me sweat. Or maybe it was Keisha? Maybe she’d sensed something was up and trailed me for the sake of damage control. Good ol’ Keisha, always the worrywart. And in this case it had paid off.
Or shit, maybe it was Lurl. Maybe she’d made a midnight jaunt to her shrine, maybe only minutes after Camilla and I left. I got the heebie-jeebies thinking about it. What if she’d lurched in on us? I couldn’t imagine what she’d have done.
My bike jounced over a bump, and I tried to focus on the road. But my mind was too busy conjuring up possibilities. Lurl with the key. Mary Bryan with the key, which wouldn’t be so bad. Everyone yelling at me. The kittens’ frantic hunger.
Bottom line, I’d screwed up. Bad Jane. Naughty, naughty girl.
But whoever had my key would have to give it back, even if they punished me for it first in some stupid way. Because for the Bitches to exist, there had to be four.
“Keisha!” I called out when I saw her the next morning. I jogged to her locker. “Thank god. I ran into Mary Bryan on the front stairs, and she cruised by me without even saying ‘hi.’ I mean, obviously she must not have seen me, but it made me paranoid. But everything’s good, right?”
Keisha’s eyes flew to mine, then away. She focused on filling her backpack.
“I know I pissed her off,” I said. “I maybe, you know, said some things I shouldn’t have. But she’s not ignoring me, is she?”
“Jane …” Keisha said.
My muscles tightened. Still, I pulled my mouth into a smile shape. “What? Are you pissed, too? I’m sorry, okay? Throw me in the chokey. Feed me to the dogs.”
Keisha closed her locker. The look she gave me was sad, not angry, and she said, “I wouldn’t have let anything happen, you know. At Camilla’s.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “I totally know. And I guess I was, like, overreacting or whatever. But that doesn’t—”
Keisha walked away, leaving me talking to nobody.
After homeroom, I hunted down Mary Bryan. I felt bad about my picnic table comment, and I wanted to apologize. She would try to stay aloof, but she’d relent despite herself. And then she’d give me some answers.
I skipped English to talk to her, because I knew on Mondays she had first period free. I found her on the steps of Hamilton. She was wearing a pale blue sweater that matched her eyes.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked.
“Me?” she said. She kept her expression neutral. “Why would I be mad?”
Fine, I thought. Let her get it out of her system. “Because I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
She gazed at me. Then, in a voice as bland as her expression, she said, “Okay, thanks.” She returned to her algebra.
I didn’t know quite what to do. Was that it? Was I forgiven? It didn’t feel as if I was forgiven.
“It was just a really bad night,” I said. “I was totally stressed out. Obviously. And then after you guys left, even more stuff happened”—I watched for her reaction—“and now it’s like, whoa, my head is totally spinning, you know?”
Nothing. Not a flicker of an eyelid. But she had to know what I referring to, because somebody had my freaking key.
“Mary Bryan …”
She lifted her head. She smiled her nice-girl smile, the one she gave everyone. “I’m really kind of busy. I’ve got a math test, and I’m so unprepared.” She wrinkled her nose, her cute little show of we’re all in this together, and my chest constricted.
“Mary Bryan, come on,” I said. I heard how my voice sounded, and my heart beat faster. I nudged her toe. “Mary Bryan!”
“Excuse me?” she said. Gone was the buddy act. She looked at me as if I were trash.
My face flamed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay? Why are you shutting me out?”
“I have a math test,” she said. “I’m sorry if you?
??re feeling fragile, and I’m sorry I can’t rub your tummy and make everything all better. But I have to study.”
I backed away.
Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
With Bitsy, my exchange was as stupid and pointless as I should have known it would be. Which I did know it would be, but which I convinced myself of otherwise, out of sheer desperation.
Me: Bitsy, hold up. We need to talk.
Bitsy: Why, Jane, aren’t you adorable. Is that a new shirt you’re wearing?
Me: What? I’m not … I just need you to … Just listen, okay?
Bitsy: Well, something’s different, I just know it. Is it your hair?
Me: Drop the act, Bitsy. I know you’re all mad or whatever, but I also know that you need me. So play your little game if that’s what you need to do, but get real: You’re nothing without me.
Bitsy, laughing: Oh, pet. I think you’ve got it backward.
Me: You have to have four. You have to.
Bitsy: How sweet of you to care. Ta, now!
As she made her parting remark, she actually patted me on the head. Then she breezed off in her flippy lime-green skirt, her doggy-ears bouncing with every step.
As for Camilla, the one time I saw her was before fourth period, as I was on my way to French. Camilla was on the quad talking to Sukie Karing, which struck me as odd until I remembered that Sukie, like Camilla, was one of them now, at least temporarily. One of the toads.
Still, I paused to stare. Camilla usually kept to herself, her spine ballerina stiff and her nose in a book. But today she had the look of someone wearing a fancy new outfit, both self-conscious and proud. A funny little smile played around her mouth, and real words went back and forth between her and Sukie. At one point Sukie even laughed—and not in a mean way.
Well, whoop-de-do for Camilla, I thought. I guess our midnight jaunt had upped her confidence after all.
I started across the quad, then stopped, a half-formed thought itching at the back of my brain. A thought I never would have had if not for my crappy day, what with the Bitches’ weird behavior. And now Camilla, gesturing with pale hands as she wooed a willing Sukie.