Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (33 page)

“I wasn’t listening.”

“Oh, and Lucas and his realtor gig. I mean, sure, it’s not like I haven’t done
anything
since graduation. Or have I?” I try to cross my arms only to be reminded of my whole wrists-cuffed-together situation, then drop my hands down. “I bet you could whip your whole high school reunion into submission with your work.”

Nell’s face seems to tighten at my words, staring off into nowhere.

I tilt my head, trying to catch her gaze. “You alright?”

“I don’t like to think about … high school,” she murmurs icily, her eyebrows pulling together. “Or what I’ve done or … haven’t done.”

“You’ve done a lot,” I say at once. “If your loft full of artwork is any indication, you’re gonna do a shitload more. Fuck, I can’t wait to see what it is you submitted for the End Of Year. Did you know there were other showcases and exhibits looking for work, too? I saw all these things in the hallway outside my digital media class, as well as a few posts on the Klangburg website. I seriously didn’t realize how many damn options we have. You could submit your work to—”

“
The
End Of Year Showcase is the only one that matters,” she interrupts. “The rest will charge you to show your work. They just want to milk you for your student dollars and take advantage of you. The art world is a cold world full of paintbrushes and
teeth
… teeth ready to sink right into your skin and never let go.”

I bring my body up against her side again. “I wouldn’t mind you sinkin’ your teeth into my skin.” She doesn’t respond, coolly staring off and seeming to be trapped in a dark thought. “You wanna tell me about the piece you submitted? I know you’ve been working on a lot of stuff lately.”

“I haven’t.”

My eyebrows quirk up. “Sure you have. You’re, like …
the
Nell. You always have fifteen works of brilliance in limbo.”

“No. Just the one.”

I stare at the side of her face. Maybe this so-called party is dragging her down. Maybe we need a change of location to get her out of that dark place I see her drift off to so much lately. “You wanna just get out of here?” I offer, rubbing her side as best as I can. “Seeing you in that uniform …
mmm
… It’s giving me ideas. Bad ideas. Bad, bad, bad ideas.”

She shrugs. “Well … I
do
have to get you to the jail, anyway,” she plays along. “Can’t risk having you out on the streets too long. You could get yourself in trouble all over again, mister
indecent exposure
.”

I’m hard. No doubt about it. She’s made me hard and now she’s making me smile.
Keep bringing her out of that dark place, Brant.
“You’re really into this, aren’t you, you kinky minx you?”

She moves forward suddenly, giving my “chain leash” a tug and pulling me along with her. The sound catches the attention of a couple pretty girls by the beer pong table, who laugh at my predicament. I give them a cocky smirk and nod at them, then realize with fear that I think I dated and dumped both of them back in high school, one at a time. They commiserated together and became best friends during a double date to the next Homecoming Dance.
See? Some bad things are meant to happen; goodness sprouts from pain.
I’m pretty sure my dad told me that after Clayton and I had our own big falling out of sorts, just before he lost his hearing forever.
Goodness sprouts from pain
, my father would keep telling me.

But sometimes, the goodness is difficult to find.

“BRAAANT!”

I spin around. In the dark den, a circle of people are sitting on the floor around a weird lamp that shifts through a gradient of colors, painting everyone’s faces in different ghoulish shades of green, orange, and purple. It’s a girl by the window who shouted my name, a girl I do not recognize. She sits there with a painted zombie-face and a tiara on her head, and
she
obviously recognizes
me
.

“Uh, hey,” I call back reluctantly.

Nell and I are stopped at the front door, seconds from leaving.

“Come join us!” She gives a short wave at the circle of people on the floor. “We’re telling ghost stories. But not corny dumb ones.
Real
ones. Horrifying ones. Blood-chilling ones not for the faint of heart.”

I give a look to Nell, who returns an unimpressed one of her own.

“Join!” the girl insists, her voice going so shrill, I literally have to suppress a cringe. “Or are you a pair of pussies?”

That seems to be the trigger for Nell. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she snaps back darkly, gripping my chain a bit too tight and pulling me toward her unintentionally.

“Then come and share a scary story. We just got done with a totally lame one,” she adds, rolling her eyes.

“It wasn’t lame!” protests some Star Trek character from the floor.

“Please save our Halloween,” the girl tiredly begs us. “Please save us all from being haunted by dumb stories. Give us a good one to haunt us instead, Brant.”

I lift my eyebrows, biting the inside of my cheek. “I … can’t really think of any. I think the last time I tried to tell a ghost story, it ended with marshmallow on my pants and laughter from all the other boys.” At the girl’s blank stare, I add, “It was summer camp. I was nine.”

“I got one.”

The room turns to Nell. Myself included.

The girl—who is still nameless—lifts her chin self-importantly at Nell. “It has to be a really good one. Like, super-duper fucked up. Edge of your seat. Psychological and scary and has at
least
two deaths.”

“Two deaths,” echoes Nell.

“Two.”

Nell considers the information she has to work with, then calmly approaches the circle, yet doesn’t sit among them. Holding my chain absently with one hand and a beer bottle with the other, she lazily surveys the faces of everyone in the circle.

“So what’s the story?” the girl prods her.

I watch as Nell licks her lips, studying her audience. Does she really have a scary story, or is she just fucking with them? Maybe she’s coming up with it on the spot.
Seems like something I’d do—
except I’m not that creative, despite Nell insisting otherwise.

I’m a second away from nudging her when she draws a breath, her chest rising. And then:

“My story is about a little girl named Penny who lived in a small house with her mother, with her father, and with a great big toothy beast named … Dog.” Nell stares eerily at everyone in the circle, meeting each of their eyes importantly as she tells the story. “Her mother was a ghost who never spoke a word except to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ … and she was
especially
fond of apologizing. Her father was a … chemist. And unless he drank his magic chemical that he kept in a cupboard above the sink, he would become a monster.”

“A big toothy beast named Dog?” interrupts the Star Trek dude.

“The biggest and the toothiest,” Nell agrees. “Little Penny didn’t have many friends because all the other girls at school were mean to her. But Dog was never mean to her. She loved that big toothy beast with all her heart. And Dog loved her back. It was evident in the way that Dog protected her, every long day and every longer night. Dog would shield her from the monsters in the woods, from the monsters in her nightmares … and the monster at home.”

“You mean her dad?”

Nell narrows her eyes, letting the cold silence serve as an answer. Then she resumes. “The trouble with her father was, little Penny had a very different opinion of his …
condition
. She didn’t like her father when he drank the magic chemical. In fact, she thought it made him mean. She thought the magic chemical made him say … wicked things … and shout curses at them all. Every time he drank it, he’d punch a new hole in the wall, screaming as the plaster crumbled to the carpet. In Penny’s eyes, her father became a monster
when
he drank the magic chemical. In Penny’s eyes, her father needed to stop drinking it. She decided that all of it must go. Little Penny decided that she would wait until she had an opportunity, and then she would destroy every last drop of that magic chemical in the house. And on one fateful Christmas Eve, that’s precisely what she aimed to do.”

I feel my insides still at her words, growing tense as I listen.

“After little Penny collected every bottle, she took them out into the yard because, thinking the magic chemical to be evil, she didn’t trust it inside the house. And it was on that lawn that little Penny had herself her own little version of a tea party, except no one drank. Daintily opening and turning each bottle upside-down, she watered the flowers and the grass with the foul chemical. Another bottle’s contents dressed the trunk of a tree. She noticed how
sweet
some of it smelled, as if its evilness was trying to seduce her too, just as it had done her father.”

“Big ol’ waste of booze,” grunts an Abraham Lincoln. A hook-nosed male Wicked Witch of the West nods in agreement at his side, kicking back a Miller Lite.

“When her father went to the kitchen to help himself to a glass of magic chemical, he discovered all of it was missing. Not knowing what had happened, he went into a rage. Little Penny watched as he tore the curtains off a window, pulling the rod down with it and shattering the bulb of a lamp sitting below. He turned over the coffee table, sending its contents loudly to the hardwood floor. Among them was a drawing little Penny had done as a Christmas present, and it made her sad to see it on the floor, forgotten as her father raged on and on.

“When her mother came into the room, it became clear to little Penny the sobering reality that her father thought her
mother
was to blame for the missing magic chemical. Penny watched as he screamed at her ghost mother, cursing and shouting and spitting fire while the ghost simply kept apologizing. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Over and over. How she so loved to apologize for anything in the world, anything at all, even things for which she owed no apology.

“Her father threw a fist, and another lamp crashed to the floor, but its bulb did not break, and it threw its eerie light in an unnatural, upward angle at the horrifying scene. Before little Penny’s eyes, her father turned into a great monster, casting a shadow behind him that crept up the walls and swallowed the room in darkness.

“It was, perhaps, in this moment that little Penny regretted her rash actions. Perhaps her angry father
did
need his sweet, magic chemical to prevent himself from turning into the monster she was now staring at.

“Her father knew where to get more. He stormed out of the house, but little Penny couldn’t let him leave. ‘Daddy!’ she cried out, chasing him into the yard. He swung into the seat of his great white truck. ‘Daddy!’ she cried out again, clinging to the handle of the car door as the engine roared to life. Little Penny would forever remember the sound of that engine roaring. It was not unlike the roar of a great, toothy beast, except this one did not mean to protect her.

“And at the foot of that driveway, Dog was sleeping peacefully.

“The truck jerked, then rolled backward with the speed and rage of the monster behind the wheel.

“Dog … looked up too late.”

The silence in the room grows thick. No one seems to move. I feel the slackness in her grip on the chain, for a moment utterly forgetting that I’m wearing them at all.

“Nell?” I prompt, worry in my voice.

Her eyes are focused nowhere in particular. She doesn’t look at anyone in the room—or anything. She simply stares into the memory, into that little house in her brain, into the cupboard above the sink. It’s like she’s staring at the foot of that driveway, at whatever it was she saw after the truck pulled out.

“Nell.” I reach up to touch her.

She flinches, dropping my leash at once, then turns and slowly heads for the door.

“What was the second death?” blurts the girl sitting on the table, completely oblivious to what the telling of the tale has done to Nell. “You promised two deaths. What’s the second one?”

Nell stops at the door. “Me,” she answers, and her voice is almost gentle, quiet and far, far away. “I died that day.”

She pulls open the door and leaves the house.

“Nell,” I call out after her, then hurry out the door as fast as I can manage with my ankles bound together, the chains rattling with each stumbling step.

She moves so quickly that it’s halfway down the damn street when I finally catch up to her. “Nell! What happened in there??”

“I shared a story,” she says flippantly.

“Babe …”

We turn a corner. My house looms across the street, quiet and dark, though I doubt my parents expected us back so early.

“Where are all the damn kids?” Nell blurts, glancing around.