Good Girls (15 page)

“Did I scare you?” Joel asked.

“No,” Trudi said.

Rebecca shook her head as a shiver rippled through her. “Why are you even out here?”

Sitting up, Joel dusted dirt and pine needles off his work shirt and the top of the speaker. Then he gave the speaker a pat, as though it were a lapdog. “Following you, of course. I'm Blair Witching you.”

“Why?” Her skin had slicked again, or slicked more, and the shudders weren't quite done rippling through her. But Joel was here, casting his spell, shedding his light where light was most needed.
Out of sight of his house, where it isn't even wanted,
Rebecca thought, but that thought confused and alarmed her. She pushed it aside.

“For fun. Why else?”

“You're not funny.”

“I'm a little funny. Wait, Rebecca, are you mad? Are you actually scared right now? In these woods? After all the years we spent wander—”

“Joel, there's someone in the clearing.”

Joel stopped grinning. “What?”

“She's not lying,” Trudi said, and Rebecca had to give it to the kid;
she
didn't sound scared at all.

“Someone who shouldn't be, you mean? As in, not a homeless person or—”

“How would I know?” Rebecca snapped, more at her own thoughts than at Joel, and as she did, she glanced over her shoulder again down the empty path. “There's a truck. A big black one. I've never seen it there before.”

“Someone
drove a truck
in there?” Pushing to his feet, Joel looked past Rebecca toward the clearing. Abruptly, Rebecca felt thirteen years old again. All she wanted to do was grab Joel's hand, the way she'd grabbed Trudi's, and pull all three of them out of these woods and back to Halfmoon House.

“Joel, let's just—”

“Do you want him gone?” he said, and his grin resurfaced. “It sounds to me like this guy should be gone.”

“I want to do spider races,” said Trudi, crouching over a stump near where Joel had tripped, poking at a web with a stick. “I think I've got mine.”

“Joel, whatever you're thinking, no.”

But Joel was already walking straight past her and back down the path. As he went, he pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, reaching for the iPod he kept strapped to his biceps and switching on the speaker.

Lonely Street,
Rebecca thought abruptly, catching her breath as last night's whisper bubbled up in her head again. It was as though that whisper had been lurking in her ears all along, holding its breath, biding its time.

I can see you.

“Joel,” she called, as he fiddled with the iPod. “Joel, I mean it, don't. Please, please, please, just leave it alo—”

“BOYYYFRRIEEND!”
screamed Joel's speaker, in the voice of that girl-woman from the radio show. Then it screamed again, higher, as Joel strode straight into the clearing, stopping in line with the tipped-over trailer, right beside that broken, barely open door. He hoisted the speaker above his head and aimed it into the bushes at the black truck. Snapping-finger sounds crackled from it, and the crazed girl-woman shrieked again, and then again, faster and louder, like a genie pouring out of a bottle.

“BOYYYYFRIEEND,”
she screamed.
“Back…”

 

12

He woke up wild, his legs banging the bottom of the dashboard and the body next to him and his head caroming off the steering wheel as he jolted upright, eyes shooting around the cab, which was dark, close, shadowless, motionless. In a daze, he squinted into his own gaunt face in the rearview mirror. Memory, delicious memory, flooded through him.

First came the sensation—sensations—of kissing the dart-head boy. In all these years, he had never thought to try that. So interesting that he hadn't. At first, it had felt like kissing a gorse bush, all bristly-dry, and then suddenly: There! The hidden burrow, all warm and wet behind the lips. And there! That little pup that lived inside, that so-familiar softness, that heat the Whistler could not generate, could only appreciate in ways
they
never would, wafting up from this boy's guts as though from the center of a volcano. It hadn't filled the Whistler—it could never fill him, he could not hold it—but it had reminded him, yet again, of what warmth felt and tasted like.

Interesting. Yes.

But the kiss hadn't been nearly as interesting as the Asian girl's reaction while he did it. Of course, that might have had something to do with what he was doing to
her
at the same moment. But she'd been watching, too. Oh, yes. He could still see her eyes bulging out of her plum-colored face like seeds as he squeezed and squeezed. All that amazed panic, and—this was the best part—it wasn't even mostly about him, or even about dying. It was about her would-be lover kissing her killer, screaming through his open teeth while she clawed uselessly at her hold on this world.

That girl had
seen,
even through her filming eyes. She'd understood what was happening.

And that had been more than interesting. The astonishment in that poor girl's face—the sheer primal anguish, as everything she thought she knew about love and people she loved fell away with her breath—had positively electrified him.

In fact, it had thrilled the Whistler so much that he hadn't even bothered killing her. He'd danced away instead, skin burning in the sunlight, back into the woods to his darkened truck to dream of the two of them resurfacing inside themselves, looking into each other's faces. What on earth could they have seen there, said to one another?

That's what he'd been dreaming about, surely. And the dream had been delicious.

So why was he awake?

Swaying to the echoing guitars, he glanced toward Mother's seat, which had mostly been his seat when he'd traveled with Mother. His new companion just leaned into the door, slumped in the dark. Around the rim of the blackout shades, the Whistler could see daylight pouring even through the snarled branches in which he'd hidden the truck. And yet he was conscious, tingling, swaying to the guitars.

Guitars?

Spinning to the door, he grappled at the handle, jerked it, and froze again, processing.

It wasn't the music that had woken him. The music was out there, all right; he wasn't imagining that. But it wasn't what had lured him from his dreams. Slowly, he reviewed the last few moments. His mouth opened in astonishment.

Yes, it was true. He was astonished.

Was it possible?
How
was it possible? He had seen the trigger pulled, the head exploding, that firework burst of white and bone and teeth and red. He'd watched his poor Destiny fold, ruined, into her mother's lap. And he'd known, in that instant, that he really had loved her, hadn't he? Poor, murdered Destiny. How marvelous they could have been together. And what a poor, bereft Whistler he'd become in that moment, just like in the songs. He'd loved her tender, loved her true, hadn't he? And that explained why he was dreaming—or imagining—that he was hearing her still, hearing her voice, whole weeks after her murder.

Yes. That was it.

He actually had himself convinced, momentarily. Removing his hands from the door handle, he let his shoulders sink back into themselves and his head tip once more toward the seat in relief. And then he heard her again.

“BOOYYYYYYFRIEEENND!!!!”

This time, his hands positively flew to the door, fumbling, tripping over themselves, his body resisting the orders from his brain because it knew that going out there was going to hurt. With a snarl, he yanked the handle, kicked open the door, and staggered from the truck. Branches clawed at him, and a shaft of light raked like a fingernail down his wrists. He flung up his sleeve and plowed forward toward the clearing.

“
Oh, shit!
” someone said, out there. It wasn't his Destiny or even a woman. But there were women with that man, or
a
woman, at least, and also a girl. The Whistler could just see them.

“
Joel, you moron,
” the woman said. Laughing? Were they laughing? “
Run!
”

And the Whistler, in his confusion, thought he knew that voice, too, though he couldn't place from where. But that voice had also been in his dreams. Lunging, he burst through pines and prickers into the light.

Pain seemed less to crash down on than blaze up
in
him, in his face, his wrists, his ears, and not just the exposed places but all over his body. Everywhere the light touched or probed, rashes raised themselves like bites. As though the light itself were biting him. Several seconds passed before he could get his eyes all the way open; when he did, he was sure he would see himself smoking, melting.

Instead, he saw sun, and daylight colors: deep-pine green, cirrus-cloud white, blinding blue. Even his assailants—three of them: a man, a little girl, a waify young woman—were just fleeing blotches of color: flying pink dress, blue work overalls on black skin, plain brown hair spattered with sun.

So much color.

The Whistler's heart broke. It did, it surely did.

Falling back into the shadows, he hunched against his truck without climbing into it, his eyes lapping the light, the world in light, sucking it down, as though he were a cat stealing milk. But even here, all the way back in the branches, light hurt. And so, with a mournful sigh, he hoisted himself back into the cab of the Sierra and closed his burning eyes to rest.

Almost immediately, he opened his eyes again. He'd seen what he'd seen, all right: the guy, the girl, the not-quite-girl-anymore, racing away. He'd also heard what he'd heard: his Destiny's voice, he was almost sure of it.

It had sounded so, so like his Destiny's voice.

Also, he knew what the other voice had been, now, and where he'd heard it, and where he'd been: last night, atop the campus Clocktower, listening through the stolen phone, the whistling wind. That was the voice of his new, Still One, who very likely had no idea, yet, that he had met her friends.

Glancing at the mirror, the Whistler checked his greasy hair, finger-combed it, smiled. He felt so much better, all of a sudden. Not only that, he felt hungry. In fact, he realized, he'd
been
hungry for days. It was just as Mother had always admonished him, and she really had been a decent sort of mother, all in all: “You're still such a child,” she'd cluck, wiping his face clean with one of her lavender-scented handkerchiefs. “Never once stop Whistling and dreaming long enough to recognize you need to eat.”

So that was one more thing to do tonight.

But not the only or the most important thing. Not even close. And these other things Mother could never have understood, even if he could have found the words or the Whistle to explain them to her. It would have been … like explaining music to the deaf. She simply didn't have it in her.

Or, he thought—and this thought actually startled him, and made him sad—maybe her problem had been that
he
wasn't in her, wasn't her Destiny, never had been, and she hadn't figured that out until the very end. Although, without question, she'd known at the end.

And now, here he was smiling again. What a sweet, complicated day to be alive for, and in. What a wondrous town, full of dart-horned boys and their blackberry-mouthed would-be lovers, who would never be lovers. Who looked at the Whistler, saw in an instant what none of the others—not Mother, not Aunt Sally, none of them—had discovered. Had seen what he could and should do, for and to them, and opened their blackberry mouths wider still. So he could fill them.

They wanted to play. They all did, and some of them even knew it. And he was hungry, and lonely. And he'd been so very bored for so very long. And his new, Still One was waiting for him, though even he wasn't quite sure what he'd do to, or for, or
with
her, yet.

So. Tonight, in just a few hours, when the light went, he'd come out to play. Then they'd all find out together.

 

13

It was at least a little Amanda's fault, Rebecca thought just a few hours later, stumbling away from Halfmoon House with that dry-ice reprimand still crackling in her ears and her hands clutched to her chest and her mouth tingling, buzzing with words she'd never imagined she would actually say, had really said, could not unsay.

Had she really just said that? Did she even believe it?

They'd poured back into the yard, she and Joel and Trudi, riding the waves of surf guitar thundering from Joel's Bluetooth speaker, and washed up sweating and laughing at the long, wooden table in the kitchen. “Malts,” Joel declared, setting down the speaker and abruptly, with a glance around him, lowering the volume. Then, just as abruptly, he turned it back up. “This calls for malts. Rebecca, to the pantry.”

Hoisting Trudi onto his shoulders—and Trudi let him, and she actually laughed, succumbing for the first time to the Halfmoon House magic, which was mostly Joel's magic—he swayed back out the door toward the shed. He would come back, Rebecca knew, with the special-day sundae glasses Amanda let him trot out only on birthdays and rare celebratory Saturdays, and also one of the family-size cartons of generic French vanilla he kept in the industrial freezer. Rebecca, meanwhile, did as instructed, ducking into the pantry to remove the front two rows of Amanda's everyday spices—the basil and oregano, peppercorns and rosemary, all in their identical green jars in perfect alphabetical order—to the treat-powders behind them. All of those were Joel's, and just shoved back there: two mismatched tins of strawberry Quik; an Ovaltine canister Rebecca suspected was the
same
Ovaltine canister that had occupied that particular spiderwebbed corner since
she'd
lived here; a lone king-size Hershey bar; and all the way to the left, fresh and unopened and impossibly free of webs or dust, as though Joel had conjured it into being by calling its name, a single jar of milk shake malt.