Phobic (36 page)

I
’m doubled over. My hands clench above my sternum like the bone is loose and I’m trying to keep it from detaching. I pat the spot several times.
Am I dead?
The knife went in—I felt the puncture. But through the slit it made in my shirt, my chest is smooth.

Sweat collects in my palms, and I don’t have to check my heart to know it’s thudding like a jackhammer. Huh. I didn’t think hearts beat when you die.

I lift my shirt to expose my stomach. The stitches are gone, and the dog bite I’d been missing near my belly button is back, leaving a white mark that looks like it was created by those glow-in-the dark vampire teeth. Long red scratches also climb the length of my forearm.

The zits on my face also return. I can’t believe I welcome the bumpy surface of my cheeks and forehead.

“I’m not dead,” I whisper.
It worked.
“I’m not dead.”

The dried bloodstain encircles my feet, and cobwebs spine between the laddered pieces of wood. In an excited frenzy, I mount the ladder and climb, only to freeze when I reach the floorboards. The kitchen looks…different.

Spent sunlight empties in through the grubby windows. And the house is an utter ruin. Paper peels from the walls, sagging in gloomy sheets. Cracks chisel through the molding along the ceiling and floor; chunks are gouged from the surface, revealing the lath and plaster beneath. The thick smell of dust and rotting wood filters through the air.

A shade has been pulled from my eyes. The shiny new layer of my house has been skinned back and I see the broken condition it’s actually in, without Ada there to do the upkeep. It’s exactly what my house
should
look like, considering it’s around a hundred and thirty years old and we’ve done zero repair work. The shattered stained glass, the grime coating the windows…

The blood. Oh gosh, the bloodstains smear the wood from the trap door and clear up the hallway. A grunt pulls my attention toward the rotting cupboard doors dangling from hinges or gaping open. Todd lies on his back in front of the sink. His long legs are bent to avoid the cabinets.

“Oh!”

I scramble out of the hole to his side. My feet sink slightly through the corroded floorboards, which are also missing chunks here and there where they’ve been gnawed through by squirrels or rats or something.

I run my fingers through Todd’s hair, press my palms to his cool face, his shoulders. His lids are closed, and a peaceful calm rests over him, like he’s simply catching some Z’s. His pulse beats at his neck, and I rest my hand over his heart, just to feel each lub dub.

I bend down, soaking in his heat and his nearness. “Is it you?” I ask softly. I don’t know what I’ll do if he’s Thomas. It would mean I failed. But Ada’s the one who stabbed Todd. So by destroying myself—her, really—it should have stopped the whole vessel thing since it wasn’t complete.

Todd’s chest rises and falls, and a surge of memories gush through me. Catching his smile from across the football field, or rifling through pawn shops for old records or license plates. That lurch in my gut anytime he honks outside to pick me up for school. Days wasted watching movies; his eighties music; his warm touch. My best friend. How can I live without him?

His eyelids flutter, and he coughs a few times, deep and throaty. “Piper,” he moans. Then he mumbles on, almost sounding like a sigh, “Sierra told me that door would work. And it did.”

Thomas would never call
my
name, and he would certainly not talk about Sierra Thompson. While I wonder what in the world Sierra has to do with anything, the relief is dizzying; it clouds over my judgment until I get the urge to disconnect completely. To snuggle in and wrap myself in him.

Just to be sure, though, I rub my finger on his arm and ask: “What’s taking up all the space in your closet and driving your mom crazy because you don’t have anywhere to put your clothes?”

“You kidding me, Pipes?” Todd mutters. With a grimace, he slowly rises to sitting and props his head against the cupboard door behind him. His eyes are still closed. “You stab yourself in front of me, and you want to talk about
Pez
?”

I laugh and hug him as tightly as I can. I press my cheek to his throat, take in his smell of soap mixed with sweat. My fingers carve through his hair, its soft, feathery feel. His arms circle tight around me.

“Mind telling me how you’re still here? And what the hell you were thinking?” he mumbles into my shoulder. His grip on me squeezes, securing me to him. I never want him to let me go.
He’s alive. I’m alive. And we’re together.

Thoughts run through my head, but pegging them down requires more effort than I want to give at the moment. “Mind if I explain later?” I ask, pressing myself closer. My arms readjust to get a better grip on him.

“I love you, you know,” he says into my neck.

The words are the ultimate resolution to the chaos of the past few days. We nearly lost one another. With more than one close call, in my case. The confession isn’t anything new—I think we’ve known the
love
thing, in some sense, anyway. But maybe it’s that this type of love is new and needed to be spoken. To be heard.

“Me too,” I say. “Love you, I mean.”

Gently, Todd pulls me back. His absorbing gaze travels across my face. “Seriously, what happened?”

I take in the decay riddling my house. The cracks in the molding. The basement door hanging on its hinges. I’m not sure where to start.

“Ada took my body. And she tried to take yours for Thomas.”

Todd’s hand goes to his neck where Ada stabbed him with the gadget. “So you thought suicide was the answer?” A smile kinks at his lips. “Very Shakespeare of you.”

“It was the only way,” I say. I kneel up and sit on my feet, showing him my arm, the cuts from where my mom’s nails razored me. “If we’d done anything to the house, it would’ve happened to me instead. I just hoped this would stop Ada before anything, you know,
final
happened.”
Like you dying.

I raise my fingers to my cheeks. The smoothness is interrupted by uneven, pimple-y bumps. But the dread I expect doesn’t come.

Who cares? I mean, really. I’m alive, and I have Todd. That’s what matters. And—

“Oh, crap!”

My hand smacks Todd’s chest and I jump to my feet.

“What’s wrong now?” he asks.

I clamber down the basement stairs. They give under my weight like squeegees, and I cling to the cobweb-spanned banister for balance. At my touch, the wooden railing creaks and slopes over in slow motion as if someone just yelled,
Tim-ber!

I slam back into the wall as the banister collapses to the floor below the stairs. Dust flurries at the impact. I scurry down the rest of the unsteady steps and click on the swinging bulb. Discolored light spreads its glow over the mess of fallen wood.

“What are you doing?” Todd calls from behind. I ignore him, partly because I’m fighting down bile at the stench in here, along with the sight of the capsized table, the rusty saws and hooks, the shattered glass near the drain in the cement floor.

I weave around to the far room. Joel’s silhouette lies in the shadows, huddled beneath the faded gray cloth Ada placed over him. I finger along the walls for a light switch, but the damp grit balls up beneath my fingers.

“Joel,” I mutter. Then louder, “Todd! Joel’s in here!”

Todd calls something back, but his words are cut off by another racketing crash. I knead the heel of my hand against my temple and dread kicks in. The house is still alive—it’s attacking Todd.

But I know better.
It’s just old. It should be condemned.

I scamper back to find Todd hunched over, monkeying his way off the crumpled heap of decayed wood. Dark curls straggle across his forehead, and he nurses his elbow. I put my hand on his arm as he jumps down to the floor.

“We have to get out of here,” I say, staring up at the fourteen or so feet between us and the door, now that the staircase is gone. The whole house could collapse on us any minute!

“That sucks rocks,” Todd says at the blood skimming down his arm.

I pull him. “Come on. I think Joel’s still alive.”

“What do you mean,
he’s still alive
?” He limps a few times and gestures to the surgical tools and dangling hooks. “Geez, it’s like a slaughterhouse down here.”

“You’re not far off,” I say, herding him forward toward the darkness.

Todd uses his phone as a flashlight, and the small beam shows the blackish, congealed blood on either side of Joel’s head.

“Ugh,” Todd says, squinting through the dim light. “What happened to his ears?”

My stomach gives a heavy lurch. “Spare-Tooth Bandit guy, remember?”

Joel looks paler than the moon under the light from Todd’s cell. A faint pulse glubs at his throat, and his body twitches. I take the cloth from him and lay it on the floor.

“Help me. We need to get him out of here.”

Todd gets under his shoulders, and I get his feet, and we heave him over. Joel lets out several moans, and his head bows backward.

“Sorry,” I tell him, fighting the desire to wipe sweat from my hairline, at the same time Todd says, “Hang in there, dude.”

We each grab two ends of the cloth and gurney him into the lighted room. Joel’s weight makes the cloth hard to grip. With every step it slips more and more from my grasp. We have to maneuver around Garrett’s mess, and I accidently kick what I think is the hacksaw. It jangles against the concrete.

“How do you plan on getting out, exactly?” Todd asks, gesturing to the gap between us and the door above. The wall behind where the stairs had been is a lighter gray than the surrounding area. “Last I checked, the stairs are gone.”

With a substantial strain on my back, we carefully set Joel on the ground. “We can’t call the police,” I mutter to myself, pacing. “The last thing we need is for them to see what’s down here. Who knows if they’ll uncover other things Ada hid in the walls.”

“I got it,” Todd says, pulling out his phone. His fingers move, and after a few seconds, he puts it back in his pocket.

“You texted someone?”

He nods.

With growing unease, I ask, “Who was it?”

Glass from the small window to our left shatters, and a rock plunks on the concrete by my foot. I let out a small squeak. A ray of sunlight pours in and then gets blocked by Jordan’s smug face and Sierra’s now-clear skin. From the sound of it, several others are behind them.

I round on Todd. “You didn’t!”

“They’ll be cool about this. Trust me. He owes me.”

“How so?”

“Because I told him I’d kick his trash for creating that fake profile, and I haven’t made good on my promise yet. Among other things,” he adds as though he’s not sure he should have.

I fold my arms, my brain on full panic mode, regardless of Todd’s awesomeness and the smile he’s giving me. I don’t get how he thinks they’ll help us with anything. He
knows
Joel is injured; these guys are probably dying for more reasons to obliterate me.

“What happened?” Jordan yells through the window. “This place was like, brand new. And now—”

“Shut up and come through the back door,” Todd yells. “But be careful!”

“You’re unbelievable,” I say, pacing away from him again. “They’re the last people in the world
I
would turn to for help.”

“They’re different, Pipes,” Todd says, barring his arm out to stop me. “You have no idea how much. They probably would have busted in here with me earlier if Kody hadn’t driven up right when he did. But I couldn’t wait around to explain everything to him, so I left. ” He slants his head level with mine. My teeth clamp shut. I refuse to look at him.

He circles around, but I close my eyes. My skin stirs before his hand reaches my face. I cringe for a second, knowing my zits are back, but at the brush of his fingers, my will to fight him crumbles. Especially when he guides my face to his and places a kiss on my lips.

The kiss washes over me like steam from a sauna, unnerving me, and for a split second I forget why I’m so upset. Instead, I get caught up in his heart beating against mine, in his warm breath on my skin.

“I wouldn’t have gone to them if I didn’t trust they would come help,” Todd says against my mouth. His soothing voice makes me bubble inside. “After Jordan axed your—you, I mean. He told me, he felt pretty awful.”

My resentment tries to dig its heels in. But Sierra did say the same thing. And she even came to the hospital with flowers for me. Maybe they really are trying to be nicer, like Todd said.

“You guys gonna make out, or do you need a hand?” Jordan calls down. Gel slicks his blond hair back. The sight of him makes me pout, especially since he saw our kiss.
Our
kiss. Not his business.

But Todd’s already bending for the top end of Joel’s makeshift stretcher. I dash over and brace with my knees, lifting Joel up. My feet are unstable along the pile of broken stairs, and I nearly fall twice on the uneven mound, but we make it to the wall just below the door.

My arms straining, I hold Joel’s legs and help Todd lift him toward Jordan and Kody’s outstretched hands. A couple other guys from the team help, too.