RAW (3 page)

Deena was babbling about how she and a friend were going to the library to study.

The moment Caelyn heard her sister say that she was going to the library, Caelyn knew that it was a lie.

Deena’s not going to study. She’s doing something bad.

But that didn’t even really matter—it was beside the point. The good part was that Caelyn knew Deena leaving the house would give her a chance to sneak into Deena’s room and do some sleuthing.

She wanted to dig up some dirt on her creepy little psychopath sister, and Caelyn was fairly certain that she’d be able to find something.

Deena was so much worse than Caelyn had ever imagined. How hadn’t she seen it? All those years growing up together, some of them good, and fun times spent in one another’s company.

How had she missed that her little sis was quietly turning into Charles Manson’s protégé?

Caelyn waited until she heard the front door open, then went to the window and saw Deena running to her car, getting inside. A minute later she was pulling out of the driveway and gone.

Caelyn smiled to herself.

Now we’ll see what you’ve been up to. We’ll see how much you like being set up
for a fall. A dose of your own medicine might not taste so sweet.

She walked slowly out of her own bedroom and turned to go down to her sister’s room.

“Oh, you’re up,” Caelyn’s mother said, coming up the stairs.

Caelyn frowned. “Just going to the bathroom.”

“I think you should at least eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Caelyn—“

“Okay, I’ll grab a quick sandwich, but then I’m coming back up to bed.”

Her mother smiled gratefully. “I’ll make you a peanut butter and jelly?”

The sound of her desperation made Caelyn itchy with discomfort. She didn’t want to pity her mother. It was far easier to just hate her. “Sure, peanut butter and jelly sounds great, Mom.”

Her mother headed quickly downstairs and Caelyn followed.

In the kitchen, her mother began preparing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Caelyn plopped down on a chair by the table and watched, marveling at how strangely familiar it all seemed—and yet, it was all totally different.

Her mother’s movements were just as they’d always been, and the sounds of silverware clinking as she took out the knife and swirled it around in the peanut butter jar were just as Caelyn remembered from her childhood.

It was as though she was split in two, feeling the distant memories of love and comfort that those sounds and smells and sights brought back. At the same time, she was stuck in the present moment of mistrust and betrayal and anger.

She saw her mother now as little more than a robot, someone who’d been programmed to behave like a good mom, but underneath it all she had her own poisonous agenda.

Still, as Caelyn watched her mother go through the act of preparing a sandwich, Caelyn couldn’t help but feel a wave of deep sadness and regret.

Maybe if I’d told them right away when Jayson raped me…

Maybe if I hadn’t tried to run…

But then you’d never have met Elijah. And despite all the pain and suffering,
you’d never trade the short time with Elijah, would you?

No. I wouldn’t trade even a second of time with Elijah for all the money and
security the world could offer.

Her mother brought the plate over and set it down in front of Caelyn and looked at her with an expectant smile. “I even cut it diagonally,” her mother said. “Just the way you like it.”

Again, the wave of pity and disgust washed over Caelyn. She tried to force a smile. “Looks great. Thanks.” She picked it up and took a bite. The sandwich was dry, the peanut butter overwhelming the jelly.

Even the sandwich wasn’t what it looked like on the outside, Caelyn thought grimly. She chewed and chewed, her mouth clogged with the bread and peanut butter.

Her mom brought over a glass of milk.

Caelyn choked it all down, wanting nothing more than to get out of there and go upstairs to Deena’s room.

Eventually, her mother said she was going to go and read upstairs in her bedroom with the TV on. Caelyn’s father was in the basement, puttering around with the drywall.

He’d been intermittently attempting to finish the basement for years.

Caelyn said she was probably going to take a shower and watch some television in the family room.

“That’s good, honey,” her mother said, allowing a thin hand to drift to Caelyn’s shoulder where it rested for a long moment. “You just relax.”

Caelyn repressed a shudder. “Thanks, Mom. You too. Go take a load off.”

Her mother withdrew her hand and looked down mournfully. “You know I love you, don’t you?”

Caelyn thought about it. She nodded. “Of course I do,” she said.

Her mother smiled the ghost of a smile and then turned, with a deep sigh, and left to go upstairs.

She wondered if her mother had possibly come up with the plan to put the credit card in Elijah’s jacket. Maybe she’d even urged Deena to do it.

Would her mother have stooped so low? Caelyn wondered. She didn’t know anymore.

She listened to her mother’s footsteps going upstairs and then the door to the bedroom opening and closing, and more footsteps creaking the floorboards above.

Finally, after a few minutes, it grew silent, and Caelyn knew her mother was lying in bed, reading with the TV on low volume.

That’s when Caelyn made her move.

She got up and turned the TV on in the family room. She even turned the channel to a Reese Witherspoon movie, just to add to the realism of her lie.

Then Caelyn made her way slowly and quietly up the steps and down the hallway to her sister’s bedroom.

Caelyn wasn’t sure how long she had before Deena got home or her mother and father came nosing around. She needed to be quick and efficient.

Entering Deena’s room, the scent of heavy perfume entered her nostrils. Deena’s room was an array of pinks and blues, everything looking much as it had when Deena was just ten or eleven years old.

Funny, Caelyn thought, how once again the surface of things was so misleading.

Despite all the pinks and blues and the teddy bears on her bed, Deena was a nasty creature.

Caelyn closed the door quietly behind her and surveyed the room once more.

First things first, Caelyn made a beeline to the desk and Deena’s Mac. She opened up Deena’s laptop and saw that it was password protected. “Damn it.” Her parents actually let Deena keep her laptop protected like that?

They really had no idea what she was up to. They were clueless.

Knowing it would be nearly impossible to figure out Deena’s password, she went to the closet. There were tons of clothes. Could Deena have stolen any of this? Surely, Caelyn thought, her mother hadn’t allowed Deena to buy so much expensive clothing.

When Caelyn had wanted new clothes as a teenager, she’d practically had to beg on her knees. Eventually, she’d worked part-time and used that money to buy nicer clothes, but Deena had no part-time job.

Caelyn didn’t know if Deena was stealing or what, but it didn’t matter. She needed more than expensive clothing to get Deena in trouble.

I don’t just want to get her in trouble, anyway. I want to…what?

I want to expose her. I want to rub her wounds raw and throw salt on them.

Caelyn smiled, nodding. Yes, expose the little cretin and show everyone what precious Deena was really like.

She kneeled down and pushed aside the sneakers and high heels, looking for something more definitive.

But she needed to be careful.

After knocking aside the shoes and finding nothing, Caelyn realized she was being too sloppy. She put the shoes back in the basic order they’d been in before she’d started snooping.

The closet wasn’t yielding anything fruitful.

Caelyn got up and started rifling through Deena’s dresser and bureau and desk.

Once again, it was mostly nothing special.

She’d been hoping to find a private journal, something—anything that would give insight into Deena’s insane mind. But so far, everything was just normal teenage stuff.

If I could just find a way to get a hold of her phone
…

She was certain that Deena’s phone would have all sorts of incriminating stuff in it. Texts, pictures, emails.

“Shit, of course,” Caelyn said shaking her head. It had to be the laptop.

It had to be.

You just have to figure out the password. It’s probably the most obvious thing in
the world, knowing Deena.

She started typing in various possible passwords.

Nothing simple was working. She tried various combinations of Deena’s first and last name, added the middle name, tried capitalizing differently. If Deena was intelligent enough to add a sequence of numbers into her password, it would be completely impossible to guess.

But Caelyn thought that Deena was too stupid and too arrogant to make the password very complicated.

Caelyn wondered how much time she had left before someone came looking for her. Deena would probably gone for awhile, but how long would her mother be absorbed in a book, how long would her father be puttering around in the basement?

Time was short.

And then it hit her. Deena hadn’t used her own name as the password.

Of course not.

Instead, Caelyn typed her own name in as the password. Suddenly, she was in.

The screen changed to a vision of Deena’s desktop.

Caelyn could hardly believe it herself.

She uses my name for her own password. How creepy is that?

And what does it mean?

Scrolling quickly to Deena’s documents, Caelyn started trying to pinpoint anything suspicious.

You always knew she was jealous and competitive, but now you know what
motivated her to feel that way. She wishes she could be you.

Maybe there would be something Deena had written in the past, venting about hating Caelyn or wanting to hurt her. Caelyn opened up some of the more recent documents, but they were all school assignments.

Interestingly, there was an English paper where the first line was a quote from the book, Lolita. Caelyn vaguely remembered that book being about a teacher who lusts after a very young student.

Caelyn scanned through the rest of the paper to see if there was anything strange in it, but it was dull and uninformative.

Next, she opened the Internet browser and looked at the history. The cache hadn’t been cleared in quite some time. Caelyn grinned. She was getting somewhere now.

That’s when she heard noise from downstairs. Her father, calling out.

“Hey, where is everyone?” he yelled, his voice muffled and distant.

“Shit,” Caelyn said, squinting as she tried to speed up. She knew that there was something in the Internet history. There had to be something.

Most of the sites in Deena’s browsing history were normal stuff. Online shopping, TMZ, Facebook, Instagram. She was able to pull up Deena’s facebook page because Deena had stayed logged in. She clicked on Deena’s private messages. There was a lot to look at.

She had a ton of friends and there were dozens and dozens of communications.

Deena was apparently a very busy bee.

From the hallway, she heard the sound of a door opening, and then her mother’s voice calling downstairs. “I’m coming down,” her mother called out. “Have you seen Caelyn?”

“No,” her father replied.

“I’ll check on her in a minute.”

Caelyn’s skin broke into goose bumps. “Oh. My. God.” Her eyes widened.

She’d just found something so crazy on Deena’s computer that she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

It was beyond a smoking gun—it was an atomic bomb. Deena had been a very, very naughty girl.

But Caelyn was running out of time.

Just show them what you found. Show Mom and Dad right now and Deena’s life
will be over. Ruin her life the way she ruined yours and Elijah’s.

Caelyn actually stood up, ready to yell for her mother and father to come into Deena’s bedroom right that instant.

Even if they might be initially upset at Caelyn for snooping, it wouldn’t matter once they saw what she’d found. Once she showed them the proof—the visual proof of what kind of person Deena really was—they’d never be able to forget or brush it under the rug.

But just as Caelyn opened her mouth, something inside told her to wait.

Not so fast.

Come on. Deena wouldn’t hesitate to bust you if the roles were reversed.

But that was the point, wasn’t it? Caelyn thought. Deena was nothing but an attack dog. She had no real strategy, no real purpose. Deena caused pain because it was in her nature, and it didn’t really help her get any further in life.

However, Caelyn wasn’t simply going to blow the whistle on her sister and get nothing out of the deal.

You’re not going to get Elijah back. So what can you possibly get out of it?

I don’t know. Yet. But I’ll figure something out.

Caelyn sat back down at Deena’s desk and quickly got to work. She had to make sure she’d have access to the evidence when she needed it again.

Be patient, Caelyn. Elijah needs you to be patient.

It might be months or years before they were reunited, and if Caelyn was going to find her way back to him, she needed to stay calm and play the game smart.

No hasty moves. Nothing done purely out of spite
.

She smiled as she finished emailing herself the incriminating material from Deena’s computer.

And then she got up and left the room. She’d literally just closed Deena’s door and walked to the bathroom when she heard her mother calling for her. “Caelyn?”

“Yeah?” Caelyn said, sticking her head out into the hallway.

Her mother’s expression was decidedly suspicious as she walked down the hall.

“I thought I heard you out here. Were you—were you in your sister’s room?”