The She (6 page)

I shrugged, didn't see how this would be interesting to Grey, but she started to laugh a little. "And your mother has a sister a Starn, who is a ... a
communist?
" She blasted out a laugh. "God. Does your grandfather go around with a bag over his head? What an awesome scandal."

"She's a socialist." I turned and stared at hei; thinking if she didn't get that smirk off her face I would leave. "That's one reason I don't go to West Hook, Grey. The summer people have too much downtime. They squawk and carry on as if everybody's business is their sole responsibility in life. Aunt Mel teaches philosophy; she's got tenure. And yet she's not so above it all that she won't go down to one of the soup kitchens on Christmas morning to mop the floors, which is more than I'd wager your mother ever did—"

"All right, I'm sorry." She put her hands up, then wiped the smirk off her face. "I'm sorry." She looked serious, like she realized she was apologizing again, and apologizing is a serious business. "My mom gets so drunk on Christmas, she's asleep on the couch by noon."

She came over and leaned against the window, facing me. "Maybe she's why I'm here. Maybe I don't want to be like her. Maybe I don't want to go through life thinking only of myself until I realize there's no self left ... or maybe there never was any self to start with." She turned, put her forehead up to the glass, and I felt my eyebrows shoot up. "I know I have spent almost my whole time in high school never really appreciating the things I have. And I was really..."—she sighed—"
...mean.
I didn't consider other people's feelings. And now ... I'm sitting up here, while everyone down at school is laughing. 'Ha-ha, serves her right for thinking she was so much hotter than'... whatever: I'll bet Soundra McLelland is having a real field day."

"I don't think anybody is taking time from their lives to talk about you, Grey. I heard about you from Mrs. Ashaad."

I would have thought she might have been surprised that she wasn't the talk of the school, but all she did was mutter "Guess Chandra's better at keeping her word than I gave her credit for." She started laughing as she started crying again. Chandra Clemmens was her best friend. "So. I hear Soundra McLelland is running track this year! I heard they fashioned her some sort of bionic metal leg over at Presbyterian Hospital! Hell, that's a great way to get your mug in the paper—"

"I'm out of here." I went over and picked Jupe up off my jacket, but Grey followed and grabbed my arm before I could get my coat on.

"Look, Evan, I'm not here because I'm a piece of shit. I'm here because I'm a piece of shit who doesn't want to be one. All right? I know I have a ways to go."

"Grey, you know what I used to think of most when I thought of you? I thought you were a lot of fun. At least, you were fun until you turned my life upside down. It was
temporary.
But I guess I woke up at that point. What in the hell gives you the right to treat people like they're some sort of cartoon characters? As if we were all put here for you to amuse yourself with?"

I thought she might lash back at me, tell me to leave. But she just kept laughing and crying at the same time. She took Jupe out of my arms, fumbling until he was cradled in her arms, and she held him, rubbing his fur: But her eyes met mine, cold and mocking.

"What, you want me to sit here and blame it on my parents or something? You want me to say they were like that first? Okay. I guess they were. But I can still remember knives going through me when my mother used to sit talking on the phone, talking about one girlfriend to another when she'd just gotten off the phone with the first one. I can remember her laughing about blackballing some lady from one of her charities because the lady was obese. I knew her whole life was wrong. Sometimes I think you can see that most clearly when you're just a little kid. I made my choices. I'm not blaming anyone."

It was the most disarming speech yet, but I think I liked best how she was treating Jupe. She was scratching him behind the ears, which was something he liked but that did nothing for her but make him relax and be heavier on her arm.

"The, um, the accident last summer um..." She swallowed and wouldn't look at me. "It was more of the same ... if you can stand to hear it. Lydia Barnes—a summer friend from New York you wouldn't know—she and I were at the yacht club down in West Hook, fooling around on my Sunfish. The sailing director came down the dock, said there were some Girl Scouts coming over and he wanted to know if we would take them out sailing. Something about them earning a badge. We thought they would be little girls. They show up. These girls were our age.
Our age,
and still in the Girl Scouts. Lydia started in—No. That's wrong. Actually, I started in. 'We've got to flip the boat, scare the shit out of the one we take for a sail.'"

Grey plopped down in the chair with Jupe, and I eased into the one across from her again. I wondered if I should go get her another Kleenex. Her eyes were still hard, but flooding over big time. "I didn't know she wouldn't be able to swim. And I don't see why ... why it is that Lydia and I could not have just accepted that. Girl Scout, our age. What's the big fucking deal? What is wrong with us? And not only that. But looking back? She really wasn't a big dork. She was really cute. Vice president of her class at Trinity. Looked like future college sorority material. I think that got under our skins even more. How dare this Girl Scout not fit with the mold we dreamed up in our heads?"

I grabbed her a Kleenex and sat down again, watching her sniff and blow. I had to say my thought, being that I was human myself. "Grey, I think we've all made fun of people. Some people just make you twitch."

"Yeah! Like the idea that you could actually become a dork yourself, if the tides turn just a little!" She pulled at her orange shirt with one hand, like she meant herself.

I just went on, "And you said you didn't know she couldn't swim. I mean, how many people from West Hook, whether they're summer people or not, don't know how to swim?"

"I didn't say she couldn't swim; I said she wasn't
able
to swim. Her parents said she did know how to swim." She stared off into space. My intuition went off big time. Seemed like some weirdness was about to fly, and I shifted around a little, looking down as Grey glanced into the darkening corners of the room.

"So ... why are you saying she wasn't able to swim?"

"Just ... the fact that she disappeared down the harbor so quickly, out to sea. She looked me in the eye for about a hundred yards, trying to swim back. She just wasn't making it."

Her eyes were wide, staring over my shoulder somewhere. I knew she was seeing it, but I didn't think the guilt was so necessary.

"She got caught in a riptide." I shrugged quietly. "Did you holler for her to swim sideways? Get out of the stream?"

"No."

"Did you swim after her?"

"No." She looked at me long and hard. "Don't even say it. It's not what you think. When I say I didn't consider other people's feelings, I surely never looked to drown anybody. I'm just a bitch; I'm not a murderer."

"So ... what was up?"

She swallowed. "I was frozen to the side of the boat. I couldn't move. I was hearing this terrible shriek. It was coming out ... from over the ocean. This girl was being sucked, very quickly, toward the sound of the shriek. Lydia was right next to me, and she said she never heard it."

The TV room was completely dark by now, save the little light coming in from the spotlights out the window and the hallway behind me. I wanted to reach for the lamp on one of the tables, but I didn't want Grey to see my face. I groaned and rubbed my forehead with my fingers hard, thinking how it seemed like bad luck—bad luck that I would share something with Grey Shailey, even if it was the possibility of weirdly shaped eardrums.

She tried to pull my arm down. "Evan, Chandra was there when you were going through some of that remembering stuff last year, She told me you were talking about some shrieking noise ... and about your parents. You said Emmett couldn't hear it. It sounded to me like this shrieking had something to do with your parents when ... you know."

I just groaned.

"So you did hear it." She was pulling on my arm still, and I just let it drop, let her lace her fingers through mine and almost squash them with her clammy hand. "I need to know what that was! Have you ever looked into it? Have you ever tried to figure out how you could hear something that a person standing right beside you couldn't—"

"No!" Actually, I had looked into it a little last year, but I hadn't gotten any answers that were worth repeating to your average, cynical person.

"Well, don't you want to know?"

"No." I was sure there was some scientific explanation having to do with how my ears are shaped slightly differently than other people's. "I don't believe in any
Ella Diablo
that haunts the Baltimore Canyon, Grey."

"Me neither," She blew her nose and whispered, "But I can't stop hearing it. You go through your life, never giving any thought to stuff that you can't hear, see, smell, touch, or explain. You don't give any thought to those stupid beach bonfire stories ... except that they help break the ice, help you nuzzle up to some lifeguard you've been hot fon Now? I don't know. This sort of changes everything. There's all these stories about Saint Elizabeth's. There's a catacomb under this place. I asked the nun about it, and she says it's just a former wine cellar and now they keep files down there. But when I asked her if dead people really were buried under the floor; she avoided the subject. She told me ... the dead rise in Christ or something. You ever heard any of those stories, Evan? About the catacombs of Saint Elizabeth's?"

I scratched my head for a second. "I heard the one about the crazy inmate who knifed all her dormies in the 1920s."

"Yeah, well, I lie awake in the middle of the night ... listening, wondering if I just heard a scream from down there—from where the administration buried them to cover up the scandal. Or was it my imagination? Or am I rehearing what I heard at the shore?"

A curse rose right up to the top of my throat, but I didn't let it fly. She would know then that I could relate all too well, and I was still hearing Emmett's wise advice on not getting myself involved.

I shook loose of her hand while she laughed. "I mean, if I've heard
Ella Diablo
screaming, why not a ghost, too? Why not the whole schmear? Why not just believe in the bogeyman? How do you know there's not something lurking in a dark corner around here? Do you believe in being haunted?"

I hadn't given a lot of thought to stuff like that since I left the shore. I mostly listened to Emmett and believed what he said, because he'd spent so much time studying reality. "I think stories about hauntings and spirits and monsters have always been used to ... control people. Keep the masses in line. It's a form of oppression. And if you're afraid of being haunted, it's really something about yourself that you're afraid of."

"Sounds educated."

"I live with one PhD and a brother who's about ten pages shy of a complete dissertation," I reminded her.

Her tone was a little sarcastic again when she said, "Well, maybe you can quote them to help me explain this."

She set Jupe down on the chair beside her, walked over to a table, and turned on the lamp. The room changed from mysterious and threatening to warm and glowing, just like that. I shook my head, smiling to myself as she brought over a big book. It looked like a library book.

"Since I'm not a drug case, and since I checked myself in here, I get to go certain places now that I've been here for three weeks. I got an aide to take me to the Philadelphia Free Public Library a couple of times this week. Please don't be passing that around school. If anyone finds out Grey Shailey has been spending hours in the library of her own free will, they'll drop over dead. Like I said, I'm not yet a murderer. Anyway..."

I cracked a grin as she turned over the cover page. "I went there to try to explain that shrieking. I looked for articles on pitches and tones and ears and stuff. All I can find is that dogs and cats and mice can hear tones that humans can't. I guess I'm half cat. I looked for articles about, maybe, tidal waves or earthquakes sucking the ocean out, creating riptides or waves that would explain my Girl Scout
and
the shrieking. I looked for something about whirlpools in the Atlantic with far-reaching suction, creating shrieking wind pockets, whatever: The Pacific? Now, that's where to live if you want stories about tidal waves or earthquakes or typhoons or suction. We, unfortunately, live on the mid-Atlantic. Our water does nothing. Except be black, reasonably predictable, and toss up good waves during a storm, according to science."

I threw up my hands, admitting something I didn't want to. "Emmett has said too often over the years that the day before my parents' last launch, he was down on the
Goliath
with Dad trying to fix a faulty hatch. It was one of the center ones that can bust and crack the hold if you're in a storm. And I think your Girl Scout is a riptide case."

"So you're saying they're not related? Then where'd the noise come from?" She opened to a page marked by a torn piece of paper. "This is why I ask if you believe in hauntings. I started looking for books in general on the South Jersey coast. And I came up with this." She pointed to a pen-and-ink drawing of a horrible sea hag rising out of the black ocean. At her belly was an enormous whirlpool, and a ship was being broken in two and sucked down. She had one sailor in her mouth and one in her hand, which, I suppose, she was going to eat next. I heard myself laugh as I shifted in the chair.

"Here's another," She flipped to another torn piece of scrap paper sticking out of the top. A screaming swimmer was being sucked out of the harbor and the end of a giant tentacle was wrapped around her ankle. Over the water was The She, with many other tentacles billowing up from her waist. The hag in the first drawing hadn't had any tentacles. Different artists, I guessed. She looked hungry.

I closed the book and looked at the title.
Ella Diablo, She Devil of the Hole, and Other Terrifying Tales of South Jersey.