Another Little Piece (27 page)

After throwing the keys into the Dumpster, I took a moment to consult my own inner compass—the one that led straight to hell.

And then I started walking.

PAY

WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE?

What would you give?

Anything. Everything.

For a boy?

Yes.

Then I’ll make him want you.

How?

It worked for me, it can work for you.

How?

It doesn’t matter how, as long as it works.

How will I know it’s working?

You’ll know. He’ll know.

What’ll it cost?

You’ll owe me.

Owe you what?

Nothing more than what you took.

And then he’ll love me?

He’ll want you. But love can follow.

If you’re lucky.

Is that how it happened for you?

Were you lucky?

She smiles, almost sadly.

Luckier than a cat with nine lives.

—ARG

START HERE

Katie is crying. I am crying. I had wanted to make her pay, it’s true. But not this way. Never this way.

“Do it,” Franky says, pressing my father’s razor into my right hand. “Start here.” He points to the tiny scar on my left wrist, where I’d cut myself with this same blade weeks ago. It had all seemed like a game then. A terrible game. A sick game. But not something that could be of harm to anyone.

I look at Katie again, wishing she would scream or run away, but she is frozen except for the steady stream of tears flowing down her face.

I’d been so angry, I’d been almost feverish with it. First the fight with my mom and then Franky told me that he’d just seen Tommy walking out of Katie’s house. Apparently, her parents had left this morning for a weeklong trip—a second honeymoon in the Poconos—and she was home alone. Except not alone, because Tommy had come to visit. While I was getting screamed at and kicked out of my own house, right across the street Tommy and Katie were fooling around and having a good old time. That’s when I finally said the words to Franky—“I love you.” I loved him for being there for me and for telling me the truth. I loved him for being as angry at the world as I was.

He’d said he loved me too. And then with him at my heels, I’d come marching over to Katie’s, determined to make her sorry.

“It’s time to pay,” I said to Katie, pushing my way inside.

That’s when it all changed. Katie hadn’t told us to leave, but just stepped aside as if she’d known we were coming.

“Yes, I will pay,” she’d said. Then Franky brought the razor out, and I knew something was definitely wrong. I tried to run, but my feet became tangled up beneath me, and I fell to the floor instead.

“It’s okay, Anna. I’m right here,” Franky whispers into my ear now. He squeezes my hand and I squeeze back. “I’m with you. Are you with me?”

“Yes,” I answer. “Yes.” I say yes because Franky loves me. And I love him. And being with him is better than being alone.

I say yes, and he presses the razor into my hand.

I am standing in a pool of blood. My blood. It spills down my arms, where I have cut a line into each of them. That amount of blood loss should have me on the floor, but instead I feel so light. If Franky wasn’t holding me, I think I would float up and away, through the ceiling and into the sky.

He takes the razor from my sticky hand and places it in Katie’s. The part of me that can still think expects her to cut herself too. Her blood will spill out like mine, and then it will be Franky’s turn, and the three of us will float away together.

“It’s okay,” I want to tell her. “It hardly hurts at all.”

Except she doesn’t cut into herself. Instead, with the razor blade extended, she comes toward me, and the blade slides through my clothing and skin, making a perfect X over my heart. Then it slips between my ribs, cutting and twisting away, until she extracts my heart. There is a tugging feeling, like something has grabbed me by the belly button. I watch my body start to sway, but can’t feel it. I am outside of myself, floating. So this is what it feels like when you die. I stare down at the hole in my chest.

I am the Tin Man. Maybe I should find a clock to stuff in there.

It’s not too bad, but then another tug, and I feel again.

Thudding heart, and shaky breaths, while I chew something terrible. In my hands, there is something warm and sticky. My heart. Except Katie has my heart. And then I feel Katie’s horror and fear. Experience them inside myself, as a part of me. Along with her, I gag on the chunk of heart in my mouth. Together we feel Franky’s fingers in our mouth, shoving in a chunk of chocolate. It melts, sweet and waxy, mixing with the heart.

“Just a spoonful of sugar,” he coaxes.

Somehow we swallow, and as we do, there is less of Katie. More of me.

“Almost there now, Anna my love.”

Bite by bite, she disappears, and I can feel how grateful she is to go, to escape, leaving me behind to live with this. Across the room my body crumbles, and the blood evaporates, until there is no trace of me at all.

Somehow, though, I am still here. And Franky too.

He smiles at me. “Hello, my girl.”

MEANT TO END

I walked from congested roads clogged with rush hour traffic to quiet suburban streets, and then the houses spread out even more, interspersed with wide fields. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d endured a similar journey, when I’d been a girl with no name. Now I was a girl with too many.

Footsteps suddenly sounded behind me. I spun, expecting Eric, forgetting the redheaded boy was gone. But it wasn’t him. Or Logan either.

Just a middle-aged man in sweats, jogging along the side of the road.

“Nice night,” he said as he came up beside me, slowing his pace.

I nodded tightly, not wanting to encourage conversation.

He held his hand out, like he wanted to introduce himself. But instead there was a slip of paper between his fingers.

“Think you dropped this,” he said.

I stuck my hands into my pockets. Not wanting to touch him. “I don’t think it’s mine.”

“I definitely saw it fall from your pocket, young lady.” His eyes twinkled at the “young lady” bit as if assuring me that he was only playing at being stern. “Come on now, I’m not gonna give it to you again after this.”

I took the paper to appease him.

He smiled, a grin so big it was almost a grimace. “See, now isn’t it lucky we ran into each other? I usually run inside on a treadmill, like a rat going around in circles.” He laughed. Not in a self-deprecating way, but like he was thinking of those rats and feeling superior. “Today, though, I decided to do something different. Not that I didn’t like doing things the way I always have, but I got these three sisters. They keep yapping at me to give change a chance. Sometimes you go a different way, and it can change your whole life, is what they say. So I gave in. Just this once, and then it’s back to the treadmill.”

I kicked at a stone in front of me, not reacting to his too-much-information chatter, not wanting to encourage him.

After the silence stretched on for several long moments, he seemed to get the message. “All right, well, you have a nice night now.” He sped up once more and pulled away from me.

“See ya,” I called after him, hoping that I wouldn’t.

He lifted a hand and looked back over his shoulder. Headlights flared behind me, spotlighting his face, and somehow twisting it. Making him look like someone else. Someone I knew and remembered too well. A man who had once called me a monster. Dr. Grimace and Gloom. The light spread and then he was Mr. Hardy, warning against calling the parents. And one last bend of light cast his face in shadows exactly like the scowling hall monitor at school.

The car behind me revved loudly, but when I glanced around, nothing was there. As I turned forward again, the road stretched wide and empty in front of me. The man was gone.

With shaking hands I unfolded the paper he’d handed me and held it out to see it clearly in the fading light.

It was the same paper that had fallen out of my algebra book. The one with Lacey’s name. And the watermark on the back. The kind of note the Physician always made sure fell into my hands. The ground seemed to shift beneath my feet as I stared at the empty place where the jogging man had been. Dr. Grimace and Gloom had called himself a physician. Had he known I was a monster because he’d made me one? How many times had the Physician spoken with me while hiding behind another man’s face?

Shaken, I grabbed hold of a weathered mailbox at the end of a gravel driveway, the only thing in the whole world that wasn’t spinning. My hand clenched tight around the paper, even as I tried to make myself throw it away.

Didn’t the Physician or Dr. Grimace and Gloom or Mr. Hardy, or whoever he was, get it? I wasn’t taking orders from his little slips of paper anymore. I’d been walking in the opposite direction of the hunger, even as inside of me it chewed away in protest. But I wouldn’t let it out. Not this time. I’d throw myself in front of a speeding car first. Or fill my pockets with rocks and walk into the nearest lake. And if all else failed, I’d find a gas station and buy a lighter. Then I would do what I had once been too afraid to. I would walk through fire.

It didn’t seem as difficult as it once had. I had been ready to let the hunger lead me to Lacey’s door. Even when Dex begged me not to, I couldn’t see a way out. Now, though, after seeing what was left of Logan, dying seemed like the easiest option. Anything to not have to live with that memory.

No, I wasn’t afraid of dying. Not anymore. But what I did fear was a niggling suspicion that the Physician might not let me die. That no car would be fast enough, no lake deep enough, and no fire hot enough to break his hold over me and kill the hunger for good.

Except. The treadmill. “Sometimes you go a different way.” That’s what he’d said. Was there a way other than Lacey? Other than the hunger taking over? Other than trying to find a dozen different ways to die?

I unfolded the paper once more, using my fingertips to carefully iron out the wrinkles. There was Lacey’s name again, and on the opposite side of the paper—the watermark. I squinted to read the barely there words. Albion, NY. I’d remembered that part. The street and house number though . . . A car came by and, holding the paper out toward the light, I was able to read: 1306 Rural Route 16. I knew that address.

That terrible instinct, connected to the hunger that I’d spent the last several hours walking away from—but different too—gave me a little poke. I leaned away from the mailbox far enough to see the numbered stickers on the side. 1306. Teeth bit into the letters. They weren’t shark teeth, like I’d thought the first time I’d seen this mailbox. Now up close, I could see those teeth came from the mouth of a monstrous whale, its tail curling around the back of the mailbox and its blowhole spouting a cascade of black pinpoints that resembled shrapnel more than water. I shivered, and as if my movement had woken it, the mailbox door fell open. Taped inside was a square bit of paper with the full address typed out—free of artistic additions. 1306 Rural Route 16, Albion, NY.

I was always given two choices. Two different girls to choose from. But this wasn’t the name of a girl. This was an address and a place that suddenly seemed to suck all the hunger away. I took a step back from the mailbox, and the hunger flared up again. Tugging me, wanting me to go to Lacey and far from here. Ignoring it, I stepped toward the mailbox once more.

The last bits of dying sun barely came through the trees that crowded either side of the driveway. I walked slowly and carefully, not wanting to twist my ankle in one of the deep tire ruts. By the time the drive opened up into a small yard, the darkness was complete. The lot was large and mostly empty. Front and center sat a squat brick house that had seen better days. The screen door didn’t close all the way, and a light breeze kept swatting it open to crash against the outer wall.

Behind the house I could just make out a weak light. I inched toward it, this time my slow steps due to the heaviness and growing dread inside me. The shed door was fully open, and kept that way with a brick. The same monster that had attacked Dex stood haloed by the bare lightbulb hanging over his head. He hummed softly to himself while he sawed at a long piece of plywood.

There was a roaring in my ears, except this time it didn’t take me back to the past—it carried me forward, closer to the monster.

Inside me all the pieces came together. I was always given the choice between two different people. Lacey’s name was on one side, and on the other—my second option. Not a name but an address. Not a girl but a man.

Lacey or him. That was my different choice. That was my way off the endless treadmill.

I dropped the paper. It skittered across the scrub grass in a series of endless somersaults until a gust of wind picked it up and carried it away into the shadows.

Without even knowing it, I had already chosen. My childhood was long behind me, and my girlhood had stretched on for much too long. It was time to grow up. It was time to become what I was truly meant to be. Or what I’d always been. I would become the monster, and in doing so make sure that he never hurt anyone else again.

Entering the tiny shed, my senses were overwhelmed by the man’s sour smell. He glanced up and, after a moment of surprise at seeing someone there, smiled. His eyes ran up and down my body.

“You lost, little girl?” Finally his eyes got around to meeting mine. He smiled wide, showing off a mouth full of gray fillings. “Hey, I remember you. Where’s your friend? He here for another ass kicking? Or you come alone, ready for a real man?”

That was when I wanted to flee. Cut and run from this terrible place. From this terrible man. After this I would not be anything like Anna or Annaliese or any of the other girls. There would be no Mom or Dad or Dex or best friend. It would be a whole new kind of loneliness.

“It’s just me. And it’s time to pay,” I said, forcing the words from my mouth, sealing his fate. And mine.

And he did pay, exactly the same way so many others had. Except that he enjoyed it. The warm blood gushing out. Sawing through flesh that moved beneath his hands pulsating with pain. And the power of holding a human heart still thrumming with life in his hand. He was enthralled.

He bit in with an enormous grin, and even as his jaw worked at the tough tissue, it didn’t budge once. The heart was half gone, the transfer half done, by the time he felt someone else in his body. At first he thought it was heartburn and giggled a bit at the idea. I heard that thought, too, and shuddered. It shivered through his body. He struggled then, trying to hold on. But it was too late. He’d already given himself away. I forced the last few bites into his no-longer-smiling mouth and pushed them down the back of his throat with his own stiff fingers. In the dirt beside me, Annaliese withered, fading from the inside out until she was only a husk. Bit by bit, I watched the wind carry her away.

He was gone. She was gone. And once again, I was still there. Always the last one standing.