Haunted (5 page)

As soon as she’d gotten out of the car and slammed the door behind her, Anthony turned to Rae.

“What is she doing here?”

“She’s the one who convinced my dad to let me come,” Rae answered.

“And?” Anthony said.

“Look, she really helped me out when I was trying to get enough evidence to prove that David set the pipe bomb
and not you,” Rae explained. “It’s a good thing she’s with us. You’ll see.”

Anthony snorted. What other response was there? “At least she didn’t lie about only taking a minute,” he said,
spotting Yana getting in line to pay.

“Um, Anthony, she doesn’t know about the fingerprint thing, and I don’t want her to, okay?” Rae blurted out.

“Oh, you mean it’s supposed to be a secret?”

Anthony asked sarcastically. What did she think he was? An idiot? “I just thought since Yana and I are friends, you
might assume she knew,” Rae answered. “And, um, I also wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry about me
accidentally getting your thoughts anymore.

I bought this stuff called Mush. You put it on dogs’ paws when it’s hot or when it’s snowing, and-”

“What are you talking about?” Anthony interrupted.

“It’s basically wax,” Rae explained. “I put it on my fingers so I wouldn’t pick up anything.” She waved her fingers in
front of his face. They looked a tiny bit shinier than usual, but that was it. “I’ll wipe it off when-” Rae stopped
abruptly as Yana climbed back in the car.

“Okay, who wants what?” Yana asked as Anthony pulled back out into traffic. “I got your Snowballs. I got your
beef jerky. I got your Cheese Waffies. I got your M&M’s-plain, peanut, and crispy. I got your Corn Nuts.”

A road trip with a girl who’s in love with the sound of her own voice. Excellent, Anthony thought.

From the second he saw her, he’d known Yana would be a pain in the butt. Girls didn’t dress the way she did
unless they wanted attention-a lot of attention. And girls who wanted a lot of attention were always a pain in the
butt. If you gave them some, they wanted more. If you didn’t, they got all pouty. He couldn’t believe Rae and this
Yana chick were friends.

“So, how do you two know each other, anyway?”

Anthony asked.

“What, you don’t think I go to Sanderson Prep?”

Yana replied, fingering one of the four earrings she had in her left ear.

“Well, do you?” She wasn’t his idea of a prep school girl. But what did he know? It wasn’t like he hung out with
hordes of them or anything. Rae was pretty much the only one he’d ever talked to.

“No, Rae and I…” Yana hesitated. Anthony glanced in the rearview mirror and caught Yana looking at Rae, as if she
was waiting for Rae to tell her what to say. What was the deal there? “Yana was a volunteer at the hospital where I
was, uh, vacationing this summer,” Rae finished for her.

She turned her head and stared out the window.

Nice work, Anthony, he told himself. Now Rae’d probably spend the rest of the trip thinking about how it felt to be
institutionalized.

“You should have seen the place,” Yana said.

Anthony shot her a glare in the rearview mirror. But either she didn’t see him, or she just blew him off.

“The doctors and the nurses, they were as freaky as the patients. Remember the wig lady, Rae?”

Rae laughed. A real laugh, not one of those fake ones people used to show that they weren’t bugged by some
stupid thing someone just said. “The wig lady was this nurse who had pulled out most of her hair, strand by
strand,” Rae explained. “She had a different wig for every day of the week. And she really believed that people
thought it was her hair.”

“It’s called trichto something, when you pull out your hair like that. I can’t remember exactly,” Yana jumped in.

“Yana’s the one who found out what the deal was.

She was always calling up personnel files on the computer and then telling all of us really personal stuff-like who’d
taken a leave of absence to go into rehab for coke addiction,” Rae explained. “Did you know there’s a rehab place
just for medical people druggies?”

“I only did it because I didn’t think it was fair that all the info went one way. Like, why should some doctor get to
know everything about Rae’s childhood but not have to ever say anything about himself?”

Yana asked.

“Oh my God. You should have seen these puppet shows Yana would put on,” Rae said, struggling to talk around
her giggles. “We had these puppets that we used for therapy sometimes, and Yana would put on soap operas with
them, using all the staff people as characters.”

“That’s cool,” Anthony said. And he actually meant it. Maybe it wouldn’t totally suck having Yana along on this trip.

Rae glanced over her shoulder. Yana was zonked out, with her head pillowed on Rae’s gym bag. “She’s asleep,”

she told Anthony, careful to keep her voice low.

“I figured,” he answered, his voice soft, too.

“Either that or she fell out of the car. It’s been way too quiet from back there.”

He sounded more amused than annoyed. Rae smiled as she leaned the seat back and stretched her legs out in
front of her. The Yana magic had already started working on Anthony. It was pretty much impossible not to like the
girl-unless you were a nurse whose personnel file she happened to have hacked her way into.

Rae rolled the window down a little more, pulled in a deep breath of the warm, moist air, and stared out at the dark
highway ahead of them.

“What was it like in there? In the hospital?”

Anthony asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” he added quickly.

Rae let her eyes drift shut. She saw her hospital room with its two single beds, her roommate pretty much always
asleep unless one of the nurses forced her to participate in one of the activities.

“The place was okay,” she said. “Except the smell. Way too much disinfectant. But I didn’t know about the
fingerprints thing. I was sure I was going crazy, and I was so afraid I was going to die in there, like-” She stopped,
biting her lip.

“Like,” Anthony prompted.

Why shouldn’t she tell him? He knew so much already. And he’d been there for her in a way almost no one else
had. Rae took in a deep breath. “Like my mother,” she said in a rush. “She got put away when I was a baby. She
died in the hospital a few months later.”

Anthony’s head jerked back slightly, but his expression stayed the same. He cut a sidelong glance at her. “Do you
think she had the same thing you did?

Maybe she wasn’t really, uh, sick, either.”

“I didn’t tell you everything about her,” Rae admitted. “She wasn’t just put in an institution because she was sick. It
was because-” Rae couldn’t say it. She’d never told anyone this part. She tried not to allow herself even to think it.

“She did something terrible,” she finished. “But they found her unfit to stand trial, so she was put in the hospital.”

Please don’t ask any more questions, Rae silently begged.

“I don’t know what to-wow,” Anthony mumbled. “That sucks.”

She could hardly believe she’d spewed like that, gotten so close to telling him everything. But riding in the car in
the dark, it was like a weird kind of slumber party-where the conversations always got really intimate, confessions
of fears and crushes and dreams coming out all over the place.

Rae let out a long sigh. “I guess that didn’t really answer your question. The answer is, I don’t know if my mom had
the fingerprints thing. But I hope she didn’t. Because if we’re alike in that way, maybe-”

“You’re not your mother,” Anthony cut in. “My mother and me-we’re nothing alike.”

“You could be like your father,” Rae suggested.

She knew he’d wondered about that. He’d never told her, but once she had matched her fingerprints up with his
and gotten a wave of Anthony thoughts and feelings.

“Maybe,” Anthony answered, keeping his eyes on the road now. “Sometimes I hope I am, just because…”

“Because why?” Rae asked, still under the spell of the darkness.

“Because I don’t really want to be like either of my stepdads, that’s for sure,” Anthony answered, his voice edged
with iron. “Or any of the various almost stepdads who’ve lived with us.”

“You don’t have to be like your dad to not be like them,” Rae pointed out.

“Yeah. But… I don’t know. I’d just like to have the chance to find out. If my old man’s like Jesse’s, a total waste of
space, I’d want to know. Jesse doesn’t sit around hoping his dad will call one day or just walk in-” Anthony stopped
abruptly.

“I get it,” Rae told him. She had an impulse to reach out and touch his hand as he steered, but she didn’t.

“Knowing the truth about my mom hurts. But it’s better than having some fairy princess mother in my head.

Probably.”

“Probably,” Anthony agreed. He pressed down on the gas, and they flew faster into the night.

Are you sure it’s on this street?” Rae asked.

She was sincerely hoping Anthony would say no. She’d thought Jesse’s neighborhood was kind of run-down, but
the houses on his street were palatial compared to these… shacks. That was pretty much the only word for them.

“That’s what the guy at the gas station said,”

Anthony answered, inching the car along the narrow street.

“And we should definitely be listening to some loser who pumps gas for a living,” Yana said from the backseat.

She’d woken up cranky, Rae noticed. Like a little kid.

“We definitely should,” Anthony told her. “Those guys always know how to hook you up with stuff.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t they give you an actual address?” Yana complained. “I don’t know why we need fake IDs,
anyway. We can all pass for eighteen.”

“You probably can. And I can,” Anthony said.

“But she-” He jerked his chin toward Rae. “She can’t.”

“She does have kind of a baby face,” Yana agreed.

“Hey,” Rae protested. Baby face sounded like code for round, fat chipmunk face. And she had cheekbones. Not
amazing ones, like Lea’s, but they were there.

Yana leaned over and patted her on the head. “A sweet little baby face,” she cooed. “I bet all the prep guys fall all
over themselves when you walk by.”

“You’re forgetting that they all think I’m insane,”

Rae shot back. Yana smacked her on the shoulder.

She always got pissed when Rae used words like insane about herself.

“Okay, now, that looks like the home of somebody called the chicken man, don’t you think?”

Anthony asked.

“Oh my God. I didn’t think there would be actual chickens,” Rae said. But there were. About six of them crowded
together in the tilting coop on the front porch.

“Oh my God. I didn’t think there would be, like, actual chickens, ” Yana repeated, doing a decent Rae imitation. She
and Anthony cracked up. They were doing that thing-that thing where there are three people and two of them don’t
know each other, so they bond by making fun of the one they both do know.

“I didn’t say ‘like,’ ” Rae muttered as Anthony maneuvered the Hyundai into a small spot between two parked cars.

He opened his door and climbed out, Yana right behind him. Rae really didn’t want to go inside, but she wasn’t
going to give the two of them something else to laugh about. She jumped out of the car and headed across the
weed-choked lawn and up to the porch. The chickens went crazy as Anthony knocked on the door.

“Why would anyone have chickens?” Rae mumbled. “I mean, hasn’t he heard of a grocery store?”

“They’re for his sacrifices,” Yana whispered.

“Didn’t you hear Anthony say he’s a voodoo guy?”

Rae had an impulse to reach over and yank open the door of the coop. No animal deserved to be killed for such a
ridiculous reason. Maybe on the way out, she thought. After we get the IDs.

The door swung open, and her plans to free the chickens evaporated. It was all she could do not to stare at the
chicken man. He was tall, definitely over six feet, and so thin, he seemed to be made mostly of bones, bones and the
masses of matted hair that fell past his shoulders. “Well, don’t just stand there on my porch. Come in and tell me
what you want.”

Anthony, Yana, and Rae obediently followed him inside. Rae’s eyes flicked over the room, jumping from the row of
crude dolls-voodoo dolls, she realized-to the jars of murky liquids, to a metal bowl with a small fire burning inside it,
a fire that gave off the unmistakable smell of singed hair.

“You looking for gris-gris? Something to protect you from the evil spirits?” the chicken man asked.

“We were looking more for something to protect us from evil bouncers,” Anthony said, not seeming at all weirded
out by the freaky stuff surrounding them.

“Oh, man. I put on the wig for that?” The chicken man pulled off his matted hair, revealing a dark brown crew cut
underneath. “Well, come on in the back.” He tossed the wig on a rattan chair with a back so high and wide, it could
be a throne, then led the way through the door, which was painted a deep rich red and covered with purple
symbols.