Phobic (32 page)

Except worry filters through the holes in my resolve. It’s not
completely
over.

“Joel,” I say, gearing myself to cross the room. I will my gaze to look only where it needs to.

“Joel?” I call out louder, peering back into the connecting space where Todd had landed after falling through my floor. I steel myself and run full circle around the piles of garbage bags. No sign of him.

“Where else could he be?” I say, feeling the panic rise like bile in my throat. This doesn’t make sense. Ada said he was down here. Even Garrett implied he was in here.

I wheel around, waiting for a flash of inspiration, for some kind of answer to magically appear. I could look through my entire house, but I already did that. I’m sure nothing has changed. Joel, where is Joel?

I wish I could ask Ada. But it’s better this way. The dead should be dead. Leave the living alone.

A person can’t just disappear like this. I don’t know where else he could be.

Or don’t I?

He wouldn’t run off. And leave his cell phone, his clothes, everything? Joel wouldn’t just abandon me, or his internship. He wouldn’t run away from his life, no matter what my dad was trying to get him to do.

No, there’s one more place I haven’t checked.

T
odd taps his fingers on the grand piano in the Warren’s posh home. The fixtures and furniture are all squared off in a very modern style that makes Todd get the same feeling he always does here, like he’s not allowed to touch anything.

Jordan kneels over Sierra on the tile, tilting her chin up to feel for a pulse. Sierra’s brown hair is frazzled; her body lies as if wilted, though Todd catches movement in her fingertips and a slight rise and fall of her chest.
At least she’s not dead.

He’s been pacing, skimming through Garrett’s journal, hoping for elaboration—maybe something on relativity or the madman’s ideas on laws of nature, perhaps. He sees a section of Garrett’s notes that touches on conservation of energy, but none of it holds Todd’s interest for long. He can’t keep his glance away from Piper’s, or get Sierra’s words out of his head. She’d mentioned other stuff. Had something more than skin-switching happened?

And what happened there to create such a volt of electricity? He’s not sure if the house did it just to ward off Sierra’s presence, or if something else—or some
one
else—caused it. It can’t have all been to keep Sierra out. He’s seen people come and go there for years and the house has never done a thing.

Then again, he didn’t know it could.

His brain tries to flick back to its factory-setting of denial. But after having Piper’s room turn upside down on him one minute and then ripping the floor right out from under his feet the next—no, it isn’t too much to expect the house to go to these measures just to keep one girl away.

Still, Piper is in there. And he’s wasting time.

“Is she okay?” Todd asks, trying not to sound impatient. All impatience fades, though, when he lowers the journal and notices Jordan pumping against Sierra’s chest, stopping to breathe air into her mouth. “Dude, what are you doing?”

Jordan stops long enough to pump against her chest again in a poor imitation of movie-scene rescues. “CPR, genius. What does it look like?” He bends to place his mouth over hers again.

Can he not tell she’s alive? Todd had only said as much when he told Jord not to call 911.

“Looks like you’re trying to make out with her Lloyd Christmas style. Oh come on,
Dumb and Dumber?
Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”

“I’ll kill you,” Jordan mutters in reply, pumping her chest once more. “If she dies, I swear I’ll kill you.”

Here we go again, Todd thinks, remembering the last few conversations he’s had with Jordan, laced with threats and declarations of betrayal. Jordan
knew
how Todd felt about Piper, and he still had the nerve to do what he did. Some friend he was, to go and vandalize her house. Most of all Todd remembers the confrontation afterward where he’d sounded off with a fist in Jordan’s eye after finding an axe in his hand and Piper bleeding on the ground.

“I told you,” Todd says, annoyed. He closes the journal. “I didn’t do anything. In fact, she landed on me—I probably saved her life.” He nurses his shoulder, still feeling the car’s metal against his back. “Besides, she’s breathing, man.”

Jordan pauses and looks right at Todd. A bruise leers below Jordan’s left eye, purpled and black. “Then what the hell happened?”

Sierra gasps for breath, her eyes popping open wide. She grapples, scraping her fingers along the tile. Jordan cradles her in his arms.

“Sierra, baby, you okay?”

As realization strikes, she loses her composure. Her full lips mush up like prunes. Tears streak down her face. Jordan pulls her into his arms, matting down her hair. Todd notices where Jordan used to stroke her face before, he avoids touching her pimpled skin now.

The crying had been one thing that surprised Todd the most about Sierra. Like the day of Piper’s audition. She’d cried to him after Piper had stood up for herself, even after Sierra had antagonized Pipes about her mom. Yeah, the phrase, “being able to dish it out but unable to take it,” applies like a stamp to Sierra Thompson.

Sierra pulls away, eyes on her lap as she coughs and gasps a few more times. “I want my skin back!” she cries. “I want my own memories, my head, my body, my LIFE. And I know she can make it stop!”

“Uhhh—” Todd grunts, not knowing what to say. Then again, who knows when it comes to Sierra. Jordan looks dumbstruck and keeps rubbing her back like that will make it all better, although the movement isn’t so much soothing as it is like he’s trying to sand down a table.

“And what’s with these memories?” she goes on, ranting to the floor. “I’ve never moved. I’ve gone to Cedarvale my whole life, so why should I care when someone is scared to come to a new school? I don’t care—I don’t, I don’t!”

“Doesn’t sound that way to me,” Todd wants to say, but instead kneels beside her as she trembles on Jordan’s lap. No, Sierra would never be scared of going to a new school. But he knows someone who would be.

“You’re seeing Piper, aren’t you?” he asks softly.

She snorts a long sniff while her burnished brown eyes trudge their way up to meet his. She doesn’t say a word, but that’s confirmation enough for him.

Todd sinks to the floor and runs a hand through his curls. “Holy crap,” he mumbles. Then, a different thought occurs. He shakes Sierra like an Etch-a-Sketch. “Are you seeing Piper? Are you seeing her
right now
?”

Her head bobbles. Jordan shoves Todd off. “Dude, back off. Sierra? What’s going on this time?”

This time?

Sierra keeps her gaze on Todd. “What—is with Piper Crenshaw’s house?”

Todd shakes his head. This can
not
be happening.

“I told you I was sorry,” Jordan says, still cradling Sierra, who is becoming more composed by the second. “I was pissed about what you said when I helped Si with that profile, and about how secretive Piper is about her house when I was
there
and something happened, something she tried to cover up. And I lost it. I only meant to, you know, taunt her a bit, not hurt her. Come on, man,” he exchanges a glance with Sierra, “we know something is up.”

Todd glances across the street again. He’s running out of time. He doesn’t know what’s going on in there, only that it’s got to be bad. And who knows if he’ll see Piper alive again, not with some egotistical Jack the Ripper scientist haunting her basement.

But if he does see her again, he knows he won’t want to try and justify why he’d confided in the two people she hates more than anyone else in their whole school.

Besides, look at what it took for him to finally believe Piper’s house-body aberration. There’s no way he can provide proof like she did. Except that they don’t seem to need it, not with Sierra being suddenly clairvoyant.

Still…

“No way,” Todd says. “Everyone knows Sierra’s a loose cannon. Especially when it’s dirt on someone else. Look what you did about Piper’s mom.”

Sierra purses her lip, shaking her head as another tear trickles out. Something about her expression tells him this time is different. A gleam in her eyes, a seriousness in her countenance. Likewise, Jordan stares at him with a mixture of guilt and assurance.

“I can’t,” Todd goes on, though this time it’s half-hearted. It’s asinine. Piper would kill him.

But who else can he turn to? One thing Piper could never understand—one thing he himself had forgotten—is that up until a few days ago, these guys had been his friends.

Sierra adjusts her clothes, then looks back up again. “You can trust us,” she says. “Remember the F shack?”

A grin spreads over her face as she says it, adding a glow to her skin and reminding Todd how smoking hot she is. It had been the second week of summer practice when Todd had heard Jordan, Sierra, Kody, and Tabitha, thoroughly intoxicated after what they called a “drinking raid” that ended with them being chased across town by the cops. They’d been knocking the side of the hot tub in his backyard and asking it if they could hide. Todd peered out at the sound and snuck them inside his house just as a cop car rolled down the street. For whatever reason, the hot tub had been dubbed “The F Shack” that night. Todd chuckles too. It’d been the first time of many nights they’d hung out last summer.

“Dude,” Jordan says, jumping to his feet and out the front door. The house across the street is visibly shuddering; the siding boards shake so much the gaps between them are visible. Images of bleeding wallpaper, of faucets turning on of their own volition, of bodies stripped of their organs sledgehammer into Todd’s brain, making thinking impossible.

All at once Sierra screams, a raging, ear-stabbing scream so tangible it goes straight through him. She rears back like something invisible is on the prowl, ready to spring. Jordan clings to her like he doesn’t know what to do. Todd doesn’t blame him—he wouldn’t either.

“Ugh!” she wails, looking at the ceiling, at something that isn’t there. “He’s like—hacking somebody. The blood. Oh man, the
screams
…Make it stop, make it stop!”

Jordan gives Todd a helpless glance as Sierra quavers and shoves away from him. She rises to her feet, grasping her head in a strange dance like she’s trying to extract something from her skull.

“Dammit,” Todd curses. He’s
got
to get back in there. Jordan coaxes his girlfriend to sit on the uncomfortably square red couch. She breathes a few times, settling back down again. He can’t imagine what she’s seeing. What Piper’s going through.

“Okay—” Todd relents. He has no other choice. “But if you do anything, or tell anyone…”

“We’ll sign a contract!” Sierra bursts, then startles when she sees the look of incredulity Todd and Jordan both give her, because she’s suddenly back to normal. She realizes it too and cowers back, folding her arms. “What, my mom has to do it sometimes.”

“Don’t mess with the Bates Motel, got it,” Jordan says, overriding her. His attention is plastered to the window and the view across the street.

Todd swallows, gripping the journal in his hand. He can’t believe he’s going to do this. Then again, maybe it won’t be as hard to explain as he’d thought.

I
glance uneasily up at the ceiling the stairs lead into. The thick sight of wood everywhere—stairs, walls, ceiling—wigs out my mind, the way a room that’s been painted all black makes you look for some sign of dissonance, for something to stand out. The solidness of everything gives an air of finality to the closet-sized room.

Jordan’s boots sank into me when he’d climbed these stairs. I wonder if I’ll feel that this time. And the image I’d seen of Ada being trapped alive under them. This is where it all started for me. Opening this door opened my view into the past.

I’m glad about it, in some small way. Glad I was able to stop Garrett, to keep Joel from sharing my father’s fate. Glad this is all over. I’ll find Joel and we’ll burn down the house. Move far away. Take Todd with us and just leave this town.

Though I can’t tell from here, there’s got to be a trap door at the top. A hatch of some kind, some way to get into wherever the floating door leads.