“Hey. Hey!” I hurry after my sister, grabbing her thin arm. We’re in the handmade matching sweater and sweatpants Evelyn sows for us, and I grimace from the feel of the thin felt fabric.
“Stop it, Billy! You’re gonna summonThe Witch,” I tell her, making my eyes big, and my voice as deep as it will go. These days, it has a mind of its own. Sybil started giggling at the dinner table last night when it suddenly got all high pitched like a girl’s.
Evelyn just told her to be quiet and eat her food, and then cast me a narrow-eyed look I didn’t like one bit.
Not. One. Damn. Bit.
Sybil’s already pale face goes so white it’s almost gray. She claps a hand over her mouth, her lime green eyes slowly rolling up to the ceiling.
We both strain to hear if the stairs leading down from the attic are about to start squeaking.
But thankfully, there’s just silence.
“You should thank your God she didn’t hear you,” I tell her.
Sybil rips her hands away, her scowl back. “Screw you, Bash.”
Then she starts stomping away again.
I try to hold back the growl of impatience, but damn it, we’ve barely seen Evelyn today, and that makes today agoodday. She’s been so busy with her new book, I’m hoping she’ll forget to eat and starve up there, and we’ll have to put on sad faces when the police come because the stench of her decomposing corpse made the neighbors complain.
Sybil gasps when I rush over and scoop her up, and looks like she wants to scream, but one big-eyed warning glare down ather, and she squeezes her lips together in a sulky line and keeps quiet.
I slow down almost immediately at the feel of her little body rattling in my arms, like chicken bones in a cloth bag.
She’s much too light for a nine-year-old.
Much, much too brittle.
There’s barely any power in her grip when she throws her arms around my neck. “Where we going?”
“I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up, Billy,” I tell her.
“You do?” she says, frowning.
I can’t blame her cynicism. She spent years believing Evelyn when the crone told her she’d get ice cream for dessert if she ate all her broccoli.
I told her there hadn’t been ice cream in the house for years. Yet Sybil was stupid or gullible enough to believe it would magically appear in the freezer at Evelyn’s command, like something out of a fairy tale.
She came around a few months back.
Watching that last shred of childish naivety wither made me loathe our witch of a mother even more. Which was astonishing, because I thought I already hated her with every fiber of my being.
I’d feel sorry for my little sister…if I didn’t force myself to finish every last disgusting green crumb on my plate at night, because I’m apparently just as gullible as she is.
“Where are we going?” Sybil whispers when we reach the kitchen door.
She knows it’s locked, so she’s stupid if she’s expecting me to go in, but she still stares forlornly at it as we pass.
Evelyn shouldn’t bother locking it. Not as if there’s anything tasty in there. The witch just does it to remind us who’s in charge. And perhaps as insurance. After all, if something should happen to her, we’d have to break down that door, or starve.
“Where, Bash?” She grips me a little tighter when I turn down the hall. There are only two doors down this passage, one of them a guest bathroom.
She gasps again, turning to burrow her head against my chest. “No, Bash. No. Not there.”
“Relax, Silly Billy. The witch is upstairs. Without her, it’s just a room.”
“No, no.” She shakes her head against me. “Please. I won’t talk about arks and sinners and floods and dying anymore, I promise. I’ll be good.”
