The cash disappears into a different pocket and Opal gives him a switchblade smile as she turns away. “That’s the thing about strays.” Her voice echoes back to him over her shoulder. “We don’t quit.”
He’d said it because it was a cruel thing to say. Because it would hurt, and people hate what hurts them, and if she hated him maybe she would run before she got hurt much worse. So there’s no reason regret should crawl up his throat. No reason he should swallow hard and say, far too quietly, “I’m sorry.”
There’s no reason he should wish she’d heard him.
He lingers, after she leaves, breathing in the smell of soap and clean wood. The House shifts subtly, the light tilting and the air chilling, so that the room is precisely as it was that last day.Damn you,he thinks, but the memory is already rising around him, closing like jaws.
He is fourteen. His mother is lying silently on her yellow couch while his father carefully stitches a flap of her scalp back into place. The battle had been a long and brutal one—had it always been this bad? was the mist rising more than it should?—and the skin over her cheekbones is white.
Arthur watches them for a while. His father’s long-fingered hands—the hands of a painter or a pianist, bent instead to the bloody, endless work of keeping his wife alive. His mother, a knotted scar of a woman, already going gray. Her right hand is still resting on the hilt, restless, ready.
Without quite planning to, Arthur announces that he is leaving.
His mother opens her eyes.How dare you,she says. She’s always been stern, but she’s never spoken to him like this, with this furious contempt.They took my home from me—you think you can just walk away from yours—this is your birthright—
His father says her name, gently, and her mouth shuts as if sewn, the stitches overtight.You’re not going anywhere,she says.
But Arthur had. That very night, he’d climbed out the library window and down the wisteria, while the House moaned and wailed. He thought it would try to stop him, but when his foot slipped, his fingers had found an old trellis in just the right place, and when he slid into his father’s truck, he found a backpack full of peanut-butter-and-jellies.
He’d driven himself to the bus station with a heady, dangerous glee, as if he were a kite with its strings cut.
The next time he saw his mother, there had been a thistle pushing gently through the socket of her right eye.
The House shifts again and the memory falls away. Arthur is twenty-eight. He is alone, and he is grateful.
SIX
Itoss the spoons on Jasper’s bed when I get back to room 12 that evening.“Put ’em on eBay, please and thank you. The antiques account.”
Jasper appraises the spoons with a clinical eye. He draws a finger down the silver and withdraws it, frowning. “You didn’t get these at Tractor Supply,” he observes.
It’s my personal ambition never to set foot in a Tractor Supply again, actually.
As soon as I counted Arthur’s money I texted Lacey tell Frank i quit :) and called Stonewood Academy to find out where I should send my first payment. The lady on the phone repeated “In . . . cash?” with audible ellipses and helpfully reminded me of the final deadline, as if I didn’t already know it. As if I didn’t repeat the date in my head every time I passed the smokestacks.
“Nope,” I say.
Jasper looks like he might have a few follow-up questions, but we have a deal where he doesn’t ask me anything he doesn’t want answered, so he merely mentions his fervent hope that I’m not doing anything illegal.
I press a hand to my chest, mortally wounded. “Me?”
“Or dangerous.”
He sounds worried enough that I give him my most earnest smile. “I’m not. For real.” It might even be true. I mean, if houses can be haunted, Starling House absolutely is, but so far all it’s done to me is moan and creak. And I’m pretty sure Arthur is just a garden-variety asshole rather than, say, a sexual predator, or a vampire. “Pretty please?” I nudge the spoons with my knee. “My phone camera sucks.”
Jasper holds eye contact for another moment, just to let me know that he’s not buying what I’m selling, before flopping dramatically back against the mattress. “I would, but Bev turned the internet off again.”
“Did you ask her to turn it back on?”
He opens one scandalized eye. “I thought you loved me. I thought you wanted me to survive to my senior year—”
I whump a pillow at him and he wheezes theatrically. It sounds a little more real than he meant it to, the breath whistling in his throat.
I head back across the empty parking lot to the front office, where Bev is busy yelling atJeopardy!,pausing only to spit tobacco juice into an empty coke can. She’s probably not even fifty, but she has the social habits and haircut of a ninety-year-old man.
We have our traditional argument: she maintains that the internet is for paying customers and not for depraved freeloading teenagers; I swear at her; she threatens to throw us out into the street; I swear again; she flips me off and turns the power strip back on. I steal four packets of Swiss Miss from the folding card table she has the audacity to advertise as a breakfast bar.
“Those are also for paying customers, by the way.”
