The Creeping Read online

  I can barely tear my eyes away from his back. What is he thinking saying something like that to me? And in front of our school’s biggest gossip hoarders. Doesn’t he understand that I already have enough people whispering about me? I get roller-coaster stomach as I turn back to the girls.

  Janey’s gawking wordlessly at me. Her eyes are glazed doughnut holes imagining all the headlines she can spin out of this. “Do you have a mint?” I snap. I can practically see the cogs winding tighter in her head. She fumbles through her purse and produces a box of Altoids.

  She pops open the lid and holds them out to me. “What was his problem?” she asks, her tone all sugar.

  “Total freak,” Kate says, smacking her lips.

  I snatch two mints and pop them into my mouth to banish the foul taste that’s still there. “Biggest freak ever,” I mutter halfheartedly. “Whatever, I have to get back to Zoey, byes.” I jump up and hurry away from them. I wrap my arms around myself as I go, trying to ease the queasiness that’s crept up on me.

  “God, you’re such a fugly witch,” I scold myself. But Sam didn’t give me a choice. I practically begged him to shut up. Pleaded with him not to call me that. Maybe it’s for the best? Maybe it was the humane thing to do? Yeah, it’s better if Sam gives up trying to be my friend. It’s been too many years. I mean, he even knows I lied about Scott Townsend being my first kiss because I didn’t want to admit it was him. How could he stand me after that?

  The mints mingle with the sourness in my mouth. The taste of shame or guilt or remorse. It’s rancid like the shish kebab Zoey and I got from a food truck the last time we were in Minneapolis. I spit the mints on the ground just before I exit the cemetery, tapping the heart on the iron gate to leave any clinging spirits behind me. The bonfire is almost exactly how I left it, except that there are more half-naked girls and boys dancing on the shore. Cole has stripped down to her bra and skirt and is gyrating against a senior football player who was a transfer last year too. Michaela’s still fully clothed, but she’s actually dancing with a guy, albeit two feet away from him—but dancing is dancing, right?

  Zoey’s on the opposite side of the bonfire, standing on a folding chair, surrounded by guys. She’s a queen addressing her subjects from a pedestal. One after another each boy in the crowd takes a shot of something clear, and Zoey knocks her own head back, lips suctioned suggestively around a bottle of booze. I catch her unfocused eye, and she beckons me over with a roundabout, inebriated wave. I motion for her to wait. So that’s how the night will end. Zoey will outdance, outflirt, and outplay everyone. I’ll have to drag her away from the party. What’s new? At least I won’t have to hold her pixie hair back when she hurls in the parking lot.

  I make a beeline toward the crowd of dancers. I start searching for him before I even admit to myself who I’m looking for. I crane my neck and stand on my tiptoes, straining to glimpse Sam. This foul taste in my mouth isn’t going away until I apologize. If I can just tell him that I only said what I said because of Janey and Kate. He has to understand how it is.

  Even though the shore is wide and long, my classmates are squished and sandwiched into one another, like invisible walls are pressing them together. His being on the dance floor is a long shot, and I’m not surprised that my search comes up empty. Small bunches of teenagers clot around the bonfire, but he’s not with any of them. Maybe I should yell his name? No, my voice won’t travel over the blaring music. And that would really get people talking about us.

  There’s a group of twitchy-looking boys about ten yards removed from everyone else. While the rest of my classmates are half-nude, these boys are in glasses and long sleeves; beads of sweat clinging to their temples. They’re like the boys who wear T-shirts at the public swimming pool to hide their concave chests. One is actually sporting a sweater-vest—the kind with wooden buttons my father wears. I sidle up to them. I don’t mean any offense, but they are the only guys present who look like they’re friends with Sam. Four moon-shaped faces—three with acne and a fourth with sideburns that defy my understanding of how facial hair grows—gawk at me. The boy nearest actually scurries back, giving the impression of a shivering daddy longlegs, dodging my tennis shoe’s sole. “Are you here with Sam Worth?” I shout to be heard over the music. “SAM. WORTH. Have you seen him?”

  “He left with Anna Young,” Sweater-Vest pipes up, brazenly holding my eye contact while his friends stare at their shoes.

  I want to ask, Who the hell is she? But in my head it sounds more scorned than it should. I flash an awkward smile and mumble, “Okay,” and shuffle away from social Siberia. I fumble through my bag for my cell. A text to him will be better than nothing. Before my fingers can jab the touch screen, someone yanks on my arm, tugging me around to face them.

  “Omigosh, you have freakish drunk strength,” I gasp at Zoey, rubbing my arm where her fingers dug into my skin. Her hair is disheveled, and a mist of sweat shines on her chest. She’s still wearing her bikini, and I feel an overwhelming urge to drape the hoodie I keep in my purse over her. “What’s wrong? You look like a possessed pixie,” I shout over the music. She’s furiously chewing her bottom lip; her eyes are almost watering with concern. I can smell the vodka on her breath. In a flash Michaela is there, towing Cole by the hand. How on earth did Zoey get Michaela’s attention on the dance floor?

  “You’re not going to believe who is back in town,” Zoey yells, placing both hands on my shoulders. I don’t know if she means to hold me up or steady herself. “Jeanie’s big brother.” Michaela gasps, and a few junior girls turn to watch us, obviously jealous of whatever drama we’re enduring. Zoey pivots to face Cole and zips through the details. “He’s a total psycho, went off his rocker after Jeanie disappeared. Their parents sent him to some reform thing, but when he came back in middle school, he basically stalked Stella. Then he got sent away again because her dad complained to the cops. The last time he came back he got some barista pregnant and ran away. He was watching us at the cove today.” I hear every one of Zoey’s words, but they’re difficult to process. Every little bit I make sense of, my brain rewinds, and I find myself unable to get over the fact that Zoey got Michaela’s attention in that crowd of grinding dancers.

  Michaela laces her fingers in mine, and Cole sympathetically squeezes my shoulder. Of course it was Daniel there at the cove today. I knew he looked familiar. I guess I haven’t seen him all up close and personal since I was twelve and he was fifteen. The last time he came back, when I was a freshman, Dad threatened to file a restraining order and the Talcott family became more reclusive than Bigfoot. I never saw Daniel again, although Zoey swore she could feel him watching us.

  “Wait for it,” Zoey says dramatically. “He’s here tonight.” Michaela not only gasps this time, she staggers backward like the words have a physical weight that barrels into her. Cole’s eyes look about to pop from their sockets. The earth tilts, and my knees bend and straighten like I’m trying to find my sea legs. I close my eyes to steady myself, but all I can see is fifteen-year-old Daniel, holding me against the brick retaining wall that framed my middle school parking lot. Its ragged edges scraped the skin on my back. “Tell me what happened,” he demanded for the millionth time, teeth bared. And as always with Daniel, I took a deep breath and promised him that I really didn’t remember anything. I was choking on tears, but I managed to get the words out. He asked me again and again, stopping only because Sam heard me howling and came to my rescue, threatening to call my dad. Sam did tell Dad, and Daniel was sent off to another reform school.

  Even as a kid I was in awe of Daniel’s devotion to his sister. I dreamed of having a big brother who loved me like that. It was only frightening because his boundless suspicion was directed at me. I never blamed him for it. He’d gotten it in his head that I knew more than I let on, and as early as I can remember, he insisted that I was a slippery shit-faced liar. Those were the exact words he shouted at me when I was seven and he was ten, at a school assembly. That got him suspen
ded for the first time, but not the last.

  Zoey wraps her arms around me, and for a moment I am completely safe. Zoey is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a love like Daniel had for Jeanie. I scrunch my eyes closed. Plump drops of water begin to fall. At first it’s only one on the bridge of my nose and then another caught in my eyelash. Within a few seconds the pitter-patter of random drops crescendos, and sheets of warm rain cascade down on us. The party erupts into chaos.

  “You’ve got to be effing kidding me!” Michaela shrieks, futilely shielding her pin-straight hair with her palms. “I just blew my hair out.” Zoey releases me and holds her head back, catching drops in her mouth. Her cheeks are flushed pink; her lip gloss is smeared. Groups of drenched teens stampede toward the parking lot, hooting and laughing. Others stay put, swaying to the music still shaking the ground. Zoey lets rip a witch’s cackle and claps her hands in delight. She lets the seriousness of the moment wash away with her mascara. A senior footballer whose neck is as thick as his head chants for a wet T-shirt contest, and Zoey disappears into the crowd on the shore.

  “Zoey!” I shout after her. “You’re not even wearing a T-shirt.” The rain pounds on relentlessly. My sundress is completely soaked, and the insides of my shoes are soggy. “You guys go to the car and I’ll get her,” I yell as our faces are illuminated by a bolt of lightning.

  Cole and Michaela take off running. I watch them disappear into the rush of cars swerving over mud and around underclassmen begging for rides. The thunder follows quickly, and the roaring clap is so loud it’s everywhere, surrounding me, a part of me. You’d think that thunder and lightning lakeside would send more of my peers searching for shelter, but when I turn to find Zoey, the number of dancers bumping on the shore has multiplied. The bonfire sizzles to nothingness, the flames extinguished. Only the battery-operated lanterns and the moon cast light. In the dark the dancers’ limbs and torsos dissolve together, becoming a rhythmic shadow creature, shuddering and pumping.

  Bottles of alcohol soar from open hand to open hand. I catch sight of Zoey’s slender fingers groping one. The gold bangle she’s worn since she was a little girl winks in the light at me. She’s a good fifteen people deep in the crowd. I shout her name, but I can barely hear my own voice. Elbows jab my sides. My toes crunch as a heel grinds into my wet sneaker. I curse and fight forward. Hands grope my butt, and I try to slap them away. By the time I squeeze through the drenched and drunk cluster of bodies, she isn’t where I thought she was.

  I push free from the crowd. These kids have gone completely crazy. Day of Bones my ass. This has nothing to do with Jeanie Talcott. This is an excuse for them to get hammered and live without inhibitions for a night. Well, who am I kidding? Isn’t that the reason for every high school party, and don’t I usually L.O.V.E. it?

  I whirl away from the dancers and trudge as quickly as I can through the mud up the shore in the direction of the car. Twenty more minutes of this downpour and Zoey will wade through the parking lot like a drowned kitten, begging to be let into the car. All we have to do is wait her out. My legs are wobbly, reminding me of the alcohol in my bloodstream. How much was in that cup Taylor gave me? Three, maybe four shots? Thank God Michaela’s DD. My stomach lurches thinking about sitting shotgun as she careens down the narrow highway in the rain, but it’s better than driving drunk and Dad finding out. Not that he’d even notice if I stumbled into the house handcuffed and singing like a drunken sailor. From behind, a calloused hand grabs my shoulder; its index finger slides under the strap of my dress. I spin around, even though I don’t really need to look to know who it is.

  “Daniel,” I say, wiggling out of his grasp. The thud of my heart hitches. He takes a step closer. I don’t move back, letting his face linger only six inches away from mine. The lightning splits the sky, revealing green eyes, grassy and speckled with brown like the swamps west of the cemetery. They’re eerily similar to mine. His eyebrows were bushy when he was a kid; now they give him a wild-man look like he cave-dives and kills all his meals. They match his auburn hair.

  “Didn’t you turn out pretty?” He clenches his teeth too much for it to be a compliment. He’s so close I can smell the alcohol on his breath. His words aren’t slurred but lazy, buzzed. The only thing that frightens me more than grown Daniel is grown drunk Daniel. He grabs my arm, and I shudder at the heat of his skin and his words.

  “Why were you watching us?” My voice is steady, to my surprise. He leans in even closer. To anyone around us we must look like boyfriend and girlfriend, or just two people about to make out in the rain. “Why did you come here?” I demand.

  “What? You thought I wouldn’t come back to see you? To see how you ended up?” There’s mock flattery in his tone. “You think I wouldn’t check on the bitch who survived instead of my sister?” He tightens his grip, and his expression darkens. “I watched you and your perfect friends playing in the water today, and all I could think was that even if Jeanie were alive, she wouldn’t be there with you. She wouldn’t have been good enough for you. Or hot enough. Or skinny enough.” There’s only malice dripping from his words. Does he know I’ve thought that before, that Jeanie would have grown up to be average? “Do you deny it?” His hand pulses around my arm. “You telling me you would have kept her around?”

  The rain hammers down on us, its sheets of water making me blind to everything more than five feet away, everything except Daniel. He came looking for me like he always does, and instead of me scared in the parking lot like the last time, I was with a group of girls the age Jeanie would have been. He probably watched Michaela catch air before she splashed into the water. He saw how alive we looked; how unlike Jeanie. I want to swear to him that it isn’t true; that Jeanie would have been there with us. But Daniel’s right. “You aren’t supposed to be talking to me.” I try to yank my arm free, but he holds me still. “You shouldn’t even be near me,” I say louder.

  Daniel’s mouth is right at my eye level. “I kept saying, ‘See, Jeanie? See, Jeanie? See? Look what you were spared. Those girls can’t hurt you.’ ”

  I lock my sagging knees and resist the urge to cover my face. As we fled the cove, Daniel was whispering to his dead sister. I know that he doesn’t really mean that Jeanie’s better off dead; this is the endless grief talking, the sorrow that inspires conversations with ghosts.

  “Daniel, why would you come home today?” I already know the answer. My eyes dart upward. We’re unwittingly standing under a dummy corpse. Its clothes are saturated with rain, and rivulets run from its boots. Staring at it, tears well in my eyes. I doubt he notices because my face is already slick with water. “You’re here for this.” I motion with my free hand. Vaguely, I register screaming coming from behind us. Not the celebratory yips about the storm or the manic laughing of the drunk dancers, but something shrill and full of alarm.

  The fine lines on his lips stretch and vanish as he opens his mouth to speak. Of course he’s here to see how his sister is being remembered or forgotten, how I turned out, how his parents are doing across town. He’s here today for the same reason I had trouble sleeping last night; for the same reason I asked Shane for the case file. Who knows? Maybe Daniel has come back every anniversary with no one other than his parents the wiser. Before he can rumble all this at me, a sharp cry like a siren carried on the wind reaches us: “There’s a body! A body!”

  Chapter Four

  I don’t know how we go from the charged moment where I’m afraid of Daniel, to tearing through the mud and spitting rain toward the screams. One second he’s clutching my arm to keep me from running, a captive to his sadness, and the next he’s holding me up as I slip and slide over the eroding sludge the ground has become. We turn in unison, both of us instantly filled with dread that a body might mean something intimate to us. It could be decomposed Jeanie. It could be grown and killed Jeanie. It doesn’t matter which; all that matters is that we are both running because of Jeanie.

  Daniel’s fingers lace tightly with mine, but it
doesn’t feel like holding hands. It’s more like being handcuffed to him. A confusion of colors and shapes spirals around us as a dizzying crowd surges toward the cries for help. Water splashes from the ground and the sky as though we’re underwater, and I wonder for a second if we should be swimming rather than running. We’re in slow motion, wading through the mud to reach the cemetery. All the while the screams find us on the current of the wind.

  As I reach to tap the heart on the iron gate, my tennis shoe snags the uneven rocks lining the path. I stumble forward, my hand missing the heart. Daniel’s arm wraps around my waist, his left hand clings to my right, and he hoists me to my feet.

  My stomach churns as we draw closer, the girl’s cries getting louder as we move toward the edge of the cemetery nearest to the lake. The candles are still lit, powered by batteries like the lanterns. Their wash of light makes it possible to see Tara Boden, a sophomore who shouldn’t even be here, hunched over an uprooted gravestone. Her voice is worn and ragged now, barely more than a hoarse whimper. Her shirt is unbuttoned, revealing her yellow lace bra. A junior boy is shirtless and rubbing a wide circle with his palm on her back.

  Only a handful of my classmates have reached the site, teetering unsteadily on the disrupted soil. All hang back and gawk at where Tara’s quivering hand points. The pelting rain washed away a ten-or fifteen-foot segment of the wrough-iron fence that separates the cemetery from the shore. Where there used to be a gradual slope down to the pebbled bank, it looks as though a giant monster took a bite.