“Avis.” Jeff squared his shoulders. “Get up.”
She did as she was told, her head throbbing with the beginnings of a headache, care of her crying jag.
Jeff flipped up the toilet lid, watching her expectantly.
If she did what he wanted, she was risking her health. Her sanity. But if she refused, he would take his family and leave. She’d then be welcome to gorge herself on handfuls of medication, because what would be the point of going on? She would fill up the tub, put on a record, take them all at once.
“Do you want to be loved?” Jeff asked, his dark eyes questioning her devotion. She struggled to reply. “Then love yourself first.” He handed her one of the bottles out of the sink.
She stared at the bottle for a long moment, the name that she no longer wanted printed in black across the label. Audra Snow is gone, she reminded herself. She may as well be dead. That was when it dawned on her—she was saying that she was Avis, but she was continuing to take Audra’s pills, and the pills kept Audra alive.
If she truly wanted to be Avis, she had to let Audra go.
Unscrewing the cap, she tipped the bottle above the toilet. Slow-rolling pills plopped into the water, sinking to the bottom like overboard men. Jeffrey handed her bottle after bottle, not leaving a single mood elevator or stabilizer to maintain balance.
Do you want to be loved?
She did.
Can you love me if I lose my mind?
He would. She had to believe he would.
With the tipping over of the final bottle, she convinced herself of that.
And as if to prove it to her, he caught her by the forearm and pulled her out of the bathroom after she had flushed the last of the pills. He pressed her onto the mattress that had once been hers, his mouth hot against her skin. And as he worked the button of her jeans loose, she knew he was finally rewarding her for her faith.
Things would be okay now.
She loved him, and he loved her, too.
She was no longer Audra Snow. She was Avis Everybody.
But she started crying again despite herself. He eased her jeans down past her hips, and she wept, her eyes wide and staring at the ceiling overhead, her tears pooling in the delicate creases of her ears.
She wept, and she told herself it was joy.
21
VEE TRIED TO sleep, but her efforts didn’t last long.
She tossed and turned, her room unbearably hot. Kicking away the sheets, she pressed her face into her pillow and tried to keep her eyes closed, trying to stay inside her dream. In it, Timothy Steinway was holding her hand. He had her cornered against a locker inside the hall of her future high school, and his lips were parted in such a way that Vee was sure he was going to kiss her. But her anticipation of that long-awaited kiss was derailed. His facial features shifted from Tim’s to something darker, more mysterious. You’re beautiful. Onyx waves replaced Tim’s sandy brown hair. Intense, pragmatic brown eyes gazed out at her from beyond Tim’s greens. The boy whispered against her skin: Just like an angel. She could almost feel his exhalation drift across the curve of her cheek as he enfolded her in his arms. The soft creak of his leather jacket was so real, too real. It pulled her out of her dream just long enough to notice the skin-crawly feeling of someone watching her from not so far away.
She peeked open an eye, half expecting her laptop screen to illuminate the room like a giant night-light with its bright blue glow. But the screen had turned off due to inactivity.
Hours before, Vee had plucked the laptop off the floor from next to the mattress and opened the lid. In her inbox, the email from her mother was still waiting to be read. She had ignored it, hit the COMPOSE button on the left side of the browser window, and typed Tim’s name into the TO field. She’d only emailed Tim once before, and it hadn’t been a real email like the one she was determined to write. It had been a link to a list of New York State’s most haunted places; nothing spectacular, nothing personal. She had vacillated on the subject line, from Hi Tim, it’s Vee to I’m living in a haunted house to mimicking her mother’s emaiclass="underline" Hello from Washington. But the longer she thought about what she wanted to say, the less urgent her message had seemed. It was as though those smiling strangers in the photographs she’d studied all night were whispering from beyond their graves: Keep us a secret, keep us to yourself. We belong to you. Only you.
The email never got written. She had clicked over to another browser tab—one she left open from earlier that night—and stared at a group photo of ten people standing in front of her current home. And then she had scrolled down the page and stopped on an old picture of a young, handsome man. Charming. His half smile full of promise and understanding. Vee chewed her lip as she memorized the contours of Jeffrey Halcomb’s face. He looked a little like Jack White and Johnny Depp, kind of vampiric with his pale skin and black hair, sexy in a quiet yet dangerous sort of way. Nothing like Tim.
Despite Tim’s penchant for horror movies and an interest in the paranormal, he looked like an ordinary kid. But Jeffrey looked like someone out of those movies in the most alluring way. Because he was dangerous. He killed people. And yet, rather than being repulsed by that fact, she only stared longer. Because what would it have felt like for Jeffrey to care about her when he had the capacity of hurting others? Did a murderer give more care to those he loved because he did away with the ones he didn’t care anything about? What did his voice sound like? Vee had opened up the music app on her computer and streamed some of her favorite tracks, stuff her mom hated because the lyrics were about death and beauty and eternity. But those sounds were perfect for the strange mystery that exuded from the gorgeous and grinning Jeff.
She then tried to sleep, but her regret was refusing to let her rest.
I know what this place is.
Her father had turned pale as cream when she dropped that bit of info. Boom. He looked almost ready to puke all over the grass, and she had been glad. He deserved the discomfort; he had brought it on himself. Her mother had warned her while helping Vee pack up her stuff. He’s going to lock himself away, you know. He always gets carried away. And she was right. Vee knew it was only a matter of time before she lost her father to his study, to his work. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference whether she was living with him or not. And so, before he could make up some infuriating excuse as to why he had dragged her to a death house, she had left him standing in the dark, bounded up the stairs, and locked herself behind her bedroom door.
He had come upstairs a few minutes later and knocked. Jeanie, open up. We need to talk. Come on, kid, give me a break. I’ll explain. Jeanie? He’d given up after a few minutes. If he wanted to come into her room, he’d have to kick down the door.
But here came second thoughts. Because now that he knew she knew, things would be different. He’d feel obligated to move them to a new place. Except, they didn’t have any money, which meant they’d probably end up living in some cramped one-bedroom apartment in Pier Pointe for the rest of the summer. Zero privacy. Zero ghosts.