Teen Hyde (High School Horror Story #2)(26)



Lena.

I could easily picture the face that went with it, staring up at me from the pavement with big, frightened eyes.

Lena Leroux.

I read the numbers and punched them into the keypad. The phone rang in my ear. I was about to hang up when a breathy voice came on the line. “Hello?” I waited, listening to the thud of my beating heart against the phone. “Hello?… Is that you?”

*

THE GAS STATION at Third and Mulholland cast a flickering, fluorescent glow that made it look like the inside of a freezer display case. Oil stained the concrete in slick puddles. An overstuffed trash can spit up plastic soda bottles and cardboard. I found Lena standing underneath the white, cascading light, hand clutched around the top of a six-pack of beer.

I pulled the car halfway between two parking spots and rolled down the window. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. Lena wore a long-sleeved fishnet top that showed off thin, fuchsia spaghetti straps that poked out from underneath it. Faded gray jeans hugged her skeleton-skinny legs all the way down to a pair of black boots that stopped at the ankle.

Lena rested her elbows on the side of my car. Her chunky black bangs fell against her eyelashes. She jerked her head to gesture back at the gas station. “Inside. I paid the cashier twenty bucks to give it to me. You said you were in the mood to celebrate, didn’t you?” I nodded. She reached up and parted the bangs to push them from her large, cartoonish eyes. “May I?”

I nodded again and Lena tucked her bony knees into the seat beside me where she cradled the beer in her lap.

Inside, the cashier who’d sold Lena the beer watched us over the top of a National Enquirer. “Were you sleeping?”

She shrugged. “Barely. I have insomnia. It blows.”

“Me too,” I said. The car felt ten degrees warmer with her in it. “But I don’t mind it.”

She hugged the cardboard carton to her chest and the cans rattled. “That’s good, I guess. My dad says nothing good happens after midnight.” She turned her face toward me expectantly. Everything about Lena was a paradox. Her wide eyes gave her a look of innocence and sweetness at odds with the dark fringe of hair that masked most of her face. She seemed equal parts helpless baby deer and streetwise feral kitten.

“Your dad’s full of shit.”

She laughed and I could tell she didn’t mind. “Where are we going?”

I tapped my foot idly against the brakes. “I don’t know. Should I know?” I’d wanted to burn off my energy with another human being, but now that she was here, there was still energy buzzing through in small shock waves, filling me up with the need for topsy-turvy anarchy but with nowhere to find it. “That’s why I called you.”

She hummed what sounded like classical music under her breath. “There’s an old grain mill out there.” She pointed past the gas station toward a field and the border of the forest known as the Hollows out back. “Not far. A few of the theater kids smoke out there sometimes. They invited me twice.” I could tell by her tone that invitations for Lena were a rare occasion. “Cops never come that way.” She tapped the six-pack.

The fact that she knew cops never came that way instilled in me a sliver of trust. “All right,” I said, not much caring where we went as long as it was somewhere. “Lead the way then.”

I felt jittery and a little silly as I followed Lena out of the car. Another girl who seemed equally at home in the dead hours of the night and the wee hours of the morning. We crossed behind the gas station into the field where the grass was unmowed and we had to high-step through it while the blades tickled our kneecaps.

The artificial glow cast by the gas station awning and the traffic lights faded until the only light we had to see by was the silver moon. We crossed through a thin layer of trees before I noticed the clearing.

The mill was a rectangular building with rows of windows that had long since lost their glass and now hovered like gaping eye sockets within the concrete’s peeling red paint. Above us, a sign on stilts attached to the building’s roof read, Golden Heart Flour. I couldn’t guess how long since the mill had been open. Ten years? Twenty?

“It’s a little … creepy, I guess, at this time of night.” Lena’s voice was a soft whisper in the night.

“Not if you don’t have anything to be afraid of,” I said, and pushed open the door. With a creak it opened up into a murky cavern.

The soles of our shoes scraped through sawdust. Lena pointed her cell phone screen outward and we stared up into a maze of wood beams overhead.

I ran my hand over a giant cogged wheel, then took a seat at the bottom of a metal staircase that spiraled up into levels unseen.

Lena giggled nervously. She handed me a can. The aluminum was barely colder than room temperature. “You drink beer?” she asked.

“Not really.” I cracked the tab. The sound echoed in the abandoned mill and the amber liquid fizzed into a head of foam. I slurped it off the top.

She watched me. A funny little grin tugged at her lips and it reminded me again of a cat. “But since we’re celebrating then,” she said, opening her own. “What are we celebrating anyway?” She wrapped one hand around a metal cord that hung from the ceiling with a pulley attached to the bottom of it.

I took my time answering. “Us,” I said.

She let go of the pulley cord and it swung in a lazy pendulum arc. “I didn’t know there was an us.” But there was. I’d been her, the stupid girl who went off with stupid boys because they were loud and handsome and older. The only difference was there’d been no one there to save me. “I didn’t think you’d call,” she said.

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