Girl One(25)

The bedroom door opened with a thin creak. Someone slipped into my room. I sat up. It was one in the morning. The figure passed through a patch of moonlight. A ghost, a monster. Hair white in the moonlight, face flat and distorted and unnaturally pale. My chest tightened before I realized it was just Bonnie wearing a clay mask, mint green and cakey, the skin around her eyes and mouth revealed in circular patches. She ran as she approached the bed and jumped in, bare leg knocking against mine.

“Sorry about that,” Bonnie said. Up close, she smelled both acrid and sweet. Self-tanner and the floral scent of the face mask. Boozy breath. Tipsy.

“Don’t be. I couldn’t sleep, anyway.”

When she laughed, the clay around her mouth and eyes cracked into fine lines. “Sorry about Mommy, I mean. She gets so intense about this shit. It’s all sunshine and daisies and God forbid anyone tell the truth.”

“Yeah, well. She certainly seemed in the mood to tell the truth tonight.”

Bonnie lolled against my pillow, fixed me with expectant eyes, like I’d called her in here. I tried to figure out what I’d ask her about first: Did she know anything about my mother’s role at the Homestead? Could she tell me what Deb had meant about my mother hurting everyone? Before I could decide, she said, “Once you mentioned Fiona, I knew we had to talk alone.” She spoke in a campfire whisper. “Mommy got sloshed one night when I was a kid and blurted out something about Fiona shutting doors with her brain powers.” Bonnie put a hand on her forehead, waggling her fingers outward, a Rod Serling pitch. “Scandalous, right? Imagine if people knew Fiona was a freak.” A cold finger traced up and down my spine, the blunt stridence of freak right in my ear.

Emily had known about Fiona; Bonnie knew. Everyone knew the Homestead’s true history except me. “Your mother’s never said anything about that to the press?”

“My mother won’t even let me get a tattoo on my shoulder. Bad for our image. I’m drinking swag-bag champagne in the pantry with the lights off like I’m thirteen. She is not about to tell the whole world that one of the Miracle Babies was a mutant.”

“More than one, maybe,” I said. “Emily French too. She’s … different.”

“Emily? Seriously?” Bonnie blinked at me. Without her heavy TV makeup, her eyes looked small and bare, like the pistils of a flower sans petals. “I thought she was…” Bonnie whistled, cuckoo, whirled her finger around her temple.

“Maybe,” I said, feeling defensive of Emily now that I’d met her face-to-face. “But my mother said Fiona was strange, and if Emily is too, then—”

“What about you? Have you ever felt anything strange, Girl One?” Bonnie asked, maybe-teasing.

This massive house was so quiet. All those rooms spread out around us, empty and still. It felt unnatural and exposed, nothing like the close quarters my mother and I had shared.

“When I was a kid, I fantasized about it,” I said. “Do you remember all those editorials about how we must be witches or demons or—or monsters? Some people got all worked up over it.” I hesitated, remembering. “Bellanger wrote me this letter when I was three.”

“Oh right, your very special letters,” Bonnie said, definitely teasing now.

“He was always so proud when he talked about us, like we were his masterpieces. But in this letter, Bellanger seemed disappointed that we weren’t more special.”

“Heavy. Guess I should be glad Bellanger didn’t make me his little pen pal.”

That letter had stuck in my head more than the others, haunting me. When I was in third grade, the kids were just starting to get mean. They figured out my lack of a dad wasn’t due to a divorce or a car accident. I’d responded by fixating on uncovering some shimmering fingerprint that Bellanger had left inside my DNA. I’d grown moody, withdrawn, not eating, snapping at my mom. I’d jumped off the garage roof, trying to fly. Imagining it in my bones—that lightness and lift, the air cradling me—right up until I landed on the concrete and broke my collarbone. I’d just wanted to feel something special manifesting inside me.

“When I got older,” I went on, “I figured I wouldn’t sit around waiting for some magical power to show up. I’d look at the world the same way Bellanger did. He created his own magic.”

“Brainiac.” Bonnie poked teasingly at my arm. “Just like your mother.” She stopped, peering at me, trying to gauge my interest. Her eyes were bleary from drinking. “Where do you think your mother is?”

“The million-dollar question.”

“I saw the house on the news.” She grimaced. “I’d be freaked out if that happened to my mother.”

It occurred to me, with a catching spark of dread, that Bonnie Clarkson herself could hold the key to my mother’s disappearance. Bonnie Clarkson: the one with the jagged scar to prove that people out there wanted us dead. The living testament to Ricky Peters’s lingering wrath. Here she was, scar and all, lying next to me, breathing hints of champagne onto my cheek.

“Well.” I drew the syllable out. “I do have one theory.” Bonnie murmured her interest, rolled closer, eyes bright. “The guy who attacked you. Do you think he might have come after my mother too?”

Against me, her muscles tensed, her breathing halted. When she spoke again, it was as if I’d managed to sober her up instantaneously. “Nah. That was years ago. It was an isolated attack.”