No One Will Miss Her(15)

The other boy, DJ, was younger—he’d sat a row behind me in Miss Lightbody’s fifth-grade class the previous year—but he was big for his age, so that he and Billy stood almost shoulder to shoulder. From the smirks on their faces, I guessed they must have been watching me for a while.

“Oh my God, it’s disgusting,” Brianne said loudly, and her brother grinned.

“I told you,” Billy said. “She kisses it and everything.”

“Oh my God,” Brianne said again, and let out something between a giggle and a shriek.

It took me a beat to understand that they were talking about the cat, who was still obliviously snoozing in my arms with his funny forelegs tucked up under his chin. It took me longer to understand the full meaning of that “I told you,” to realize that this wasn’t the first time Billy Carter had crept onto our property and watched me while I played in the yard with Rags. He had been here before, maybe more than once, maybe hanging back in the woods so I wouldn’t see him—or maybe I’d just been so lost in my stupid games that I never noticed I wasn’t alone. Now he was back, and he’d brought an audience.

Billy and his sister sneered and laughed as I gathered Rags more tightly to my chest, but it was DJ who stepped forward.

“You shouldn’t be touching that cat,” he said. “My dad says cats like that have a disease. He’s gonna give it to the other cats and soon they’ll all be messed up like him. He shouldn’t even be alive.”

I bit down on my lower lip, unable to form my thoughts into words. My mouth was dry and my mind felt fuzzy, like I’d just jolted awake from a vivid dream, and my skin was prickling all over with the unpleasant shock of being intruded on. I wanted them all to go away. I hated Brianne and Billy, who had come through the woods and onto our property even though they knew they weren’t allowed, even though they’d been warned. Pop had told them that the next time they trespassed he was going to call their folks, or maybe even the cops, and yet here they were, so sure that they could just tromp and stomp all over our yard and get away with it. But it was DJ who made me more nervous, the way he kept taking little steps forward, the way he looked at Rags with a mix of disgust and fascination. The way his red, wet mouth formed the words, He shouldn’t even be alive.

I should have run. I could have run. I knew the yard better than anyone, and I was fast; I could have made it back through the heaps to the trailer and shut myself in, and Rags, too, safe behind the locked front door. We could have waited there until the intruders got bored and went away. Even though Pop said no cats in the house, he would have understood that I had to, that breaking the rules was the only way to keep the terrible thing that happened from happening.

But I was too slow. Too stupid. Too innocent to understand that we lived in a world where some people liked to stomp on little things—and where they’d tell you afterward that what they had done was a sort of kindness. I remembered all at once what Pop had said, the meaning of which I had stubbornly refused to really hear.

You ought to put him down before he starves.

DJ, the little boy with the red mouth, was fast, too. And unlike me, he had come with a plan: I would find out later that he’d tagged along with the Carter kids just for this reason, to do this thing he’d been taught was necessary. He grabbed Rags out of my arms before I knew what was happening. One moment my arms were wrapped around the cat; the next they were empty, and Rags was dangling by his armpits from DJ’s hands, which held him fast as he squirmed. I tried to rush forward.

“No!” I screamed.

“It’s gotta be fast. Keep her back,” DJ said, his mouth set in a grim line that made him look older all of a sudden, like a grown-up man with a job to do. The low, gray clouds overhead had started to mass and darken, and from inside my head, from the part of my mind that could keep me preoccupied for hours with make-believe stories, a small voice whispered, It’s too late; the curse is spreading. Brianne and Billy obeyed instantly, running to me, grabbing my arms, pushing me backward as DJ carried the squirming cat away, and I was screaming because I finally understood, too late, what was about to happen. What he was going to do. He shifted his grip on Rags, flipping him in the air, holding him by his hind legs. A single drop of rain sliced against my cheek as I struggled against hands that held me fast. DJ stopped in front of the stack of crushed cars, so tall and solid and unforgiving. I saw him shift his weight like a ball player, pivoting his knee, bending his elbows, his body coiling with pent-up energy as Rags swung helplessly by his hind legs—and then from inside my head, another voice spoke up, one that sounded like my own, but older and tired and ice-cold.

Don’t look.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

There was a yowl, abruptly cut off by a terrible, echoing clang.

The hands that held my arms let go.

The rain began to fall hard, harder, dampening my T-shirt against my skin.

“Hey,” said DJ’s voice beside me. “Hey, look . . . it didn’t suffer.”

I didn’t answer.

The rain kept falling.

I sat in the mud, shivering, eyes closed, until I was sure I was alone.

Pop arrived home not long after, and found me sitting on the folding stairs in the rain. I was soaked to the bone and holding Rags’s limp body in my arms, my T-shirt covered with blood and matted fur.

“Lizzie?” he said. “Jesus, what in the hell . . .”