Wish You Were Gone(13)
“No! No, not moving out of town. Just… downsizing,” she improvised. “With Willow going to school next year it just seems like the right time. I don’t know why I bought this big old house in the first place anyway.”
But she did know. It was because she loved it. It was because she was drawn to it as if it had actually called to her. She adored its rickety porch and its stained-glass front windows, the curved banister and the hardwood floors. There were built-in bookcases and intricate moldings, a turret room in the attic and a claw-foot tub in the upstairs bath. Yes, it was too big for just her and Willow, but when she bought it, she had dreamt of filling it with a husband and more kids and maybe a couple of dogs. But she’d never found the right man. And Willow had proven to be allergic to pet dander. So now, here they both were. Two bedrooms too many.
“Oh, Lizzie, really? You’ve done so much with the place.” Emma sounded like she was on the verge of tears.
Idiot. Idiot, idiot, idiot.
“I’d stay in town,” she said, feeling a tad teary now herself. “Maybe a Cape Cod or a condo? Or one of those new apartments downtown?”
“Well, if you’re sure… Margot is great,” Emma said. “I’ll text you the number. Tell her I recommended you. Maybe she’ll give you priority.”
The toilet flushed, running water through the old pipes, and Willow came clomping down the stairs in heavy boots and a delicate ankle-length skirt—all sparkles and lace. The girl had a style all her own. She grabbed Lizzie’s wallet as Hunter honked his Jeep’s horn outside.
“Willow? What’re you doing?” Lizzie hissed, holding the phone away from her.
“You said I could go to the magic shop after school, remember?”
The magic shop. It was one of the things Lizzie had always found endearing about this town. That it could have a Williams Sonoma and a Coach and a Lilly Pulitzer, but also a magic shop and a used record store, five different art galleries, and a huge antiques shop with a full NASA space suit on a mannequin out front. Yes, the populace was rich, but they were also quirky. Lizzie related to the latter and aspired to the former.
“Lizzie? Are you still there?” Emma’s voice called.
Willow saluted her mother and walked out the door. Lizzie sighed into the phone. “Sorry, I’m here.”
“Oh. Good. Listen, can you come over?” Emma asked. “Something weird happened.”
Lizzie’s heart did a stutter step. “Weird? What do you mean?”
“It’s probably nothing, but… I don’t know.”
Lizzie checked her wallet. Willow had swiped fifty bucks. She went to the door, but Hunter was already peeling out. That would have to be dealt with later. Right now, Emma needed her. But for what? Hadn’t they all hit their threshold for weird when James drove his ridiculously expensive car through a wall? A cold sense of foreboding skated down her spine.
“I have to go open the shop,” she told Emma. “Let’s meet over there.”
KELSEY
“Kels, you’re bleeding.”
It wasn’t until Hunter said it that she tasted the coppery tang on her tongue and pulled her hand away from her mouth. Her fingernails were a ragged, bloody mess. She placed her hands in her lap and made fists to hide the massacre as Hunter pulled the car into a vacant space. He killed the engine. At the far end of the parking lot, a wood-chipper screeched. It made the tiny hairs on her neck go rigid. When the hell was this town going to be done cleaning up after the hurricane already?
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just don’t want to talk about Dad anymore, okay? I want everything to go back to normal.”
Just a couple of weeks ago on one of these drives to school, she and Willow had sat in the backseat together and Willow had painted Kelsey’s nails the same purple as her own while Hunter turned up that awful new rap song he loved and rapped along with it at the top of his lungs, just to make them groan. It was so weird to think that her father had been alive then, and she’d been laughing and chatting, excited that Willow had asked her to go shopping that afternoon—alone, without Hunter—because they were becoming real friends. Now her father was dead and there was no joy in this car.
Part of her felt like the fact that her father was dead should have made the mood lighter, rather than the other way around. Which she knew made her a horrible person.
Hunter looked in the rearview mirror, locking eyes with Willow, who was sitting alone in the back today. What were they thinking about her? What were they silently communicating right now?
She didn’t want to know. She shoved open the door and got out, slamming it behind her so Hunter would have to let Willow out his side. At first, she speed-walked ahead of them, but then she started to notice something. People stopped in their tracks as she approached. They stared and hesitated, like they didn’t want to get too close. It was as if the flesh was melting from her face. Kelsey hesitated at the split in the walk where Hunter and Willow usually peeled off toward the junior/senior entrance, and waited for them to catch up.
The cream brick walls of the turreted building rose in front of her. Set on top of a small hill, the main building of Oakmont Day had been built in the late 1700s as part of a wealthy sawmill owner’s estate. It was later converted into a school and had been through countless renovations, but it still had that moneyed colonial appeal. The place was hallowed ground for upper-class, Ivy-League-bound North Jerseyans, and Kelsey knew that hundreds of kids who applied every year didn’t get in. Her father always told her she should be grateful he paid to send her here, and she knew she should be. But it was the school he wanted for her. The school he’d forced her to attend. And she wanted out.