The Broken Girls(35)
Mary Hand walks on Old Barrons Road at night. She sucks blood. Maybe true, probably not, and not very interesting either way.
There is a baby buried in the garden.
Katie had heard this one before. It was one of Idlewild’s myths, though she had no idea if it was true. Everyone hated the garden, which they were all forced to use in weekly sessions called Weekly Gardening. There was no one reason the garden was so hated, though the strangely slimy soil and the pervasive chill created by the shadows of the two buildings that bordered it were part of it. The garden never drained properly, and it always had an odor of rotting vegetables to it, mixed with something more pungent. Every once in a while someone resurrected the dead baby story, probably to scare the freshman girls.
Katie looked up when she noticed movement on the wall. A spider was crawling down from the ceiling, its legs rippling gracefully, its body fat and black. Katie stared at it for a long minute, transfixed and shuddering. Idlewild had a lot of spiders—and mice, and beetles, and bats under the eaves outside the locker rooms. But the spiders were the worst. If she killed it with her shoe, she’d be stuck looking at its dead black smear for the rest of Special Detention. Reluctantly, she looked down at the books again.
The next textbook had other bits of wisdom: If you call for Mary Hand at dusk under a new moon, she rises from the grave.
Beneath this, a different girl had written in bold, black pen: Tried it not true
The conversation was continued by a third girl, writing along the bottom of the page: She is real. Died in 1907 after miscarriage. It is in the records.
A debater chimed in: Idlewild was not opened until 1919 stupid
To which was returned: This house was here then look it up. Her baby is buried in the garden
The baby in the garden again. Katie glanced up at the spider, which was halfway down the wall now, intent on its spider business. There was a second one in the far corner of the ceiling, still and curled. She could not see a web. Maybe I should kill them after all, she thought. Feeling like she was being watched, she forced her gaze down and reached forward to turn the page.
Hold still, a voice said in her ear as a spider, black and cold, crawled over the edge of the desk and skittered over the back of her hand.
Katie screamed, upending the chair and backing away, shaking her hand. The spider dropped out of sight, but she could still feel the touch of its tiny legs on her skin, the feather pokes of its feet. Her heart was pounding so hard her vision blurred, and she heard deep, gasping breathing that she realized was her own. She put her hands to her ears.
Hold still, the voice said again.
Her teeth chattered. She struggled to inhale a breath that tasted like old chalk and something acid, sour. She backed up against the wall, her shoulders bumping it, then too late remembered the spider she’d seen. She looked up to find it poised several feet above her left ear, utterly still, clearly watching her. It began a slow, deliberate pace toward her, somehow intent. The other spider was still in the corner of the ceiling, curled, though its legs were now waving helplessly, as if it couldn’t move.
Katie tried the locked door again, her clammy hand slipping on the knob. Then she lunged to the desk, picked up one of the textbooks, and smashed the spider on the wall.
She couldn’t look at the mess it made. She dropped the textbook and picked up the next one, holding it up, maneuvering back toward the door. Somehow the door seemed the safest place. Her hands were shaking. She nearly put her back to the door, then realized there could be more spiders—spiders—and stood several inches from it instead, the textbook under her arm. The silence beat in her ears. There was no movement.
“Fuck,” she said into the silence. It was an awful word—the worst curse she knew, the worst word in her entire vocabulary. Her mother would have slapped her if she’d heard her speak it. It felt good, somehow powerful, coming from her mouth right now. “Fuck,” she said again, louder. “Fuck!”
There was no answer. She spun in a circle, still keyed up and shaking, the textbook raised, her gaze skipping over the disgusting smear on the wall. Everything was still. The thing in the top corner had stopped moving.
She let out a shaky breath. There were cold tears on her cheeks, she realized, though she had no memory of shedding them. She looked down at the textbook in her hands and opened it. Written in pencil, the lines of a familiar rhyme looked back up at her:
Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land. She’ll say she wants to be your friend. Do not let her in again!
She stared at it, her head aching. Her eyes burned. Those two words: Hold still. She wanted to cry again.
She’d met Thomas when she was thirteen. He was sixteen, with big, heavy shoulders, eyes that drooped sleepily, and a curious smell of mothballs. He’d lived on the other side of the block. He’d liked to flirt with her, and she’d loved the attention: tickling, chasing, wrestling. More tickling. He had given her silly nicknames, teased her, made fun of her. She’d played along, breathless, feeling special, singled out among the other girls. He was sixteen!
And then, an afternoon in July: the air hot, the sky high and blistering blue, the two of them in the empty school yard, chasing each other around the playground, abandoned in the summer heat. He’d caught her behind the slide, which was too hot to touch that day, the slide that was so familiar to her with its nonsensical words painted down the side: big slide fun!
Thomas had pinned her to the ground, shoved at her skirt. Hold still, he’d said.