Pretend She's Here(29)

I fell asleep in despair. Being kidnapped and kept in a dungeon was surreal, and being forced to have my friend’s eyebrows tripled the nightmare. The next morning, I checked the mirror—they were worse than I’d thought.

I stepped into the shower and turned the water as hot as I could stand, feeling it almost burn my scalp. I kept touching my eyebrows. Horrible. The smell of Lizzie’s shampoo had started to make me sick. I shouldn’t be using it—she should. She should still be alive, filling her spot in the family. Fury had replaced my grief.

“You did this, Lizzie,” I shrieked into the water. “Why did you leave? Why didn’t you fight harder? Why can’t you be alive? I hate you. I hate your eyebrows.”

I wanted to hear her answer me back, to be outraged, then to tease me, to tell me I was being a loser and a jerk and the worst eyebrow plucker in the world. I wished so hard to hear her voice, that laughing lilt as she agreed with me about her mother.

“Your father, though,” I said. “What’s up with him? He can’t stand having me here, I can tell.”

Idiot, what do you expect? Lizzie would have asked. You’re not me.

I dried myself off with her towel. As disgusted as I’d felt at her shampoo, the touch of the terrycloth comforted me. The weird thing was, it had been so easy to feel Lizzie with me back home in Black Hall, when I’d walk along talking to her. Since being forced into her family, I’d barely sensed her presence.

But right now, I pretended my best friend was here—she was out in the bedroom while I was drying my hair. We’d pick out the clothes we wanted to wear and head to our favorite spot on Main Street for chai lattes. She’d get pumpkin because she loved pumpkin everything in the fall, and I’d get cinnamon.

We’d go to school, study in our favorite out-of-the-way nook. It was on the second floor, called the Apiary because many years ago a science teacher had built a beehive directly into the wall. It was covered with glass so students could study at tables and watch the bees fly in and out of the brood chambers through a passage to the outdoors, where they’d build their honeycombs.

Looking in the mirror I had that jolt—it wasn’t me staring back. It wasn’t even Lizzie. It was some freak. I felt like one of those bees trapped behind glass in our school apiary. The bathroom door was closed, the air steamy. I thought I heard someone in the bedroom; I froze, listening to footsteps. The closet opened and closed. Same with drawers. Someone was taking inventory, maybe searching for signs I was planning to escape, to fight back.

Finally, silence.

I stepped into the room, looked around. At first everything looked normal. I hadn’t yet made my bed, so the covers were rumpled. There was something dark red on the white sheet. I approached slowly, my heart pounding.

It was a shoe.

I’d know it anywhere: maroon suede, old laces that were slightly frayed, a leather sole that had recently been replaced. My love of quirky clothes had been inspired by my sisters, and before them, my mother. My mom usually wore this shoe and its mate with a tartan skirt and a brown leather bomber jacket. She loved to put together comfortable shoes and clothes in her own style, a combination of preppy and tough Irish girl, and this shoe was part of one of her favorite outfits.

Inside the shoe was a note:

I came into your room last night and saw what you did to your eyebrows. You have ruined yourself, you look nothing like Lizzie, and until they grow back, you are not leaving this room. Did I really need to remind you of what can happen? It was so easy to get this memento of your mother. So easy.

My hands were shaking. My mother kept her shoes in her bedroom closet, on the second floor of our house. How had Mrs. Porter possibly gotten it? Had she attacked my mother, pulled it off her foot? Or had she somehow …

My house key. It had been in the pocket of my army jacket the day they took me. Had Mrs. Porter found it? Would she have dared let herself into my house while my parents slept? I hated myself for letting her get to my key, but I prayed that she had done just that.

The alternative was too much of a nightmare to even consider.




Do you know how long it takes eyebrows to grow out?

Basically forever.

On the other hand, my roots had started to grow out. Chloe delivered a batch of black dye and told me her mother wanted me to touch them up. The dye was sticky and gross, smelled like chemicals, and made my scalp sting.

Wasn’t I supposed to start school? Weren’t Casey and his friends expecting me? The teachers? What was Mrs. Porter telling them?




She checked me every night. I’d hear her enter my room like a sleepwalker, drift over to my bed, stand there staring down at me.

I pretended to be asleep.

She didn’t speak. Sometimes I felt the spider’s touch of her fingernails on my eyebrows.

She’d stay long enough to give me a pit in my stomach, and then she’d leave, closing the door softly behind her.

I never closed my eyes after her visits.

I would lie awake and imagine who I would text if I had my cell phone. What I would say, how I would describe my location, how I could get my whole family to charge in and rescue me.




She still didn’t speak to me during the days, but she continued to enter my room at night. She did the same thing as before—hovering, touching my eyebrows, tracing them with her fingernail, peering at them to see if they had grown out—but with one change: She began whispering.