The Cheerleaders(20)

“What are you looking at?” My mother’s voice sounds behind me.

“Nothing. Do I have time to walk Mango before we eat?”

My mother’s eyebrows knit together. “Why do you need to walk him right now?”

“Because he’s put on weight and I don’t want him to die.”

She blinks and shakes her head. “Be back in fifteen minutes.”

I grab the leash from the key rack and call out to the dog. “Walk? You wanna go for a walk?”

Mango trots into the kitchen at once, sitting at my feet obediently. I attach the hook through the loop in his collar and leave out the front door. The second we step outside, he bolts forward, dragging me down the driveway, tail bobbing up and down like he can’t believe his luck.

He hooks right, and I tug on his leash. “No. This way.”

My dog is not the brightest or fastest, but he has impeccable hearing, and he can bark like a motherfucker. If there’s anyone lurking in the house, Mango will hear him or her and go berserk.

The leaves on the lawn crunch under my feet. Once every two weeks, the owners come and mow the grass to placate my mother. I cross onto the driveway and climb. It slopes hundreds of feet up to the house, and Mango gets lazy halfway through our hike. By the time we get to the front door, he’s lagging behind by a good foot, resisting every tug I give his leash.

The outside of the house is complete, but there’s no door to the garage. The hair on my arms pricks. Anyone can get inside. I swallow and head through the door off the garage, which matches the one on our house.

A thin layer of sawdust coats the floor of the kitchen, and none of the cabinets have doors. A chandelier without lightbulbs hangs from the dining room ceiling, the wiring still exposed.

I spot the outline of footprints in the sawdust.

I straighten, slowly. Trace the footsteps out of the kitchen and into the living room. The footsteps stop at the bay window facing the street. A cigarette butt is inches from my shoe.

The bay window offers a near-perfect view of my house that makes my stomach turn.





I approach the bay window.

On the ledge, there’s an envelope. I almost don’t want to touch it. How long has the person I’ve been texting been coming here? Has he or she been watching us? Two hours ago, he/she texted me saying they could prove they were friends with Jen. Somehow they made it here between sending me that text and before I got home from Rachel’s without my mother noticing a car pulling up outside the house and getting suspicious.

Petey’s soccer game. He and my mom wouldn’t have gotten home until after four. Plenty of time for him or her to come here, drop the envelope off, and leave without being seen.

A piece of loose-leaf paper, folded in half. I swallow away the dry lump forming in my throat and unfold it.

At the top of the page is a sentence written in neat cursive.

    I’m not okay.



Beneath it, in block letters formed by a black felt-tip pen:

DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT?

Yes.



I cover my mouth. Trace the rise and fall of my sister’s handwriting with the tip of my finger.

I don’t want to go home, but I can’t stay in this creepy-ass house either. I slip out the way I came, nudging Mango toward the wooded area behind the house.

When I get back to my house, I tell her I ate a late lunch at Rachel’s and I’m not hungry, that I’ll eat the leftover chili in a couple hours. She makes a sound of acknowledgment, mid-argument with Petey about how he can’t go to his friend TJ Blake’s house, because even though there’s no school tomorrow TJ’s parents still have to go to work.

I sit at my desk and take the envelope out of my sweatshirt pocket.

I’m not okay.

I think of the furry purple diary with a flimsy lock that I kept under my bed until middle school. The things I scrawled on the pages in a fit of anger. Jen is soooooooo mean sometimes. Mom likes her SO MUCH better. Everyone thinks she’s perfect and it’s so annoying.

Why wasn’t she okay?

Was Jen the diary-keeping type? I don’t know.

If Jen had a diary, Mom would have gotten to it first.

No—my mother hadn’t even gone through Jen’s things after she died. My sister’s bedroom door had stayed shut for almost a year before my mom said she was going to hire someone to pack up all of Jen’s things and get rid of them. I told her that I hated her. She closed herself in her room, and Tom left the house and returned an hour later with a stack of storage tubs from Walmart and packed up everything himself.

Jen’s stuff is in the basement now, which is somewhere I have no good reason to be. Around ten, when the laugh track of the evening sitcoms Tom watches in the living room quiets, I wait for him to come upstairs.

When his bedroom door clicks shut, I slip out of bed and inch down the hall, down the stairs, and straight down the basement steps off the garage entrance.

The heating system is making noises like fingernails tapping against a tin can. I feel around on the wall for the light switch.

The fluorescent bulb overhead hums to life. I step down.

The storage bins of crap from our old house are stacked in the corner, next to the hot water heater. I climb over the box that holds our fake Christmas tree to reach them.

There are three tubs with JENNIFER written on the sides in Sharpie. I take a breath, the loamy smell of the basement filling my nostrils. Pop the lid of the box closest to me.