“This is about you and JD,” Em said, staring at Drea, willing her to deny it.
“Are you accusing me of something?” Drea’s eyes narrowed. They stared at each other. Again Em felt a surge of emotion roiling through her body, making her nerves tingle. She tried to tamp it down.
“Just tell me,” she said, willing her voice not to break. “Tell me what’s going on.” She’d thought she could trust Drea. Was she wrong?
“Look,” Drea said, “we all know that you don’t hang with JD and his friends, and he doesn’t hang with yours—unless you ask him to. It’s kind of like our friendship, isn’t it? You spent most of your life ignoring me. Until you needed me.”
Em opened her mouth to respond, but found she had nothing to say. Everything Drea was saying was true. And it killed her.
“Face it, Em. You never really knew what was going on with JD, or who he hung out with, or what he was doing when you weren’t around. So now you’re not around. And his life goes on. That’s the way it is.”
Em’s fists clenched into balls and her cheeks went hot. A coil of fury burst through the tangle of her feelings, and Em shouted, “Do not try to educate me about JD! You don’t know anything about him, or us. And you don’t know anything about me, either,” she added, kicking a planter for emphasis.
Drea jerked back an inch, but her face remained impassive. “Listen to yourself,” she said, infuriatingly calm. “Look what you’re doing. You’re acting crazy.”
As Drea spoke, Em saw JD peering out the front door’s window, trying to make sense of what was going on. It was too mortifying for words. She spun around without another word and stalked toward her house. Drea did not call her name; Em heard her go back inside and shut the door.
I am not crazy. I am not crazy. I am not crazy. She repeated the words like a mantra as she tried to will back the tears that threatened to blur her vision. That scene had been weird and suspicious, and she had every right to be furious that Drea claimed to know anything about her and JD. She was totally grounded. Not crazy.
Maybe if she said it enough times, she’d believe it.
She approached her front door and stopped short. All the breath slammed out of her.
There were marks all over her front door. Red marks.
No. Handprints. A dozen of them, smeared and sticky-looking, like a child’s finger painting gone totally wrong. She snapped her head to look back over her shoulder. Nothing. A small whimper escaped from her throat.
She turned back to the door. The prints were rusty and red, unmistakably the color of blood. Bloody handprints, reaching up the door, like someone had been clawing to get in. Her legs felt weak beneath her, and for a second her vision flashed black. Again she twisted her head over her shoulder.
“Hel-hello?” she called out, even though she knew there was no one there.
Then she saw a flash of blond hair disappearing behind a copse of trees. She knew that hair. It was Ali. As in Alecto, the Fury who had stalked her, the one who avenged moral crimes according to the mythology Em had looked up. Ali, whose red-lipsticked smile was like the smell of flowers at a funeral—sweet but imbued with death. Was she here? Had her hands smeared their bloody mess all over her white door?
“Leave me alone!” Em shouted. But there was no one there, not even a shadow. For an instant she considered running back across the lawn to Drea. But she couldn’t, not after their blowout just a few minutes ago.
She was totally alone.
Fear had blanketed her, making it hard to breathe. She stepped closer to the door. Closer. Her mind was full of horrible images: palms sliced open and fingernails ripped off. She thought back to the palm readings she’d done with Gabby in fourth grade—finding the Heart Line and the Life Line in the wrinkles on their palms. These prints were flat and unmarked by even the swirls and coils of fingerprints: just flat, shiny, bloody shapes.
She knew she had to get rid of the markings before her parents came home. She wrapped her sweatshirt cuff around her hand, careful not to touch any of the dripping red substance, and pushed open the door. She bolted inside, fumbling for cleaning supplies from under the kitchen sink.
Then, with her knees digging into the cold stone of her front stoop, she scrubbed and scrubbed until her hands were raw. The prints dissolved under the soapy water, staining the sponge a deep brownish red. It ran onto her sleeves, freezing her wrists. She gagged but kept on scrubbing until the stains grew faint. It wasn’t until she’d dragged herself upstairs, exhausted and trembling, and turned on the shower as hard and as hot as it would go, that she realized—from the red eyes that stared back at her in the mirror and the tears streaking her cheeks—that she’d been crying.
CHAPTER TEN