The ice tongs squeezed harder. The closet got darker. Ben squeezed his fingers into the spaces behind his temples.
Worst of all, and he wasn’t sure why this was the worst, but he couldn’t tell the time. This was how a blindfolded hostage felt. He guessed an hour, maybe more, had passed. If the best way to torture someone was to force them to lose sense of time, Mr. Cillo was torturing him.
Keep talking to yourself, Ben. Keep talking.
Ben reached down blindly and felt the outline of the pills in his lacrosse shorts. Wasn’t this what the stupid pills were for? Taking the edge off? Because this might be a good moment for that. Ben heard Kyle’s voice in his head: You hear me, Ben? Don’t do it.
Ben yanked the bottle from his pocket. He squinted at the bottle: Take two tablets with a full glass of water. If two was good, three was better. He wrenched off the cap, popping three dry pills and swallowing hard, the bitter taste burning his tongue.
He leaned into the clothes and sighed. The clothes embraced him. He listened for signs that Mr. Cillo had discovered some overturned item, some misplaced shoe that revealed someone had broken into his house, and at some point he stopped listening at all. Thick golden warmth flooded him. Ben eased the closet door wider and was surprised when it made no noise. He tested his footstep for creaks. Finding none, he stepped out of the closet and stood in the middle of the girls’ room. The warmth stayed with Ben, and seemed to transfer to an affection for the bed, the bureaus, the tiny violets on the old-fashioned wallpaper. Every object called to him to be touched, lifted, gazed at. Held. Even Mira’s bed was inviting, and he knew it shouldn’t be. He ought to be thinking of her there, helpless, seeing things happening to Francesca, or shutting herself off to things happening to her.
No, he had to get his head right. Stay on his toes. Because despite the danger that lay below, he was, in fact, getting sleepy.
Ben rubbed his eyes. What time was it? Mr. Cillo had been out drinking hard, probably at Piggy’s father’s club, and no one came home from Big Steven’s early. The sounds from downstairs were the news, and not the six-o’clock news, since he’d rung the doorbell well after six, and the earliest the news came on was ten. And those same sounds had been going for a while. Was it past ten? It was the kind of time-suck that happened at the quarry, only he was in a different place illegally, and he was going to get caught.
Unless the beast was asleep.
He inched his way across the room, walking in slow motion, heel, pad, toe, his arms akimbo, as if balancing on a wire. He made it as far as the square patch of landing before the stairs when he realized he’d left his backpack in the closet. He turned to repeat his heel, pad, toe pattern back to Francesca and Mira’s bedroom when the telephone rang loud. The ring came from every direction: the living room, kitchen, and from Mr. Cillo’s bedroom, next to where Ben froze. Nerves rose from Ben’s bare arms like static electricity. As it rang a second time, Ben heard the alien, female voice echo through the house, flat, with inhuman beats and pauses.
“Call from”
“Paul”
“Lattanzi”
APRIL 2016
“We’ll use the EpiPen,” Connie told Mira. “It’s a foolproof plan.”
Mira turned to Francesca. “Do we know how to use it?”
“Don’t question.” Francesca collapsed on the edge of the bed. Her shirt gaped as she leaned over her knees to tie her sneakers. Mira stared at the sharp ridge of her clavicle and the hollows above. She knew Francesca’s body as well as she knew her own. Her sleeping and eating noises, shapes and shadows. Mira could close her eyes and see Francesca turn away in her strappy tanks, her rounded scapula like wings rising as she breathed. Her pale wrists flexing at the breakfast table as she twisted sleep from her bones. Francesca had always been strong, and proud of it, using her muscles, taking over jobs a boy might do, if a boy lived in the house. Lately, though, she was all sharp angles. Her shoulders ended in points, with recently emerged knobs and hollows. Francesca’s body was changing, as though something was carving away her soft parts.
Francesca blew hair from her eyes and rose. “Stay or go, your choice.”
Mira’s mouth grew dry. “Of course I’m going.”
Francesca slipped inside the moth-eaten A-line coat she’d taken to wearing and stared at Mira’s feet. “You’ll need sneakers, not boots.” Francesca searched her face for a moment, then touched two fingers to Mira’s brow, smoothing the cleft between her eyes. “Have courage, sister. We’re all blood here. No one’s hurting anyone.”
Connie wavered in the doorway. “Can we go? It’s getting dark soon.”
Francesca moved to Connie and draped her hands over her shoulders. “Concetta Marie. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Connie smiled gamely and looked only at Francesca. “I’m sure. Mio sangue.”
Mira’s eye fixed on the slip of green sequined T-shirt that dragged past the hem of Connie’s short purple parka. She’d worked her hair into a beachy, wavy style that Mira knew took hours of coaxing with salt spray and a clip-less curling iron. Her glossy lips were the color of cotton candy. On her feet were trendy boots with chunky heels not made for running. Francesca had let the mouse in her experiment wear whatever she’d wanted, because she knew something about this nightmare experiment fed into Connie’s desire to be the center of a drama in which she was the main character, or as close to it as she’d ever get. Even if Connie died, she knew she’d look good doing it.
“Mio sangue.” Francesca gazed over her shoulder at Mira. “You’ve got the phone to record?”
Mira nodded.
“Let’s roll.”
Francesca flew down the stairs. Mira grabbed Connie by the elbow.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Mira whispered harshly, over Francesca’s footsteps echoing heavy on the stairs.
“It’s what I want.” Connie’s eyes darted over Mira’s face. “You heard me.”
“What if Francesca’s miracle doesn’t work right away?”
“Then she’ll use the pen.” Connie winced. “Why are you questioning me?”
“I want to make sure you understand what we’re doing.”
“I know the plan.”
Mira knew she was talking about the official story that they had rehearsed, one that involved overexertion, a faulty EpiPen, and a divine miracle. “I meant the risk.”
Connie’s eyes went dark. “Who are you to talk about risk? You, who makes Francesca hide the antifreeze in the cellar so you won’t drink it? Who can’t take her temperature with a glass thermometer because she’ll bite it? Who stays back from the edge of the altar so she doesn’t hurl herself into the quarry?”
Mira swallowed hard. Connie had never spoken so harshly to her. Yet everything she said was true: she was a hypocrite.
“It could go wrong,” Mira said.
“You don’t get it,” Connie said. “I live a padded life. I can’t play sports. I don’t do gym. I can’t swim at the quarry. I’m not even supposed to have strenuous sex!”