Andy gazed at her, not completely off-balance. She replied, seriously, “Sometimes it crossed my mind there’d be no next time.”
“Fuck,” Kerri countered, Andy’s line gone seemingly ignored. “Sorry. That was inappropriate.” She would have added, It’s the alcohol speaking, but she knew better than blaming the voluntary ingestion of bottled faux pas for her mistakes.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s because you always wanted us to call you Andy and hang out with the boys. And you liked it when people took you for a boy.”
“I know.”
“And now, you know, I’ve been outside, met people…I talked to this guy once, a really handsome boy who had made the change, and I thought…” She paused, eyebrows arcing up a little farther in helplessness. “Am I sounding ignorant?”
“No, you never do.”
“I’ll drop it. I’m drunk.”
“It’s okay. I saw the world outside my Christian home too. I saw that it’s all right to be the way I am. It’s fine to be a girl and prefer jeans over dresses and mountain bikes over dollhouses.”
Kerri listened, hugging her knees. “Did we make it hard for you?”
“No,” said Andy seriously. “You were great.”
A memory seemed to cross before Andy’s eyes, and she dispelled it together with the bang of hair in front of her face.
“Though I could have killed Joey Krantz on more than one occasion.”
Kerri laughed. “Joey. What a dick. He picked on all of us. You know he was actually jealous, right? He called you butch because he would’ve loved to hang with us.”
“No, he called me butch because I was butch. Some people are like that, they need to state the obvious.”
“Whatever, fuck him.” Kerri leaped over Andy to claim the outer side of the bed as good hosts do and slithered under the blanket, waving Andy to do the same. “Pull over that quilt. You can take your pants off, but do it at your own risk; it’s like Alaska in the mornings.” They locked eyes for a second. “You’ve been to Alaska, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I remember now. I keep your postcard somewhere. Okay, maybe it’s not like Alaska,” she said, reaching out to throw her coat over Tim, who lay curled on his cardboard-carpeted corner. “We slept in worse places, right?”
Andy looked at the narrow iron bed, the coarse wool blanket, the sinusoidal wave of Kerri’s body in the raglan shirt. “I have.”
“You still have to tell me what you’ve been up to these years—don’t think I forgot,” Kerri said, tidying her hair up for the night. “How long are you staying, anyway?”
Andy hadn’t lain down yet. She was leaning on one elbow while her other hand had been forced to relocate on top of Kerri’s hip. It was now wailing for the rest of Andy’s attention like a child calling for Mom from a diving springboard.
“I’m not staying,” Andy said. “I mean, we’re not staying.”
“Really? Where are we going?”
“Blyton Hills.”
Kerri chuckled. “Blyton? Are you going to kick-sterilize Joey Krantz too?”
She waited for Andy to laugh, in vain.
“Are you serious?” she insisted. “Andy, I haven’t been there in years. Uncle Emmet died; Aunt Margo moved to Portland. Why are we going there?”
Andy didn’t answer right away. In the lapse, she grew aware that the night had become incredibly silent, like big cities hardly ever do. Like there was no big city outside those black windows, and the room, the only piece of universe left, was floating in the void. Only the colorless walls, the piles of clothes, a toaster, a bottle of vodka, an astronaut dog, and Kerri and herself all dressed in bed, cruising through space.
Whispering seemed only proper.
“Kerri, don’t you feel like…we left something unfinished up there?”
The layer of alcohol on Kerri’s eyes blocked any reaction from surfacing. “What do you mean?”
Andy tried to shift on the narrow bed.
“Ever since Peter died,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about the last time we were all together up there, all five of us. And…I think I want to go back. I want to go to Debo?n Mansion again.”
“What for?”
“You know,” Andy said, as if Kerri did know. “Look into the Sleepy Lake case.”
“But we solved that case,” Kerri said. “It was Mr. Wickley trying to scare off people while he searched for Debo?n’s gold.”
“Actually, no, I talked to him—”
“What?” The italics just flew out past the alcohol’s guard. “You talked to Wickley? You went to see him in prison?”
“Yes—I mean—no, I just waited for him to come out, but—”
“You met with Wickley? Are you insane? He’s a criminal!”
“Please!” Andy scoffed. For a moment she considered relating the actual meeting, until it dawned on her that no part of that episode would cast her in a good light. “Look, I had to talk to him. I had to talk to someone. We never talk about that case.”
“What’s there to talk about?” Kerri asked. “We caught the creature, it was a guy in a mask.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Andy reacted, almost painfully. It had become that obvious in her head. “I mean, there happened to be a guy in a mask there, and we captured him. But there was something else going on in that house, Kerri. Come on, you know it.”
“Andy, we solved that case! It was in the papers!”
“I know, I learned the story by heart too! ‘Tracks in the mud’? ‘Sightings of a monster’? What about the slaughtered deer?”
Kerri faltered, then offered without attempting a smile: “Grizzly?”
“There are no grizzlies in Blyton Hills! Do you think if they had fucking grizzlies to worry about they’d have time to invent stories about lake creatures? And what about the hanged corpse?!”
“Gosh, it’s a local paper, Andy; I guess it was too macabre for the Pennaquick Telegraph!”
“What about the house? The pentacle? The empty coffins? The symbols written in blood?!”
“Those were props! Wickley staged the haunting of Debo?n Mansion to direct blame at Miss Debo?n!”
“Kerri, come on, stop pretending you forgot about that night!” Andy begged. “Don’t you remember when I found you in the basement? When we locked ourselves in the dungeon? The things outside scratching the walls, all of them? We were in each other’s arms, sweating pinballs, shivering, Jesus Christ, choking on pure terror! Do you want me to believe that Mr. fucking Wickley did that? That a guy in a mask made us cry?”
“Is that what this is about?” Kerri regretted and then finished saying, in that order, but her mouth wouldn’t stop now. “Andy, I’m sorry your self-imposed tough guy persona got shattered that night, but I’m not going back to Blyton Hills because some creep got your ego hurt!”
“That’s bullshit!” Whispers had slowly given way to shouts. “It was not a creep! And they weren’t props! I know what I saw! We all saw it!”