“We were scared!”
“We are scared!” Andy countered. “We’ve been scared ever since! We never went back to Blyton Hills after that. The next year, we found an excuse to stay at your house in Portland and we didn’t even dare to look each other in the eye. And Sean, your Sean, Tim’s great-grandfather, was standing there, trying to bark us to life again, like ‘What the fuck are you doing here? Why aren’t we back in that house solving the real mystery?’?”
“Because we grew up!”
It went downhill from there, Tim noticed, watching the girls on the bed (not in the bed: blankets had receded long ago), a moody Mom and Dad are fighting look on his Byronian face.
Kerri caught her breath, tired and sad. “We grew up, Andy. We grew apart. That’s life. You move on, make new friends, lose the old ones. We can’t spend our whole lives in Blyton Hills, chasing sheep smugglers and lake creatures.”
She brushed some orange hair aside, and she seemed exhausted.
“I’m sorry, Andy. I’m not going back.”
She lay down and switched the light off. The coils in the toaster glinted yellow in the dark, a poor but well-intended impersonation of a fireplace.
Andy met Tim’s eyes, the dog’s profile outlined in the warm glow. They held a silent exchange for a minute or two, until Tim deemed it courteous to lay his head down, close his eyes, and pretend to sleep.
Kerri murmured in the brown dark, “Can you please take your arm off me? I feel smothered.”
Andy’s right hand radioed a message: We’ve been spotted. And it fell back.
She changed positions and tried to lie down faceup in the narrow space between Kerri and the wall, making sure to touch neither. She tried to swallow something in her throat, careful not to make a single noise, and kept her eyes open.
The tiny room went on flying through space, wrapped in zero Kelvin silence.
—
Several hours or light-years later Kerri felt her again, a peach-fuzz brush against her back that didn’t wake her up so much as give her a gentle reminder of the world beyond her body.
She felt her own left arm, crushed under a bad posture but too numb to complain anyway, and her right one, hanging off the bed. She felt the almost excessive heat on the toaster-lit side of her wrist and the cold on the dark half. She felt the twilight zone along her forearm like the Greenwich parallel of Eternia. She guessed the yellow aura of the toaster behind her closed eyelids, and Tim lying by it.
The bitter memories of their argument were beginning to rush in when something unexpected happened: a second caress. This time it was deliberate, Andy’s hand brushing her side like a petal stroke. She focused on the body behind her, the microearthquakes it caused on the mattress. And she smiled, internally, for her lips were too deeply asleep to be bothered, but she did acknowledge Andy’s touch as it clumsily tripped on every little wrinkle of the tight shirt around her torso, descending toward the waist where the shirt ended.
And that’s where she noticed it. Cold.
She suddenly found herself wondering whether Andy would have cold hands from being far from the toaster, or if they could be that cold, while the hand sped up slightly across her skin and then hesitated by the edge of her jeans, and it didn’t resume its path over the clothes, but burrowed beneath, and Kerri’s thoughts hurried up too, deliberating how she should react, because the hand was hovering south over her belly and sending a scouting fingertip, cold and smooth, surfing between her thigh and her abdomen, scurrying easily under her panties. And a long fingernail was brushing through her pubic hair, and another finger and another and another followed, too quickly, over her labia and bending around her legs, cold and skinless and clawed, closing in a burning icy clutch ready to grab her groin and rip her womb apart shout now!
The scream woke every single cell in every body in the room. Hers, and Tim’s, and Andy’s, who immediately grabbed Kerri by the shoulders and shook the dream off her.
“Kerri! Kerri, wake up!”
She fought to break loose, blinded by panic.
“It’s me!” Andy insisted. “Kerri, I’m real! I know how it is; feel me; I’m real! You’re okay!”
She was.
Kerri noticed the hands clutching her whiter wrists. They were strong and warm, a landscape of veins and knuckle valleys, untiringly detailed like every millimetric hair on Tim’s paws on the bed and the voices of both—Tim barking in a pathetically sweet attempt to soothe her, Andy’s words slowly succeeding. She recognized the room in twilight, the yellow glow of the toaster, every piece of junk on the floor, Tim’s compassionate eyes and Andy’s dark, resolute ones, inches from her.
And in the next breath, the dam broke. Massive, physically painful sobs burst out of her chest.
Andy released her wrists and tried to hold her head, but she recoiled, hiding under the sheets.
Andy sat still. She had not seen Kerri cry since they were kids. She used to feel awkward back then too. So did Tim, apparently. She settled with resting a hand on her, over the blanket.
“Kerri, we have to end this. You can’t go on like this. It broke us.”
The gesture of her hand encompassed everything in Kerri’s room, in Kerri’s life.
“You were going to be a scientist. By this time you were supposed to be in the Amazon rain forest, naming a new species of butterfly after each one of us. We won’t find peace until we fix this.”
Kerri had cowered into a corner, hiding behind her knees, her orange hair so inconsolably distressed.
Andy saw Kerri Hollis, age twelve, in the way she swiped her eyes and nose and tried to woman up.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said with a quiver.
“Kerri, the fact that you don’t want to go back is proof that we must go back,” Andy sotto voce’d, recognizing a softness in her voice that she had not used in the last thirteen years. “Would you be scared to go to the place where you had the greatest times in your life if we had really caught the bad guy?”
Kerri shied away. “I prefer to think it ended happily.”
“But it didn’t!” Andy exploded, softness lost to a passionate monologue. “Look at us! Look at what we are! I wish it had ended happily and that we’d gone on to solve more cases, and that somehow our teenage adventures had morphed into a happy sitcom of our adult life with all of us turning to face the camera smiling and every scene beginning with a long shot of a great house with a garden and a big-ass pool while a stupid fucking sax went dibiddydawahwawah, but it didn’t happen! Peter’s dead and Nate’s in a loony bin and you live in this hole and I’m going psychotic and even the dog knows there’s still something out there!”
Out the window, New York had slid back into view, blowing steam and pining for coffee.
Kerri and Tim both watched Andy panting after the climax. The darkness of the immediate future trickled in like saltpeter down the walls.