“Yeah, well, if you get any wild ideas in your head, you better not go running off like an idiot to solve things all alone,” Derrick had commanded, slurring loudly even over Amelia’s vegetating body. “You call the cops, pronto!”
“Derrick, keep your voice down!” Sarah had commanded him.
“She can’t hear us!” Derrick had nearly laughed, but not quite.
The half-laugh lingered in Sarah’s ears, along with the image of Amelia’s shattered face, propped uselessly with breathing devices and equipment. Those labored, rattling breaths stayed with her as well.
At nightfall, the two-story residence in the woods surprised her. She wasn’t normally skittish, but in this view, where branches opened sublimely for her to see Willy’s house, Sarah shuttered. Toilet paper littered the roof, swaying in the autumn breeze like ghost decorations. It was only timing, Sarah reminded herself. American culture had made October 31 the token “scary” night. There was nothing to fear but fear itself. And being discovered.
Sarah took in the setting, stifling the natural urges that compelled her to leave this place. Amelia’s little skull-and-cross bone diary was in there. Tonight was the safest time to permeate Willy’s “club” without detection.
She parked her aunt’s ancient beetle car on the outskirts of the forest, near a pick-up truck and a ratty smaller vehicle. When her cell phone vibrated against her thigh, she shuddered, “Shit! Derrick!”
Sure enough, her older brother’s name read across the brightening screen. In the lack of urban lights, the cell phone’s glow suddenly irked her. But she answered, her own tiny voice doing nothing to calm her. “What?”
“You better be at your little boyfriend’s house and not playing Nancy Drew or some shit!”
“Will you get off my ass! I’m just trick or treating.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, I’m smoking pot!” She offered a more realistic, 15-year-old lie. “You happy?”
“I don’t care if you’re snorting crack off a dead bum’s ass, but you better not visit Amelia’s friends. They’re a bunch of stoners. And that Will guy is”
“I don’t even know where they are,” she lied, Amelia’s stolen phonebook on the passenger seat. “Besides, you don’t care if I’m doing lines of coke but you do care if I’m hanging out with coke heads?”
“Don’t be a stupid bitch, Sarah. Look what it did to Amelia.”
“Fuck yourself, Derrick!” she fought her urge to throw the phone and simply hung up.
She was refueled to disobey him. By the car’s dim light, she found her robe and Star Wars Yoda mask. She pulled out of her schoolbag one pair of iron knuckles. “Stupid,” she mumbled to herself. Equipped with a flashlight and guised in her costume, she cautiously took to the forest.
The night noises again warned that Sarah turn around, pick up her cell phone, and voice her suspicions to the police. But what would the authorities do? Rattle Willy and his cronies up enough to make them realize every possession Amelia had left in the camp house needed to be disposed of. No, only two days later they wouldn’t have realized this yet. Now was the best time.
Though reaching the house in the itchy, hot costume was taking longer than Sarah had expected. Following the sound of stereo music on high aided her through the white noise to the source of human-made harmony.
A couple now lay on the porch swing. Two teenagers around Amelia’s age, separated only by their clothing. To Sarah’s relief, she saw that the boy was in a poor guise of some Star Trek character. Star Wars and Star Trek, they were all the same to Sarah.
“Is that Gaven!” the girl declared, her glassy eyes suddenly on Sarah. “Hey, Gaven!”
“Yoda’s so overdone!” the trekkie rolled his eyes.
Sarah kept her silence, but even through the mask caught the scent of smoke. Both pot and tobacco, salting the air. Last year, it had been an open-house party, but what if things had changed?
On the doorbell, a smashed mosquito had spilled its juices across the yellow neon light. It was then, as Sarah pushed the button, that she realized she may have overcompensated for the holiday. She had cut her nails for the occasion, but the house was free of any Halloween decorations, saved for the toilet paper that ran from the roof.
The girl who answered Sarah’s ring peered down at her from eyes as green as her own, or as Derrick’s, or even as Amelia’s. For a moment, Sarah felt a surreal relief, which sank all too quickly. This girl could be Amelia’s twin.
“Yoda, huh?” the raven-haired beauty gave a wide, white smile. “Come on in.”
This must be the Lili of Amelia’s stories. The girl with the nose rings and the unbecoming dark style, but the face of a porcelain doll.
“Hey, everyone! Yoda’s here!” Lili exclaimed, and Sarah’s heart sank.
She began immediately to count the reasons why Derrick’s advise had been wise.
But eyes did not scrutinize her. On the contrary, most eyes in the room were busily rolled back into the heads of their owners. If there had been pot on the premises, or even cocaine, Sarah could see no more of it. The party guests, mostly female, were caught in the sway of each other, and every now and then of the things they placed on one another’s tongues.
Sarah crossed the room nearly on tiptoe. Her attention was drawn to the chaos on the nearby coach. A man, fully dressed save for the necessary area, was atop a woman, fully nude where she lay, nonchalant as he noted Sarah’s presence. Willy did not cease thrusting even as he nodded to acknowledge the new guest, and Sarah was startled by the energy of his vacant eyes.
Sarah gasped for breath, immerging from the mask safely behind the bathroom’s locked door. She quietly rummaged through the medicine cabinet. It wouldn’t be the type of place for Amelia to hide a diary. But the two lived-in bedrooms of the first floor had turned up no diary. Granted, the search was a sticky, migraine-inducing task behind the Yoda mask. The speed of Sarah’s heartbeat was not helping either. The sound of rampant footfalls outside the bathroom door signaled a drunken chase, high giggles and noise included. The toilet had rings within it.
My god. It’s not just a party house anymore, Sarah realized, noting a grungy hairbrush by the sink. I think these kids live here.
She sat on the toilet lid for a moment, mentally tracing her next steps through the house.
She was leaving, and that was for sure. This had been a suicidal idea, snooping into the lair of a group she had always known would plummet into madness. She at last checked the blank screen of her cell phone. She pressed down on the power button until the screen relit. The phone had hardly any battery power left, so she pressed down again on the power button. Better to save the last of the energy for later.
Willy’s eyes had replaced the image of Amelia’s ravaged face in Sarah’s memory. His mud brown eyes, she recalled were in more than one of her memories. As she examined her own watering green eyes in the mirror, she recalled this day a year ago, when she had in fact met Willy in this house. She had stood alongside her sister Amelia at a costume party, before Amelia had begun to disappear sporadically for months. Willy had towered guru-like over Amelia, just as he did with the others tonight. Only then, the living room had looked hotel-worthy, and this bathroom like one in a styled brochure. Even then, the energy in his eyes had been too much for Sarah to accept as pure. Something else charged it, just as something vacant charged the energy of this sloppy party. Outside the yellowing bathroom, the living room had taken on the appearance of a classic frat house. And Willy’s eyes had been all the more charged.
Leaving the smarmy heat of the bathroom, whose vent was left running for no apparent reason, Sarah met again with the ventilated air of the hallway. Only then, as the hallway stretched out before her, did she fathom how long a drive it was back to the city. Only as one of the many high girls ran past her giggling did she begin to recollect how she had seen only two other cars on the outskirts of the forest.
Slash his tires, she thought to herself. If push comes to shove…
Willy was standing in the doorway, dominating the space like an actor on stage. The girls around him were attentive, wide-eyed, some still swaying. He was conversing, with grand sweeping gestures, to the only other male in sight. Bidding him farewell, casually.
Sarah turned, her narrowed vision running up the white walls and down to the red, stained carpet. A glimpse of ugly, kitchen-looking tile appeared at the other end of the hall. Sarah gambled to find the back door.
But the couple from outside had relocated, directly in Sarah’s path to that door. She could not bring herself to step over the naked teenagers, because she could not stand to get close to the noisy act. The boy’s rhythmic breaths troubled her. For the first time that night, the stairway appealed to her, with its peeling, stained red carpet.
She took her ascent patiently; step-by-step as though the modern stairs would creak beneath her tiny weight. When a form’s warm mass pushed against her from behind, her shriek was so high that it was inaudible. Long, feminine nails ran down her robbed frame and cupped her buttocks.
“You’re not Gaven,” Lili whispered, winking. “You’re a girl.”
The maddeningly bright smile and crinkled nose left Sarah speechless. She collected the trailing part of Yoda’s robe and hurried upstairs. Lili did not follow, at least not immediately. Sarah darted into a darkened bedroom and eased the door shut. After locking it, she switched on the lights.
This time her gasp was quite audible.
A girl lay in the king-sized bed, her straight black hair fanning out across white sheets. She opened her dark, disoriented eyes and smiled, giggling. The young girl sat up straight, “Where’s Willy, Yoda?”
“Downstairs,” Sarah heard herself answer.
She would be caught. There was no doubt in her mind. The question now was how would she fight.
This disoriented teen sat straight up in her long white t-shirt. Perhaps she was the girl Willy was with earlier. She seemed highly sexed, the nipples beneath her t-shirt jutting out.
“Can you tell him to come up here, girl?” the stranger stretched out, her large breasts nearly tumbling from the shirt. When she stood, Sarah saw that this girl was fully naked save for the t-shirt.
“I think he’s busy,” Sarah deepened her voice as best she could. It probably sounded closer to Yoda than a person.
“I guess I’ll go get him. You wanna come, Amelia?”
Sarah surprised herself when she did not faint at the sound of the name. “No thanks.”
With that the stranger fluttered from the room, leaving Sarah to its security alone. She locked the door, and choked back deep sobs. What had she been expecting to retrieve here tonight? Amelia’s life force? If Willy had raped and beaten her into a coma, what difference would it make who caught him for it?
She dragged herself to the sweat-stained bed where she reached her wit’s end. Her weeping made the bed creak, a sound that triggered more than memories of this dizzy night. Among the strangest memory was hearing Derrick’s voice chide Amelia in a yell, “Geez! Will you keep it down with that in there! The rest of us like to sleep sometimes!”
“Oh, shut up!” Amelia had yelled back, making Sarah smile where she lay in her own room. She knew that Amelia was only moving her mattress to retrieve her hidden diary beneath it.
Before Sarah could collect her thoughts, her own hands were fishing beneath the heavy king-sized mattress of this bed. When her fingers scanted the binding of a cheap notebook, with skull-and-cross bone cover, her heart skipped several beats again.
©2009-2011 Luz Briar. Stealing is morally repugnant.
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