The Dead Queens Club, page 26
“Maybe in Mary’s room.” He disappears, and I decide hey, what the hell, and put the dressing gown on. It’s very asylum-escapee-aboard-the-Titanic.
Henry comes back in and cracks up again. “You should wear that to school tomorrow.”
“Only if you wear that,” I say, because he’s in kelly green prepster shorts with whales all over them and a shirt that at first glance looks like your typical screen-print Che Guevara face, except it’s Martin Luther instead of Che, and it says I’ve got 95 problems.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” he says, handing me a bikini top and shorts so short they’d get you expelled if you even thought about wearing them to Lancaster High.
“No way,” I tell him, and go tramping around like the Ghost of Girlfriends Past until I find George’s room.
I scrape together a moderately workable outfit of the bikini, the obscene shorts, a shirt that says EXTRA SALTY, and the dressing gown, because it’s really growing on me. When I get back, Henry’s sitting on the floor paging through one of Anna’s books.
“Okay, don’t you find it slightly creepy to be sitting in Dead Anna’s room wearing Dead George’s clothes listening to Dead Beethoven?”
“Rachmaninov,” he says. “And you don’t have room to talk.”
I wave the dressing gown sash in his face. “I’m just here for the boat theft.”
“You live in Anna’s old house.”
“Is it also built on a sacred burial ground?”
“I’m serious. You didn’t know?”
I stare at him. “Excuse me, what? The Boleyns used to live in my house?”
He nods.
“And it never occurred to anybody to mention it?”
“It’s not like you really knew them.”
“Okay, but you’d think somebody could’ve found the time to be like, oh, hey, you live in the haunted Boleyn house.”
Henry sets the book down. “It’s not like the whole school knows your address.”
“You do! And what about—I don’t know. Katie? Parker?”
“You know I didn’t want to talk about her. And I don’t think Katie even knew that was their house. She was never in town until she moved in with Norfolk, and the Boleyns were gone by then. And Rochford—who knows.” He shrugs.
The Parker thing is bothering me. I’ve been trying to be Switzerland, but I’m starting to feel like neutrality might be a little risky. Especially since Parker and Henry both think I’m on their side.
I’m the worst double agent in history.
“Okay, but what if Parker’s not really playing me?” I say.
“Hey, Cleves.” He glances up over my head. “It says ‘gullible’ on the ceiling.”
“Very clever, asshole. I’m sorry the Dead George getup has failed to make you witty.”
“And I’m sorry the Dead Anna bathrobe has failed to make you charming.”
I dig back into the closet and find a totally ridiculous old-Hollywood hat, a gauzy scarf, and a pair of leopard-print ankle-breakers. I emerge in full costume, waving another double-middle-finger salute. “I’m charming as hell.”
“Sit down before you hurt somebody.” He grabs my hand, and I dive for the floor and lose the hat and one shoe. And also land practically on top of him.
“Watch it. I’m figuring you out,” I say. “You’ve got a pattern. Get me into a room that isn’t mine when I’m cold and emotionally vulnerable. Make sure there’s something classical playing, and I’m dressed like the total ingenue I am, and nobody knows we’re alone—”
He leans closer and brushes Anna’s scarf out of my face. “Is it working?”
My heartbeat’s at a full gallop. It is working. It’s totally working.
But apparently I still have some tiny shred of decency left, because I sit up and say, “I can’t hook up with you while I’m wearing your dead ex-girlfriend’s seduction bathrobe.”
He smirks. “You don’t have to be wearing it.” And then he does a fake-sexy eyebrow wiggle, but damn him, his fake-sexy is still legit-sexy, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. It doesn’t matter if he’s wearing a shirt with a five-hundred-year-old joke on it and shorts that scream “irredeemable douchebag.” It doesn’t matter that he smells like Norfolk Howard’s Old Spice and Lake Mad Max. It’s that stupid I-own-this-place confidence of his. He’s so sure of what he wants that you end up wanting the same thing.
“No no no no no,” I say, before the overwhelming majority of me that doesn’t give a damn whose nightgown I’m wearing can destroy the last few brain cells that are still hanging on.
“I know,” he sighs, and then he leans back against the wall. We sit there listening to Rachmaninov for a minute, and then Henry says, “Why did we break up, anyway?”
“Hilarious.”
“For real.”
I honestly don’t even want to talk about it, because I’m not the one who did the breaking up. But if he has to ask, he has to listen to whatever bullshit I feel like concocting. “Um, because we never should’ve been going out in the first place? Because we were only going out because it made sense, like, intellectually, and you’re so codependent—”
“Thanks.”
“Come on. You suck at being single. And you were over me the minute I freaked out about your Camaro attack.”
“You weren’t into me.”
“I never said that!” I untangle Anna’s scarf, ball it up, and toss it at the closet, but it unwinds like a comet and hits the floor five feet short.
“Not to my face.”
“Dude. You’re the one who told everybody we never sealed the deal because you felt like you were kissing your sister. Which is interesting, seeing what happened last Thursday—”
“I never said that.” Now he looks pissed.
“That’s my line. And I wasn’t finished. You acted all weird after that night in your car, and—”
“I thought you didn’t want—I thought you didn’t like me like that.”
“Get real,” I say, like I’m twelve, but I’m way too annoyed to come up with a better zinger. “I’ve had a thing for you since our first week of Overachiever Camp, okay? I just thought I was about to get cannibalized. Slasher vibes aren’t considered an aphrodisiac where I’m from.”
He gets up and throws Anna’s crap back into the closet. “You wanted me to go out with Katie.”
“I said I was fine with it because I thought you liked her.”
“It was your idea!”
I pull off the stupid dressing gown. “It was never my idea.”
“Then why the hell did you tell Rochford everything?”
“Like what?”
“How we didn’t go all the way,” he says. “How it wasn’t working, and I should dump you for Katie—”
“I literally never said that. I mean, the first thing, but that was it. Parker said you didn’t think it was working.”
Our eyes lock. Rachmaninov slams out a few particularly dramatic chords.
“Rochford,” Henry says quietly.
I don’t want him to be right about her, but all of a sudden it’s crystal clear that she broke us up. And maybe that move could fit in with her Henry-is-a-murderer theory, except for the part where she immediately suggested Katie as a replacement girlfriend—which, if she was expecting future murders, was a pretty cold move.
So apparently she doesn’t believe any of her bullshit after all. Apparently she’s just fucking with me. And Henry. Again.
This looks so shady, I should probably make a Dead Queens post about how Cat should watch her back.
“It always comes back to Parker Rochford,” Henry says. “Every damn time.”
I can’t even think of a response, so I just get up and hang Anna’s dressing gown in the closet. When I sit back down, I slide in close so I’m leaning against Henry, but the potential makeout moment is over. This is just about being near the only person I can actually trust in this whole shitshow.
“So what should I do?” I finally ask.
He squints at one of the paintings. It looks like those inkblots you can use to figure out your secrets: If you see a knife, you’re probably a killer. If you see a kitten, you probably aren’t a killer. If you see boobs, you’re probably an eighth-grade boy.
“Act like we never talked,” he says after a minute. “Like you aren’t onto her. Sooner or later she’ll give herself away, and we’ll figure it out from there.”
The painting just looks like a lot of expensive nothing. “Okay,” I say.
We stand up, and Henry pulls me into a hug. It’s totally platonic but ridiculously intense at the same time. Like we’re about to go to war.
Finally we pull back, but Henry leaves his hands on my arms and looks right into my eyes again.
And he says, “Don’t trust anybody.”
Operation
Desdemona
Nobody Expects the Fort Wayne Inquisition
What Henry may not have realized is what a shockingly untalented actress I am.
I get to Hampton Court Friday morning and promptly make a moron of myself by laughing way too hard at a joke Brandon tells. When Erin looks at me like, what, I laugh even harder, and then I high-five Parker for no reason and excuse myself to the library, where I proceed to make a very aggressive vaguepost about the lost art of not being a pathological liar.
I don’t even attempt lunch. I just hit the library again.
Rationally this would be a perfect opportunity to maybe (a) actually read Othello, because I do want to pass twelfth grade; or (b) research colleges, because if I do manage to graduate, it would be good to have somewhere to go; or (c) prepare for Potential Future Day Job #000, Person Who Makes No Meaningful Contribution to Society.
Instead I spend the whole time trawling through Lancaster Tribune archives.
Here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure Anna did set up the Tower fireworks, and she might’ve even been trying to get Henry back for Jane and all the shit-talking. But I still don’t think she was trying to kill anybody, and if I can just find some damn receipts to post on Dead Queens, maybe people will stop being such dicks about her. And also stop accusing everybody and their mother of murder. And also stop inviting Cat Parr everywhere.
Except there’s nothing. I mean, there’s something, obviously. But it’s about as uninformative as nothing.
May 20: Two dead in Howard Heights fire.
It barely even qualifies as perfunctory. It’s two paragraphs. Explosion, prom night, details remain unclear.
Enlightening.
There are articles about it every day for a month, but there’s never anything that means anything. The last article says, A representative from the Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the May 19 fire at the Lancaster Country Club has been ruled accidental. Howard Estates CEO Elizabeth Howard-Boleyn declined comment.
That’s literally it. Other than the mind-boggling number of editor-deleted comments on every single page that even sort of references the fire.
Censorship is the real villain in this town, in case you were wondering.
So I text Eustace: prom. why did people start saying anna was trying to kill people?
He texts back practically before my message goes through.
Eustace: Necklace. Duh
Me: right, but why MURDER-kill? not accident-kill?
Eustace: Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland
Me: useless, useless, useless
Eustace: Ms. Parr won’t think I’m useless when she gets my story about a gold Camaro driving into Howard Heights at midnight last night
Me: breaking: fuck you
Eustace: Calm down. You’re old news. Word on the street is he’s into Erin now
Me: that’s the least believable thing you’ve ever said
Eustace: Didn’t say it was true. He’s acting the same as always with Cat
Eustace: At least in public
Then he sends me the devil emoji twenty separate times, and the resulting buzzfest compels the librarian to come over and chew me out because “this isn’t social hour!” When I tell her it’s my lunch block, she starts rambling about how I should write a letter instead of texting, which is definitely the solution I need right now.
So, you know, ainsi sera, or whatever.
But I successfully avoid Parker. Which means that the closer we get to the shopping trip, the more I’m trying to weasel out of it. Friday night I text her that I might have to do a family thing. Saturday morning I take it up a notch and tell her I have a headache, which isn’t even a lie, because thinking about hanging out with her and Cat all day is giving me a headache.
She doesn’t text back.
Anyway, I’m crossing my fingers that she’s icing me out for being lame, but then at literally the exact second my phone flips over to ten o’clock, the door flies open, and there’s Parker in full shopping attire.
“Cleveland, get up, we’re going!” she says and starts throwing things at me.
I’m still in bed, so the only weapons I have are my pillow and my computer. “I’m sick!” I yell.
A shoe flies past my head and hits the wall, and a layer of lake mud cracks off and rains down onto the sheets. “You could at least try to make your voice sound hoarse,” Parker says, flinging a pair of jeans onto the bed and crouching down to dig for a shirt.
“Migraine.”
“You don’t get migraines.”
“I do when people break into my room at the crack of dawn and start assaulting me with my own belongings.” Especially people who deliberately get guys to dump me and then lie about it. “Who let you in?”
“Amelie.” She pauses on the shirt I nabbed from George’s room. It’s inside out, but I’m totally sure she’s going to detect his cologne or something and bust me. Then she drops it and grabs a sweater instead. “Get dressed. I don’t want to keep Cat waiting.”
“I can’t go to Fort Wayne. My ankle monitor will detonate.”
She throws the sweater at me. “You can’t hate Cat that much.”
“Yeah, and you can’t like her that much.”
“You’re coming.” She glances at the closet.
Anna’s Hollywood hat is on the doorknob. Where I hung it, like an absolute genius, after wearing it home, also like an absolute genius.
Parker’s across the room before I can blink. “What the hell? This is Anna’s.”
“Um.” All I can think is, holy shit, I would make the world’s worst criminal. Or spy, which is what I’m supposed to be right now, and I’m starting to wonder about the lasting effects of Henry’s bike-slide head injury, seeing as he actually approved me for this role. “No, it’s not.”
“She got it in Paris. God, the last time I saw her in it was spring break at Lake—”
“It was in the attic,” I say before she can telepathically determine that Lake TJ Maxx is exactly where I got it.
“Was there anything else up there?”
I’m not even sure we have an attic. “Um, not much. I don’t remember.”
“Which is it?”
“What?”
“Not much, or you don’t remember?”
I need to make friends with dumber people. “Um. Amelie’s the one who went up there. She thought the hat would complement those rocket pajamas you love so much.”
She narrows her eyes. “You’re acting so weird.”
I grab the clothes she threw at me and hop out of bed. “Gotta get ready.”
Parker stands outside the bathroom while I brush my teeth and try to manufacture a better lie-face. “When did she go up there?” she says through the door.
“Um. Thursday.”
“Why?”
“Um. You know. Looking for lightbulbs. It’s a science fair thing. Electricity.”
“Are you high or something?”
My Parker-curated floor outfit looks better than half of what I’ve worn to school in the past two weeks. “On life. And liberty. And also the pursuit of happiness.”
“I bet. Hey, can I go up there and look around?”
I throw some water on my face. “Don’t want to make us late to pick up my favorite editor-in-chief.”
“I meant tonight. When we get back.”
“Um.”
“Perfect,” she says. “Aren’t you ready yet?”
“Very sympathetic, coming from the girl who does her hair to go to a hair appointment.”
By the time I finish my minimalistic beauty routine and surreptitiously scope out the ceiling—there does, in fact, seem to be a trapdoor between my room and Amelie’s—it’s pretty clear that (a) there’s no way out of this expedition, (b) there’s also no way out of attic exploring, and (c) Parker knows I’m up to something. Shocker.
I let Cat have shotgun, and she and Parker gab nonstop while I play the classic role of Annoyed Teenage Offspring On Electronic Device In Back Seat. I’m on Dead Queens, combing through the notes on my anti-slut-shaming manifesto. We’re past two thousand at this point, which is kind of unbelievable until I look back to yesterday and realize an Actual Legit blog reblogged me. You know, one of those ones attached to an Actual Legit website, with Actual Legit writers who do Actual Legit stories.
And now it’s fully unbelievable.
Once we’re in Fort Wayne and out of the car, I’m contemplating wandering off and seeing if Parker and Cat even notice, but right when I’m about to split Parker pulls us over to a bakery and says, “I’ve been dying to try this place.” She leads the way in.
And there’s Lina Aragón, sitting there reading.
So that’s weird.
Cat goes, “Lina!” and runs over and hugs her.
So that’s also weird.
Then Lina says to Parker, “I thought you were going to tell them.”
