AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She thinks back to that first night. She’d taken a dislike to Dana right from the start. She thought it was because she reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t think who. It wasn’t until after cocktails, when they were having dinner, that she realized who Dana reminded her of. It wasn’t until Dana’s comment, It sounds like someone fell off the roof, and her laughing about it, that she realized exactly who Dana was. And then Lauren’s heart began to pound and she could feel herself turning hot and cold and breaking into a sweat.
Dana – she had been Dani when Lauren knew her – had given no sign of recognizing her. Not until that comment. Then she knew for certain that Dani had recognized her, but had pretended not to. Dani always was a good actor. But Dani obviously wanted Lauren to know that she knew who Lauren was.
They’d both changed. At least on the outside.
It was a long time ago. Fifteen years. Half her lifetime. Lauren had been a plain, sullen, overweight teen then, and Dani had taunted her relentlessly. But she had recognized her.
Dani looked different now, too. At fifteen, she’d worn her hair very short. She had a tough, mean look. She was a tough, mean girl. Now, fifteen years later, she was completely different. This new version – Dana – was very feminine, polished, expensive-looking – no wonder Lauren hadn’t recognized her at first. But Lauren was certain that the scrappy Dani was still there – Dana was a fake. Dana didn’t look like she’d ever spent a single night in a miserable foster home, taking her frustration, rage, and fear out on others more vulnerable than herself.
Lauren, too, had put her past behind her. She didn’t want it to come out now. She had Ian now. She couldn’t let Dana ruin everything. She had to be sure that Dana wouldn’t say anything.
For the rest of the evening, her mind was in turmoil. She let Ian fuck her on the back staircase, but her mind was on other things. Would Dana tell?
She told herself that Dana also had a lot to lose. She was about to marry, and obviously into money. Lauren was certain Matthew didn’t know about Dana’s past. Dana would keep that from him, surely. She wouldn’t want a man like Matthew to know what she’d come from. But Dana knew something about Lauren that Lauren couldn’t allow to get out.
Of all the shitty luck.
How easily it all came back to her that night. That horrible time in her life. She was full of rage. She’d been removed from her family’s house and sent to that wretched foster home on the other side of the city. Her parents had found her unmanageable and she thought they wanted to teach her a lesson. She hated them for it. Her father had had enough of her, but her mother – her mother thought Lauren was just unhappy. Her poor, long-suffering mother. She never really understood who Lauren was.
The foster home was awful. She didn’t even have her own bedroom, but had to share with two other girls. One of them was Dani, tall and skinny and vicious. She never knew what Dani’s situation was – they never talked about home, and how they ended up in that shithole. The bathroom was shared among six of them. No one ever seemed to clean it. The food was barely edible. But she ate it anyway, and hated herself for shovelling it in, looking for comfort wherever she could find it.
They would go up onto the roof. It seems unlikely now, unbelievable, that when they were in care, they would climb up the TV antenna tower in the backyard and get onto the roof. The house was at the end of the street, and if they stayed on the back of the roof, no one saw them. They would hang out up there, smoking cigarettes that Dani stole from Mrs Purcell, the woman who was supposed to be looking after them. One afternoon, one of the kids, Lucas – he was thirteen, but seemed younger – climbed up after them and asked Dani for a smoke.
Dani told him to fuck off.
He stayed. He kept pestering them until Dani told him his parents were drug addicts and they were never coming back for him because she’d heard the social worker telling Mrs Purcell that they’d overdosed and he was an orphan now. She really could be a cold-hearted bitch.
‘You’re lying!’ he shouted, furious tears streaming down his face. ‘I’m going to tell on you!’
‘Go ahead,’ Dani said, flicking her cigarette ash. Then she added, ‘God, you’re such a baby.’
Getting nowhere with Dani and stinging with hurt and the need to hurt someone else, Lucas turned on Lauren and said, with a contempt beyond his years, ‘You’re fat and ugly!’
And Lauren stood up suddenly and pushed him off the roof, just like that.
Dani turned to her in shock. ‘Jesus! Do you know what you just did?’
They looked down at the boy on the patio stones below. He wasn’t moving; his head was split open and leaking. They bolted off to the mall and didn’t come back until suppertime.
It was assumed he’d fallen, or jumped. He was a troubled boy, the child of drug addicts, with probable fetal alcohol syndrome and poor impulse control. No one even questioned where they were. But Dani knew what Lauren had done, and for a few days she held it over her, threatening to tell whenever she felt like it.
Dani left, no more than a week after Lauren pushed the boy off the roof. She stuffed her things in a bin bag and said, ‘See ya, loser.’ And then she was out of the house, slamming the door behind her. Lauren didn’t know if she’d gone back to her parents or to another foster home.
Lauren wanted to go home. She hadn’t thought she would be there long. But it dragged on, week after week, until she wondered if her parents would ever ask to get her back, and no one told her anything. Lauren’s rage grew and grew.
When Lauren was finally reclaimed, her mother came for her alone. Her father was gone; she never saw him again. Her mother took her home and things went back to normal, with Lauren doing whatever she wanted. A couple of years later, her mother remarried. Her stepfather adopted her and she changed her name to his.
And then Dani showed up at Mitchell’s Inn.
That night, Lauren didn’t actually take her sleeping pills. She waited until Ian was asleep, and then, when all was quiet except for the bluster and rattle of the wind, she slipped out of her own room and padded quietly down to the first floor and knocked lightly on Dana’s door. She was all alone in the hall; everyone was asleep, the storm crashing outside their windows. She didn’t have to knock twice.
Dana answered the door, looking guardedly at her. Lauren said that they should talk. Dana glanced back at the sleeping form of her fiancé, slipped the room key into the pocket of her dressing gown, and stepped into the hall without a word. She followed Lauren down the stairs to the landing and then stopped. ‘Wait,’ she said, her voice low. ‘We can talk here.’ And she stopped as if she wouldn’t go any further. So, at the top of the stairs, Lauren looked Dana in the eye and said, ‘We need to clarify a couple of things.’
Dana stared, her eyes wide, the same way she’d stared at Lauren in the dining room when she made the crack about someone falling off the roof. They had a fraught, shared history. The only question was, what happened now?
A cool, blank expression settled over Dana’s face. ‘What is it, exactly, that you want to clarify?’ she asked. And then she simpered and said, ‘Oh, wait! I know. You want to be sure I’m not going to tell anybody that you’re a murderer.’
‘Shut up, Dani,’ Lauren snapped, her voice low. ‘Don’t think you can push me around any more. Things have changed.’
Dana snorted. ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ve changed that much. I think I’ve still got the upper hand here, given what I know about you.’
‘But I don’t think you want Matthew to find out about your past, either, am I right?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. My past may be sad, but it’s not criminal,’ Dana said.
Lauren reached out and grabbed Dana’s robe and yanked at it. There, over Dana’s left breast, was the small, telltale tattoo. A viper. ‘You didn’t get rid of this?’ Lauren almost laughed. ‘You can get those removed, you know.’
Dana looked at her and spat, her voice low, familiar, ‘You always were a little sociopath. What are you going to do – are you going to push me, too?’
