She didn’t know why those words hit her as hard as they did, but they felt like a fist to her stomach. She’d been working as hard as she could, trying to please Auntie Zee, who clearly didn’t want to be pleased. “Why not?”Why don’t you like me?
“You just aren’t the right fit,” Auntie Zee said.
Ouch.
Hadn’t she been demonstrating that she wasn’t useless? Jack liked her pancakes, she’d helped fix the porch, and she was cleaning nonstop, voluntarily, without any instruction or help or encouragement.
Auntie Zee added, “And I told you: don’t ask questions, especially of guests.” She then stalked out of the room, leaving Calisa to feel like she’d been dunked in cold water.
Now what?
It was clear that Auntie Zee didn’t want her here.
It was clear that Calisa had to change her mind.
She wasn’t going to just leave, not so soon after she got here, not when she didn’t have a backup plan, and not whenshe hadn’t yet tried everything she could to make this work. Like she’d tried with Ethan, until he’d revealed his true colors and made it impossible. Crossing her arms, Calisa stared into the cold fireplace, thinking, until a minute later she came to a decision:
I’m going to clean the bathrooms.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it was a chore that always impressed her moms. She was certain even Auntie Zee wouldn’t be able to resist the allure of a sparkling toilet. And she could drown her thoughts of Ethan in the toilet, flush them away where they belonged. It would be cathartic.
Visiting the kitchen, Calisa scooped up the cleaning supplies and headed upstairs with renewed determination.
The guest bathroom on the second floor was at the end of the hall, a white door with a rose painted on it. She knocked first, then opened the door.
It was, as bathrooms went, adorable: an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub, a linen shower curtain embroidered with leaves and vines, and a sink with a faucet shaped like a flower. On the windowsill was a row of vases with sprigs of dried lavender in them. It had been cleaned much more recently than the common rooms, thankfully, but if you looked, there were still streaks on the mirror over the sink, hair around the shower drain, and grime behind the toilet that said it wasn’t done daily or thoroughly, or had been done by someone with less exacting standards than Mom-Elise. Setting her cleaning supplies down, she opened the linen closet to check if—
Thump.
Calisa shrieked as a large, lizard-like reptile tumbled out of the linen closet and landed in front of her, its clawed feet splayed out. She jumped backward.
What the hell—
Lifting its bulbous head, it looked at her with marble-size amber eyes.
She shrieked again.
It’s alive. And huge!
Like, Australia-wildlife huge. It was at least a foot long, not counting its whiplike tail, with a narrow body and four beefy legs. It looked like a…She didn’t know what it was. Iguana? Alligator? Not an alligator—that was absurd. She thought of the alligator feed in the supply closet.No. Not an alligator.It was the wrong shape for an alligator anyway—they had elongated snouts and, like, alligator jaws.
She stood rooted in the doorway and stared at it. It stared back.
Its head was the size of her fist and covered in knuckle-like ridges. Its skin was gray-green and rough, like leather that had been clawed and shredded. Loose purplish-brown flaps of what looked like shed skin covered its back.
It’s molting,she thought.
And then:I don’t care if it’s molting. It’s in the bathroom.
Why was it in the bathroom? Specifically, why was it in the closet in the bathroom? How did it get there? And what was she supposed to do about it? She very badly wanted to scream again. Her heart was thudding hard in her chest.
Behind her, she heard Mulligan, concerned. “Miss Calisa, are you well?”
Calisa jumped again and bit off a third screech. She spun around to face Mulligan and pulled the door shut behind her. She leaned against it. Her heart was racing from two jumpscares when she’d expected zero. Bathroom jumpscares were the worst. “Fine. Sorry. Just…this bathroom is out of commission right now. Would you mind using one on the first or third floor?” She smiled a fake smile at Mulligan.
He was dressed in just as much black as the other night, except this time he wore a thick quilted bathrobe. He held a towel over his arm. “Of course, but you have not injured yourself?”
“Nope. All good here.” Except for the presence of the lizard. She didn’t think any guests needed to know about loose reptiles in the towel closet. Unless it belonged to one of them? “You didn’t happen to, um, lose a pet, did you?”
