Page 99 of Cackle

“Pet,” I hear. Sophie emerges from her room in a dress that looks pretty much identical to the robe. I don’t know why she bothered to change. “You look upset.”

“Just thinking about rats,” I tell her. “Do you think I have too much empathy for rats?”

I ask because I know she won’t laugh at me. She won’t think I’m crazy in a not-adorable way. She would never.

“Rats are selfish creatures,” she says. “They want to survive, and they do whatever they can to survive. I admire them.”

“Yeah.”

She reaches for my hand and helps me up.

“Shall we?” she asks.

I follow her out the door. I hear it lock behind us.

We walk in silence for a while, the ground chomping beneath our feet like it’s something alive, like it’s something we bring to life with our contact, with our presence.

“Are you still thinking of rats?” Sophie asks me.

“No,” I say, “I’m back to thinking about last night. What do you mean, it was me?”

“Here,” she says. “Open your palm.”

I do. In it, she deposits a large spider. So large I can see its face perfectly without having to squint. Countless eyes and a smile. A big lively grin.

“This is Ralph,” she says. “He and I are good friends. He’s very cheery.”

“Is this real?” I ask her.

“Annie,” she says, “there’s only so much I can tell you, only so much I can teach you. I can show you things about the world, about yourself. Beautiful, wonderful things. But I can’t make you believe them. There are some things you need to discover on your own. Do you understand?”

“I . . .”

I look down at Ralph, whose smile is so big it takes up most of his dark, fuzzy face.

He’s the most adorable creature I’ve ever seen. And she’s right. He is very cheery.

And suddenly, I’m cheery, too.

“He’s amazing.”

“I thought you two might hit it off,” she says. “He’s good company. Almost as good as me.”

When we arrive at the diner, we sit in our usual back booth and order pancakes. Sophie pours maple syrup into her spoon and lets Ralph stick his face in it.

“Should he eat that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “But he loves it.”

“This is so weird.”

I almost say that I can’t believe it, but I stop myself. Instead, I say, “There’s a lot I used to believe wasn’t possible.”

She smiles, picking an apple out of thin air and tossing it to me. She says, “I know.”

INTERLUDE

In the weeks after the date, Jill, along with the rest of the staff, avoids me like I’m a leper on fire. I assume Jill told them what happened and I have to admit that between the Chris Bersten spider incident and the bone-date incident, they’re fully justified in being wary of me, though, since the date, there have been no other suspicious occurrences on my end.