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Feeling awful, Shelly sat on the floot, wiping the fake blood off his face and forehead with a handkerchief. It hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned at all. He had wanted to impress them all with his creativity and his acting ability, but the joke had backfired, and instead, they all thought less of him than ever.
I wish I could die, he thought.
Chapter Three
Vera ran down the porch steps, climbed into Rick’s white VW bug, and started the engine. It caught with a cough and sputter and settled into a steady, chugging idle. She shifted into first and started to pull away when Shelly came running out of the house, waving at her.
“Hey, hey, hey!” he yelled, waving his arms and running toward the car. “Let me go with you! I gotta get outta here, too!”
Jeez, that’s all I need, she thought, letting out the clutch and accelerating past him, kicking up the dust as she spun around and headed for the bridge. Then she made the mistake of glancing up in the rearview mirror.
He looked so forlorn and pathetic standing there, gazing after her, that she simply couldn’t help herself. Against her better judgement, she stopped the car, sighed, and opened the passenger door.
Elated, Shelly came running. I just know I’m going to regret this, she thought as he got in, beaming. She shook her head in resignation, cursing herself for being softhearted and drove off across the bridge.
“Chris! Chris, wait up!” yelled Debbie, running down the trail after her.
Chris stopped and waited for her to catch up before resuming her walk down to the lake.
“What’s wrong?” said Debbie.
“Oh, it’s that creep, Shelly,” Chris said angrily, picking up a branch and tossing it into the bushes, as if she were throwing it at him. “What a sick sense of humor.”
“Oh, that’s just his way of getting attention,” Debbie said. “He doesn’t know about what happened.”
Chris sighed with exasperation. “Oh, I know it, Deb. But from the minute we got here, I’ve been seeing things and hearing things . . .” She shook her head. “It’s probably just my imagination. I shouldn’t have come back here so soon.”
“Don’t let it get to you,” said Debbie, trying to reassure her. “Relax. Enjoy the weekend. Nothing’s going to happen when we’re all here together.” She quickly tried to change the subject. “Hey, how are things going with Rick?”
“Okay,” said Chris, in a resigned tone. “But he just doesn’t understand.” It was clear from her tone that she didn’t really want to go into it.
Debbie wished that there was something she could do to make her friend feel better, to make her forget what happened, but there were some things a person simply couldn’t forget. Things like what had happened to Chris last summer.
Debbie and Chris were best friends since childhood, and they had talked about it, just as Debbie had talked with Chris when she had found out that she was pregnant and had some very serious decisions to make. But what had happened that summer was the sort of thing about which Debbie couldn’t really give Chris any advice. Because she didn’t really know what happened. Not even Chris knew, not completely. Perhaps that was just as well, Debbie thought. On the other hand, not knowing could be even worse.
There was a dark secret buried deep in Chris’s mind and there was no way of telling if she would ever be able to unearth it. Not even analysis had helped. A psychiatrist had tried to hypnotize her and cause her to regress, but she had subconsciously resisted him, refusing to go under. Chris wanted to remember, because not knowing frightened her; Debbie thought maybe there were some things that people were better off not knowing.
Chris only remembered part of what had happened to her last summer and that had been frightening enough. The rest was a complete blank. A gap that Chris felt she desperately needed to fill. But Debbie was afraid for her. After all, when the mind blocked out something so completely, there was usually a reason for it. It was self-defense.
Debbie bit her lower lip as they walked down by the lake. Chris had become silent, staring off across the water. Debbie knew that Chris was afraid of what would happen if she could never remember that missing part of her life.
But Debbie was afraid of what would happen if she did.
The cashier at the crossroads convenience store rang up the total as a local high school girl bagged their purchases of several six-packs of beer, a couple of six-packs of soda, assorted bags of chips, cookies, and a mess of candy bars, cupcakes, and doughnuts Shelly had grabbed for himself.
Vera guessed that he had used restraint because of her. Otherwise, he probably would have loaded up on two or three times as much junk food. She figured that he probably had some emergency supplies stashed away in that makeup kit of his. It was certainly big enough. She didn’t even want to think about what sort of gruesome things could be inside there if that hatchet-in the-head trick was a typical example. Boy, she thought, Shelly was really strange.
“That’ll be eighteen-fifty,” the cashier said. “And we don’t accept no food stamps.”
Vera sneered at the thinly veiled racism. She thought, you wouldn’t say that to an Anglo, would you, bitch? And then her face fell as she realized that she had left her wallet in her purse, which was still back at the house.
“Shelly?” she called.
He quickly put the skin mag he was leafing through back into the rack and turned around guiltily, blushing like a little boy caught doing something wrong.
&
nbsp; “I need some money,” Vera said, feeling awkward that she had to ask him.
