CHAPTER TWENTY
Alice’s room is like a monument to pre-teen lust.
Everything is pink. Literally everything. The bedspread, the pillows, the curtains, the walls. Even the carpet is this horrid fuschia-colored shag she begged and begged for. Dad said it reminded him of the inside of a stomach, but he bought it anyway. When it came to Alice, he was a sucker. I guess we all were because I helped paint the walls, and Mom sewed the curtains, and Dad even found her a cheap plastic chandelier to hang over her bed.
Also pink.
Like a Pepto-Bismol nightmare, if you ask me.
We haven’t touched it, Dad and I. Mom wanted to clean it out, strip the carpet, and repaint the walls, basically just erase any indication Alice ever lived there, but Dad wouldn’t let her. He grabbed her wrists and hauled her back into the hallway and screamed at her about the memory of their daughter and how if she killed it off, she was just as bad as the asshole who took Alice in the first place. He threatened to bar the door. Threatened to nail it shut. Threatened to move himself in there if he had to, just to keep it safe from her. That was the night the fighting started, and it never stopped, really. A screaming match in the hallway, and then Mom was drinking, drinking, drinking all day, every day, and then she was driving to the station to make a scene in front of all Dad’s colleagues before she fled town and never came back.
All of it over Alice’s ugly pink carpet.
But now, three years later, everything is covered in dust. The house always gets coated in a fine layer of ash from the lumber yards ten miles down the highway. I could never let it go long without wiping it away, or we’d drown in it. It turned the white enameled stove black. Turned the wooden windowsills grey. The mantle looked grimy all the time, and when I vacuumed, it came up in clouds.
The ash is so thick in Alice’s room, I leave footprints.
The first thing I do is sit down on that ugly pink carpet, my back against the rose-colored footboard, and cry. I haven’t cried over Alice. Not in three years. Not that night. Not the next day. Not at her funeral. Not on her birthdays. Not at Christmas. Not every time I caught my dad sitting in the dark with her stuffed bear or her hair bow or her sock in his hand, silent tears spilled all to himself.
If no one sees you cry, did it even happen?
My lack of tears at the funeral was what sparked it all. The town began to whisper, and then that whisper was a murmur, and then the murmur was just regular talking, and pretty soon the rumor mill was like a screaming banshee. It was a sign of a psychopath, the girl who couldn’t even manage a tear over her poor, dead-but-not-dead sister. I was no better than a cold-hearted killer. Maybe I was the cold-hearted killer. That day, the day of the funeral, as I was putting on my ugly blue dress and hating my knees and my face and my life, I never could have imagined this was where I’d end up.
Curled up in a ball on my sister’s ash-covered carpet, crying over her fangs.
I scrub the salt from my cheeks and stand, puffs of ash rising around me as I wipe myself down. I get a backpack from her closet, pink, of course, decorated with purple flowers and a plastic pull on the zipper in the shape of a star. I put her favorite tulle skirt in the bottom, magenta-colored, and shove her pastel sweater in on top, the one with the sequins around the neck. She’d need socks and underwear, and all of those have pink ruffles on them somewhere, somehow. I pack her a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts, My Little Pony and a blue one with a big gold bow printed on the front of it. I pack her jacket with the fake fur around the hood before I remember she’s just cold anyway, forever, and probably doesn’t need a jacket. I toss the jacket aside and shove in a few headbands, with big pink bows and pink ribbons on them.
I pack the dress I had thought we’d bury her in, the pink one with the hearts around the hem.
Just before I leave, I add her leopard, the one she had since she was a baby, to the backpack. Its name is Bubblegum, and it’s barely pink anymore. More of a muted blush because a childhood of tea parties and backyard adventures means that the fur has gone ratty and discolored, and no amount of washing ever brought the beast back to its original glory.
I tuck that ratty leopard under my chin and cry some more.
What am I even doing? Alice tried to attack me half an hour ago, and here I am packing her clothing and wondering about underwear. Here I am crying into her stuffed animal. The only thing that stopped her was Edward. He held her long enough for me to run to my car, slam the door shut behind me, and get the lock thrown before she was up against the window, practically licking the glass, her eyes red and wild and her fingers clawing to get at me. Like a wild fucking animal. I just sat there with my hands on the wheel, watching her, feeling my insides curl up and crawl away somewhere to hide. My hope and my three years of searching and everything that gave me a purpose since she disappeared just up and died right there on the spot. Right between those two giant fangs in her mouth.
Alice is a vampire.
Part of me thinks this would have been easier if she was just a pile of soap.
Alice in sitting in the grass just off the porch, surrounded by piles of butter yellow dandelions. She’s chaining them together, threading one through another through another. Chains around her wrists and around her head and looped around her neck. Chains around her ankles and strewn all around her in the grass. It’s so normal, this dandelion thing, for a moment I almost forget that she tried to kill me yesterday.
I walk slowly off the porch, keeping my eyes on her. I know that Edward is close by, close enough to catch her if needed, but I wanted to do this on my own. I also know that Alice can smell me. Her shoulders stiffen, and her head turns just the tiniest bit, but she doesn’t look at me as I settle into the grass a few yards away, moving slowly, like she’s a motion-activated nuclear bomb.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she replies, not quite looking at me, continuing to thread her flowers.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask.
“My sister,” she says. “You hated my music.”
I nod because she’s right. “Yeah. You hated mine.”
“Because it sucked!” Alice snaps, baring her fangs. I didn’t know much about becoming a vampire, but Alice has gone from eight to eighteen, and I didn’t think that was part of the package. I scoot a couple inches away, like those two inches could give me a head start if I needed it, and try again.
“I’m really happy that you’re not dead.”
“That’s what you think,” Alice responds, sounding sullen and pissy and mean. She looks at me then, her face a sick grey color, her eyes lifeless, and her hands limp in her lap. The pretty yellow flowers in her hair and around her neck do nothing to make her appear softer, or happier, or even as young as I know she is. Instead, she looks ancient.
“Is it ok I’m here?” I ask, wondering if I was just salt in a fresh wound, a sting she didn’t exactly need right now.
“Edward said I’m not allowed to attack you. That I have to try to keep you safe.” Alice looks back at me, and I swear to god, she licks her lips.
“Edward is a nice guy,” I say, subtly scooting a few more inches away. I resist the urge to look toward the house because I bet Edward is standing there in the windows smiling at the words that just came out of my mouth. I still don’t know what the fuck to think about him, but “nice” is the first word that comes to mind. I mean it in the way of “Nice of him to save you.” “Nice of him to befriend me.” “Nice of him to tell me what the fuck happened to you.” “Nice of him to keep you from killing me.”
“He makes me eat rabbits,” Alice grumbles. That was probably the worst part about the entire situation for her. Forget the eternal damnation thing, or the whole allergy to sunlight problem, or the “I eat blood now” bit. It was the killing of small, cute, furry creatures that irked Alice the most. This small fact gives me some hope there’s still some semblance of my sister in there.
“What do they taste like?” I ask this because I’m curious. Her answer makes my curiosity wither like an under-watered tree.
“They’re so gross.” She grimaces like there’s something rotten in her mouth. “I bet you taste a lot better.”
My mouth falls open. I know I should say something, anything, to distract or mollify or dissuade her, but I’ve got nothing. Just pure shock such a statement just came out of my little sister’s mouth.
“I’ll keep eating rabbits for Edward, though. I’m gonna marry him,” Alice muses.
I look at her, and she’s in dreamboat land. It’s all hearts, flowers, and pre-teen fangirl love. Her hard face is soft, and her red eyes are kind of rose-colored, and she’s got this weird grin on her face, making her look like a serial killer contemplating her next victim. She may be acting eighteen, but she still looks like she’s eight. Her chest is flat, and her hips are skinny, and she hasn’t even gotten acne.
“Have you told him this yet?” I ask.
“Yes. He said ok.”
Oh, really?
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