Grim and Darling

Chapter Eleven

Dear Self,

Your mother’s favorite story to tell about your birth was the one where she asked the nurses to give you away, or lose you on purpose. To switch you at the very least.

She wanted a prettier baby, a quieter baby. One not so skinny. Or loud.

Or real.

You were an oops. That kind of oops you don’t even realize happened until it’s too late, and suddenly there’s a human inside of you. The kind of slip that’s really just a split second, and suddenly you’re growing hair and teeth and brain cells and in ten months or so, you’ll be responsible for keeping it alive. Alice was another oops, but by the time she came along, the deal had already been broken. There was more fighting than friendly family dinners. Your mother had started sleeping down the hallway in the impending nursery long before the new baby arrived. Your dad spent more time hunting than home, more time fishing than being a father. You spent most of your time under the back porch with the dirt and the worms building castles out of the soft dark dirt.

That was your first really bad idea because you got some sort of weird rash on your knees that spread down your legs, and by the time you worked up the courage to tell anyone about it, you looked like you’d stood in a bonfire for a few seconds too long. It took almost six months of antibiotics and some green smelly salve to clear it all up.

A few months later, you tried to become a mermaid and ended up flooding the upstairs bathroom, which in turn flooded the downstairs living room and short circuited the fancy flat screen television your dad had just bought himself to watch baseball on. The house got new carpet, new drywall, new curtains, your dad got another new tv. You got grounded for almost a month.

The next year, you played dress-up with the cat and accidentally strangled it when it tore out of the house wearing a tiny pink doll dress printed with yellow flowers and trimmed with a lacy collar that got caught up in a barbed wire fence. You set your tree house on fire a week later trying to hold a funeral for the cat, toppling one of the candles you stole from the pantry, the ones that were supposed to be saved for the nights when the northwest storms blew through and knocked out the power. It took three days for anyone to actually notice the charred remains in the old sycamore out back, but when they did, your parents grounded you. Again. This time for two months.

In seventh grade, you decided to drive to Port Angeles at midnight because you’d eaten the last of your dad’s special ice cream, and he’d be so mad when he got home from the double he was pulling down at the station that fear got you behind the wheel of the old station wagon. You sat on a pillow to see over the dash and drove halfway there with the parking brake on before you figured out how to disengage it. You spent every last dime of your allowance and even needed to scrounge the car for a few quarters to make up the difference. You got pulled over for speeding on the way back. By him. Grounded. Three months.

You wore black lipstick to school and never lived it down. You tried out for the cheerleading team and never lived it down. You won an art contest with a drawing of a sad girl in a puddle of blood and never lived it down. Most of your high school career was one big long first-hand account of the acute kind of humiliation that only teenagers can inflict on other teenagers. Gitmo doesn’t have shit on high school. Waterboarding, isolation, all that shit was small potatoes compared to the bathroom interrogations, and the locker room beatings, and the hallway gauntlets. Problem was, most of it was your own fault. You could have flown under the radar, could have just slunk through the building and not made eye contact and sat in the back with your head in your books and then gotten the fuck out of there with a little bit of your integrity intact but, for some reason, you couldn’t seem to do that. It’s like you invited it, the lipstick and the tryouts and the bloody artwork.

Not to mention the sleepwalking.     

Your entire life has been one big bad idea.

But your worst idea yet?

Falling for this guy.

First of all, you don’t know anything about him. He might not have a job. He definitely doesn’t have a car. He can run too fast and drink too much, and you’ve never seen him eat anything. What if he hates peanut butter? That’s a deal breaker in your book. What if he loves his mother? You’re not sure you know how to even do that anymore, and what if that’s a deal breaker for him? What if he’s addicted to drugs? What if he deals the drugs? What if he reads books by Nietzsche and Proust? What if he hates the fact that you spend your nights reading smutty fanfiction and scrolling through Tumblr, instead of educating your brain? What if his favorite time of day is the middle of the night, and he finds out that’s usually when you’re fast asleep, walking somewhere?

What if everything about him clashes with everything about you? That could be a problem.

But the biggest problem?

You don’t know how to like someone.

You have no experience with this. Even having a crush on someone is kind of like rowing yourself out into the middle of the ocean and closing your eyes to spin your little boat all around, then using just your nose to row yourself home. You’re gonna end up in China. Or Australia. Or the friggin’ Antarctic before you make it back to the place you started.

Plus, who wants to spend weeks at sea in a tiny rowboat with nothing but sun and sharks and seaweed?

Yours Truly,

You

---

Later, when Edward was standing in my doorway about to leave me alone in my big empty house to spend an entire night by myself, I’m not wondering where I’m going to wake up later. I’m not wondering what I’ll have to do to keep myself awake all night. I’m not wondering why my heart feels so faint or my head feels so heavy or my stomach feels like it’s full of the entire ocean and all of its millions of riptides.

I’m wondering what it would feel like to let myself like him.

“What are you staring at?” I ask him.

“Your face.” He licks his lips and blinks twice and still doesn’t take his eyes off of me.

“I hate my face,” I grumble.

“Funny, that’s the part about you I like the best.”

When he says it, so easy like it’s natural, like he wasn’t even thinking about trying to keep it a secret, my heart jams itself so hard up into my throat that I have to fight back the urge to choke when he reaches a hand out in my direction. I rip my eyes off his face, and it’s just his fingertips reaching for me, the ridges in his skin and the nails he has trimmed down neat and short and square, the cuff of his shirt peeking from beneath the arm of his suit and then his hand is on my cheek, and I finally look up at him.

He’s pretty fucking beautiful, really.

Beautiful like the multicolored rainbow of a ten million gallon oil spill.

Beautiful like the triple trillion heat of a space swallowing nebula.

“May I?”

For a moment, I can’t believe he actually asked. Do people even do that anymore? Ask like that? I’m almost certain that I know what he’s going to do. Kiss me. Kiss my mouth, press his lips to mine, and I’m wondering cliche romance novel things like whether he’ll taste like oranges or smell like cedar. Whether he’ll steal a simple peck or if he’ll lick the seam of my lips to get me to open to him in a real, full-blown tongue tangle. Whether he’ll put his hand on my waist or his fingers through my belt loops or if he’ll slip up underneath my shirt and it’s then that I remember that I forgot to wear a nice bra today, so I’m really hoping he doesn’t do that.

But then he just comes in at my forehead.

A kiss. To my forehead.

“I have to go,” he says, just far enough away that I can feel the sweep of his cold lips against my skin.

“Where?”

“Home. I have a… uh… a guest.”

“Someone is visiting your haunted house?” I step back. Furrow my brows. It’s not his hesitant voice or the fact that he’s not looking at me, because he never really does. It’s not the shuffle in his feet or the downcast of his chin. It’s the fact that he is actually living at the old haunted house out on Hollow Road, and now he has a visitor.

“Sort of.” He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing right there in front of my eyes, and just before I find the thump of his pulse beneath his skin, he’s gone. Off the porch and out of sight and my thousands of tiny bad ideas are slowly blooming into one big giant weed of a crush on this guy who just kissed my forehead.

Next

AN:

Thank you for joining me here.

And thank Hadley Hemingway for basically being the best thing to ever happen ever in the history of ever.

Grim and Darling

Chapter Nine

“I’m going to Seattle tomorrow.” Dad keeps looking at his spaghetti when he says this, like he’s embarrassed to admit it or something. I knew it was coming. He’s been staying late after work, and that always means he thinks he’s found a lead. That guy he told me about… That guy must be more than just a lead for him to pick up and go investigate him.

“That guy?” I ask, spinning my own spaghetti.

“Yeah. I think I’m on to something.” He shoves a giant forkful in his mouth, almost as if it will keep him from having to say any more. He gets sauce in his mustache.

“Who is he?” I stab my spaghetti a little harder.

“Works the shipyards.” Dad shrugs and gulps and spins more spaghetti around his fork. Spins and spins and spins.

“That’s it?” I stare at him, waiting for him to quit it with the endless spinning and just tell me something substantial already. I wish I could tell him about all my investigations, the locals that I trailed. Part of me wants to think that maybe he would take me seriously and start including me in his searches, but I know that he’ll just tell me to leave that job to the professionals and pay attention in school instead.

Dad shrugs. “He was seen in Port Angeles the day before the… ” His eyes dart toward the living room, and he clears his throat. “Anyway, will you be ok for a night?”

He wants me to stay here.

Alone.

“Sure,” I mutter and stab, stab, stab with a shaky hand and tears in my eyes.  

---

I’m at the park that afternoon keeping an eye on Stephanie Felice when I see Edward again.

Stephanie is a senior at my school. She plays varsity volleyball and varsity basketball and runs first string track and sits second flute in band. She volunteers to tutor middle school kids in math every Saturday and works one day a week at the nursing home pushing old ladies around the gardens in their wheelchairs, pretending to be their granddaughter. She walks her little brother home from school every day and picks up trash along the highway with her youth group every summer. She has curly blonde hair and big blue eyes and long, long legs and could probably be Barbie’s little sister.

Basically, she’s perfect.

I hate her.

I’m pretty sure that she murdered my sister. I have absolutely no evidence, no reason to even suspect her really, but I’m almost convinced. People that good, people that perfect? Their demons are bigger and darker and hidden even deeper. I’ve been trailing her around for weeks now, and I know, I just know, that at any moment she’s gonna crack, and I’ll finally get some proof.

What that proof will be, I have no idea.

It’s when I’m darting behind another tree to get a little closer that I see Edward. I gasp and stumble and go down to my hands and knees in the grass, scraping my skin and bruising my pride, and Stephanie looks over at me with her pretty, perfect face full of concern, that bitch.

“Are you ok?” she asks, and I grumble and huff and mutter to myself as I stand and brush the dirt off my legs. Both of my knees are bleeding. Don’t even ask about my pride.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I hiss, then glare over at Edward. He’s standing beneath a tree on the far side of the park with his hands in the pockets of that same limp suit, and he looks no better than the last time I saw him. Still pale. Still shadowed. Still slumped. He’s shaking his head at me like he disapproves, and I stomp over to him, ignoring the screaming kids running between us.

“Leave me alone.”

“I’m not bothering you,” he says, still shaking his head, but his mouth is almost smiling.

“Yes. Yes, you are. You’re following me.”

“Like you’re following that girl?” He looks over at Stephanie just as she brushes the sand off her brother and kisses his cheek and then they’re off, holding hands like they always do, headed home like a goddamn Lifetime movie, and did I mention how much I hate that girl?

“She murdered Alice,” I tell him, completely convinced of it.

“No. She didn’t.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “You know that how?”

“I just do.” He shrugs and doesn’t meet my glare, and I resist the urge to kick him in the shin.

“You are the most frustrating person I know.”

“Probably not,” he says, staring down at me. “You’re alone tonight?”

I narrow my eyes at him. “How did you know that?”

He ignores my question. “Will you be ok?”

“I’m not a child.”

One, just one, of his eyebrows rises high into his forehead. He says nothing.  

“Ok, fine, I’m legally still a child, but I can sleep alone.”

“That’s not what I asked. I asked if you would be ok.”

“I’ll be fine,” I mutter, even though just the thought of a night alone in that house has my heart fluttering like a hummingbird on speed and my blood pumping fast enough to make my vision go fuzzy. My palms are clammy. My knees are weak. I can’t even feel the earth beneath me, and I have to swallow a few times to wet my mouth because I’ve dried up like a desert.

“I’ll come by to check on you,” he says.

“Don’t bother.”

Next

AN:

Two for one tonight. Because I'm nice like that.

Hop over to Facebook and tell Hadley Hemingway she's the shit. That girl deserves parades and diamonds, none of which I can afford.

Grim and Darling

Chapter Eight

Edward lets me keep the knife.

It’s stupid, bringing it home, but there’s a riptide of morbid curiosity barreling through me. Now that I know that I stabbed someone with it, I can’t let it go. I really want to ask him if I could see the scar, but I’m way too embarrassed to actually do such a thing. Instead, I just trudge along behind him back through the forest. We sit on the porch in the dark, and I spin that knife in my hands while he glares off across the yard.

“Sorry for stabbing you,” I say.

Edward just shrugs like it was no big deal, like people stabbed strangers every day. Like it was normal or something.

“You couldn’t hurt me even if you tried,” he wheezes.

“Why did I do it?”

“I scared you. It was an accident.”

I peek at him out the corner of my eye, trying to imagine what it was like, sinking the blade into him. I wonder if I hit a bone or an intestine. Maybe I’d managed sheer stupid luck and slid it into the slim centimeter of space where nothing important was in the way, just like that girl on the highway a few years back. A big iron pole from a construction vehicle burst through her windshield and pinned her to the seat when it went through her chest. It missed her heart by millimeters. Missed her lung by even less. She was a miracle.

Maybe he was too.

“Where did you come from?”

“A different century,” he sighs and drops his chin to his chest. I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or just being sarcastic. He must hear me huff because he shakes his head and says, “Alaska.”

“So, you’re on vacation?”

“No, I live here.”

“I’ve never seen you.” I rack my brain for him but come up empty, which is weird. Small towns like this make strangers impossible to miss. How this guy with his sick face and his wheeze and that assassin suit could go unnoticed, I don’t understand.

“I own a house here,” he says.

“Where?”

“Out of town. Down the 101, on Hollow Road. ”

There’s only one house out that way, and it’s haunted. At least that’s the rumor. I haven’t seen the actual house, but I know the driveway is barely a driveway, overgrown and shadowed and not much more than a hole in the dense forest that borders the highway. Half the town would tell you that an entire family was murdered there. The other half claims that the family murdered each other.

“I thought that house was haunted,” I mumble.

Edward laughs. A hard, rough laugh that catches in his throat.

“You have no idea.”

Next

AN:

I am a mess, but Hadley Hemingway fixes me up. I cannot thank her enough.

Thank you for reading.

bzzzzzzzz

Grim and Darling

Chapter Seven

I’m home alone when the doorbell rings.

The panic is immediate. There are too many exits. Too many entrances. Too many people who might be too curious, too drunk, or too angry, and they could come knocking with the taste of too much vengeance on their tongues. The backwoods raving lunatics determined to right a wrong, home-brewed moonshine in their bellies and the rage of a thousand scared townsfolk singing through their veins. The suburban helmet heads in their minivans and their herringbone, their baby monitors in their back pockets, and the numbers to their security systems programmed into their cell phones.

The teachers who should have seen me coming.

The classmates who knew it all along.

It could be anyone.

I tiptoe through the house and slink up to the peephole, but it’s not a backwoods anarchist, or a suburban housewife, or even a concerned citizen. It’s not Mr. Welburn with his fuzzy grey hair and that wrinkle between his eyes, on the hunt for blood. It’s not Stephanie Walsh with her nose in the air and her cheerleading skirt rolled up two extra inches, searching for rumors. It’s not old Mrs. Franklin with her ugly toy poodle and her gout, looking for gossip.

It’s a guy in a suit who looks likes he’s prepared to sell me a vacuum. Or god.

“I’m not home!” I yell through the door and watch him startle through my fisheye view. He looks hard right at the peep hole, and I swear he can see me through it.

“Yes. Yes, you are,” he says simply.

He looks sick. Like terminal sick. Like his blood cells stopped working, and he’s been surviving on air and not much else. Like he caught some weird disease that snatches away the color in his eyes and leaves him hunched over, pale as snow. His hands are shaky, and his cheeks are hollow, and his eyes are empty and dark. He’s dressed in a suit that looks limp and heavy, hanging off his shoulders. Tie loose. Buttons undone. Shirt wrinkled.

Young and half-dead and beautiful.

“Let me in, Bella Swan.”

When he says it, my name, my heart grinds to a stuttering halt. My blood freezes. My skin goes creepy-crawly cold. I don’t even have time to wonder how he knows it before I’m flinging the door open, trying to look bigger than I am. I straighten my spine and throw my chin up and stick my chest out like I don’t actually weigh just a hundred odd pounds. Like I’m a thousand pounds of gravity. A million pounds of concrete. A zillion tons of earth. The unbearable weight of the universe, not some girl with bird bones or paper skin or a heart like a helium balloon.

His nostrils flare.

“What do you want?”

“Let me in,” he says, his voice as rough and worn and as tired as his face.

“I don’t even know your name. I’m not stupid,” I hiss.

“Edward.”

I wait for it, but he doesn’t offer up anything more.

“That’s it? Just, Edward?”

He nods, only once, and he still hasn’t blinked.

“Well, just Edward, I don’t need a vacuum. Thanks, anyway.” I step back and start to shut the door, but then his hand is splayed across the wood next to my face, and the door is stationary, and all I can think is that his skin smells like the very middle of the forest where the oldest trees grow.

“I’m not selling anything.”

“I don’t need Jesus either,” I say.

“Come with me.”

Before I can turn to run, flee, scramble away, he has a hand around my wrist and has dragged me clear out of the house. I’m off the porch, into the grass, my bare feet fumbling along behind him in an effort to keep up. He is fast, despite looking so sick, but his hand is freezing cold, and he’s breathing hard with a wheezing sound in his throat that cannot be healthy. He marches up to the edge of the forest where the elderberry and the sumac stand shoulder to shoulder, like the front line of an army defending something that you think is big and grand but is really only small and meek, and maybe not even worth defending. It’s not raining, but the fog is so thick you could slice through it. Even from a few feet away, standing staring off into the trees, he looks like a shadow.

“I’m not going in there with you.” I halt, wrenching myself out of his grip, my hands shaking. I’m sure, really sure, that he’s going to take me into that dark forest and pull some self-righteous revenge-killing on me. He doesn’t look like a housewife, or a backwoods hillbilly. In that suit, he looks like a goddamn assassin.

“Is that so?” He’d probably deny it, but I swear to god he’s laughing at me.

“No fucking way. You’re gonna take me in there and beat me to death and then bury me under a tree. They’ll never even find me.”

“I have no intention of doing that.” He licks his lips, the inside of his mouth red against his sickly skin, eyes all over my face. He takes a step closer, a hand floating shaky out toward me. “You’re giving up too easily,” he says.

“What?” I stammer. He’s too close, too stern, and too strong. It’s making my head spin funny. All I see is the flash of his hand near my face, and then he’s pulling me through the forest faster than my feet can keep up with. A blind stumble through the trees with my hand held tight in his, and there is no warmth coming up through his bones. There is no give to his skin, no take from his muscles. No flush or thump or breath. He skids to a halt, dropping me into the leaves beneath a gnarled tree before I even have time to wonder what all that means.

Edward looks up at the sky for a moment, breathing steady and slow, until he’s no longer wheezing. Even still, his chest doesn’t move, and his eyes don’t blink, and he’s not even flushed from running through the woods like that. I turn red just walking up my stairs.

“Dig.” He turns to point at the ground between my knees, tone oddly bland like he didn’t just run me out into the middle of the woods to kill me.

“Are you serious?” My mouth drops open.

“Deadly.” He isn’t even looking at me, and I’m not even remotely gonna do that.

“No.”

Edward scowls at me. “It’s about Alice.”

I gulp and shove my hands into the loam. My fingers push through the wet and damp and cold, and I try to ignore the rotten egg smell that drifts up from between my knees with each handful I push aside. Try to ignore the skittering feet of insects and the wet slime of worms. Blindly digging and digging and digging until he tells me to stop by pushing me aside. I scramble to my feet, my legs covered in dirt and my hands caked in mud, to watch him finish the job. Edward pulls something from the hole and brushes off the mud, the dull glint of metal in the moonlight.

“What is it?” I ask, peering around his shoulder. He holds it up, a sharp blade with a wooden handle that looks oddly familiar. I feel the sink in my stomach before he even tells me what it is.

“This is the knife you stabbed me with. I buried it here.”

Next

AN:As ever, Hadley waves her wand over this and then I usually fuck it all up again tweaking things at the last minute. 

Any and all mistakes are mine.

Thank you for reading.<3

Grim and Darling

CHAPTER SIX

Dear Self,

You wake up in Mrs. Sherman’s flower bed with your mouth tasting of metal.

You are cold, and shivering, and slimey. In the damp light from the window, you can see a speckle of wet across your arms and hands, and when you wipe your face, your palms come back glistening. Inky black, but you know it’s not ink. For all you know, you are the blood-battered hostage of a war. The gutted victim of a homicide. The bystander to a triple takedown.

But you don’t know anything.

All you know is your mouth tastes horrible, and you need to get home.

There are roses around your ears and violets between your fingers, and you’ve crushed her peonies beneath your feet. You can hear her from the house, the off-key singing she does because she’s still stuck in a youth spent chasing a Broadway dream that died somewhere in the Midwest with a positive pregnancy test and a bad case of deadbeat dad. She was probably wearing that see-through robe and smoking those black cigarettes, indulging her drinking problem with a mixture of gin and whiskey She was probably inspecting every wrinkle in the mirror, pulling her temples back, and her chin up, and her lips tight over her teeth.

She was probably going to come outside in the morning and flip her shit over her ruined flower bed.

You duck through the darkened yard, avoiding the glow from the windows like some dark nocturnal creature. Mrs. Sherman lived on the complete opposite side of town, and it’s kind of amazing that you made it this far without getting picked up by the cops. Thank god for that, because you’re only wearing a bra and a pair of sweatpants, and you’re fucking freezing. You hop fences and run down alleyways to get home, hiding behind some especially smelly trash cans when one of those cop cars rolls slowly by. You scare a cat that screeches beneath someone’s porch and fling yourself into the dark when the living room light bursts on. You get caught up in a wild morning-glory bush that’s eating up a fence you scrambled over, and you end up trailing flowers all the way back to your house.

You should have known something was wrong.

You should have known.

Even from the end of the driveway, the house felt hollow. Like the space in a bowl waiting to be filled, like the see-through squares of a window, suddenly empty, and nothing more. You should have known the moment you stepped through the door, but you don’t. You don’t notice anything out of place until you make it to the kitchen, and you slip. Your feet go out from underneath you, and you land knees and palms in a puddle of something wet and warm and thick. You stand, unsteady, feet still slipping, and reach for the lightswitch.

The kitchen floods with a weak yellow glow from the ancient overhead light, and you can’t move. You can’t blink. Can’t breathe. Can’t feel your heart, or your skin, or your eyes. Can’t cry, or swallow, or sob. You can’t even scream. You drop your eyes to your feet, and you don’t look up. Reaching blindly for the old rotary phone on the wall with the long curly cord, you press the phone to your ear as the panic starts to rise. You wait with something concrete blooming in your throat and weight like a hurricane sitting on your breastbone, and when the line clicks on and his gruff voice comes through the speaker, you lose your shit entirely.

You can only whisper even though you feel like screaming.

“Dad?”

Sincerely,

Me

NEXT

AN:

*falls down at the alter of Hadley Hemingway*