Deadly Little Lies Read online

  “Jealous that I’m going to be a rich and famous fashion designer one day?” Kimmie asks him.

  “A fashion designer for Night of the Living Dead culties maybe.” Wes extends his arms and shuffles his feet to make like the sleepwalking dead.

  Meanwhile, I glance out the window at the street, thinking about tomorrow. Word is Ben’s finally coming back to school after having spent the past four months on his own, following Matt’s arrest.

  “I wonder how Ben will get treated,” I venture.

  Two years before our incident in the parking lot, while on a hiking trip, Ben had touched his girlfriend, Julie, and sensed that she was cheating on him. Unable to control his power, he grabbed her—hard—wanting to know more. Julie pulled away, completely spooked by the urgency of his grip. And though he tried his best to stop her, she ended up tumbling backward off a cliff, and dying almost instantly.

  Ben was devastated after it happened—so much so that he spent his days avoiding touch altogether, afraid of his own powers and what he could sense. For two full years, he barely touched anyone. But then he ended up at our high school, anxious for a somewhat normal life again.

  And that’s when he accidentally touched me.

  “I’m just surprised he’s coming back at all,” Wes says. “I mean, the poor boy was practically ridiculed to death.”

  It’s true. Because of what happened with Julie, everybody at the school—the administration included— couldn’t have made him feel more unwelcome. And so there were countless complaints from parents, havoc wreaked in the form of student pranks, and posers pretending to be victims of Ben’s villainous ways. Nobody was willing to give him a fair chance.

  Including me.

  “I have my own theory as to why he wants to come back.” Kimmie winks at me. “I mean, who voluntarily goes to school for the education?”

  I bite my lip, hesitant to get my hopes up. The last time I saw him, when he kissed me and told me good-bye, he said that we couldn’t be together, that someone like him could never be fully trusted, and that maybe someday I’d understand.

  “I just hope things will go back to somewhat normal between us,” I say.

  “I hate to break this to you, Cam,” Kimmie says, “but last I checked, feeling someone up in an effort to sense clues that could possibly cease the plot of a psycho stalker is hardly the norm.”

  “It’s all in how you look at it, though.” Wes smirks.

  “You could always pretend to be in danger again,” Kimmie suggests. “I could help you draft up a couple good stalker notes.”

  “Except he’d be able to sense it was a hoax,” I say, bursting her balloon with a pin of reality.

  “Not if I seriously plot to kill you,” Wes says, making his voice all sinister. He stabs his brownie with a plastic knife. “I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  “Probation, that’s what,” Kimmie says, referring once again to Matt’s lame-o punishment.

  “The boy got away with barely a bitch-slap,” Wes squawks. “I mean, honestly, you get more for public nudity these days.”

  “Not that you would know,” Kimmie says.

  “Bottom line,” I segue, “at least Matt won’t be coming back to school.”

  “But Ben will,” she sings. “And who knows, maybe he’ll touch you and sense something really hot.”

  “Even hotter than a mad stalker armed with plastic knives?” Wes jokes, continuing to stab at his brownie.

  But all joking aside, I’m just hoping that Ben will talk to me—that he’ll tell me it was him outside my bedroom window last night. And that he misses me just as much as I miss him.

  4

  Later, at home, I sit up in bed and look in the mirror, once again unable to sleep. My normally bright green eyes are dull and bloodshot, and my wavy blond hair is piled high in a bed-head heap. I just can’t stop thinking about what happened the other night.

  I glance out my window at the trees across the street, where I could have sworn I saw Ben. The branches are completely bare, highlighted by the streetlamp. Is it possible that I was only seeing things, that my mind concocted the whole scenario? And yet, when I close my eyes, I can still hear Ben’s voice calling out to me in the basement, and then leading me up to my bedroom.

  “Camelia?” a voice whispers from behind me.

  I startle slightly before realizing it’s my mother. She raps lightly on my open door. “It’s after midnight, what are you doing up?”

  I turn to face her, noticing she’s still dressed in her yoga gear from work. “I could ask you the same.”

  She comes and sits beside me on the bed, failing to mention why she’s awake, especially since she’s usually asleep by ten. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Another restless night, I guess.”

  “You had a rough sleep Friday night too, didn’t you? I thought I heard you get up.”

  “You did?” I ask. “Did you hear anything else?”

  “Like what?” Her eyes narrow.

  “Nothing,” I say, forcing a slight smile.

  “I just think it’s so wonderful that you have your sculpture,” she continues. “It’s important to have an outlet—a way you can express yourself and work through any stress or anxiety. That’s what you did, isn’t it? I thought I heard you retreat down to your studio.”

  “Only for a little while,” I say, as though a short length of time makes a difference—makes the fact that I was up in the middle of the night less alarming.

  “So, how come you’re having trouble sleeping?” She gazes into the mirror at my reflection. Her henna red corkscrew curls are pushed back with a bright blue headband, emphasizing her heart-shaped face.

  I shrug, tempted to tell her about Ben, but I’m not sure how happy she’d be about the possibility of him entering my world again. I mean, yes, it certainly helps that he saved my life—twice now—but still, I’m sure there’s something unsettling to a parent when she hears her daughter is obsessing about a boy who was once tried for murder, regardless of the outcome of that trial.

  “I think I’ll try to go back to sleep,” I lie.

  “Want some chamomile pellets and almond milk first?”

  “No thanks.” I grimace, remembering how the last time she offered me one of her herbal remedies I ended up with a nasty case of hives—and on my ass, no less.

  Mom kisses my forehead and tucks me in, then summons the nighttime fairies to come in through my window and hum a little tune that will lull me to sleep—just like old times.

  I try not to giggle out loud. Instead I close my eyes, but I don’t picture nighttime fairies.

  I picture Ben.

  I turn over in bed and imagine him pulling into our driveway on his motorcycle, knocking on my bedroom window, and leading me outside. In my mind, we ride along the coast, the sea-soaked air tangling the ends of my hair and making my lips taste like salt.

  You’d think this image might relax me, but instead it keeps me up, reminding me of that night, last September, when I couldn’t sleep—when I’d called him just before midnight to come and pick me up. I told him to take us to Knead, the pottery studio where I work, and we ended up kissing for two hours straight, right there on the worktable, the moist and gritty clay lingering on our fingertips and pasted to our skin.

  It still gives me tingles.

  * * *

  As a result of failing to sleep more than two full hours the entire evening, I’m an absolute wreck at school.

  It’s the first block and I’m sitting in pottery class, trying my best to focus on my work—on everything Ms. Mazur’s telling us about the instinct and emotion of a piece—but Kimmie is less than interested, instead lecturing me on my ensemble du jour.

  “I mean, honestly Camelia, a ribbed black turtleneck with a pencil skirt? You’re sixteen, not sixty. I’d have thought you’d choose something with a bit more oomph after four full months of absent longing.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”
r />   “Don’t be sorry for me. It’s you that I’m worried about. That ensemble is more likely to score you a discount at the supermarket on senior citizen’s day than a squeeze from a certain touch boy.”

  “Whatever,” I sigh, refusing to let her get to me.

  “Of course it’s not your fault,” she continues in a hushed tone. “I should have called you this morning to check in about your wardrobe, but my dad had me completely distracted with the shaving of his chest. No joke: he monopolized the bathroom all morning and then had the audacity to leave the floor a hair-infested mess.”

  Kimmie continues to prattle on—something about having to change her tights due to stepping on said hair-infested mess, which then prompted her to change her entire outfit. I nod, trying to keep up, even though I’m much more interested in what Ms. Mazur’s saying. She’s allowing us to sculpt anything we want, so long as it evokes emotion in some conscious and meaningful way.

  “What are you making?” Kimmie asks, rolling her clay into a giant ball.

  I shrug, not really sure. I close my eyes and smooth my fingers over the mass of clay, creating slopes and grooves, trying my best to channel the emotion Ms. Mazur’s talking about. After several minutes, I open my eyes, noticing how it sort of looks like I’m creating the contours of a face.

  I go with it, forming the lids, pupils, and irises. Then I sculpt a box around the eyes, as though someone’s looking through a window.

  “Nice work, Camelia,” Ms. Mazur says, standing over my shoulder. “Very intense.”

  I smile, flattered by the compliment, especially since intensity is precisely what I’m feeling.

  “But is it as intense as the broken stiletto heel of someone who just came down the stairs at the Met?” Kimmie asks, referring to her shoe sculpture.

  “Cute,” Ms. Mazur says.

  “Except I wasn’t exactly going for cute,” Kimmie squawks. “I think ‘tragic’ would be the word that best describes my piece.”

  Ms. Mazur raises an eyebrow and moves on to check out the rest of the class’s sculptures. Meanwhile, I continue to work on my boxed-in eyes. About twenty minutes and a pair of eyebrows later, there’s a crowd gathered around me as Ms. Mazur uses my piece to describe the look of desperation and desire.

  “It’s like the box represents seeing things from the outside in—like being shut out—when all you really want is to be up close.” Lily (peace-loving) Randall rests a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. Her flower-power ring grazes my neck. “Do you ever feel trapped and helpless?”

  “Um, think about who you’re asking,” says Davis Miller, my boy-band neighbor from down the street. “It wasn’t too long ago that the girl was tied up, drugged, and kept captive in the back of an old trailer.”

  “Right,” Lily sings. “Cooooool.” She continues to nod and smile at me, like being trapped is actually a good thing.

  A nervous smirk inches across my lips. I try not to let it morph into a laugh—despite the topic of conversation— but then Kimmie drops her clay shoe to the floor. It lands in a messy thud against the tile.

  “Holy crap!” she gasps.

  But she isn’t talking about her shoe.

  She grabs my arm and whirls me around to face the door. It takes me a moment, but then I notice a pair of eyes staring right at me through the door’s glass. You can’t see his face, only his eyes.

  Just like my sculpture.

  “That is so wacky,” Lily says, still nodding.

  “It’s like that weird key sculpture thing you were talking about,” Kimmie reminds me.

  I nod, trembling at the mere coincidence. I recognize the eyes right away. Dark gray, wide, and intense.

  There’s no doubt in my mind—they’re Ben’s.

  5

  I tell Ms. Mazur that I need to be excused to use the bathroom. But by the time I get out into the hallway, Ben is no longer there.

  Instead I see John Kenneally, Kimmie’s former crush, coming out of the physics lab.

  “Hey,” he says, nodding in my direction.

  I reluctantly make my way over to say hello, the giant hallway pass—a life-size replica of a toilet plunger that a former student carved in wood shop—clutched against my work apron.

  “So, how was your vacation?” he asks.

  “Okay,” I say, still looking around for Ben.

  “Just okay?” He proceeds to fill me in on his vacation: how he had basketball practice every other day, a party to go to every single night, and back-to-back dates to fill up his weekends. “So many hearts, so little time, I tell you. The work of a heartbreaker is never done.”

  I resist the urge to stick my finger down my throat, and turn to gaze over my shoulder, wondering if maybe Ben has a free period this block—maybe he was coming from the library.

  “Is everything okay?” John runs a hand through his dark blond hair, which is much longer and shaggier than last I noticed, like maybe he’s going through some wannabe rocker phase even though he’s a jock.

  “Did you happen to see Ben come this way?” I ask.

  “Ben? As in Killer Ben?” His brown eyes widen.

  I give a reluctant nod, since I honestly don’t feel like getting all defensive right now.

  “He doesn’t go here anymore,” John says, like I’ve been living under a rock for the past several months.

  “No,” I correct him. “He’s coming back this term. At least, that’s what I heard.”

  “For real?” He smiles. “That guy’s got some big ones, huh? If I were him, I wouldn’t show my face within a thousand-mile radius of this place.”

  “So you didn’t see him?” I snap.

  “Come on, Camelia, didn’t you have enough fun with your stalker-ex last term? You really need to go hanging out with full-blown killers?”

  “Forget it,” I say, gripping my bathroom-pass-plunger and moving down the hallway.

  In the bathroom, I stand at the sink and splash some cold water onto my face. It’s not John Kenneally that’s got me so unhinged—at least it’s not only him. I know he just speaks for the masses—that there are dozens who’ll say something similar the moment they see me talking to Ben. What I don’t know is why Ben’s being all mysterious, first allegedly outside my house, now for certain outside my classroom.

  I take a deep breath and try to get a grip. A second later, there’s a knock on the bathroom door. I ignore it at first. But then there’s another knock, even louder this time.

  I glance in the direction of the sound, but from where I’m standing, I can’t see anything. There’s a wall that separates the sink area from the door.

  I turn back around, but the knocking continues. It sounds like someone’s beating on the door with their fist.

  I grab the bathroom pass and take a couple steps toward the door, but then I hear something else. The door creaks open. I hear the hinges whine, but I still can’t see.

  And then the lights go off and everything goes black.

  Frozen in place, I wait to hear something else, wondering if someone’s come inside. I open my mouth to call out hello, but no sound comes out.

  I step forward, the hall pass positioned like a baseball bat, ready to swing. “Who’s here?” I shout.

  No one answers.

  “I know you’re here.” I swipe at the air, moving toward the door, but nothing interrupts my path. And so I reach out in search of the light switch on the wall. My fingers rake over the cold, hard bricks, unable to find the switch. Instead I find the doorknob and go to tear the door open, but it doesn’t budge.

  Like someone’s locked me inside.

  I pull and twist the knob with all my might, but it’s no use. I let out a scream and start pounding at the door. No one comes. And there’s a broken-glass feeling in my chest when I breathe.

  I take a step back, trying to keep focused. The faucet drips behind me, a monotonous ping that echoes through my brain.

  After a few moments, I try searching for the light switch again. This time I find it a
nd flick it on, relieved to see that I’m alone. But then I notice a folded piece of paper at my feet. Someone must have slipped it under the door.

  I reach down to grab it, my head feeling suddenly woozy. Using the wall as support, I unfold the note. The words IT ISN’T OVER YET! stab right through my heart and shake me to the core.

  6

  The knob finally turns and I’m able to open the door. I hurry down the hallway, the note crumpled in my hands. A second later, the bell rings. The hallway fills. And my pulse continues to race. I push through the crowd and head straight to the guidance office.

  Ms. Beady’s door is partially closed, but I go in anyway. “I need to talk to you,” I say, even though she’s on the phone.

  “Hold on a minute,” she says into the receiver. “Camelia, can’t this wait until after lunch?”

  I shake my head and she pauses a moment to study me, noticing maybe how I look like I’m about to blow. Finally she tells the person she’s talking to that she’ll have to call them back.

  “You can’t just come charging in here without knocking first,” she says once she hangs up. “That was an important call.”

  “Yeah, well, this is important too.”

  She gestures for me to sit in one of the two vinyl chairs facing her desk. “What’s going on?” she asks.

  “I should be asking you the same thing,” I say, standing firmly in place.

  Her eyebrows furrow like she doesn’t have a clue.

  “He’s back,” I snap. “You told me he was expelled. You told me I’d be safe here.”

  “Wait,” she says, tucking a strand of her mousy brown bob behind her ear. “Slow down. I assume you’re talking about Matt.”

  “Was there some other student recently on trial for kidnapping and assault with a dangerous weapon?”

  “Matt isn’t here,” she says. “He was expelled. You should feel secure in knowing that he won’t be back.”

  “He is back.” I toss the note onto her desk.