Page 16 of All These Beautiful Strangers

Where his skin should have been was red, raw flesh, as if it had been boiled and stripped. There were two gaping black pits where his eyes should have gone, and the seam of his lips had been stitched together. He tried to move them, his lips straining at the stitches as if he desperately wanted to tell me something, but all that came out was a terrible, painful groan.

I sucked in my breath in horror.

He reached out to grab me and I screamed. I closed my eyes and thrashed against it, the hand on my shoulder, whose grip only tightened and shook me harder.

“Charlie,” a voice said. “Charlie, it’s okay. It’s me.”

I woke with a start. There was a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Leo standing over me, shaking me slightly. I screamed again.

“Easy there, cousin,” Leo said. “It’s just me.”

“I would say that’s a perfectly normal reaction for a girl to have when your face is the first thing she sees when she wakes up,” Drew said. “Don’t act like this is the first time this has happened to you, Leo.”

“Drew, always a pleasure,” Leo said, turning to look at her. “Especially this bright and early in the morning.”

“Bite me,” Drew said.

“Been there, done that,” Leo said.

“Oh, fuck off.”

I sat up in my bed and rubbed my eyes. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. Six thirty a.m.

Drew was standing in the doorway in a robe, her wet hair tied up in a towel. Her shower caddy was slung over one arm.

“How’d you even get in here?” Drew asked.

“You left the door open when you went to shower,” Leo said, shrugging.

“Well, that’s the last time I do that,” Drew said. She set her shower caddy down on the top of her dresser.

“What’s up, Leo?” I asked. My mind felt muddled as I tried to grasp on to the remnants of my dream, which were quickly slipping away. I had dreamed of the house on Langely Lake, of the fight my mother and father had had the day my mother disappeared, of a faceless man with a camera who was trying to tell me something.

Leo sat next to me on the bed. “My first class was canceled,” he said. He reached for the remote on my bedside table and flicked on my TV. Well, technically, it was Leo’s TV. Aunt Grier had refused to let him keep a TV in his room because she thought it would interfere with his studies, so he kept it in my room instead, along with his Xbox. “Wanted to get some Call of Duty in.”

“Get out,” Drew said. “I have to get dressed.”

“By all means,” Leo said. “Go right ahead. Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Drew threw her hairbrush at him. Leo ducked, and the brush clanked against my headboard and fell to the floor.

I held up my hands. “Hey, watch it,” I said. “I don’t want to get hit by friendly fire here.”

“Sorry,” Drew said.

“Can’t you do this later?” I asked Leo.

“Duty, Charlie,” Leo said, holding his controller up and shrugging as if he were powerless. “It calls.”

“Whatever,” Drew said, ripping open the top drawer of her dresser and pulling out a bra and a pair of underwear. “I’ll just get dressed in the bathroom.”

“Oh, wear the black lacy one,” Leo said. “I always liked that one.”

I climbed out of bed before Drew chucked a bottle of hair spray at him on her way out the door.

“Do you have to do that?” I asked Leo as I sorted through my closet for something clean to wear.

“If it were thirty percent less fun, I would try to abstain,” Leo said, his eyes on the TV screen and his fingers working the controller.