Page 28 of Play Nice

After two days, I was able to retrieve my laptop, my jewelry, my clothes, and my fire safe with all my paperwork—passport, tax records, et cetera.

The fire safe was a gift from Dad when I moved in.

He also insisted I get renter’s insurance, which I’m now grateful for.

The damage to my unit was minimal, thankfully. The top units weren’t so lucky.

On the bright side, because of my fiery misfortune, my friends can’t be mad at me for what I said to Kiera.

She’s forgiven me. Or has at least claimed to.

They all took me out to lunch yesterday.

Ethan got me a day pass at a spa. My sisters have been checking up on me.

Aunt Helen sent me cash. Dad called. He offered to come get me, but I said no.

He offered to put me up in a hotel in the city, and I said fine.

I’m coming up on a week in the hotel.

Everything I own—well, everything I could salvage—reeks of smoke.

This room now reeks of smoke.

I can’t stay here forever.

I can leave anytime I want. I don’t live here. If you want to play with me, you have to play nice.

That’s what I said before I left the house. Before I came back to the city and smoked on my roof to alleviate some stress. Before I offered words of encouragement to my idiot neighbor, inadvertently inspiring him to commit arson.

This isn’t the fault of whatever’s there at Edgewood. Not directly. It’s not a coincidence either. It’s cause and effect. It’s distress instigating poor judgment manifesting disaster. It’s how all bad situations get worse. Give in to despair, let your demons win, end up like my mother.

I know better.

“You’re welcome to stay with me,” Austin says. I have him on speaker while I soak in the tub. “Work on your house during the day. Crash here at night. There’s a guest room upstairs, too. If you’d rather.”

“A guest room?”

“I’m giving you options.”

“Interesting,” I say. “Don’t want to live in sin with me? You know, I never took you for old-fashioned.”

“No? What if I am? Let’s get married.”

“Don’t tempt me with a good time.”

“Mom would be thrilled.”

The joke isn’t funny anymore. “I’ll let you know when I figure things out. I have to go.”

I hang up.

The thought of going back to Edgewood terrifies me, makes me forget how to breathe, makes me feel like I’m being constricted, squeezed to death by my own skin. And yet somehow the thought of never going back is even worse.

Because I want to go back. Even if it scares me. Maybe because it scares me.

It occurs to me that I now have an excuse I didn’t have before.

No one could blame me if I were to ditch the renovation project in the wake of this fire.

There’s no pressure for me to finish. When I want to be done, I’ll be done.

I’ll have Leda put the house on the market—tell her I need the money for a deposit on a new apartment. She won’t be able to argue with that.

Part of me still does want to finish, to show them, to spite my sisters, to spite Dad. But we’ll see.

Part of me just needs to know what will happen. How could I walk away now? Just go on living with this half-baked supernatural mystery floating around in the back of my mind. Return to my old life, which seems, unfortunately, far less stimulating post-demon.

I had this boyfriend in high school—Kyle Matheson—who loved to go see horror movies.

He’d pay for the tickets and the popcorn, and we’d make out in his car in the parking lot after, and he was beautiful and a great kisser, so I was game.

I came home late one summer night to my sisters in the upstairs bathroom, Daphne helping Leda color her hair.

“Where have you been?” Leda asked.

“The cinema,” I’d said, flipping my curls over my shoulder for some drama.

“What’d ya see?” Daffy asked.

“An art house film called Cannibal Dinner Party .”

They’d both rolled their eyes. Horror wasn’t the genre of choice among the Barneses, for obvious reasons.

“I don’t know how you could sit through that garbage,” Leda said.

“Kyle likes them,” I’d said, spritzing some perfume to combat the scent of ammonia. “It’s not so bad. They’re fun.”

“I never understood those movies,” Daphne said. “I can’t suspend my disbelief. Like, a bunch of stupid fucking teenagers are, like, there are rumored to be murderous cannibals or ghosts or whatever over there, we should go! Why would anyone do that?”

“Curiosity. Excitement,” I’d said. “I’d go.”

I remember how they looked at me. Like I was crazy.

I shrugged and left the bathroom, understanding there was a fundamental difference between us.

Some people jump out of airplanes, some people backpack alone across Europe, some people climb Mount Everest, some people swim with sharks, some people fuck hot strangers they meet on the street, some people do heroin, chase a high because they know what it’s worth, despite the danger.

And some people sit around thinking, I would never.

Yes, the house scares me. But nothing scares me as much as the idea that I might become one of those tragic, boring, would-never people.

So I pack up my hotel room, drop some things off in my storage unit, and take an Uber all the way to New Jersey. I put it on Dad’s account. I hope he sees where I went.

—

There’s a package waiting on the doorstep when I get to Edgewood.

I take it inside and open it, my back to the wall with the frowning face.

It’s the copy of Mom’s book I ordered. It’s somehow in even worse condition than the copy she left me. The spine cracked, cover frayed. The pages are yellow, and it smells—top note of vomit, base note of BO.

I sit at the dining table and flip through the book, looking for the place where I left off. But I can’t concentrate, can’t focus with the frowning face behind me. I can feel it looking at me.

I change into my painting shorts and T-shirt and then get out my putty knife and some Spackle. I patch the deep gashes in the wall, trying not to think about what made them. Who made them.

I ruin my manicure in the process.

The utility sink in the garage would be useful to wash off my putty knife and scrub the Spackle currently crusting on my cuticles, but I refuse to go back in there after the mouse massacre. I wash my hands in the kitchen sink instead.

I catch a whiff of something rancid, follow my nose to the fridge.

I open it to find guts.

Purple gore.

Jelly. The jar is on its side, lid off. Smeared all over, spotted with fuzzy white mold.

I slam the door shut.

My eyes find the bread on the counter. It’s also covered in mold, so much it’s practically bursting out of the plastic.

It is horrifically humid, but even still, this is a freakish amount of mold. And without Dad, there’s no one to call to clean this up on my behalf.

I tie a bandanna around my face to cover my nose and mouth, and then I toss the bread into a garbage bag, reluctantly move on to the fridge.

I turn on some music while I scrub, but it doesn’t make the experience any more tolerable.

Moldy, sticky, disgusting. I ruin two sponges and go through an entire bottle of lemon-scented Lysol.

The fridge now legitimately sparkles, but as far as I’m concerned, it’ll never be clean again.

When I finish up in the kitchen, I take a long shower. The water temperature fluctuates between piping hot and freezing cold. There’s no comfort to be found, even after I towel off and get dressed and sit on the couch. I’m sweating, then I’m shivering, so I get a blanket, then I’m sweating again.

The humidity reaches its breaking point, and it starts to pour. I get up to close the sliding doors. I pause to watch the rain, listen to the meaty drops pound against the house. It almost conceals the sound. The long dragging footsteps. Almost.

I’m too afraid to turn around.

My eyes peel wide, won’t blink. My neck is stiff. Head stuck. The only part of me that moves are my lips, my teeth, my jaw—they tremble and chatter.

I stare straight ahead at my own reflection in the sliding glass doors. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something else. A silhouette. A shadow beyond me, in the room behind me.

I know this shadow is too big to belong to me, to be mine. And its shape…my brain can’t quite make sense of it.

There’s a flash of lightning, followed by a low rumble of thunder, and in its wake comes quiet. An eerie silence.

I finally turn, slowly, to face the other side of the room.

There’s no one there. Nothing. Except for the book, which is still on the table. Though in a different spot on the table. Maybe. I’m not sure where I left it. I don’t remember.

I walk over and pick it up. It falls open to a section I haven’t read before.

This copy isn’t annotated by my mother.

But it is annotated.

Father Bernard had given me a list of contacts to reach out to, to further inspect the house and corroborate his assessment of demonic possession.

The first call I made was to a team of paranormal investigators out of Baltimore.

They agreed to take the case if I paid for their travel.

I borrowed the money from my sister, not telling her what it was for.

I was embarrassed, ashamed—which was made all the worse when the team arrived a month after my initial call.

Four men with an excessive amount of “equipment,” with muddy boots they didn’t bother to remove.

They trampled through the house, holding up their devices, their toys.

“Well, there’s definitely something here,” one of the men said, pulling up his jeans. “Strongest in that downstairs bedroom. It’s not aggressive enough to be demonic, in my opinion.”

“What do you mean, ‘aggressive’?”

“Demons scratch, bite, gouge. Growl, snarl. It’s more targeted. Demons, they generally possess people, not places.”

WEAR ANY SKIN

WANT HOUSE SKIN

“But Father Bernard said—”