Page 43 of Play Nice

Leda unlocks the door. She opens it just a crack, just enough so we can see her face. There’s a new welt on her forehead. Above her bloodshot eyes is all swollen, black-and-blue. She must have been up against the door when Daphne rammed into it.

She takes a few steps back, her head lolling. Daphne and I cross into the room. It’s arctic in here. I can see my breath.

The tulip lamp is on, emitting a dull pink glow. Shadows crawl up the walls. I check to make sure they don’t have eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Leda says, sitting on the bed. She scratches at her splotchy neck. She’s digging her nails in too deep. “I’m sorry…I…I don’t know what came over me.”

“Leda,” Daphne says, kneeling in front of her.

Leda raises a shaky hand, points to the closet. “Up there.”

There’s a sound. A muffled voice. A man’s voice.

“Is that…Roy?” I ask.

Somehow I’d totally forgotten about Roy again. Wow.

From the look on Daphne’s face, she did, too.

She stands and approaches the closet.

“Daffy,” I say. “Hold on.”

She peers inside. She touches the ladder, running her fingers along the rungs. Her back is to me, so I can’t see her face as she angles it up toward the ceiling.

“Wait,” I say, the word catching in my throat. My eyes frantically scan the room, heart pounding in my chest. “Don’t go up there. It’s up there. That’s where it lives.”

“It’s just Roy,” Daphne says, starting up the ladder.

“Leave him!” I say. “Don’t go up there. Daffy. Stop! I’m begging you.”

She pauses, turns to look at me.

“Please. After everything that’s happened, how do you still not believe me?”

“Daphne,” Leda says. “Don’t.”

“So, what?” Daphne asks, stepping down off the ladder and sitting next to Leda on the bed. “We just leave him up there?”

Before we get a chance to answer, a scraping noise infiltrates the space. Wood against wood. The panel moving aside.

I peek into the closet, look up. “Roy?”

The panel shifts, revealing the dangling head of what was once Roy. His eyes are gone. Scratched or gouged out, caked in gore.

I don’t have the chance to scream. He falls, landing with a thud at my feet.

Leda and Daphne eject high-pitched, terrified wails. Leda jumps up on the bed, but Daphne runs toward me, toward Roy. She flips him over.

He lets out this horrendous yowl, then appears to pass out.

But he’s alive. He’s still alive.

“Help me get him out of here!” Daphne says.

I’m wedged in the corner of the closet, mouth open, eyes wide, body useless. He’d been so handsome.

“Fuck. Leda?” Daphne says, coming around and slipping her arms under Roy’s pits. “Help me!”

“This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. None of this is happening,” Leda says, leaping off the bed and flailing toward us. She gets Roy’s legs and, together, my sisters drag him out into the hall.

With the two of them gone, I stand alone in the closet, gazing up at the dark void.

I climb the ladder.

When I get to the crawl space, it’s exactly as I pictured it, as Mom described it. There’s insulation, white like snow. Cobwebs hanging from the rafters, dancing in a nonexistent breeze. It’s dark and it’s freezing. I can’t feel my face.

Death is strewn everywhere. Motionless flies. Mouse parts. Tiny skulls. Dried-up wads of fur. Tails slithering through the insulation.

But it’s not just carnage. There are photos.

Pictures of Mom, of me and my sisters. Empty bottles of liquor.

A jewelry box—it was Mom’s; I remember admiring it as a kid, seeing it on her dresser.

The cups, our cups. The pineapple cup, the strawberry, the apple.

And there are copies of the book. I count two.

One out of reach, but one just at my feet.

I pick it up. Flip open the front cover.

For my Daffy—

Your kind and gentle spirit inspires me. You may be my daughter, but I’ve always looked up to you.

I hope this book finds its way to you, and I hope you can find it in your beautiful heart to forgive me.

Love forever,

Mom

A sudden creaking startles me. I drop the book, follow the sound. There’s movement. A bulge, a bending where there shouldn’t be. Where the angles of the house should meet clean.

A shape emerges. I watch as it births itself from the rafters, peels free from the wood—sheds its house skin. It hunches in the gable.

It edges closer, its movements graceful.

Don’t look.

I have to look.

So much of my life I’ve been preoccupied with beauty, and this face in front of me erases it all.

Big milky eyes. Red slits for pupils. A gaping, drooling mouth crowded with sharp teeth. A long, slim crimson tongue split like a snake’s.

I wonder if it loves me most because I can see it in all its hideousness, in all its glorious depravity, and I won’t turn away.

“Hello,” I say.

Hello, I said the first night it showed me its form, the first time it came down out of the attic, into my bedroom. The first time I saw it in my closet. I didn’t scream or call for Mom. I just said hello.

The memory reveals itself to me in the demon’s eyes, like two screens playing home movies. All that was lost to me, all that was forgotten. My memories. It kept them for me. Or from me. So I would come back.

Its claws are sharp against my neck. Its split tongue strangely dry as it grazes my cheek. As it licks a rogue falling tear. As it laps up my fear.

It starts to laugh.

I understand why some ears bleed at the sound of this laughter.

It’s not evil. It’s not joyous. It’s a lonely sound.

This being in front of me is what it is, and it cannot change.

It lives in this place amid the damage and the chaos it reaps just by existing, and it breaks my heart because it’s so familiar to me.

I love it and I hate it, and I admire it, aspire to be it, and I resent everything about it that I recognize within myself.

It’s got my hair now. It pulls me deeper into the attic.

Gently, at first. Until I resist.

It wants to keep me here. And maybe I would let it if it weren’t for the sound of my sisters calling my name.

I pull back, and it snarls.

Its pale eyes watch me. They narrow as I struggle.

“Let me go!” I tell it. But my resolve is waning, and it knows. It laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs, and it tightens its grip.

I look around at all the mouse parts, at all the stuff . The photographs, the jewelry box, the bottles. The books. The cups. Why is this shit in the attic?

Did Mom put it up here?

She tried to appease it…She did what she could to keep it happy. If it was content, it would sleep. Go dormant. That’s what Roy said.

My pain kept it occupied. Kept it happy.

I understand now, as the demon drags me into shadow. Mom couldn’t figure out how to beat it, how to exorcise it, so she tried to live with it. Give it everything it wanted. Everything it could possibly want. She played along. Played nice.

“Stop,” I say. “Wait.”

I reach up around my neck, unclasp my necklace, my snake charm.

“For you,” I say, dropping the charm into its claw. “An offering. A gift.”

It closes its fist around the necklace, then leans in close again, its tongue prodding my cheek.

Now is the time to turn on my tears.

It recoils. Spits. Growls.

It knows I’m faking. It can taste it.

My inner rebel is reluctant to give in, but what happens if I don’t? Will it keep me here forever, its claws around my throat?

So when I do start to cry, to really, sincerely cry, I don’t cry for it.

I cry for my mother. I cry for my sisters.

I cry for myself.

I cry for everything it’s taken from me that lives here now. With it. In it.

It drinks until it’s satisfied, laughing again as it retreats into the dark of the attic.

It allows me to climb down the ladder, to replace the panel.

It allows me to leave, but I’m not sure it will ever let me go.

“Clio? Clio! Where are you? Come on.” Daphne.

I find her on the landing. She throws her arms around me and practically pushes me out through the front door, down the wooden stairs to the pathway, to the yard, where Roy is splayed on the weedy grass, arms out wide, legs together, very “Jesus on the cross.”

Leda paces up and down driveway. When we get to her, the three of us embrace, hold each other, as the sirens approach, without saying a word.

—

There are two police cars and an ambulance.

There are neighbors in the street, necks craned.

“Clio?”

It’s Austin. He stands in the middle of the cul-de-sac in his sweatpants and tank top and gold chain.

“Shit! Your face,” he says as I walk toward him.

“You need to work on your sweet talk,” I say.

He runs to me, takes a good look. “Fractured. What happened? I heard the sirens.”

“That is what they’re for. That’s their whole thing.”

He drops his gaze to his shoes. His Vans.

I reach out and pull one of his curls straight. His hair isn’t as springy as mine, but there’s still some satisfaction in it. In touching him again. “I’m sorry. For what I said the other night. You didn’t deserve it. Any of it.”

“No,” he says, “I didn’t.”

“If it helps, I think karma is on your side,” I say, pointing to my massacred face.

“It does, kind of,” he says, laughing a little. A good laugh. A laugh that erases the memory of all other laughs. For a moment. “Hey. Listen…”

“Cli?” Leda calls. She stands next to Daphne and a somber police officer, looking extra tense.

“I should go. I don’t want to keep law enforcement waiting. I know cops are known for their patience, but I pride myself on my manners.”

“Right, right,” he says. “Well…”

“Austin. Would you believe me if I told you the demon was real?” I ask, because I have nothing left to lose.

He takes a beat, runs his hands through his hair. “Um, yeah. I would. I never wanted to say anything, but it’s creepy as shit in there.”

Wow. I love him. I love him. “Maybe I can take you to the diner sometime. We can get disco fries and I can tell you all about it.”

“You know how I feel about disco fries.”

I give him a smile and a wink, even though it hurts.

—