Page 21 of The Intruder

No. No.

I did not just kill someone. That did not just happen.

I stare down at Devin’s body and the small pool of blood forming under his skull, a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Except then he groans and shifts slightly on the ground.

“Oh,” Anton says. “I guess he’s still alive.”

He sounds disappointed. He draws back his Nike sneaker and kicks Devin as hard as he can in the ribs. Devin groans louder.

“Come on,” Anton says to me. “We better get out of here.”

“You’re the one he’s mad at,” I point out.

He rolls his eyes at me. “Yeah, and you think he’s going to be thrilled with you after you slugged him with a rock? Come on, Ella.”

When I don’t start moving on my own, he grabs me by the arm, and then we run for it.

We get out of the park, and even after, we are still sprinting to get as far from Devin as we possibly can.

Anton was right—it was smart to run. Devin may not be dead, but he’s probably pissed off, and also, he has a knife.

When we finally stop running, Anton grabs his side, wincing.

Now that we are in the light, I can see how badly he’s hurt—Devin really messed him up bad.

His right eye is starting to swell, and so is his nose.

There’s blood all over the lower half of his face, both from his nose and his split lip, and it’s staining the entire front of his gray T-shirt.

He sticks his index finger in his mouth and flinches. “I think he cracked one of my teeth.”

“That sucks.”

“Sucks more for him.” Anton grins at me with bloody teeth, even though it must hurt a lot with his lip split open like that. “That was awesome, Ella. Thanks.”

Today is the first day he’s called me anything but Smella in the whole time I’ve known him.

“Well, it wasn’t fair,” I mumble. “He had a knife, and you didn’t.”

“Yeah, you don’t know that guy like I do. He’s a complete psycho. I don’t know what the hell he would’ve done if you hadn’t come along.” Anton shudders as he wipes his bloody nose with the back of his sleeve. “Shit, I’m a mess. I gotta get cleaned up. You live around here?”

“Yes,” I answer without thinking before I realize I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”

I stare at him. “Go where?”

“Go to your house. To, like, use your sink and shit.”

I don’t want Anton at my house. It’s out of the question. I don’t want anyone at my house, but definitely not him. “Sorry, I can’t have visitors.”

“Come on, Ella.” He frowns. “If my dad sees me like this, he’s going to kill me. Please can I use your sink for two minutes?”

The way he says it, I get the feeling he’s not just being dramatic. That if his dad sees him beaten up like this, he’s going to be in bad, bad trouble. I know the feeling.

“Fine,” I agree. “But just use the bathroom and then you have to leave right away. Okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m not planning to move in or anything.”

Anton walks next to me as we travel the remaining few blocks to my house.

The whole time, I can’t shake the awful feeling in my stomach.

What is he going to say when he sees my house?

It’s bad enough that he already tells everyone at school that I smell.

What is he going to say to the other kids when he sees what the inside of my house looks like? Everyone will know.

Maybe if I can get him in and out really quick, he won’t notice.

Oh, who am I kidding? He’d have to be blind and stupid not to notice. I should have just let him get stabbed.

When we finally get to my block, my palms are slick with sweat at the thought of Anton coming into my house. But what can I do? He’s still oozing blood out of his nose and lip, and there’s no way he’s going to walk all the way home like that when I live right here.

We pass Mrs. Fleming’s house first. It’s dark inside.

A few days after I took out her trash, she slipped and fell during the night, and she hit her head really badly.

She’s in the hospital now, and they’re not sure she’s going to get better.

In other news, I’ve had money for lunch for the entire week.

“This is me,” I say when I get to our house.

It is the tiniest one on the block, built specially to rent to a low-income family—us.

It looks fine on the outside though. My mom is careful about stuff like that, because she doesn’t want to attract attention.

But people aren’t completely stupid. They know about us.

Anton follows me up the steps. I almost want to tell him to close his eyes, but he’s not going to do that. Better to stick to my plan and just get him in and out.

My mom shouldn’t be home now, although I almost wish she were, because that would be an excuse not to let Anton inside.

Instead, I stick my key into the lock and ease the door open.

All those plastic bottles are still in the garbage bag behind the door, so I can’t get it open all the way but enough for us to slip through.

As soon as Anton steps into my foyer, he stops short.

His eyes widen for a moment as he takes it all in.

Our couch made of mattresses and also the other mattress propped up on the wall next to the “couch.” The papers stacked in piles on the floor and even going up the entire length of the stairs.

The rolls of toilet paper stacked next to the bathroom.

The twenty or so pencil holders on the coffee table, each one packed with pens and pencils.

Eight ashtrays. Four boxes of never-opened Tupperware.

I’m dying inside. This is so embarrassing.

“Bathroom is over there,” I mumble, pointing in the general direction. I’m sure he’ll find it.

“You got soap in there?”

I almost laugh at the question. We have so much in our bathroom we could theoretically never buy soap again for the rest of our lives, although I’m sure in a week or two, my mom will come home with a few more bars.

The entire cabinet under the sink is stuffed with soap in every single form. I just give him a tight nod.

Anton picks his way to the bathroom. It takes him a few seconds to find the little trail we use to get from the front door to the bathroom, through the papers and my mother’s other junk.

We have a lot of little trails like that, or else we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere.

He nearly trips on a clothing rack near the wall, but he makes it.

When the door shuts behind him, I let out a breath.

I hover at the bathroom door, listening to the water running inside.

Anton is probably cleaning his face, but he’s still got blood all over his shirt that won’t wash off.

He’ll probably want a fresh T-shirt that isn’t covered in blood, except anything that belongs to me or my mom would be too small for him.

But I’m pretty sure my mom never threw out any of the clothing Chip left behind, and if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably in the basement.

But that would mean I have to go down to the basement—my least favorite place in the whole house.

The water is still running in the bathroom, and I figure it’s better to grab the shirt now so I can get Anton out of here as quick as possible.

With some effort, because the floor is such a disaster, I locate the trail that leads to the basement door.

I haven’t been down in the basement in a long time—not since the washer broke.

I crack open the basement door. It’s just as bad as I feared. Maybe even worse. Now that the washer is broken, my mom has been dumping all the clothing down here to wash at some future date that will never come. As a result, every inch of the floor is covered in clothing; it’s even on the stairs.

I don’t know how I’m going to find a T-shirt in this mess. But I’ve got to try.

I wade through the sea of clothes, which mostly belong to my mom, although some of it is mine.

Some of it isn’t the right size for either of us or anyone who has ever lived in this house, and I’m not sure why we have it.

My mom keeps insisting we’re going to get the washer fixed “any day now,” and then it’ll be convenient to have all the clothes down here.

She’s optimistic like that. Except how can we possibly wash everything? It would take us a million years.

Sometimes I have nightmares about our basement.

I dream that I’m down here, and the clothes are pulling me under.

I’m trying to keep my head above them, but I keep sinking, fabric twisting between my ankles, making it impossible to move.

Finally, my head goes under—I’m suffocated by the ocean of dirty laundry.

Like I said, the basement is my least favorite room in the house.

I’m about to give up when I find something that looks like it’s an undershirt. I’m not sure who it belongs to, but it looks big enough for Anton, and also it doesn’t smell too bad when I sniff it. I manage to wade back up the stairs to the first floor just as Anton is coming out of the bathroom.

“Hey,” he says. “How bad do I look?”

He’s managed to wash all the blood off his face and neck.

His eye and nose aren’t as swollen as I thought they were, although his lip definitely looks like somebody punched him in the face.

Compared to other kids in our grade, Anton’s skin is pretty clear of acne, and the truth, which I hate to admit, is that he is not bad looking at all.

Even his green hair is kind of cute. Too bad he’s such a jerk and is probably going to ruin my life tomorrow.

Instead of answering his question, I thrust the shirt at him. “Here.”

He holds it up for inspection, then nods his approval. “This is your dad’s?”

I consider telling him that yes, it is. But he’s already seen my house. He knows my worst secret. “No. I don’t know my dad.”

I’m not sure if he heard me, because he’s busy pulling off his bloody T-shirt. With his shirt off, I notice he’s just as skinny as I am. I can count all his ribs. He pulls on the clean undershirt, and then his eyes meet mine. “That’s okay,” he says casually. “I’d rather have no dad than my dad.”

I’m not sure I agree, but then again, I don’t know Anton’s dad.

Now that he’s cleaned up and gotten his shirt on, I figure he’s going to leave.

But instead, his eyes dart around my living room, taking everything in.

My face burns, imagining him telling everyone at school tomorrow how disgusting my house is—the smell, the stained mattresses, the teetering piles of garbage.

When he opens his mouth, I’m sure he’s going to say something along those lines or make a hasty retreat.

But then he blurts out, “Is that your couch?”

He’s referring to the two mattresses. I’m seriously dying. “Um, kind of.”

“Wow,” he says like he means it. “That’s really cool.”

Okay…

He plops down on the mattress on the floor like it’s totally normal that our couch is made out of moldy old mattresses. Then he shoves over a stack of papers to make more room and raises his eyebrows at me, like he thinks I should sit down. So I do.

“Hey…” His gaze settles on the ashtray on our coffee table.

The ashtray is one of the grossest things in the room, and that’s saying a lot.

It is filled with at least fifty cigarette butts of varying length.

My mom never seems to smoke the entire cigarette, and then she puts them in the ashtray to save them, but then she never ends up smoking them and they just stay there forever.

“These yours?”

“My mom’s.”

He picks up one of the larger butts from the ashtray. Then he whips a lighter out of his pocket. “I was out of smokes.”

I watch with a combination of horror and fascination as Anton lights up my mother’s old cigarette. He holds it out to me, offering me a drag, but I shake my head. The thought of smoking a cigarette makes me physically ill.

“So,” Anton says, wincing when the skin of his split lip opens more, “what are we going to do for that project?”

My jaw drops. “I thought you said you didn’t want to help me.”

“I was just messing around.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“You know what your problem is, Ella?” He blows out a ring of smoke. “You can’t take a joke.”

I stare at him.

“Fine. I was being an asshole.” He tugs at the old white undershirt, which is a couple of sizes too big. “I’m offering to help now though, aren’t I?”

I imagine attempting to divvy up the work for the project while surrounded by my mother’s papers and all the other junk in this living room. The thought makes me sick. Even though he’s not being a jerk about it at the moment, I want Anton out of here.

“Not here,” I say. “Let’s work at your house.”

“My house isn’t much better. My little brother is super annoying.”

“Not here,” I say more firmly.

He looks like he’s going to argue again, but then he finally seems to get it. “Okay, my house.”

Anton opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, but then he gets cut off by the sound of a key turning in the front door. My mother isn’t supposed to be home for another hour, but somehow, here she is.

And now I am in really, really big trouble.