Never Tell

Chapter Forty-Three

Mom, what are you going to do?”

Her mother’s face was white.

“Mom. This isn’t just words anymore. He knows who you are. He found you. He’s stalking you. We have to do something.”

Ramona knew that the world her friends inhabited wasn’t real. It was real for them, but it wasn’t the world that normal people lived in. Regular people didn’t have chefs and drivers and private SAT-prep coaches. Regular mothers didn’t have lines of credit at Tiffany. Regular dads didn’t trade in their wives every decade or so for a newer model, like a car.

Ramona also knew that she wasn’t rich the same way her friends were rich, with parents who had been raised rich, as had the parents’ parents. Ramona wouldn’t even be at Casden if her family didn’t have a friend who’d pulled strings to get her in.

Still, Ramona had always been grateful for what they had. Ramona’s mother made sure of that. She hadn’t come from wealth, that was for sure. She’d been raised in Chico, California, by Ramona’s grandmother, a single mother who waited tables for a living and who died before Ramona could meet her. Ramona’s grandfather had never been in the picture. When her mother met her father, she was working as a nanny.

Maybe it was because Ramona was appreciative of what she had that she tried so hard to stay grounded in the actual “real” world. In retrospect, Ramona realized that a shared yearning to know another world was what bound her and Julia together.

Julia and Ramona had been different in a lot of ways. Julia was long and lean and lithe, with flowing blond hair and classic good looks. She was the kind of girl who attracted men. She also had a recklessness and darkness about her that Ramona liked to think she had managed to avoid.

But Julia was the only friend from Ramona’s world who was happy to join in her hobby of talking to strangers everywhere they went. They both believed they could learn at least one interesting thing about human nature from any person they encountered. That was how they had gotten to know Casey, Brandon, and Vonda. Brandon had been the one holding the panhandling sign claiming they needed money for a bus ticket to Missouri.

“Do you really want to go back to Missouri?” Julia had asked.

Brandon had assumed Julia was messing with him and started in with the spoiled rich girl comments. But then Julia sat down cross-legged on the sidewalk next to them and said she just really wanted to know. They’d spent the next four hours sitting in that same spot. Just talking.

But nothing Ramona had learned from the world outside of hers had prepared her for what was happening now, in her real life. That privileged little bubble from which she’d been so eager to peer out was now being deflated, one slow leak at a time. Julia was dead. Brandon and Vonda had lied about a person who had been nothing but kind to them. And now she was terrified that something was going to happen to her mother.

“Mom!” Ramona was shouting now. “We have to call the police.”

Her mother was staring at her, but her mind was clearly somewhere else. Her lips were parted, but no sound was coming out. And at her feet, on the freshly polished hardwood beams, lay the package Nelson had handed them as they’d entered the lobby, stuffed from dinner at Fishtail, one of their favorite mother-daughter spots when Dad worked late.

The top had spilled to the side when her mother had dropped the box to the floor.

Maggots. Hundreds of them, rushing to escape from their temporary housing.