Secrets to the Grave

17

Wendy went to her room as soon as dinner was over and the kitchen was cleaned up. She tended not to hang around downstairs when both her mom and dad were home because they weren’t happy and everyone was tense and it sucked. And it was her fault, which sucked even worse.

Her parents stayed together because of her, because that was what she wanted. Only it wasn’t. She wanted them to go back in time and be happy the way they used to be—that was what she wanted. If she could have time-traveled like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, she would have gone back and changed so many things.

She would have gone back and made sure that whatever had happened to make her parents fall out of love never happened. She would have gone back to that day last October and made sure she and Tommy didn’t take the shortcut through Oakwoods Park, and they never would have found that dead body, and none of what had happened would have happened.

But she couldn’t travel back in time. She couldn’t fix what was wrong between her mom and dad. And she was too afraid of losing what family life she had to tell them not to try anymore.

Restless and depressed, she wandered around her sunny yellow bedroom with its white wicker furniture and her stuffed animals on the bed. Her Barbies lived in their own little cul-de-sac in the corner in the pink Barbie dream house with the pink Barbie Corvette parked beside it.

Wendy felt like she was in somebody else’s room. The room of a stupid happy child who didn’t know the things Wendy knew.

She turned her radio on and sat down on the bed. Her newest favorite song was playing—“True Colors,” by Cyndi Lauper. She had been crazy for the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” She would always sing along and dance and be ridiculous when the song came on the radio. Her mom had joined in with her sometimes. Tommy had always blushed and practically died of embarrassment when she did it.

Tommy wasn’t allowed to listen to popular music because his mother was a bitch. Wendy wasn’t actually allowed to use that word, but she used it all the time in her head—and out of earshot of adults. Janet Crane was an evil bitch. She had always been a bitch to Tommy, and then she took him and left, and nobody knew where they were.

Wendy kept hoping she would hear from him, that he would send her a postcard or a letter or something just to let her know he was all right and that he was thinking about her. They had been best friends since the third grade. But more than a year had passed with no word. In her darker moments Wendy wondered if the Evil Bitch might have killed him, just like Tommy’s father had killed all those women.

The world was such a dark place. So many bad things happened. It made her feel stupid to have a sunny yellow bedroom.

After everything that had happened with the murders, and Tommy’s dad attacking Miss Navarre, and Tommy disappearing, Miss Navarre had tried to get their fifth-grade class interested in something good, something positive.

They had begun to follow the space shuttle program and learn about the astronauts and the scientific experiments they would perform on the next mission. It had been especially fun because one of the astronauts—Christa McAuliffe—was a schoolteacher. They had all been so excited to watch the launch on the twenty-eighth of January. But seventy-three seconds into the flight the space shuttle Challenger had exploded, killing everyone on board right before their very eyes.

Weeks later the navy had found the crew compartment in the ocean with the bodies of all seven astronauts still inside. Wendy had had nightmares for weeks about looking inside the capsule and seeing the rotting corpses.

And not long after that a nuclear power plant had a meltdown in the Soviet Union, and killed and poisoned thousands of people and animals and the environment, and now there would be freaks and mutants there like something out of a horror movie—only it was real.

It just seemed like everything in the world was bad and wrong.

Now her mother’s friend Marissa was dead. Wendy had known Marissa too, and Marissa’s daughter, Haley, was so cute and sweet. Wendy had begged and begged to babysit for Haley, but her mom thought she was too young and wouldn’t let her babysit until she was at least thirteen. Two whole years away.

And her parents wouldn’t say exactly what had happened to Marissa, but Wendy knew she had been murdered, because she had heard part of the story on the news.

She didn’t know why people did these things. Why had Tommy’s father killed those women? Why would anyone kill Marissa? No adult had given her a real answer. They didn’t know. Did people just wake up one day and decide they wanted to kill? Did they just get so angry they couldn’t stop themselves?

She had especially wondered about that because of Dennis Farman. Dennis was just a kid, like she was a kid, like Cody Roache was a kid. He had always been a bully, had always liked hurting people—maybe because his father had picked on him and hurt him, Miss Navarre had said—but why had he decided that fateful Saturday to bring a knife to the park and stab Cody and try to stab her?

Did he just go crazy? Did people just go crazy? Would she go crazy? Would her dad go crazy? Would a crazy person come in their house one night and kill them just because he felt like it?

Wendy wandered into her bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, and wondered whether other people wondered these things too or whether she was losing her mind. How did people know if they were going crazy? If they were crazy didn’t they probably think they were normal, and everyone else would think they were crazy?

Just to try to do something normal, she brushed her teeth and took the scrunchie out of her hair. She had done her hair that day mostly down but with some messy sections snatched up into an off-center ponytail that looked like a blond fountain coming out the top of her head. She liked to dress like her favorite singers: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the girls in the Bangles. Although she didn’t put as much effort into it lately as she once had.

Everyone told her she looked just like her mother, which she did. They had the same thick, wavy hair that was all different shades of blond but darker at the roots. They had the same unusual blue eyes. Wendy had grown nearly two inches since fifth grade. In another year or two she would be as tall as her mother.

As she crawled under the covers of her bed she made a vow to herself not to end up as unhappy as her mother.

She snuggled her favorite brown teddy bear and kissed his nose. She was going to grow up to be a famous journalist, and she was never going to get married—until the perfect man came along.

She pressed her cheek to her bear’s head and whispered his name as she closed her eyes: “Tommy.”