“Dean has a temper,” Michael told me, leaning back against the workout bench.
Lia snorted. “Michael, if Dean had a temper, you’d be dead.”
“Dean’s not going to kill anyone,” Sloane said, her voice almost comically serious.
Michael dug a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. “Wanna bet?”
— — —
That night, I didn’t dream. I also didn’t sleep much, courtesy of the fact that Sloane, who had a dainty little build, also apparently had the nasal passages of an overweight trucker. Instead, as I tried to block out the sound of her snoring, I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house. Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s.
Lia’s.
I started with the physical things. She was taller than I was, and lithe. Her hair was longer, and instead of sleeping with it tucked under her head, she would spread it out on the pillow. Her fingernails were painted, and when she had energy to burn, she rubbed the thumbnail on her left hand with the thumb on her right. In my mind, I turned my head—Lia’s head—to the side, peering into her closet.
If Michael had leveraged a car out of Briggs, Lia would have gone for clothes. I could almost see the closet, full to overflowing. As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.
I let go of my bed and my closet, my physical sensations. I let myself be Lia, and a rush of information came at me from all sides. Like a writer getting lost in a book, I let the simulation run its course. Where Sloane and I were neat, the Lia in my head was messy, her room a multisensory archive of the past few months. There was no rhyme or reason to the organization of the closet. Dresses hung half on and half off the hangers. There were clothes—dirty, clean, new, and everything in between—on the floor.
I pictured getting out of bed. In my own body, I had a tendency to sit up first, but Lia wouldn’t take the time. She’d roll out of bed, ready for action. Ready to attack. Long hair fell on my shoulders, and I twirled a strand of it around my index finger: another of Lia’s nervous habits, designed to look like it wasn’t nervous at all.
I glanced over at the door to the room. Closed, of course. Probably also locked. Who was I keeping out? What was I afraid of?
Afraid? I scoffed silently, my mind-voice sounding more and more like Lia’s. I’m not afraid of anything.
I walked over to the closet—light on my toes, hips swaying gently—and pulled out the first shirt I touched. The selection was completely random, but what came next wasn’t. I built the outfit up around me. I dressed myself up like a doll, and with each passing moment, I put that much more space between the surface and everything underneath.
I did my hair, my eyes, my nails.
But there was still that little voice in my head. The same one that had insisted I wasn’t scared. Only this time, the one thing it kept saying, over and over again, was that I was here—behind this locked door with who knows what waiting outside—because I had nowhere else to go.
YOU
You’re home now. You’re alone. Everything is in its place. Everything but this.
You know that there are other people like you. Other monsters. Other gods. You know you’re not the only one who takes keepsakes, things to remember the girls by, once their screams and their bodies and their begging-pleading-lying lips are gone.
You walk slowly to the cabinet. You open it. Carefully, gingerly, you place this whore’s lipstick next to all the rest. The authorities won’t notice it’s missing when they search her purse.
They never do.
A lazy smile on your face, you run your fingertips across each one. Remembering. Savoring. Planning.
Because it’s never enough. It’s never over.
Especially now.
CHAPTER 10
The next day, I could barely look at Lia. The game I’d played the night before was one my younger self had played with strangers: children I’d met in diners, people who had come to my mother’s shows. They were never real to me—and neither were the things I’d imagined once I’d mentally tried on their shoes. But now I had to wonder how much of it was really imagination and how much of it was my subconscious working its way through Lia’s BPE.
Had I imagined that Lia was messy—or had I profiled it?
“There’s cereal in the cabinet and eggs in the fridge,” Judd greeted me from behind a newspaper as I wandered into the kitchen, still debating that question. “I’m making a grocery run at oh-nine-hundred. If you’ve got requests, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
“No requests,” I said.
“Low maintenance,” Judd commented.
I shrugged. “I try.”
Judd folded his paper, carried an empty mug to the sink, and rinsed it out. A minute later—at nine o’clock on the dot—I was alone in the kitchen. As I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I went back to trying to work my way through the logic of my Lia simulation, to figure out how I knew what I knew—and if I knew it at all.
“I have no idea what those Cheerios did to you, but I’m sure they’re very, very sorry,” Michael said as he slid into the seat next to me at the kitchen table.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been stirring them into submission for a good five minutes,” Michael told me. “It’s spoon violence, is what it is.”
I picked up a Cheerio and flicked it at him. Michael caught it and popped it into his mouth.
“So which one of us was it this time?” Michael asked.
Suddenly, I became very interested in my Cheerios.
“Come on, Colorado. When your brain starts profiling, your face starts broadcasting a mix of concentration, curiosity, and calm.” Michael paused. I took a big bite of cereal. “The muscles in your neck relax,” he continued. “Your lips turn ever so subtly down. Your head tilts slightly to one side, and you get crow’s-feet at the corners of your eyes.”
I set my spoon calmly in my bowl. “I do not get crow’s-feet.”
Michael helped himself to my spoon—and a bite of cereal. “Anyone ever tell you you’re cute when you’re annoyed?”