Brad was walking around in his room, his steps big and angry. Even from here, Ellie could tell he was making a lot of noise. His mouth kept opening and closing. He threw a bunch of wadded-up clothes, or maybe a sheet, onto the floor. Then he ducked out of his room to grab something.
It was a little girl.
Ellie saw her swinging ponytail as Brad yanked her around.
He pulled open the door to his bedroom closet and shoved the little girl inside. Ellie watched as Brad took a key off his dresser and twisted it in the old- fashioned lock.
He stomped out of the room, disappearing from view.
Ellie thought she could see the door bulge in and out as it was pounded, but maybe she was imagining that.
She felt as if she were in a trance. Once somebody — called a hypno-something — had visited their school for a special assembly. He’d made the kids come up on the stage and do all sorts of things, bark like dogs, think their skin had turned purple. Even a couple of teachers had gone up. All the kids thought it was really funny, but Ellie had found it creepy.
She felt like that now. Like somebody besides herself was making her do things.
She tiptoed down the stairs, even more intent than before on making sure David didn’t hear her.
She was almost to the front door, taking the knob in her hand and beginning to nudge it around slowly, soundlessly, when something struck her.
She’d gotten lucky in the closet the last time. Funny to think of it that way, but she had. If the lamp hadn’t fallen, after years and years of her praying nothing would, she wouldn’t have been able to break David’s arm. And not every closet had a lamp in it.
It didn’t have to be a lamp, she realized. The one she’d used was too heavy to carry next-door anyway.
She stood a minute, thinking. Her gaze roamed around the house, lighting on different objects.
She forced herself to hurry, to decide. Brad’s little sister — Ellie didn’t even know her name; her mom had never tried very hard to get to know their neighbors — was in the closet right now. And Ellie knew what she was feeling, what she must be doing. She hoped the little girl hadn’t hurt her hands too badly yet. Or her head.
Then she thought of something good.
She raced back upstairs — saying sorry in her head for the extra seconds; promising the little girl it would be worth it — and swerved into David’s room again. She paused.
“David!” she called. Wanting, needing to know where he was right now.
It was stupid, though. David would never shout back.
She ran across his room and pulled open the third dresser drawer. The box was behind a stack of T-shirts, and the secret drawer was in the bottom, opened by a series of taps.
Easy.
When she wasn’t in the closet, she was usually watching David.
The game she had stepped on in David’s room — broken, you broke it, said the new voice — gave her an idea. Ellie dashed outside and ran across the two front lawns, pants pocket heavy with the thing she had taken. She pounded on Brad’s front door.
“David says you have his X-Men Three!” she shouted breathlessly as soon as Brad opened it.
“What? I do not,” Brad replied. He was giving her a look like his laugh had been, funny, shaky.
“You do too!” she shrieked hysterically. “David says so! Go look!”
Still with the same look, Brad began to back away, and Ellie watched him walk to some distant part of the house.
“It’s not here!” he called out loudly after a moment or two.
Ellie squinted. She couldn’t even see where Brad was calling from.
“Fine!” she shouted. “I’ll tell David but he won’t be happy!”
Brad would start to look again, she figured. At least give it one more try.
She stepped into the house, pushing the door shut loudly, so Brad would think she had really left. Then she tore upstairs.
The screams coming from the closet were so loud they hurt her ears. It was like running straight into a wall of sound. Ellie’s eyes teared, her head smarted.
She didn’t even have to use the map in her head of where Brad’s room must be — directly across from David’s — to locate the little girl. She flung herself around a corner into Brad’s room and ran straight for the dresser. It was tall, higher than any of the furniture in their own house. The key had to be somewhere on top, but Ellie couldn’t see it. She looked around wildly, knowing she’d never be able to hear Brad coming up over all this screaming. But her brother’s friend seemed as unbothered by it as David always was. Ellie stood on tiptoes, straining the backs of her legs till something felt ready to rip inside, and swiped her palm across the top.
The key fell off. It dropped beneath the dresser.
Heaving a grunt of pure frustration, which was lost beneath the little girl’s cries, Ellie dropped to her knees and looked down.
The key was out of reach.
Ellie stretched her fingers, feeling splinters from the underside of the wood break off and stab the skin on her hand, before she touched its jagged edge. She forced herself to go slowly, nudging the key out, so she wouldn’t lose it again. For a moment she paused to clap her hands over her ears, shutting out the sound of those awful screams. But she knew she couldn’t stay like this because she wouldn’t hear if Brad came upstairs, not even if he walked right up behind her.
On hands and knees, she swung around.
It didn’t seem possible, but the little girl had gotten even louder, the whole room shaking now. Ellie understood. She could remember pushing her own voice beyond limits she hadn’t known it had, stopping only when her tongue blocked her throat and she started to choke.
The key was in her hand.
Ellie stood up and fitted it into the lock on the closet door.
There wasn’t so much as a break in the little girl’s screaming before Ellie pulled the door shut again and dropped down beside her in the dark.
“Shhh!” Ellie hissed. “You have to stop screaming! Now!”
Unbelievably, the girl fell silent. She didn’t question Ellie’s presence, or why Ellie hadn’t let both of them out. All went quiet around them, two girls huddled in dark as complete as any Ellie had ever known, but somehow not as scary, as paralyzing as it had been only a day ago.
And then they heard footsteps coming into the room.
“Lily?” they heard Brad say.
Ellie located the jackknife in her pocket in the dark. She had to prod out its blade by feel, pushing the can opener back in when she ran her thumb across it and didn’t feel a sharp tip.
Beside her, the little girl’s breath heaved in and out, as if she were a small animal. Ellie couldn’t see anything, but she gave the little girl — Lily — a nod, hoping she could somehow sense it in the dark.
“Lily? You in there?” Brad said again.
They would be blinded when the door opened, Ellie knew that.
She raised the knife to what she hoped would be mid-section height on Brad, gauging it by feeling her own chest, then moving up several inches, and turning the tip so it faced out.
Footsteps strode across the room and the door was yanked open.
Ellie thrust forward with the sharp end of her blade.
She missed completely — Ellie could tell because the knife had sunk into nothing but air — but it didn’t matter. The second he knew who she was, and what she had done, Brad fell backwards onto the floor, like he did when David wrestled him, soft belly exposed.
Ellie crawled across the floor. The knife was still open; she was holding it out. She bent down over Brad and whispered into his hot, red ear. “If you ever put her in the closet again—”