Page 36 of My Favorite Lost Cause
If my life was on the line, I wouldn’t admit the truth. “That you’d murdered someone,” I reply. “Maybe you were drunk driving as a teen and weren’t sure if you’d killed a kid. Your sober driving is sufficiently dangerous, if we’re being perfectly honest.”
She laughs. “Okay, back to the subject at hand… Are we in agreement that this is miserable, and we should go back to our beds?”
“I think it’s perfectly lovely outside,” I reply. “But if you want to quit, go right ahead.”
“There is no way that you think it isperfectly lovelyoutsideright now,” she says. “You’re sweating anytime I try to raise the air conditioning above sixty-five.”
I laugh. “Yes, it’s fucking miserable, Maren, just like I told you it would be. And we can go in as soon as you’ve said, ‘Charlie, you were right about this the same way you were right about everything because you are wiser and more logical than me. Probably because I have a weak female brain.’”
She sits up. “You realize that I could just go in regardless of whether or not you agree?”
My hand presses to her stomach. “I could always pin you in place.”
Our eyes catch. Hers are wide, surprised. Even in the darkness I can see the flush crawling over her face. And I’m suddenly picturing her calling my bluff. Saying, “Try it and see, Charlie.”
Iwouldtry it. And goddamn, would she see.
“Charlie,” she says, “you were right about everything, and you were always super smart and logical, and whatever else I was supposed to say.”
“Because you have a weak female brain.”
“Fuck that,” she says, and I laugh again.
She’s finally standing up to someone. Even if it is, regrettably, me. Even if it means I don’t get to pin her to this mattress.
Which she wants me to do.
She’d never admit it, but she wants it too.
19
MAREN
Charlie helps me drag the mattress back inside and then returns to his own cottage, though I wish he’d just stay with me.
I could always pin you in place.
He said it with his hand pressed flat to my stomach, as if he was ready to act. The memory of it is enough to make my core squeeze tight. I picture that hand sliding lower, beneath the elastic of my shorts.
Think about something else, Maren. Please think about anything else.
It’s not as if I don’t have anything else to focus on. That photo album has been freaking me out all day.Margaret and Papa.
I tried really hard all night not to make it into a thing. Not to becrazy Maren with the overactive imagination,but when I dreamed I was walking down the road, lamenting that I couldn’t go to the dance…was thatmydream or was it someone else’smemory? Perhaps a memory belonging to the girl in those family photos, a girl standing beside her handsome brothers. In the final photo, they were grown but still young. Teens or earlytwenties at most.Samuel, Walter, Leonard, Raymond, and Margaretsomeone wrote beneath it in careful, curling script.
They must be dead by now, all of them. But how on earth, with all those children and probably a ton of grandchildren, did this house wind up for sale?
I could always pin you in place.
Jesus. I’m never going to get that out of my head.
Only Charlie Dalton could have a girl more focused onhimthan the fact that she was recently possessed by a ghost.
I wakeon my last full day in Oak Bluff, determined to finish up Walter and Sam’s rooms…and avoid Margaret’s.
Today, though, the call from the room is harder than ever to resist. And I absolutely should resist because of the way being in there seemed to bend my brain: the sight of Charlie crouching in front of me, the urge to lean forward and press my mouth to his…I can’t seem to get it out of my head.
But when will I ever come back here? What possible excuse will I ever have to fly down to my stepbrother’s strange, haunted mansion once I return to Manhattan?
