Page 37 of Worse Than Wicked
We come out to a slight clearing that’s not much more than a gap in the canopy. To our right, a series of two-by-four sections were nailed to a tree in the distant past, though they’re greying and rotted away on the ends, covered over with a skim of green moss and splotches of flat, blue lichen. At the top of the rudimentary ladder, an equally decrepit platform spans the space between two branches of the old oak.
“Oh,” Mabel says, her voice faint, her fingers going to her mouth.
“What is it?” I ask, frowning at her reaction.
In answer, she rushes toward the tree, grasping the highest board she can reach and bracing her foot on a lower one. It twists when she puts weight on it, and her shoe scrapes down the trunk.
“Mabel,” I call, hurrying to her. “That doesn’t look safe.”
“You can stay down here,” she says, lifting her foot to the next rung up from the one that caved. “I just want to see.”
“See what?” I ask, but she’s already climbing, not even testing each step with her weight.
“Careful,” I order when a piece of wood comes off in her hand and tumbles to the ground.
She reaches the top without an answer and folds her body over the edge of the platform, boosting herself with her hands and scrambling over.
“This better be worth it,” I mutter as I start up after her, going much more slowly. I’m not used to this side of Mabel. She’s never reckless, never overcome by emotional urges.
When I reach the platform and climb on, she’s sitting with her back to the trunk of the tree.
“You made it,” she says. “I didn’t know if the ladder would hold your weight.”
“So it was a trap,” I say, brushing off my hands. “Care to explain yourself?”
She shakes her head and uses her foot to push off some of the leaves wedged under a branch that’s grown against the platform. “This is where I’d meet her.”
“I don’t think my nanny would have hiked all the way out here,” I say, looking around at the decaying boards under us, some of them barely intact, all covered with a scummy layer of accumulated pollen, dirt, and patches of moss.
“Oh, she didn’t,” Mabel says. “And I wasn’t allowed to go into the woods alone because there are coyotes and bears and snakes. But whenever my cousins came over to play with Colt, she had her hands full, so she didn’t miss me. Or I’d tell the adults I was going to nap or read in my room, and then I’d sneak out.”
She smiles at the memory, and I watch her, captivated by this tender side of her I haven’t seen since I was courting her the first time. I thought it was gone.
“So even then, you only pretended to be a good girl?”
“Sometimes we read,” she says with a smug little smile. “I’d bring a backpack with a picnic and books, and we’d sit on the blanket and eat pastries and read all day.”
“Why?” I ask, cocking my head. “Your room would be more comfortable, and you have a bathroom. You could have your cook make whatever you wanted to eat, your drinks would be cold, and you could get online if you got bored.”
She stares at me for a second. “The boredom was the point.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“If we finished our books or got tired of reading, we had to think of other things to do. I wasn’t good at that, so if it was my turn, we just told stories. She knew all these Armenian fairytales from her grandma, and I knew the original versions of the ones she’d only seen on Disney—the evil queen who had to dance in the burning shoes until she died, the stepsisters who cut off their own toes to fit into the slipper, the Sleeping Beauty who was used by the king for years and only woke up after giving birth to his baby, when it sucked the splinter from her finger trying to nurse.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
She smiles a little. “Dahlia liked to play pretend. She played in the woods without me, but I didn’t like to get dirty, sowhen it was just us, we stayed up here. We could be pirates, and the deck was our ship, or it would be the desert island we were stranded on. Sometimes we’d braid our hair and hang it over the edge and pretend to be Rapunzel.”
“Who would the other one pretend to be?”
“What?”
“There were two of you,” I point out. “So who was Rapunzel?”
“We were both Rapunzel,” she says, like that makes sense.
Like they were one person.
