Pretty Bad Things Read online

  PRETTY

  BAD

  THINGS

  C.J. SKUSE

  FOR MY DAD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PAISLEY ONE

  BEAU TWO

  PAISLEY THREE

  BEAU FOUR

  PAISLEY FIVE

  BEAU SIX

  PAISLEY SEVEN

  BEAU EIGHT

  PAISLEY NINE

  BEAU TEN

  PAISLEY ELEVEN

  BEAU TWELVE

  PAISLEY THIRTEEN

  BEAU FOURTEEN

  PAISLEY FIFTEEN

  BEAU SIXTEEN

  PAISLEY SEVENTEEN

  BEAU EIGHTEEN

  PAISLEY NINETEEN

  BEAU TWENTY

  PAISLEY TWENTY-ONE

  BEAU TWENTY-TWO

  PAISLEY TWENTY-THREE

  BEAU TWENTY-FOUR

  PAISLEY TWENTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PAISLEY

  ONE

  SCHOOL COUNSELOR’S OFFICE,

  IMMACULATE CONCEPTION ACADEMY FOR GIRLS,

  LODI, NEW JERSEY

  Simpson fumbled getting the tape into the VCR. She was all, Which button is it?

  And I was like, How old are you and you can’t even work a friggin’ VCR?

  “I’d like you to watch this and tell me how you feel about it,” she said, finally getting her fat ass out of the way so I could see the screen. The music started up over CNN’s flashy intro. The words came up: CNN BREAKING NEWS: SIX-YEAR-OLD NEW JERSEY TWINS MISSING. MOTHER FOUND DEAD. CNN’s Kim Slaughter appeared—devil-red lipstick, concrete bouffant, gray suit, serious face—shuffling her papers.

  “Good morning, I’m Kim Slaughter, and this is the news you’re waking up to on Monday, March twentieth. It’s seven A.M. We take you live now to New Jersey, where Jake Williamson is outside the house where this tragic story is unfolding. Jake, what’s going on down there?”

  Yeah, do tell, Jake, I thought. What is going on down there?

  “Thanks, Kim. And tragic is definitely the operative word in this story. I’m here standing outside the Argent family’s house on Forest Way, Clifton, a quite unassuming residence where an extraordinary story began to unfold earlier today.”

  Cue montage of worried faces, woman in a red coat biting her lip, sniffer dogs in bushes. Then back to Jake.

  “This is what we know: At three fifty this afternoon, Fae Wong, who lives next door to the Argents, dropped off the twins Beau and Paisley at home after school, as she normally does, and went home with her own children. And then, approximately five minutes later, a 911 operator received this call:”

  Cue the blue screen and scratchy tape recording.

  OPERATOR: 911 emergency.

  GIRL: Hi, um … I think my mom needs an ambulance.

  OPERATOR: Is your mom sick?

  GIRL: Uh-huh. She’s on the couch.

  OPERATOR: Is she awake or asleep?

  GIRL: Asleep. (Background crying.) I said, “Mom, wake up,” and she didn’t say anything.

  OPERATOR: Okay. Are there any grown-ups around?

  GIRL: No.

  OPERATOR: What’s your name, honey?

  GIRL: Paisley Jane Argent.

  OPERATOR: That’s a pretty name. Can you tell me where you live?

  GIRL: 1175 Forest Way, Clifton, New Jersey. (Background crying.)

  OPERATOR: Is someone else there with you, Paisley?

  GIRL: Beau’s here.

  OPERATOR: Who’s Beau?

  GIRL: He’s my twin brother.

  OPERATOR: How old are you, Paisley?

  GIRL: We’re six and ten days old.

  OPERATOR: You’re very smart to call 911. Did you learn that at school?

  GIRL: Mmm-hmm.

  OPERATOR: Okay, there’ll be someone to help you real soon. You just keep talking with me and we’ll wait for them. They’re coming.

  Jake appeared again. I was kinda glad. I started lip-synching along with him.

  “We now know that the little girl on the tape there, Paisley Argent, didn’t stay on the line. An ambulance showed up at the house approximately seven minutes later, and the body of her mother, Sylvia Argent, was found in the living room. But Paisley and twin brother Beau were nowhere to be found …”

  Maggie Simpson stopped the tape. The picture went to black. She set the remote down on the table and put her hands in her lap. Maggie Simpson wasn’t her real name. That was just what I called her ’cause she had spiky blonde hair and would sit there in our sessions pouting and puckering her lips as she listened to me, like a baby sucking a pacifier.

  “You okay?” she said, eyebrows peaked in fake sympathy.

  I looked at her. “What did you expect?”

  “I thought maybe that might have brought back some bad memories for you, hearing yourself as a little girl.”

  All these counselors had one mission: to get me to cry. And there was no way—even if they pricked my eyeballs with pins or splashed lemon juice into every cut—no way was I gonna cry.

  “Would you prefer that I start bawling?”

  “No. I just want to know how it made you feel, seeing that news story again.”

  I shrugged. “Hunky-fucking-dory.”

  Simpson smiled, and there was a definite roll of the eyes. “Can you relate to that little six-year-old girl anymore?”

  I sat back in my leather chair and played with my hair. I was running out of boredom indicators. She didn’t have a clue how to deal with me. None of them did. It wasn’t my choice to go to counseling. I was forced to have it. I was one of the school’s “special cases.” Like the piano genius in my music class who only ate orange food. Or the autistic girl in science who liked banging her head against the fire door.

  “Tell me about what happened. You and your brother came home from school, found your mom … and you went to find your dad to tell him she was sick.”

  “She wasn’t sick. She was dead. I do know the difference.”

  “Okay, so you both headed out to go tell your dad. But you got lost, didn’t you? In the woods. Were you scared?”

  “No, we had the time of our lives. No parents, no peer pressure …”

  “Why did you go into the woods?”

  “We didn’t mean to go into the woods. The woods were behind the country club.”

  “Your father worked there?”

  “I thought you read my file? No, he sometimes went there for dinner after work,” I sighed, in the same singsongy way little kids read out poetry.

  “Was your brother scared when you were in the woods? Did you look after him?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Your brother’s name is Beau, isn’t it? Are you close?”

  Still nothing. We were having a staring competition now.

  “You’re twins, aren’t you?”

  I was rock solid. Not even blinking.

  “Is he the younger one or the older one?”

  I wasn’t going to talk about Beau. Beau was off-limits. I didn’t want him going through this torture, too.

  “The sooner you speak up, the sooner you can leave.”

  “Yeah, we’re twins.”

  “Some twins don’t get along. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever experience that strange telepathy with Beau that some twins get? You know, do you feel pain at the same time as him? Have the same dreams? The same feelings?”

  “I sometimes get the urge to touch my dick.”

  “I am trying to help, you know.”

  “No shit.”

  “Would you at least try to open up? Just go with it. No one else can hear.” />
  She had a pockmark on her face that kept catching the light. We’re talking crater-sized. The last counselor was better than her. I called her The Jawbreaker ’cause she had this really large lower face and big donkey teeth that could crush rocks. Then there was Pretty Shitty Blah Blah at Sacred Heart. I called her Pretty for short. Except she wasn’t. She was the kind of person who looks pretty to start with but gets uglier the more you learn about them. I could call most people Pretty.

  This one, Simpson, was so nervous I only had to sneeze and her coffee cup would rocket up to the ceiling. Such was my reputation, I guess.

  “Your father’s imprisonment …,” she began, then stopped for me to fill in the blank. I wasn’t going to. But then I did, ’cause she was looking at me and going all puckery again like she was gonna explode.

  “He didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Our mom.”

  I could see her balk, checking her notes again. Father robbed hotel staff at gunpoint. Been in prison for the last ten years. Mother overdosed. No wonder. No fucking wonder.

  “What do you think about your recent behavior? Do you know why you felt compelled to do that to the piano?”

  I shrugged. “I was bored. I’m a fuckup. That’s what fuckups do.”

  I had to meet with the school counselor—whoever it happened to be that semester—every Tuesday and Thursday after school to talk through my “issues,” while sitting on a beanbag with my shoes off. I’d done this as long as I could remember. In every school it was the same—different days and different color beanbags, but the same setup. The rooms always stank of coffee, and the walls were always plastered with posters of kids with their heads in their hands, saying things like, “We get the blues, too” and “Amy didn’t like being laughed at.” I’d feed them all the usual crap of finding life so tough ’cause I was away from my brother and Mommy never showed me any affection, and they’d look at me sympathetically and give me meditation exercises and all that kinda fuckery. It was bullshit.

  “Do you ever think about your mom? How do you feel about her?”

  “She hated me. It’s no biggie.”

  What was I supposed to say? My mom did hate me. She hated Beau, too. She hated us so much she used to drink to forget we were there. She’d hit us. She’d lock us in the basement for hours on end. She hated us so much she took her own life. I don’t know what that is if it isn’t hate.

  Simpson looked at me, eyes all smoky with compassion. Luckily my bullshit shield kept out oncoming attacks of kindness. What’s that stuff they freeze Han Solo in at the end of The Empire Strikes Back? Anyway, it was like I had that all around me. No one could get through my shield of “that.”

  Immaculate Conception Academy (ICA) was the best boarding school in New Jersey—highly academic—turning out America’s finest girls since 1908. It was also the most expensive. I knew that ’cause I’d been kicked out of all the crappy ones. Our Lady of the Oranges, Rambuteau, Satan’s School for Girls (Bayonne High), and Sacred Heart Academy—been there, done that, broke the windows. My grandmother realized that to keep me out of her way permanently she had to spend some real dough. I supposedly had this “volatility” problem. My dad got the blame.

  Simpson checked her notes. “Your father’s in prison, isn’t he?” she started again. She was getting confident. “How do you feel about that? Do you miss him?”

  I picked my nails. I wasn’t gonna answer that. I didn’t want to tell her anything about my dad. I only ever talked about him to Beau.

  “Your grandmother tells me that when you went home for the summer you didn’t argue as much.”

  “That’s probably because we’re not talking as much.”

  “Oh. You had a fight?”

  “We always fight. So we don’t talk to each other.”

  “Why don’t you get along?”

  “Uh, because she hates me?”

  “She must think a lot of you.”

  “And why the hell would you think that?”

  “Well, she’s spending a lot of money to give you a good education.”

  “No, she’s spending a lot of money to keep me as far away as possible.”

  I remembered the day she’d dropped me off at Our Lady of the Oranges when I was seven. There was little me, drowning in my huge uniform, standing on the huge mosaic steps with the principal’s hands on my shoulders. My grandmother, Virginia, stood there, too, with Beau beside her. Nowadays I call her the Skankmother. She’s too Botoxed to be called Granny. As we stood there, she kept straightening my tie. I hated that.

  “You’ll make lots of friends. We’ll see you at spring break.” I looked up at her. “I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t say any more bad words and I’ll help clean my room and I won’t be mean to Beau …” I would’ve said anything to go back to Los Angeles and go to school with my brother.

  “We have to catch our plane. You take Mrs. Lloyd’s hand.”

  Beau held out his toy owl, Two Wit, to kiss my owl, Two Woo. “Bye, Pais.”

  “Why can’t I go with Beau?” I kept asking, but she didn’t seem to hear it. “Why can’t Beau stay with me?!”

  She finally looked down at me. “Stop whining and go with Mrs. Lloyd, please.”

  “We’ll keep you informed, Mrs. Creed,” said the principal. “And we’ll take good care of Jane.”

  Five schools later and they still always called me by my middle name. I hated that.

  “Do you want to talk about those marks yet?” said Simpson, scoping my legs.

  I sighed. When were they gonna learn? I decided to throw her a bone. “No. It … it’s too painful,” I lied, pulling down my skirt hem to hide my cuts. Counselors were born to be lied to. I liked to watch them lean forward and get all excited ’cause they thought they were on the brink of something.

  “You know, some young people do it because it’s the only outlet they allow themselves. Opening their skin becomes a way of leaking out what’s troubling them. Do you have any friends that you talk to about it?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’m saving up for some of those Harajuku girls. You know, those Japanese chicks you can pay to be your friends and they don’t say anything, they just carry your bags and stuff. Gwen Stefani used to take hers everywhere. You can tell them to get out of your face, and they’ll fucking listen.”

  She did the lean-forward thing. “You can talk to me. You can always talk to me. You can think of me as a friend, if you want.”

  That was a big fat hairy lie. The older I got, the bigger and fatter and hairier the lies got. She was no friend. Just like the counselor at the hospital when we were six. It’s okay, you’re gonna be all right. Your dad’ll be here soon, okay? she’d said. Yeah, in about ten years, maybe. Eight with good behavior.

  I reached into my pocket for my peanut M&M’s.

  Simpson took a deep breath, then blew it right out. “You remember in our last session together we spoke about the possibility of you moving to another facility, one that might be able to help you….”

  “Yeah, a nuthouse,” I said. I popped a blue M&M in my mouth and began flicking it around on my tongue. I liked to suck them until just the peanut was left.

  “No, a behavior-modification facility—it’s a positive place. And there’s one in California, so you’d be closer to your grandmother….”

  I scoffed.

  “Well, closer to your brother, then.”

  The M&M almost shot right out of my mouth. Closer to Beau? Yeah, sure, where do I sign? I thought. But of course there would be a catch, and I knew what it was.

  “That’s right. Get me all cozy in this nice little nuthouse, regular visits from my brother, trips to the zoo, all nicey nicey, and then zap the fuck out of my brains. I can see it now. I’m just staring into the abyss with drool dripping down my chin. Shuffling around in my slippers. Buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh. I’ve heard electric shock treatment is killer.”

  “It wouldn’t be like that.”

  “Oh, please. I know
how this works. You just want me outta Jersey. If you can’t turn me into a High School Musical wannabe, you ship me off to La La Land, where they’ll put those little wires on my temples and turn me into a vegetable.”

  “I can assure you that’s not what happens. But it’s true that your problems may be a little beyond my expertise…. Have you tried reading that book I lent you?” She looked down at my legs again.

  I looked down at my legs again. “No,” I said, bowing my head. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. I was using it to balance my nightstand. Simpson breathed a little sigh. Her breath reeked of stale coffee.

  I wasn’t really cutting myself, duh. I only liked them to think that. I just sucked at shaving. I have no patience, no interest in doing it right at all. I scrape and scratch away and I’m done in, like, five minutes. I don’t see the point.

  My M&M was ready, just the peanut left. I took it out of my mouth and split it in two. The little bunny was there. The bunny that was always there whenever I opened a peanut. It had been something I’d noticed when I was about eight. I don’t think I was the first to discover it, though. That was probably Columbus or somebody. It’s the middle part where the two halves join.

  “So, I be crazy. Is that what I put in my next letter home to the folks?”

  Simpson sighed. “No, I wouldn’t put it like that. But you do seem to be incredibly … tense. You have a lot of frustration, and I can completely understand that, after what you’ve been through. And if we could identify what’s causing …”

  I crunched down on the nut and tuned out. I was so frickin’ fed up of hearing the same old same old. Yeah, I was tense. Yeah, I needed help. Yeah, I was all outta love. I’d read somewhere that the best tension reliever was sex, and that would have been great if I could get it. Only problem was, Immaculate Conception Academy for Girls was pretty dry of tension relievers. No men, just three hundred and sixty-five mechanically engineered lesbians who’d do it with a broom handle if it looked at them the right way.

  But a week after that crunch meeting with Maggie Simpson and the threat of being sent to the cabbage patch, a miracle happened. A blinding light shot down from the August sky and this angel appeared before me in paint-splattered jeans. His name was Jason, and he was helping the school gardener. He was seventeen, had a perfect V-shaped torso and spiky brown hair. I was convinced we were soul mates. I even took more interest in the classics—you know, Jason and the Argonauts? I imagined that was him, sailing forth to retrieve the Golden Fleece and doing all this heroic shit, when really he was downstairs filling wheelbarrows with weeds. As a rule, I don’t like dropping the L-bomb, but I guess, maybe, it was sorta love. In a way.