I press my lips together so I won’t react.
The fire is littered with ashes. She’s been lighting it. It’s too hot to need a fire, even at night. What has she been burning?
I’m certain I don’t want to know.
“What are we doing here, Lillian?” I ask.
“We need to have a conversation.”
“We could have had that anywhere. You know where we live. Why all this?”
Kayla nudges me as if she thinks I’m going too far. Me. Lillian has been messing with us for weeks. She slaughtered a deer, drugged us and left creepy notes and messages. She scared a camp full of kids and now she’s freaking kidnapped us and I’m the one who has gone too far?
“Do you really not get it? You ruined my life!” Saliva sprays from her mouth as she bares her teeth at us.
I meet her eyes. “I get that, and I can tell you how sorry we are and how much we regret it, but it seems that’s not good enough. You won’t accept that we wish that night could have been different. Nothing we say or do will make this better, so why are we really here?”
Her head tilts again like she’s unsure. But I know she has absolutely thought this through. She knows what she wants from us. She can exact her revenge, but that will never make things right. Is she just now accepting that?
“Look, whatever you do here tonight isn’t going to make up for the fact that a terrible thing happened to you. Hurting us will make you feel better for about two minutes and then you’re back where you started. It changes nothing.”
She levels the gun at my forehead. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Yes, I do, and you know I’m right.”
“Shut up, Esme!” Kayla hushes me.
What are we supposed to do if we can’t talk to her? Lillian wants something from us; otherwise she would have just shot us in the forest.
“Kayla’s very close to getting a bullet in her skull,” Lillian says to me.
I feel Kayla shudder. She whimpers, then clamps her mouth shut.
“She’s scared and confused,” I say. “We don’t know what you actually want. Do you just have questions?”
“Do I have questions?” Lillian’s manic laughter cuts through my heart. “I have a lot of questions.”
“We’ll answer anything,” I say softly. Maybe I can get her talking about that night and draw some emotion out of her other than rage.
“Why did you sneak out?” she asks.
“There was this group of older kids and they would sneak out. We weren’t actually friends with them; they were too cool to be seen with us. But we thought if we snuck out too, they might like us. It was stupid, but we were kids.”
Lillian scoffs.
“We’re sorry that things got so out of hand…but you made mistakes that night too.”
I’m dancing on the edge here. Calling her out isn’t my finest idea, but Kayla and I aren’t taking all the blame.
Lillian’s eyes narrow. “You let me burn. You ran.”
I close my eyes against the image of Kayla throwing Lillian backward. In that second, she was just reacting; we never intended for Lillian to get hurt, but she landed in the fire, knocking the wood onto the ground.
Lillian tilts her head. “Now I’m going to light a fire and do the same to you.”
53
My eyes fly open.
“Burn us? No. No, no, no!” Kayla gasps for air.
I squeeze her hand. Please calm down.
“Or I could just shoot you.”
My mind spins so fast I can barely catch my breath.
Five dolls. Four with their eyes crossed out. She wanted us dead this whole time.
Bile hits the back of my throat.
Lillian’s eyes look straight through us. “You think I’m crazy, but you have no idea what that night was like for me. I can still feel the overwhelming pain and smell my burned flesh. I couldn’t call for help. My dad is…not a nice man. I was scared what would happen.”
“What did you do?”
“I couldn’t call for help,” she repeats. “Everyone would know that I had run away. You don’t understand, I couldn’t let that happen.”
“What did you do?” I ask again.
“I dragged myself to the lake. I tried to soothe my burns in the water, but it only made things worse.”
Kayla gasps.
“Someone else must have called the cops, because I eventually heard sirens. I ran with everything left in me. When I got home, I set fire to my bedroom and that’s how my parents think I got burned. We all got out, but our house was ashes.” She smirks. “My hair straighteners were blamed.”
“Jesus.”
I press one hand against my rolling stomach.
Lillian was ten. She did all of that before she hit puberty. The hunting, mutilating animals, and burning down her freaking house! She set fire to her home so she wouldn’t get into trouble. And she thinks she’s better than us?
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? The fire in the woods wasn’t your fault.”
“That wouldn’t have mattered to my dad.”
“Okay,” I say, trying to wrap my head around this. I need to talk to her as if this is all totally normal behavior. “He would have blamed you?”
“He’s not a forgiving man. A lot of people respect and look up to him. They think he’s an amazing husband and father. No one knows the truth. If he knew I’d snuck out of the house…” She shakes her head and I have to fill in the blanks.
Things would’ve been very bad for her.
“Are you sorry too, Kayla?” Lillian asks. “You pulled Esme away. I saw her turn back to help me.”
“Kayla was scared,” I say.
“I wasn’t asking you!” Lillian snaps. “Kayla can speak for herself.”
“Of…of course, I’m so sorry,” Kayla says, her voice husky. She clears her throat. “W-we never meant for anyone to get hurt. We liked…we liked hanging out with you.”
Kayla is making it sound like we were all friends that night. It’s a good move.
We didn’t like it, though. Lillian showed us the head of a deer that she had hunted and killed. It made me nauseous. I was instantly petrified of Lillian. Kayla completely freaked out when she saw the deer’s head. She started screaming at Lillian that she was a freak.