Chapter 19

 

Once again, Aleda was startled out of sleep by a loud, insistent, and annoyingly cheerful knocking at the front door. She fell out of bed with a groan and looked at the clock.

It was a quarter to seven in the morning.

“Que carajo quieres!? Hijo de la gran puta… Yes! Ay, yes, I’m coming! Stupid… molestia, que no… Hiya, Talia. Come on in,” she grumbled, opening the door and turning towards the kitchen without even waiting for the girl to come inside.

If she was going to be getting up this early, she was going to need food.

“I take it I’m not going to be sleeping in any time in the near future?” Aleda demanded through a mouthful of corn flakes a few minutes later. Talia looked up at her from her seat on the couch, having already turned on the television.

“Don’t worry,” she assured her. “It’s just going to be for the next week. Maybe less. As soon as we get their schedule figured out, we’ll clean them out, and that will be it.”

“Oh,” Aleda said crossly. “Goody. Another week.”

“I don’t know what you’re worried about. Aren’t you usually at school right about now?”

“Well… yeah.”

“So, no problem.”

She had a point. Aleda ate her cereal in annoyed silence, still in a bad mood from being woken up at the crack of dawn. Once finished, she dropped her bowl in the sink and went upstairs to get dressed. Talia was still on the couch when she returned.

Aleda sat next to her with a sigh.

“What are we watching?”

“’Passions’,” Talia said, handing her the remote. “You can put it on something else if you like.”

“No, it’s fine.”

Aleda watched the soap opera for several minutes, half in morbid fascination.

“So, that guy is married to her?” she asked Talia after a little while, pointing to the screen. Talia nodded. “And she’s in love with the other one.”

“That’s pretty recent.”

Aleda tilted her head at the screen and continued watching.

“…And that kid’s really a doll?”

“Okay, yes, it gets a little weird.”

Aleda was rapt.

“I really shouldn’t like this,” she said, her eyes glued to the screen. “Why do I like this?”

“Same reason I like it, I guess.”

“Yeah? Why is that?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” she admitted, laughing. “It’s like a train wreck—you can’t look away!”

“Good thing life isn’t really like that,” Aleda mused. She glanced at Talia. “…It’s not, is it?”

“Are you kidding? It’s a load of crap!” Talia motioned derisively at the television screen. “I mean come on—this girl keeps getting ‘possessed’ by the forces of evil? Either you’re a demon or you’re not, and she is clearly not.”

Aleda studied the girl onscreen for a few moments. “How can you tell?”

“You mean aside from the fact that this is a television show? …Because I can see her.”

Aleda gave her a blank look. “Ye-es,” she said slowly. “So can I. She’s right there.”

“Well, yes. But no. I can—.” Talia glanced at Aleda and frowned. “You know what? I’ll explain later.”

Damn it.

Mom and Papá got home a few minutes later. Since Aleda had nothing better to do until noon, she went along with Talia into the woods.

It was kind of nice, actually.

Aside from the temperature, Aleda found it very relaxing to sit out in the woods. It wasn’t hard to keep an eye on the feeders, either, especially since few of them left the nest at this time of day. She was particularly pleased to recognize the same feeder that had returned at about the same time the day before. She nudged Talia when she saw it, who nodded slightly and winked at her.

For the rest of the time, she just sat quietly and enjoyed the morning. On the rare occasions that she found herself bored, Talia would always entertain her with a new joke. At those times, it was hard to keep herself from laughing out loud.

Hardly any time had passed when Talia noticed that it was close to noon. Aleda had to get back for the Sunday matinee performance of her musical; Talia sent her off with a quip that left her chuckling for the next hour.

As for the final performance, things went surprisingly well.

Much of that, for Aleda, was due to the fact that she had finally found Mara’s lighter hidden in an inconspicuous sock. She had been trying to find her hiding place the entire weekend.

Aleda tucked it into her own pocket until the performance was finished. She would probably return it later—must let the girl have her fun, after all—she just didn’t trust Mara with all these dry, heavy curtains around.

After two nights of following her everywhere with a water bottle, switching scenery was an afterthought.

Val, meanwhile, wouldn’t shut up about the after-party.

She was still talking about it backstage, while they waited for the last scene to end.

“It won’t really matter about the glass, though,” she whispered. “Mom says she’s got some aluminum foil that might do the trick.”

Aleda’s eyes flicked to the girl next to her and back to the actors.

“…It really just depends on the glue. And anyway we’ll still have the pink lights. It should be enough. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve put more effort into the after-party than you did the musical,” Aleda said with a smirk, her eyes still fixed on the stage.

“Well, yeah.”

“We seem to have soldiered through,” Mara commented. She nodded towards the stage. “Unless one of those idiots trips in the next five seconds, I’d say we’ve had ourselves a successful production.”

“Yeah, not bad. Oops—curtain call.”

They plastered on smiles and ran out to the stage for their final bows. 

“Not bad at all,” Val continued when they were offstage.

Mara grinned and stretched out her arms, draping them over her head with a sigh. “Man,” she said, “I can’t believe it’s done.”

“That does seem to have gone awful fast,” Aleda said. “Musical’s over. Now what?”

“Now, we party!” Val laughed, nudging Mara in the ribs and making her yelp loudly.

“How much this time, do you think, Leda?”

“Oh, I’d give it two, maybe three inches.”

“Damn it, guys,” Mara protested, wrapping her arms around her sides.

“Hey, not our fault you jump like a rabbit!”

“Bah.”

They left for the party at Val’s house a few minutes later, while most of the cast and crew were still scraping off their makeup and socializing with the audience. The three girls drove to her house in Val’s car—well, really Val’s mom’s car; she had lent it to her for the night.

She had, once again, gone all out with the decorations. Having no holiday-based theme to follow, Val had apparently attempted to include every possible ornament and color scheme. Aleda wondered vaguely if the girl were afraid of hurting some of the decorations’ feelings.

“Wow. You really…er--,” Aleda trailed off, her eyes trying desperately to take in the chaotic surroundings as she stood frozen in the foyer.

“Damn,” Mara concluded succinctly.

“Is that a good ‘damn’ or a bad ‘damn’?” Val asked.

“Just… damn. That’s all, really.”

Aleda cleared her throat and went the rest of the way into the house.

“There’s not going to be some inexplicable shortage of streamers for the next year, is there?” she wondered. Her neck was getting sore from staring at the ceiling.

“There had better not be,” Val said, her voice dropping into an uncharacteristically serious pitch. She frowned slightly. “I’m having another party the weekend after Thanksgiving.”

“I’m surprised you don’t just leave this stuff up,” Mara mused.

Val got a glint in her eye.

“Hey,” Aleda warned. “Don’t give her any ideas. She has enough of her own.”

“…Sorry.”

“Hey, are you guys going to help me set out the food or what?”

“You’re welcome, Val.”

It’s not as if there was really all that much to do. The remainder of the preparation consisted of pouring various bags of snacks into bowls and discussing the finer points of the male actors.

The rest of the cast and crew started to trickle in a few minutes later, depending on how long it had taken them to clean up after the performance—or, as was somewhat more common, finish socializing and failing to clean up altogether.

More than one actor showed up in full costume.

Others arrived wearing just a part of it, or sometimes with only half of their makeup wiped off.

Come to think of it, they were quite the motley crew.

…And cast.

By now, Aleda knew all of them… or at least their names. She even knew the actors. Sure, she wasn’t best friends for life with most of them, but it was practically impossible to spend that much time with a group of people and not reach a certain level of camaraderie. Admittedly, it was also impossible to spend that much time with people and not develop certain homicidal tendencies against those who, for example, ended every sentence with ‘right, dude?’.

Aleda’s affinities, fortunately enough, did not run in that direction, so the past few weeks had been nicely social for her.

“Hi there, Leda!” one of her new acquaintances exclaimed when she arrived. Aleda recognized her as Lizzy Geiger, a girl from the musical’s chorus. She didn’t know much about the girl, although she always greeted her in the halls.

“Hi, Lizzy.”

“So… good musical, huh?”

“Oh, yeah, it went really well. Especially our leads,” Aleda said agreeably.

“You mean Chad and Jenny?” Lizzy shrugged. “They were alright. And of course Chad is a hottie. Jenny is a little diva, though. You know what they say about her, don’t you?”

Aleda frowned at her, puzzled.

“No, I don’t. What do they say?”

Lizzy snickered. “Come on, everybody knows about her little ‘incident’ at last year’s production.”

Aleda stared at her blankly.

“Oh, that’s right. You weren’t here last year. How could I have forgotten that? Well, last year, she…” Lizzy paused, looking around conspiratorially, then leaned in close and whispered in Aleda’s ear.

Aleda’s eyes went wide.

“No! She…”

Lizzy nodded insistently.

“In front of…? And they still let her stay!?”

“Oh, it’s all favoritism,” Lizzy said with a bitter sneer. “I was good enough to get a part years ago, but I’m still stuck in the chorus just because I’m not one of Dodges’ little princesses.”

“I’m… surprised. That doesn’t seem like Mrs. Dodges at all.”

“You don’t notice because you’re just a stage rat. Trust me, if you were actually part of the cast, you’d see it. Like Nate—he’s way too good to be the Mayor.”

Aleda smiled a little to herself. “Yeah,” she agreed. “He’s something, alright.”

Lizzy gave her a calculating smirk. “Of course you would be watching him. I hear you two have become quite the couple.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say—”

“I mean sure, why not? You just met him a couple of months ago.”

Lizzy’s voice had abruptly changed, and not for the better. Aleda stared at her. “Er…”

“I do wish you had been a little quicker, though, so I wouldn’t have wasted my time this summer. I thought that was supposed to be you Spanish girls’ specialty…Being ‘quick’, I mean.”

An astonished noise forced its way out of Aleda’s throat. “B-beg p-pardon?” she finally managed to spit out.

“So much for learning English,” Lizzy sneered. “Whatever, I’m done with you. You can keep your little w***e-boy.”

Aleda stood staring after the other girl for a full minute before she finally blinked and turned away, making a beeline for Mara.

What the bloody hell just happened??