The Dollhouse Asylum (21 page)

Someone trudges through the trees, the sound of breaking twigs and rustling leaves cracking through the woods. I think they’re coming from the fence. But no. The footsteps are going farther away, away from Teo’s compound. A slight clinking sound—the gate?—someone grunts and the clinking sounds again. My legs twitch to follow, to jump up to the sound, but Marcus’s steady arm has me planted to the ground. I yearn to shift, because even though Marc’s here, it’s hard to find a comfortable position with thistles and thorns digging into my hands and feet.

We wait for what feels like hours; the brown-green seeds littered about me give the illusion of grenades ready to explode. Some already have—the casings split open wide—and I tense, jittery, waiting.

Eventually, the crunching grows softer before silencing completely. My instinct is to run, but I force myself to stay on the ground and count slowly to twenty. One, three, six, eleven. I’ve just hit nineteen when my mouth flies open. “What do you think—?”

“Come on.” Marc grabs my hand and pulls me up. It’s nice to stand again after lying so long on the ground. Pulling me past a cluster of thorny spikes jutting out from a handful of trunks, we tread past rocks that threaten to trip me. But Marc’s directing me. We weave in and out of the trees, and I’m so glad to be with him.

And then I see it. A multilayered, barbed-wired fence cuts us off from the outside. The barbs are so close together that nothing much bigger than a toothpick could fit through. It’s twelve feet high. There’s no way we can hop the fence, and at the bottom where we might dig a hole, the barbs scratch the surface of a three-foot high stretch of cement. I stare at the wires, trying to detect a break in the fence, when something black and human-sized launches my heart into my mouth.

Body bags
.

Two of them.

I try not to look, but I can’t help it. I cover my mouth with my hands to stifle a shriek.
Bee
. And Ramus. Ramus and Bee. Deposited like rotten produce or sardines. I saw the body bags that first morning, knew what Teo said, but I never really thought I would see them again, never believed real bodies would be sewn up inside.

Marcus looks away, his face turning the color of the beige carpet in Bee’s room, and I step to the fence and stick out my hand, but he catches it. “It’s electric, remember?” he chokes out. Of course I remember, but I have to feel closer to Bee.

I shudder; the body bags don’t look all that filled—there wouldn’t be much of a body left after that lion. But it’s like if I can reach my hand through that barbed wire I can reconnect, bring them back to life.

I feel like a ninety-volt battery has already been in direct contact with my chest, but I lower my hand a few inches, know electrocuting myself won’t do any good. I stare at that three-foot stretch of cement below the fence and wish I could turn myself into a jackhammer to break through.

“Didn’t you say
they
come out at night?” I ask, the little girl in the orange dress from Cleo’s TV flashing in my mind.

Marc pushes my hand further down. “When the sun goes down,” he says, and my hand tingles where he touched, long after he moves away.

I can’t stop staring at the body bags. “How well did you know them?” All I can hear are Ramus’s and Bee’s screams.

“Ramus and I—we went to preschool together,” Marcus answers, and the idea of watching someone you’ve known your entire life die becomes a new pain. Sharp and biting and dull at once.

Here Marc’s been joking around in the woods with me when, really, he’s been grieving over the loss of his friend. But that’s what Marc does. He jokes to forget the pain. That’s what he did when his father died. He screwed around at the math meets when he should have been seeing a counselor instead.

I turn to him, study the lines running under his eyes. Did he have them before Elysian Fields, or did watching his friends get murdered do that to him? Where there was once a faint outline of a bruise, his skin has healed completely to a fair brown, but a bruise seems like nothing compared with the death of our friends. If we’re going to move their bodies before the sun goes down, before
they
can get them, we’ll need to leave before the party at Izzy’s ends.

Marcus doesn’t look at me, merely studies the intricate wires of the fence for what feels like an eternity. I wish he would say something. I may technically be engaged to his brother, but it was only to earn the vaccine. My connection to Teo is being replaced by Marcus, which is scary in about a hundred different ways. Am I really one of those girls who needs to have a boy? I never thought I was that way. Before Teo, I was content with my books. Sure, I wanted more than anything to be loved like the heroines were loved in them, but I
was
okay by myself. Maybe I need Marcus right now to help me know what unselfish love is all about.

But I’m not about to bring all this up with Marcus. He’ll laugh. So I decide to join him—study the fence and its interlocking gnarls of wire, the silver metal glinting from the sun. There has to be a break. Jonas opened it up. “Do you think it’s controlled by another remote?” I ask.

But Marcus isn’t listening to me, he’s too busy crouching down so that he’s eye level with the fence. He scans the close-knit wires, though it’s impossible to follow them all. There might be fifty that intersect, just in this small section.

“Even without the electrocution,” I say, examining the twisted gnarls of the wire, “it looks like it hurts.”

Marc shifts, crouching lower so that he’s nearly to his knees. “Do you see any changes in color?” He peers closer at the fence. “Any places where the wires don’t look aligned?”

I crouch down next to him, scan the sharp barbs, and study the angles at which the wire flows. Up, right, down, left. They’re a labyrinth without any real pattern. It’s impossible to tell if there’s a break because the wires bunch so closely together. The cement at the bottom of the fence makes me feel trapped, like we’ll never break out.

The clicking sound we heard before runs through my head. The click must mean something, so I ask him, “Why do you think it clicked?”

Marcus rubs his hand over the new growth of his beard. “It sounded mechanical. Maybe Jonas pulled a trigger to open the gate.”

It’s a good hypothesis. Easier than finding another remote. I search for a button on the fence. But I don’t see anything there, so I scratch my hands along the dirt for a clue.

“A tree?” I suggest, then spin to search a few close by. I run my fingers on the rough, knobby bark, prick my thumb on what looks like crocodile teeth—thin and jagged. Freaking trees. I move to the next.

Combing the ground close by, Marcus bends down to examine an exposed, splitting root. “If I made a button, I’d put it here,” he says, pointing to where the bark has worn away. I step closer to inspect it, too. Bark, thinly veiling the flesh of the tree, is the only feature we find. There are supposed to be buttons. A diagram or two. I run my finger over the tree root and tug on the bits of bark to see if any of it will move, when I slice my finger on a thorn concealed by deadened leaves.
Holy mother—freak
. I look up to Marcus to make some excuse for why I’ve hurt myself again, but he’s staring at the fence, so I suck on my finger to draw out the blood.

Marc’s eyes fall to the ground. “Maybe he did make a remote for this.”

There has to be. Otherwise, Teo risks people getting out.

“I’ll search for it,” I offer, looking at the homes through the trees. “Tonight, while everyone’s at Izzy’s house.”

Marcus laughs right in my face. “Think Teo won’t notice if you leave?”

That’s a little rude. Besides, that’s not what I’m thinking. I’ll slip my hand inside Teo’s coat. But I doubt Marcus will like that any better, so I throw the question back at him. “What do you suggest?”

“I’ll search.” He shakes his head at me. “Look around for a stash of insulin, too.”

His eyes rove over my legs, then jump up to my face. “Just show him a little leg, and you’ll have him captive for hours.”

I slug him on the arm, which feels
really
nice.

“Just sayin’.” He laughs, his eyes sparkling again. “That’s how I’d react.”

All I can do is groan. “I’d rather pull a fire alarm.”

“Assuming Teo has them,” he says, shoulders slumping.

“Where’d he get this little community from, anyway?” I’d like to lean against a tree to relax, but those trees will probably jab me in the back. “He couldn’t possibly have paid for it with his teacher’s salary.” I shift my feet from left to right.

Marc’s cobalt eyes darken like I’ve struck a chord. “No, that’s not how he paid for this place.”

Now I’m getting visions of drug money and the mafia, but that would be ridiculous, so I nudge him on. “Then how?”

Marcus turns his back on me and I watch that muscular back and those low-rider jeans, gulping before looking higher to where he’s grabbing some random tree branch. “There was an inheritance,” he says, not bothering to turn and look at me. Not that I’m minding. The view’s just fine with me.

“What, from a grandparent?” My eyes fall to those jeans again where they’re resting just a little too snugly on his hips, but he turns around, catches me looking, and I glance away. It’s okay that he caught me, though, because he just told me he thinks I’m pretty.

Marcus rubs his eyes, his chin, his hair, as if rubbing the stress from his face. “My dad.”

“That’s an awful lot of money he must have had lying around.”

Marcus laughs and it’s so beautiful, so clear that it matches his face. “Oil rigs.” He smirks, looking away from me. “That was the business my dad was in. It paid well.”

Marcus stops short like he doesn’t want to add anything to that, but I have to know more.

“Okay,” I say, trying to slow my reeling mind, “you’re saying Teo took that money—from your dad’s financial dealings.” He must have been raking in the cash.

Marcus kicks a rock. “It was supposed to stay in the bank for college. He used his part for his precious Dartmouth, but he told me he was ‘investing’ mine.”

That can’t be right. Teo would never take his brother’s money—oh my—of course he would. “But how could your mom let him do that? That was your money for school.”

“Welcome to the Richardson family.” Marcus shrugs. “Mom’s dead, so Teo pisses the money away.”

“Wow.” I don’t know what to say, so I stare at the knobby trees. “Your brother really screwed things up.”

Blowing the steam he’s collected in his lungs, Marcus says, “At least Teo’s saving us from the Living Rot.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but he keeps his mouth shut. I can almost feel a tangible wall coming between us. Just like before, he pulls on the front of his hair, and I want him to stop.

“You’re doing it again,” I tell him. “You’re thinking about something, and you don’t want me to know what it is.”

Marcus looks at me, eyes wide as silver spoons. It’s like he can’t believe I’ve watched him long enough to know such a thing.
You are wrong, Marcus
. I smile thinly.

“It’s just—” Marc scuffs his feet on an exposed tree root “—we make Teo out to be the bad guy, but really, what’s so different between us?”

It’s like he’s become a prop in a child’s game.
All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel
. And Marcus is the weasel right when I least expect it. He can’t possibly compare himself to Teo. It’s like comparing an iron maiden with a yo-yo.

But his face reads earnestly. His blue eyes are clear. So I ask what he must be wanting me to ask him. “What do you mean?”

He runs his hand over his stubble, moves on to the back of his hair. “Just what I told you. We’re really the same.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. “You are everything good that your brother is not.”

His blue eyes flash, a spark amazingly like his brother’s, though blue. “Am I? Don’t take it personally, Cheyenne, but you barely know me.”

For one humiliating millisecond, my voice makes a strangling sound before I’m able to close it off. How can he say that? I know we haven’t grown up together, that we went to two different schools, but I’ve seen him, wanted to get to know him. Every time,
he
was the one who backed off.

“Let’s just say I’ve screwed up before,” he mumbles between his teeth.

When I shake my head, Marcus says, much too loudly, “I killed someone. Do you get it? I killed someone, so we really are alike.”

He can’t be serious. I’ve experienced so much warmth from him. He doesn’t cause pain. It’s like I’m dreaming, not really awake.

I’m sure there’s an explanation—a freak accident. He fed someone turnips and they were lethally allergic. Someone slipped on some ice in front of his house. A worker fell from his roof, and he hasn’t been able to forgive himself since. But then Marcus is opening his mouth and I have to really focus to understand everything.

“It was late,” he tells me, watching the gnarled roots on the ground. “You could say I was missing my mom, so I grabbed one of dad’s liquor bottles to—I don’t know—I guess to find a friend. But then it was suddenly empty, and I didn’t feel so good, so I made my way to the fridge for my insulin, but I remember being so confused because all of it—it was gone.”

Marc walks around to the other side of the tree, putting distance between us, and I don’t want to push him to be near me, so I gingerly lower myself to the dry ground, hugging my knees.

“You know,” Marcus says, voice so monotone it doesn’t sound like him, “it was stupid for me to be drinking, being diabetic.” He kicks a few leaves. “I think, whether I lived or died that night, I didn’t really care. But I knew I had to get some insulin, so I hopped in the car.”

No
. He said he’d been drinking.

“I tried pulling out of the garage—it took me a few tries—when my dad came outside.”

I’m not really sure I can hear what his dad had to say. All I see is a scowling man marching out to the garage.

“Dad was drunk, too,” Marc’s saying. “Kept telling me to get out of the car, but I didn’t care. He never cared for me, not like Mom—she’s the one who always got my insulin. Teo helped me after she died, but when he went to Dartmouth, I was on my own—kept screwing it up.