Anna Snoekstra - Only Daughter

If she hadn’t already sent the message, she wouldn’t have told Lizzie about last night. The image of them sitting there was perfect: two carefree, pretty teenagers ready for anything the endless summer threw at them. The shadow in her room didn’t fit with that.

“So what happened?” asked Lizzie, and the perfect image flickered and died.

“Talk and walk?”

“Could it have been your brothers just trying to freak you out?” asked Lizzie, after Bec had briefly explained what had happened.

“No, no way. They would have been wetting themselves laughing if they managed to scare me that much. Plus, it didn’t feel, you know, human.”

“So you think it’s, what, like a poltergeist?”

“I think, like a specter. Not a ghost or spirit, but something evil and solid that’s not meant to be there.”

“Wow,” said Lizzie, not quite looking at her, “how horrible.”

She was worried Lizzie might laugh and call her crazy, but she seemed just as genuinely shocked as Bec.

“It was horrible.”

“Do you think it will happen again? Maybe you should stay at mine tonight, dude?”

“Maybe. Ugh, I don’t even want to think about it anymore.”

“I know something that would take your mind off it.” Bec recognized the glint in Lizzie’s eye.

“I thought you’d never ask!”

They were mucking around as they ran up the last few steps of the escalator. The white facade of the department store shone in front of them. They stopped laughing abruptly as they walked into the store.

The most important thing when shoplifting is to be as quietly confident as possible. Bec had learned that in the early days. The moment you start looking shifty or laughing too loudly, a security guard is shadowing you and that’s your chance blown for the day.

The second most important thing is to pick something with a lining. Bec had a look through the racks in the teenager section. Trying to find a label her mother would know was worth a lot of money. Scanlan & Theodore, perfect. She was getting so good at this it was almost unconscious. She looped the straps from the dress behind onto the hanger in front. It now looked as though there was one dress on the hanger, where in fact there were two. The maximum for a change room was six. So she quickly picked five other bulky dresses. The thin silky fabric was barely visible amongst the thick knits and ruff les of the other dresses. The harassed-looking girl at the changing rooms counted her hangers without really looking, gave her a red piece of plastic with the number six on it and ushered her through.

Bec pulled the silky fabric over her head and looked at herself in the mirror. She would have taken it either way, but it was nice when it actually suited her. This one was a teal colour, which looked pretty against her pale skin, and the soft folds hung nicely from her figure. She’d have to find some excuse to wear it in front of Luke. She slipped it off again and took the little pair of scissors out of her handbag, cutting the lining neatly around the plastic antitheft tag attached. When it came off cleanly, she slipped it into the pocket of one of the other skirts and rolled up the dress and put it in her handbag. She’d come in with six hangers and she came out with the same.

“Sorry, they just didn’t look right,” she said to the shop assistant, who obviously couldn’t care less.

“Did you find anything?” she asked Lizzie, who was waiting for her.

“Nah. Let’s go.”

* * *

The air outside felt even hotter after the air conditioning inside the department store. It was windy, too, rubbish and dead leaves slapping against their bare ankles as they walked. The adrenaline abruptly left Bec’s body and exhaustion took its place.

“What did you get?” she asked Lizzie.

“Two Marc’s dresses. I’ll show you later. I was just going to get one, but I knew that girl wouldn’t even notice if I came out with nothing but hangers. What about you?”

“Scanlan & Theodore. Just one, but it was meant to be like three hundred.”

“Nice!”

Bec was beginning to sweat. She could taste the salt collecting on her top lip. She rubbed her hand over the back of her neck; it was slick with oily perspiration, disgusting.

“Should we go to Gus’s?” asked Lizzie.

Gus’s was always cool and dark inside, with an all-day breakfast menu.

“Sounds good.”

Even if she had to spend a bit of money on food, it was worth it not to have to go home.

She stopped walking. The money. How could she not have thought of it before? She’d been sure that whatever it was that had been in her room wasn’t human. But what if it had been? What if it was the most obvious explanation: a burglar?

“I think I might just go home, actually. I feel really tired suddenly.”

Lizzie stopped and looked at her with genuine worry.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Bec said, although she didn’t really feel it.

Lizzie pulled her into a quick, tight hug. It was too hot for anything longer.

“Call me if you change your mind about stayin’ at mine, okay?”

“All right, thanks,” she said.

Bec sat on the bus, her panic growing. It was taking forever, stopping every few blocks to let someone on. They might as well not have bothered with air conditioning; every time the doors swung open the hot wind blew in. Riding the wind was the faint but sharp smell of something burning; the bushfires. Bec wrinkled her nose. She’d been worried when she first saw an article about it in The Canberra Times . A black-and-white photograph of a raging fire on page four. She usually didn’t read the paper, but she’d read this article. No one seemed to think it was a big deal, or maybe they were just distracted by everything else that was going on. Right next to the article was a full-page advertisement: “If You See Something, Say Something,” run in large bold letters. She knew all about that. If she’d called the number underneath she’d have a one-in-ten chance of talking to her mom. It was the new anti-terrorist campaign that seemed to be everywhere right now. Not just in the paper but on billboards and on television. To make it worse, her mom would come home from work with endless dumb long-winded stories of people spying on their neighbours. Bec had no idea about politics and stuff like that. Still, it seemed strange to her that people were more worried about their neighbour’s new car than a fire so close you could actually smell it.

Bec didn’t even thank the driver as she got off the bus. She charged up the street to her house. When she was halfway she started to run, not caring about ruining her hair and sweating through her makeup. The scorching-hot air blew hard against her face, stinging her eyes, but she didn’t care. Nothing was more important than knowing if the money was still there. She kept running until she was on her doorstep, pulling out her keys, slamming the door behind her.

“It was just a joke!” she heard Andrew whine from the kitchen.

“It’s not funny.” She hesitated on the foot of the stairs. Her dad sounded really angry.

“Don’t be too hard on them.” Her mother’s voice was quiet. “They’re just kids. They don’t understand.”

“You’re so weak,” he said quietly.

She didn’t want to hear this; she ran up the stairs two at a time.

“Bec?” she heard her mom call from downstairs. She ignored her, flinging open the door to her room and grabbing her talking Cabbage Patch doll from on top of the chest of drawers. Hiking up the dress, she pulled open the Velcro patch at the back, where the battery pack was meant to fit inside. Instead there was the yellow and orange of twenty- and fifty-dollar notes. Thank God. It was her pay for the whole of last year. Almost six thousand dollars pressed tightly inside the belly of her toy. She heard the slow, steady steps of her mom on the stairs. She carefully put the doll back into place and pulled the dress out of her handbag, holding it up in front of herself and looking in the mirror.