Jilliane Hoffman - Pretty Little Things

‘Nice car,’ she said with a smile as she closed the door. She bent over and casually tried to rearrange the book bag at her feet so that Robert Pattinson was flipped face-down on the floor. She could shoot herself for forgetting to switch it out.

‘Thanks,’ he replied.

The window slid back up, and he turned up the radio. Lainey recognized the song from the movie Thirteen Going on Thirty . It was Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.

That’s a weird song, she thought. Who the hell listens to Michael Jackson that wasn’t, like, her parents’ age? She would have expected maybe Linkin Park or The Fray, Zach’s two favorite bands. Maybe he was playing it in the spirit of Halloween – as a build-up to the movie. God, she thought, please, please don’t let him be a geek. Or a weirdo. ‘Zombieland’s playing at a couple of places,’ Lainey said. ‘The next showing is six-ten at Magnolia, which is just up the road. Or we could go to the seven-fifteen at the mall.’ There were a couple of other theaters within driving distance, but those were the two she knew didn’t care if a kindergartner walked by himself into an R movie, as long as he bought himself a ticket.

‘OK.’

… You start to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it …

Michael Jackson crooned and squealed on the radio. ‘You want to go to the seven-fifteen? Then, um, make a left out of the parking lot. I can take you the way I always go, but I have to be on Atlantic Boulevard to get there.’ She giggled and looked around the dashboard. ‘I hope you have a navigation system on this thing. My friends always say I’m geographically challenged. I have a hard time finding my way back to my locker after lunch.’

Embossed in metal on the steering wheel was a raised, scripted L. Lainey recognized it from Molly’s dad’s car. He had a Lexus.

… Cause this is thriller, Thriller Night! And no one’s gonna save you from the beast about to strike …

She wanted to ask him why he wasn’t driving the BMW, but that sounded shallow. And it was shallow. A Lexus was just as nice. Nicer, maybe. She fidgeted with the mood ring on her finger. She hoped making conversation wasn’t gonna be this hard all night. Molly was the conversationalist, not her.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asked as they pulled out of the lot and made a right on to Rock Island. ‘We can go to the food court at the mall, if you want.’ That would be perfect, she thought. There was a really big chance that she’d see someone from Ramblewood there. Maybe even Melissa or Erica.

‘Sounds good,’ he said softly.

The creepy-sounding old guy started to rap on the radio. Vincent Price, the horror movie king from, like, a thousand years ago.

Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand …

‘I really liked your picture,’ Zach said, but he didn’t look at her. She watched as a single drop of sweat trickled down the side of his neck, disappearing into his shirt.

His arm was on the armrest, his hand dangling casually off the edge. Rough fingers tapped the gear shift. Wiry black hairs sprouted from the flesh above his knuckles. Lainey’s eyes slowly moved up his arm. Coarse black hairs stuck out of his cuff, like spindly spider legs.

She suddenly felt incredibly cold. Prickly goosebumps raced across her flesh. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the car.

Zach was blond.

… And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver …

He turned into an empty lot where a bunch of power station lines were. Across the street was a park. Molly’s mom had taken her and Molly there once before. It had a nature reserve running through it. The mall was in the other direction.

For no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller …

She reached for the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. The king of horror broke out into maniacal laughter. The song was over.

The cloth came across her face with lightning speed even as the car was still moving. The wicked taste burned her eyes and closed her throat. It was hard to breathe. Then he punched her hard in the head. She felt her face smash against the glass. She felt the warm blood trickle from her forehead, running past her eye and down her cheek. She felt her hands fall to the floor, her legs twitch and just stop working, as everything went to black.

The horror king just kept on laughing.

The hall clock started to chime. Debbie LaManna could hear it, even over the blare of the television. Even two rooms away. It chimed every quarter-hour, then dang in the number of hours at the top of every hour. It took five fucking minutes just to get through midnight. She cracked off a smoke ring. The ornate grandfather clock and a bank account with $3,714.22 in it was what her mother had left her nine years ago when she’d died of lung cancer, an oxygen tube strapped to her nose and a pack of Newports in hand. Of course the money was long gone, but damn it if that hideous Mack the Knife moon-face clock was still here – dragged along behind her from husband to husband, apartment to apartment, rental to rental. Toasting each lost hour of her life with a loud, distracting clang. One of these days she was gonna call the Salvation Army to come haul it away.

Debbie counted as the dings hit eleven. Just to be sure, she looked at her watch. She was gonna kill Elaine. Really kill her. Who the hell did she think she was, staying out till eleven at night? She crushed out her cigarette. This was how it all started with Liza. Breaking curfew, coming home stoned. Smelling like a fucking bottle of Bud. If that kid thought for one second that she was gonna get away with half the shit her older sister had pulled, she had a cold, hard reality check coming. What was that saying her own mother used to love to say? Fool me once, shame on you, Debra. Fool me twice, shame on me . And Debbie was no fool. Not any more. Elaine Louise was so gonna have her ass handed to her when she walked through that door. That was for certain. She swallowed a big chug of her Mich Ultra and tried to concentrate on the news.

‘Is she home yet?’ Bradley called out from his bedroom down the hall. His voice had the twisted smirk of a kid who was happy that his sibling was gonna be in a shitload of trouble.

‘Brad, if you don’t close that damn door and go to sleep in the next five minutes, there is no Laser Tag tomorrow with Lyle. I can promise you that!’

The door closed with a thud and Debbie tried to focus once again on the news. Listening to everyone else’s tragedies seemed to help for a little bit. A local fire. A bank robbery. Nine dead in an Iraq suicide bomb. Then her thoughts came around again. This time they landed on Todd, who was also not home yet. He was the real reason Debbie was so pissed off. Where the hell was he?

An after-work beer with the boys, honey. Just unwinding from a long, hard day of making money to feed your kids .

My ass, Debbie thought, bitterly. She knew he was probably drunk and fucking that new girl from the office in some sleazy Lauderhill motel or on a beach towel in the backseat of his car. The receptionist named Michelle that he swore up and down didn’t work at his office, even though that’s who’d answered the phone yesterday when Debbie had called to check.

Debbie rubbed her throbbing temples and lit another cigarette. She looked around the family room, littered with crap the kids hadn’t cleaned up, including petrified cereal bowls leftover from breakfast, video games, clothes and stacks of crumpled school papers pulled out of book bags and thrown wherever. When Liza did feel like coming home, she loved to dump whatever she didn’t want to wear or carry anywhere she felt like it. And then there was the other prince in the house, Bradley. Thanks to his dad’s testosterone-fueled edict that housework was a woman’s job, he didn’t lift a finger to pick up his shit, either. After working another nine-hour shift, this is what Debbie got to come home to – a messy house, a rat-bastard husband, kids who drained every last bit of energy from her body. And of course, no respect. Now, after she’d just gotten through what she hoped was the worst with the oldest, Elaine was gonna try and give her patience a run for the money. She shook her head and slapped the newspaper off the couch. This was not how life was supposed to have turned out. On cue, her mother chimed in down the hall.