Deadly Little Voices Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m at Knead, desperate to know where I am and why I went all psycho-and-demonic in sculpture class (her words, not mine). Part of me wants to hang up, but instead I agree to let her and Wes pick me up, which is exactly what they do. Less than twenty minutes later, they’re parked and waiting outside the studio.

    Luckily, we don’t really talk much to one another in the car. Kimmie is too busy on her cell phone, telling her dad why he can’t expect her to change plans on a moment’s notice.
    Kimmie’s parents separated recently, and Kimmie and her younger brother, Nate, have been spending some weekends at her dad’s new apartment in the city.

    “Just because you want to play house with your fourteen-year-old girlfriend on the weekend of the twenty-first doesn’t mean that I have to rearrange my whole entire social schedule,” she tells him.

    “The highlight of which involves eating curly fries, playing video games, and driving around aimlessly with me,” Wes snickers.

    Kimmie moves the phone away from her ear as her dad speaks, enabling us to hear his garbled voice. He’s demanding that she give him more respect, and reminding her that his girlfriend, Tammy, is actually nineteen years old, not fourteen . “And very mature for her age,”
    he adds.

    Unfortunately, Kimmie’s not the only one whose parents are dealing with drama. Ever since my aunt’s most recent suicide attempt about six months ago, my mom hasn’t been herself.
    She’s been beyond stressed out, clinically depressed, and ADD-like distracted, which is why she’s started seeing a therapist, and why she hasn’t been super involved in my life lately, despite how messed up it’s been. I think she just can’t handle it, and I’m pretty sure the feeling’s mutual.

    By the time Kimmie clicks off her phone, we’re in front of my house with exactly one hour before either of my parents gets home. We go inside, and I head straight for the kitchen.
    The red light on the answering machine practically blinks Ms. Beady’s name. I press the play button, and her voice squeaks out, begging for either or both of my parents to call her back pronto .

    I delete it.

    “Okay, are you trying to get yourself grounded?” Wes asks me.

    “You’re right,” I say, keeping my voice low, though fairly certain Aunt Alexia is locked away in her room, out of earshot, as has become usual for her. “If my parents have to hear that I had some sort of psychotic episode in the middle of sculpture class, it’s better if they hear it while my mother’s straight-out-of-a-mental-facility-suicidal-and-possibly-schizophrenic sister is staying with us.”

    “Point taken,” he says, keeping his voice low, too.

    “Plus, it doesn’t even matter, because I’m pretty sure Ms. Beady left two messages earlier, not one,” I say, suddenly flashing back to the voice inside my head that told me there were two. Is it possible that it was referring to the two messages? Does that even make sense?

    “So, there’s at least one other voice mail message out there just waiting to get played,”
    Kimmie says, putting the pieces together.

    “Hungry?” Wes asks. His arms are full of bags of Fritos and Starbursts. He’s managed to locate my dad’s stash of junk food (kept in the baskets over the kitchen cabinets) in less time than it takes most people to pick a wedgie.

    We loot the stash, and I lead them down the hallway, almost forgetting the fact that Aunt Alexia’s nurse is there.

    “Hi,” Loretta says, coming out of Alexia’s room. She closes the door softly behind her.

    Nurse Loretta (a.k.a. Nurse Leatherface, according to Wes) is about sixty years old, but it looks as if she’s spent at least forty of those years in a tanning bed. Her skin is pure lines and leather. “Alexia’s just gone off to sleep,” she tells us, “so if you wouldn’t mind speaking in soft voices…”

    “Will Frito-munching be too loud?” Wes asks, holding the bag out to