Lessons from a Dead Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

her hands.
    Leah shoves the magazine under her shirt. “Come on!” She pushes past me and makes her way back up to my bedroom.
    I stay behind and push the plastic bag back against the cardboard box deep in the closet. The closet smells like my father, only it’s a stale him, mixed with must and old wool. I quickly step back out into the room.
    It feels different in here — the sweet blue flowers on the wallpaper, the silver frame with my parents’ wedding picture, Christi’s and my tiny plaster handprints hanging from pink ribbons — it all feels fake. I shut my father’s closet door. How could something so nasty exist in this room?
    “E-laine!” Leah calls in a singsong voice from upstairs.
    It’s wrong. I know it. But I go to her anyway. She’s lying on her stomach on my bed. She looks up and smiles when she sees me, then pats the space beside her.
    I join her. She has the magazine opened to a picture of a woman with red hair sitting in a chair with her legs spread open. She’s smiling.
    Leah turns the pages while we both stare, speechless. My body tingles all over. I feel the same fear and excitement I felt in the doll closet. I hate it. But I keep looking.
    Suddenly we hear the back door open downstairs and my mother’s footsteps wandering through the house.
    “Girls?” she calls out.
    “Hide it!” I whisper loudly.
    Leah laughs. “You should see your face,” she says.
    “Leah, please,” I plead. “Put it under the mattress.”
    She stands up with the magazine in her hands.
    “What’s wrong, Laine? Afraid your mother will catch us?”
    “Yes!”
    Leah rolls her eyes. “It’s only a stupid magazine. What’s the big deal?”
    “Girls?” my mother calls from downstairs. “Are you ready for some lunch?” I hear her feet starting up the stairs. I know at that moment something awful is going to happen.
    “Hide it. Please,” I whisper.
    Leah dances around the bedroom, swirling the magazine above her head. The blond woman on the cover smiles at me, her large white breasts laughing.
    I lunge for the magazine, pull it out of Leah’s hands, and manage to shove it under the mattress right as my mother reaches the top of the stairs.
    Leah seems surprised, but only for a second. She giggles.
    “What are you girls doing?” my mother asks from the doorway.
    “Nothing,” I say.
    “Well, not
nothing,
Laine,” Leah says.
    God, I want to kill her. My heart beats so hard and fast it hurts. Sweat prickles out all over my body, hot and cold at the same time.
    “We were playing, right, Lainey?” Leah giggles again and sits on the bed.
    “What are you up to?” my mother asks suspiciously.
    “Nothing,” I say again. But she’s already caught on.
    “Why is the dust ruffle on your bed tucked into the mattress?”
    I look. The edge of the magazine is sticking slightly out from under the mattress. I’d shoved it under so quickly, I pushed the dust ruffle in, too.
    “What is that?”
    “Nothing,” I answer quickly.
    Leah giggles again.
    My mother pulls the magazine out from under the mattress and looks at the cover. Her mouth drops open. She rolls the magazine to hide the cover. Leah keeps giggling. But she sounds nervous now.
    “Where did you get this?”
    I don’t answer. Leah can’t stop making those awful giggle sounds.
    “Where?!”
    Leah laughs out loud. I glare at her. “Shut up!” I scream.
    My mother grabs my arm so hard, her fingers dig into my muscle.
    I pull away and run out of the room, down the stairs, and outside. Out to the pathway in the woods that leads to the big rock Leah and I used to hang out on when we first became friends. We pretended it was an island and we were stranded on it and had to come up with ways we could survive.
    I climb the rock and sit on top of it, hugging my knees to my chest. Through the woods and my tears, I see our white farmhouse. It looks quiet, but I know it isn’t. I watch, waiting for some sign of my mother. Or Leah.
    I’ve never felt this ugly