The Girl Who Kissed a Lie

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

We go to Salem Willows. Andy drives. He’s the only one of us with a license, and he uses a Zipcar to get us up there. Apparently, he pretends he’s his mother to get the Zipcar, using her account. I wonder if this is supposed to impress us. Kelsey doesn’t seem very impressed. She says, “Is your mother going to have to pay for this?”

Andy hesitates, then says, “I guess?”

“Well, that’s rude of you.”

“She won’t even notice,” Andy assures her.

Kelsey looks stonily out the window, plainly offended by all of this, and I’m not sure why.

The car feels awkward now, with Andy clearing his throat uncertainly and Kelsey staring silently out the window and Brody staring silently at me. I desperately start a conversation to break the awkwardness, but, because I’m an idiot, what I say is this:

“Do you think it’s a big deal that Mrs. Bourne sews?” I ask.

The silence in the car feels stunned at my idiocy instead of awkward. So at least I accomplished that?

I fail at being normal.

Kelsey twists around in the passenger seat to look at me, where I’m sitting behind the driver’s seat. I expect Kelsey to look at me like I have thirteen heads and say, No, of course not. Why would that be a big deal? Instead Kelsey looks thoughtful. “I guess,” she concludes, “it depends on what she sews.”

She sounds so much like Ben that I can only gape at her.

“What?” she asks defensively. “I mean, I was thinking that it would be spooky if she was sewing people’s skin. Like, putting body parts together like Frankenstein or something. You’re the one who got it into my head that she might be a witch!”

“Mrs. Bourne’s a witch?” says Andy.

“Of course she’s not a witch,” says Brody.

“Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t a witch!” I point out.

“It’s the same idea,” Kelsey insists. “Spooky Halloween stuff.”

“She’s sewing lace,” I tell her. “There’s just a lot of lace back there. Piles and piles of lace.”

Kelsey doesn’t look assuaged, which was what I was going for. She looks thrown. “Really?”

“It’s pretty lace,” I tell her. “It’s not creepy lace. It’s not black lace with spiders on it or anything. It’s just white lace.”

“Sure,” says Kelsey. “Fine. Just…why does she have so much of it?”

“I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “I guess she just…really likes it?”

Kelsey looks dubious and I’m annoyed.

“Why can’t she just be a normal old lady?” I complain.

“Oh, I’m sure she is a normal old lady,” Kelsey tells me. “It’s just that normal old ladies are weird. That’s what makes them normal.”

I think about my aunts, who are very weird old ladies. So does that make me normal?

Brody says, “I agree. Sewers can be very peculiar.”

“Sewers can be?” I say to him. “People who sew?”

“Yes.” He looks at me. “Don’t you think so?”

I’ve never thought about it. I think it’s weird that he apparently has. But then I think of my aunts and decide that maybe I’m not the best judge of weird.