Beneath The Skin(81)

I lift my eyebrows, biting the inside of my cheek. “I … can’t really think of any. I think the last time I tried to tell a ghost story, it ended with marshmallow on my pants and laughter from all the other boys.” At the girl’s blank stare, I add, “It was summer camp. I was nine.”

“I got one.”

The room turns to Nell. Myself included.

The girl—who is still nameless—lifts her chin self-importantly at Nell. “It has to be a really good one. Like, super-duper fucked up. Edge of your seat. Psychological and scary and has at least two deaths.”

“Two deaths,” echoes Nell.

“Two.”

Nell considers the information she has to work with, then calmly approaches the circle, yet doesn’t sit among them. Holding my chain absently with one hand and a beer bottle with the other, she lazily surveys the faces of everyone in the circle.

“So what’s the story?” the girl prods her.

I watch as Nell licks her lips, studying her audience. Does she really have a scary story, or is she just fucking with them? Maybe she’s coming up with it on the spot. Seems like something I’d do—except I’m not that creative, despite Nell insisting otherwise.

I’m a second away from nudging her when she draws a breath, her chest rising. And then:

“My story is about a little girl named Penny who lived in a small house with her mother, with her father, and with a great big toothy beast named … Dog.” Nell stares eerily at everyone in the circle, meeting each of their eyes importantly as she tells the story. “Her mother was a ghost who never spoke a word except to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ … and she was especially fond of apologizing. Her father was a … chemist. And unless he drank his magic chemical that he kept in a cupboard above the sink, he would become a monster.”

“A big toothy beast named Dog?” interrupts the Star Trek dude.

“The biggest and the toothiest,” Nell agrees. “Little Penny didn’t have many friends because all the other girls at school were mean to her. But Dog was never mean to her. She loved that big toothy beast with all her heart. And Dog loved her back. It was evident in the way that Dog protected her, every long day and every longer night. Dog would shield her from the monsters in the woods, from the monsters in her nightmares … and the monster at home.”

“You mean her dad?”

Nell narrows her eyes, letting the cold silence serve as an answer. Then she resumes. “The trouble with her father was, little Penny had a very different opinion of his … condition. She didn’t like her father when he drank the magic chemical. In fact, she thought it made him mean. She thought the magic chemical made him say … wicked things … and shout curses at them all. Every time he drank it, he’d punch a new hole in the wall, screaming as the plaster crumbled to the carpet. In Penny’s eyes, her father became a monster when he drank the magic chemical. In Penny’s eyes, her father needed to stop drinking it. She decided that all of it must go. Little Penny decided that she would wait until she had an opportunity, and then she would destroy every last drop of that magic chemical in the house. And on one fateful Christmas Eve, that’s precisely what she aimed to do.”

I feel my insides still at her words, growing tense as I listen.

“After little Penny collected every bottle, she took them out into the yard because, thinking the magic chemical to be evil, she didn’t trust it inside the house. And it was on that lawn that little Penny had herself her own little version of a tea party, except no one drank. Daintily opening and turning each bottle upside-down, she watered the flowers and the grass with the foul chemical. Another bottle’s contents dressed the trunk of a tree. She noticed how sweet some of it smelled, as if its evilness was trying to seduce her too, just as it had done her father.”

“Big ol’ waste of booze,” grunts an Abraham Lincoln. A hook-nosed male Wicked Witch of the West nods in agreement at his side, kicking back a Miller Lite.

“When her father went to the kitchen to help himself to a glass of magic chemical, he discovered all of it was missing. Not knowing what had happened, he went into a rage. Little Penny watched as he tore the curtains off a window, pulling the rod down with it and shattering the bulb of a lamp sitting below. He turned over the coffee table, sending its contents loudly to the hardwood floor. Among them was a drawing little Penny had done as a Christmas present, and it made her sad to see it on the floor, forgotten as her father raged on and on.

“When her mother came into the room, it became clear to little Penny the sobering reality that her father thought her mother was to blame for the missing magic chemical. Penny watched as he screamed at her ghost mother, cursing and shouting and spitting fire while the ghost simply kept apologizing. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Over and over. How she so loved to apologize for anything in the world, anything at all, even things for which she owed no apology.