The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

she knew she’d never get lessons and it was probably already too late to begin
anyway. She’d fallen in love with comic books and sometimes pretended she
was a superhero with a secret identity. Not heroine. It never occurred to her that
comic-book characters really had gender, or anything under those tights.
More seriously, she thought she’d like to draw X-Men when she grew up, even
if, right now, her figures tended to be lumpy and misshapen. She knew she’d
have to study hard.
But it was hard enough just to get by in school. She was out of the house so
much that it was a struggle to keep up appearances. Not that she cared much
about appearances the way the popular girls did, not that she bothered with
makeup or painting her nails, but she did like to be clean like anybody else, and
have fresh underwear. Yet if she spent all night at the library, or at the train
station reading under the lights while pretending to be waiting for a late train,
and then came home to find the house full of strange people and noises and odd
flickering lights and had to sleep out in the yard, it showed. She hated going to
school with the knees of her pants dirty or leaf bits in her hair. By the time she
was in junior high, she figured out how to slip into the girl’s locker room at six
o’clock in the morning and use the shower—until she got caught at it one day.
“My mom hasn’t been paying the water bills,” she said, but she didn’t think
she was believed.
“Caroline,” the school counselor said, in a voice so drippingly sympathetic that
it was all Caroline could do to not laugh in her face, “is everything all right at
home?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
That was the funny part, as she laughed and cried and screamed into her pillow
—or sometimes, when she was alone in the park, into the sky and she didn’t give
a damn who heard her—because things were not fine.
It was, again, almost November. She was sleeping out in the yard more often
than not because she was afraid to go into the house, and she was likely to get
frostbite in that damn hammock, even if she did wear a heavy coat and sleep
under the same old, muddy blanket as always.
She lay there in the dark. Her face was cold. Her teeth chattered. She was
angry. By now she was fourteen and had torn up her notebooks in a fit of rage,
and wasn’t going to be an artist anymore when she grew up. No, she was going
to become a scientist and learn a way to blow up the world and do it. No one
cared about her. No one believed anything she said, and so, she decided, it didn’t
matter what she said—because she was always a mess, because she was crazy