side looked as if a tidal wave had picked everything up and thrown it down again randomly. Isobel was sitting in the middle of this mess like a spider on a web.
But that wasn’t what made Bonnie’s gut churn. It was what Isobel was doing. She had laid out beside her what looked a lot like Mrs. Flowers’ kit for cleaning out wounds, but she wasn’t healing anything.
She was piercing herself.
She had already done her lip, her nose, one eyebrow, and her ears, many times. Blood was dripping from all these places, dripping and falling onto the unmade sheets of her bed. Bonnie saw all that as Isobel looked up at them with a frown, except that the frown was only half there. On the pierced side, the eyebrow didn’t move at all.
Her aura was shattered orange with black lashings through it.
Bonnie knew, all at once, that she was going to be sick. She knew it with the deep knowledge that overcame all embarrassment and which sent her flying to a wastebasket she didn’t even remember seeing. Thank God, it had a white plastic bag lining it, she thought, and then she was completely occupied for a few minutes.
Her ears recorded a voice, even as she was thinking she was glad she hadn’t had lunch.
“My God,are you crazy? Isobel, what have you done to yourself? Don’t you know the kind of infections you can get…the veins you can hit…the muscles you can paralyze…? I think you’ve already pierced the muscle in your eyebrow — and you shouldn’t still be bleeding unless you’ve hit veins or arteries.”
Bonnie retched dryly into the wastebasket, and spat.
And just then she heard a meaty thud.
She looked up, half knowing what she would see. But it still was a shock. Meredith was doubled over from what must have been a punch in the stomach.
The next thing Bonnie knew, she was beside Meredith. “Oh, my God, did she stab you?” A stab wound…deep enough into the abdomen…
Meredith clearly couldn’t get her breath. From somewhere a bit of advice from her sister Mary, the nurse, floated into Bonnie’s mind.
Bonnie pounded with both fists on Meredith’s back, and suddenly Meredith took a huge gulp of air.
“Thanks,” she was saying weakly, but Bonnie was already dragging her away, away from the laughing Isobel and a collection of the world’s longest nails and the rubbing alcohol and other things that she had on a breakfast tray beside her.
Bonnie got to the door and almost collided with Jim, who had a wet washcloth in his hand. For her, she supposed. Or maybe for Isobel. All Bonnie was interested in was making Meredith pull up her top to make absolutely, positively sure that there were no holes in her.
“I got it — out of her hand — before she punched me,” Meredith said, still breathing painfully as Bonnie anxiously scanned the area above her low-rise jeans. “I’ll have a bruise, that’s all.”
“She hit you, too?” Jim said in dismay. Except that he didn’t say it. He whispered it.
You poor guy, Bonnie thought, finally satisfied that Meredith wasn’t perforated. What with Caroline and your sister Tami and your girlfriend, you don’t have the first idea of what’s going on. How could you?
And if we told you, you’d just think we were two more crazy girls.
“Jimmy, you have to call Dr. Alpert right away, and then I think they’re going to have to go to the hospital in Ridgemont. Isobel’s already done permanent damage to herself — God knows how much.All those piercings are almost certainly going to be infected. When did she start this?”
“Um, well…she first started acting weird after Caroline came to see her.”
“Caroline!” Bonnie blurted, confused. “Was she crawling?”
Jim gave her a look. “Huh?”
“Never mind Bonnie; she was joking,” Meredith said easily. “Jimmy, you don’t have to tell us about Caroline if you don’t want to. We — well, we know she was over at your house.”
“Does everybody know?” Jim asked miserably.
“No. Just Matt, and he only told us so that somebody could go check on your little sister.”
Jim looked guilty and stricken at once. The words poured out of him as if they’d been bottled up and now the cork was out of the bottle.
“I don’t know what’s going on anymore. All I can tell you is what happened. It was a couple days ago — late evening,” Jim said. “Caroline came over, and — I mean, I never even had a crush on her. It’s like, sure, she’s good- looking, and my parents were away and all, but I never thought I was the kind of guy…”
“Never mind that now. Just tell us about Caroline and Isobel.”
“Well, Caroline came over wearing this outfit that was — well, the top was practically transparent. And she just — she said, did I want to dance and it was, like, slow dancing and she — she, like,seduced me. That’s the truth. And the next morning she left — just about the time Matt came. That was the day before yesterday. And then I noticed Tami acting — crazy. Nothing I could do would stop her. And then I got a phone call from Isa-chan and — I’ve never heard her so hysterical. Caroline must have gone straight from my house to her house. Isa-chan said she was going to kill herself. And so I ran over here. I had to get away from Tami anyway because me being there at home just seemed to make it worse.”
Bonnie looked at Meredith and knew that they were both thinking the same thing: and somewhere in there, both Caroline and Tami propositioned Matt, too.
“Caroline must have told her everything.” Jim gulped. “Isa-chan and I haven’t — we were waiting, you know? But all Isa-chan would say to me was that I was going to be sorry. ‘You’ll be sorry; just wait and see,’ over and over and over. And, God, I am sorry.”
“Well, now you can stop being sorry and start calling the doctor. Right now, Jimmy.” Meredith gave him a swat on the behind. “And then you need to call your parents. Don’t give me those big brown puppy-dog eyes. You’re over eighteen; I don’t know what they can do to you for leaving Tami alone all this time.”
“But—”
“But me no buts. I mean it, Jimmy.”
Then she did what Bonnie knew she would, but was dreading. She approached Isobel again. Isobel’s head was down; she was pinching her navel with one hand. In the other, she held a long, shining nail.
Before Meredith could even speak, Isobel said, “So you’re in on it, too. I heard the way you called him ‘Jimmy.’ You’re all trying to take him away from me. All you bitches are trying to hurt me.Yurusenai! Zettai yurusenai! ”
“Isobel! Don’t! Can’t you see that you’re hurting yourself?”
“I’m only hurting myself to take away the pain. You’re the one who’s really doing it, you know. You’re pricking me with needles inside.”
Bonnie jumped inside her own skin, but not just because Isobel suddenly gave a vicious thrust of the nail. She felt heat sweep up into her cheeks. Her heart began to pound even faster than it was already going.
Trying to keep one eye on Meredith, she pulled her mobile phone out of her back pocket where she’d stashed it after the visit to Caroline’s house.
Still with half her attention on Meredith, she went on the Internet and rapidly entered just two search words. Then, as she made a couple of selections from her hits, she realized that she could never absorb all the information in a week, much less a few minutes. But at least she had a start.
Just now, Meredith was backing away from Isobel. She put her mouth close to Bonnie’s ear and whispered, “I think we’re just antagonizing her. Did you get a good look at her aura?”
Bonnie nodded.
“Then we probably should leave the room, at least.”
Bonnie nodded again.
“Were you trying to call Matt and Elena?” Meredith was eyeing the mobile phone.
Bonnie shook her head and turned the phone so Meredith could see her two search words. Meredith stared, then lifted dark eyes to Bonnie’s in a kind of horrified recognition.
Salem witches.
“It actually makes a horrible kind of sense,” Meredith said. They were in Isobel’s family room, waiting for Dr.
