Beastly: Lindy’s Diary Page 3

  “Excuse me, miss. I have lunch.”

  It was a woman’s voice, a maid, maybe. Not wanting to be rude, I opened the door.

  She had been in the act of leaving a tray. Now, she held it out. “Hello, you must be Linda. I am Magda.”

  “You work here?” I asked.

  She told me she did, and that if I told her what I liked for lunch, she’d buy it.

  Like Will before her, she assured me I was safe.

  I told her thank you, but I wasn’t hungry.

  An hour later, I found a note under my door. It said:

  Dear Lindy,

  Welcome! Do not be afraid. I hope you will be comfortable in your new home. Whatever you want, you only have to ask. I will see that you get it immediately.

  I am looking forward to meeting you at dinner tonight. I want you to like me.

  Sincerely,

  Adrian King

  He did think we were going to have some romance! He thought he could trap me, kidnap me, whatever you called it, buy me, and I’d just go along with it. Well, that was definitely not going to happen. I wrote, “NO!” on the note in big letters and slipped it back under the door.

  I went back to sonnets.

  An hour later, he was there in person, begging me to come out, talking about the favor (!) he was doing, getting me away from my dad. And again, an hour after that, all apologetic. “I hope we can be friends someday,” he said. “I understand if you’re . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t ask him to.

  Still, I wondered what he looked like, what had happened to him. Clearly, Will couldn’t tell me, and I hadn’t believed my father.

  Where were Adrian’s parents? Now that I knew Dad’s story was a lie, I wondered if any of it was true.

  I wondered where my father was too, if he was safe. Much as I hated what he did sometimes, he was still my father.

  July 22

  The past three days, I haven’t left my room at all. I’ll admit I’ve been sulking, a luxury I don’t get at home. I’ve talked to no one except Magda, and her only because I don’t want to be rude when she brings my meals. Each time, she brings a different rose, a different color, and each time, she points it out to me, saying something like, “If you cut a rose in early morning, it lasts longer,” or, “A coral rose symbolizes admiration and friendship.” Each time, I thank her and go back to reading. In two days, I’ve read all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and four plays. I’m halfway through a book, The Woman in White, which is over seven hundred pages long. I’m starting to lose touch with reality, but reality sort of sucks.

  Since I’ve always lived in apartments, I’m used to hearing other people’s sounds that have nothing to do with me. I’ve long known that our neighbor, Mr. Estevez, farts every morning at 5:30 and that when the Wolfs (or is it Wolves?) have a fight about money, she threatens to move in with her sister. I know that Angela Lester, who lives downstairs and isn’t much older than I am, has two kids, a boy and a girl. When I can hear from her voice that she’s had it, I offer to watch them.

  This house is a little different, though. I live with these people, but I don’t know them. I guess that Will and Magda live in the bedrooms above mine. Sometimes, I hear Spanish-language radio from the left side or NPR from the right. I wouldn’t mind discussing NPR with Will. The kitchen and common areas are below me, and I smell cooking smells and hear vacuuming or Magda singing during the day. She has a beautiful voice and loves opera.

  Since the first day, Adrian has made no attempt to speak to me. I assume his rooms are either on the top floor of the house or in the basement, not connected with mine. Only late at night do I hear someone pacing the halls below me, someone surfing channels, watching old movies on TV, someone who can’t sleep. I’m sure it’s him. Adrian.

  I suppose I should be happy he’s not up here, attacking me in the night, and I AM. Believe me, I am.

  But the weird thing is, I’m starting to feel lonely. Yes, I’m getting a lot of reading done, which is great, but I sort of wish Adrian would ask me to come out again. Or Will would offer to tutor me. I might say yes this time. I miss talking to people.

  Adrian is downstairs right now. I can hear the television go on and the channels being changed. He settles on a movie, Forrest Gump. I hear Robin Wright yelling, “Run, Forrest!”

  He obviously has decent taste in movies. I mean, most guys my age, unsupervised, would be watching porn or, at least, something with lots of explosions.

  Maybe I’ll watch it too. Up here in my room.

  Good-night for now.

  July 23

  I had the strangest dream.

  I fell asleep early and woke to hear a clock striking midnight. Funny, I’d heard no clock before. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went to find my book.

  That’s when I saw the bird. I’m pretty sure it was a crow, but it sat on the top of my doorframe, like the raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” and like that raven, it was tap-tap-tapping.

  “What?” I said.

  Then, the crow transformed into a woman, and she began singing in a strange, almost unearthly way, operatic, yet without words or maybe with strange, garbled words, and in a tune that was equally mangled. She sounded almost like a theremin, this weird instrument they use in old horror movies.

  The weird thing was, I recognized her. It was Kendra, from my school, that girl who’d been talking to Kyle the last day I saw him.

  She was dressed all in white, a flowing dress that surrounded her like a Greek goddess’s robes. She raised her hand, beckoning to me to follow her.

  I did. She left the room. I don’t remember the door opening, but I followed, as if by magic, out of the room and down a staircase to the second floor. This, I knew, was the floor I’d seen when I came in, the living area of the house. I hadn’t looked around much. Now I did.

  The room was beautiful, with shiny wooden floors and high ceilings, but it barely looked lived in. No mess, for sure, but nothing personal, either—no photographs, no books, magazines, or art, even on the walls, as if it had been put together hastily, more like a decorator’s model than a real home.

  Kendra beckoned to me from the window, where she had gone seemingly without walking. I obeyed and stood by it, wanting to drink in the full moon. When I was little, I always imagined the moon following me down the street. Now, in someplace so lonely and different, it comforted me to see it still.

  When I reached the window, I stepped back.

  I had been wrong to believe no one was awake. Someone was, and he was out in the greenhouse. My own room had no window that overlooked it, but now that I saw it, I gasped.

  Hundreds

  of roses—red, yellow, pink, coral, white, even purple—roses climbing on trellises to the ceiling, roses in pots on the ground, lining the walls as hedges, hanging like a bridal veil. This, too, persuaded me that I was in a dream. Who had ever seen so many roses in one place?

  In the middle of the greenhouse, a shadow moved.

  Was it him? Adrian?

  I had been avoiding him all these days. Now, I really wanted to see him, but just see him, not talk to him. Part of the reason I’d been avoiding him, I realized, was not just fear of what he might do to me, but fear of myself. I was afraid he’d be hideous and, more than that, I feared my reaction to him. I’ve always prided myself on being kind, being understanding. But my father had called Adrian a monster, my father, who’d seen all kinds of ugliness. What if I cringed when I saw him? What if I cried? What if, like Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I found I simply couldn’t look at him at all? I didn’t want to be shallow, cruel. I wanted to be better than the students at Tuttle, who’d looked down on me because I didn’t have the right clothes, the right family, the right money. What if I wasn’t?

  Now, though, maybe I could see him without him seeing me. The living room was dark, the greenhouse well lit. I stepped forward.

  He had been partially hidden by the roses, but now, as if he
knew I was watching, he came into view. He was pacing, I realized, and when he stepped out from behind the vines, I could see his face.

  I gasped. My father hadn’t been wrong or crazy or strung out. Adrian was a monster. He looked like no one I’d seen outside a movie. At first, I could only see his body. He was tall, tall and slim, and if I’d seen him from the back, I’d have assumed he was handsome, but as soon as his face became visible from the shadows, I knew he wasn’t.

  Blond hair—fur—covered every inch of his face and what I could see of him. His hands had claws, but his face was weirder. The nose, long and wolflike, sloped downward to a mouth with white, fanged teeth. The hair on his head had been brushed to shield as much of his face as possible, but it did little good. It was blond and long, and from beneath it, I could see the most beautiful wide, blue eyes. They seemed to glow, somehow, from the darkness. They seemed to meet mine.

  I realized he was looking at me. Could he see me staring? Of course not. Yet those blue eyes—oddly familiar—seemed to plead with me.

  Again, I backed away. I stumbled across the dark room, half expecting footsteps to pursue me. None came. I didn’t see Kendra again, in human or bird form. Not caring how much noise I made, I stumble-ran upstairs, slammed and locked my door. I staggered to bed. Only then did I realize I was crying. Not for me, not for me, for him. I wanted to hate, not pity Adrian, yet how could I not pity someone who looked like him, someone so pathetic and twisted and ruined? What accident could cause such a thing? No accident, other than an accident of birth. What would it be like to be this way, to have people run from you?

  And yet, his roses were so beautiful. He understands beauty.

  I had seen him. I could look at him now, I thought, without cringing. Part of me still hated him, wanted to hate him for making me pity him. Before, I could live in the world, not knowing that someone like Adrian existed, and not somewhere far off, not like the cleft-palate babies you see in magazines, the blind beggars in Slumdog Millionaire, but really, in my own neighborhood. I couldn’t ignore him. I pictured the pleading look in those eyes. I had to take pity on him.

  Still, I cried, I cried for him until I fell asleep.

  Or had I always been asleep? I was dreaming, wasn’t I? I looked up and saw Kendra, still standing there, still singing weirdly. Then, her mixed-up words became real ones. She sang:

  Now, his name means darkness

  But once, it meant beauty.

  His face is hideous as a thorn

  But within, he is a rose, maybe.

  Go to him.

  Go to him.

  That was the last thing I remembered before I fell asleep for real. When I woke next, it was midday. No sign of Kendra, but my room was filled with roses of every color.

  The fact is, I’m stuck here, whether it’s because my father needs me to be or because I need to run away from my life, I’m here, alone. Adrian is stuck here too, lonely, ugly, so desperate for companionship he was willing to resort to blackmail to get it. But I understand now. I understand, and it would be cruel for me to ignore him.

  I understand, and I know that, tonight, I will do as Dream Kendra said.

  I will go to him.

  July 24

  All day, I sat on my bed and tried to read, but I was restless, excited, I realized, at the thought of meeting Adrian. I’d sworn to stay in my room forever, but when it came down to it, it was just too difficult. I’ve never been good at sulking. When I was a kid, if I argued with a friend or one of my sisters, I’d pledge never to speak to her again. I usually lasted an hour, maybe less.

  And, of course, I always forgave my dad, too.

  It was the same here. If I knew I’d be safe, I’d give the guy a chance, just to have someone to talk to.

  So when Magda came to bring me my oatmeal, I stopped her.

  “What’s he like? Why does he want me here?”

  She looked a little surprised, then shrugged and said, “He is lonely. That is all.”

  I nodded and took the oatmeal. It was as I thought, not a murderer or rapist, just a freakish, friendless boy, a lonely soul. Like me.

  “And you . . . like him?” I asked Magda.

  She said she did.

  It makes sense. After all, isn’t it always the handsome, outgoing, “normal” guys who turn out to be dangerous wack jobs? Every time they arrest a guy for killing tons of women, his neighbors always say they never suspected. That he was perfectly normal.

  Wouldn’t it then follow that deformed, reclusive freaks are actually safer than normal people?

  Well, it made sense in my head.

  I waited for nightfall. After everyone was asleep, I picked up the dinner dishes and brought them downstairs to the kitchen, just to have an excuse to be there. I made noise so he’d know I was up. I heard him in the living room, watching television. I listened at the door. It was some sporting event that must have happened hours earlier. Still, it comforted me that he was watching sports, not some History Channel special about virgin sacrifice. Finally, after a minute, I went in.

  His back was to me. He said, “I’m here. I want you to know so you won’t freak.”

  Freak. Even I cringed at the word, but I stepped toward him.

  For one moment, everything froze. Me, standing there, the baseball game on television, Adrian, star

  ing ahead but—I now knew—not really paying attention to it. The room was shadowy-dark, and I could only see the back of his head. It was so normal.

  Then, he turned to meet my eyes.

  At close range, in the dim light, I found I was more fascinated than repulsed by Adrian’s face. I stared at the counterclockwise whorls of fur at the edges of his nose, the eyes human, but wider set than my own. On its own merits, his face wasn’t ugly, wasn’t repellant at all. On its own merits, Adrian’s face had an almost catlike beauty.

  It was just . . . he was supposed to be human.

  He saw me staring and looked down. “Please. I won’t hurt you. I know I look this way, but I’m not . . . please. I won’t hurt you, Lindy.”

  I started babbling, trying to cover my faux pas of staring at him with the greater faux pas of too much talk, too many stupid things I don’t want to remember. He started trying to change the subject, talking about the dinner we’d eaten, what a good cook Magda was, normal stuff, anything to shut me up. He sounded perfectly normal.

  Which made me feel sorrier for him.

  “When I used to live with my father,” Adrian said, still talking about the food, “he never wanted Magda to make Latin dishes. She just made regular stuff then, meat and potatoes. But when he left us here, I didn’t really much care what I ate, so she started making this stuff.”

  He meant his father. His father had left him. I said, “What do you mean he left you here? Where’s your father now?”

  He looked away, as if he knew he’d said too much, but he said he lived with Magda and Will, that Will was his tutor. I could tell he was trying to keep it very normal, trying not to upset me. It was all so abnormal, though. But then, what in my life wasn’t?

  “Tutor?” I asked, just to keep the conversation as normal as he wanted it.

  “A teacher, really, I guess. Since I can’t go to school because . . . anyway, he homeschools me.”

  And I wondered. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen. Same as you.”

  Sixteen. My father had said he was a teenager, but he was all alone. Of course, I was alone too. “Where are your parents?” I asked. He knew I was just as abandoned as he was.

  He didn’t say it, though. Instead, he said, “My mother left a long time ago. And my father . . . well, he couldn’t handle that I looked like this. He’s into normalcy.”

  My mind flooded with questions. Had he always looked this way? Was his father cruel to him? Did he treat him like a freak, like in The Phantom of the Opera? The house, all of it, was beautiful, but how could he live here, how could he grow up with no nurturing? Of course, my father didn’t exactly nurture me
either, but at least I could try to live a normal life. Just thinking about him, trapped here, brought tears to my eyes. Now, it was I who looked away.

  “Do you miss him?” I asked, still not looking. “Your father?”

  He shook his head. “I try not to. I mean, you shouldn’t miss people who don’t miss you, right?”

  I nodded, and said something about my own father, so he’d know I understood, even though I couldn’t, not really, not the level of it. We were the same, motherless, fatherless, both freaks in our own way. We were the same. I was here because I was meant to be.

  Adrian was the one who changed the subject away from our mutual patheticness. He asked if I wanted Will to tutor me, too. I heard myself saying yes. I felt myself meaning it. I feel like, maybe, I was meant to be here, meant to help this poor guy.

  He told me they were reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. Then, he invited me to see his rose garden.

  “I’d like that.” I said I would meet him there tomorrow.

  And after a few more stupid statements on my part, a few more awkward ones on his, I started up to bed.

  It has begun.

  Only when I reached my room did I think to ask what else they were studying, what math, what social studies. Funny how Adrian had homed in on reading, on literature, as if he knew it was what I loved. Does he have Magda spying on me, to know I read all day? Crazy. I went back downstairs but stopped.

  As I approached the living room, I heard a voice, quietly whooping. Through the door, I could see someone, a boy my own age, more human than not, doing a wild victory dance around the room.

  I smiled. It could wait.

  July 25