Allyson In Between ✔︎

Chapter Six

My family's new-to-me house is a Williamsburg Colonial, the same architectural style as Faircrest. But it's not genuinely old and the newness makes it look...sort of...fake. And this house is nowhere close to being mansion-sized. So my second impression is claustrophobic. The four of us barely fit in the kitchen—which is where we enter the house after Dad parks the van. Which barely fit inside the cramped garage.

But god, the smell in here.

It's food, obviously, something meaty and mouth-watering. Familiar, but I can't quite...

"What do you think?" Dad asks.

There's pride in his tone. So I give the room another scan, trying hard not to judge. But. Our cabinets in North Carolina were white. There were twice as many windows. And the kitchen opened up to the family room. This kitchen is closed off and crowded. It's like a cave with a six-burner gas range and an oversized stainless steel refrigerator.

Dad smiles when our eyes meet. And there's this glint in his dark eyes. Like he knows I'm making the comparison, and the Virginia house is coming up short. "It's a little darker than the kitchen you remember," he says. "But I have a plan to fix that."

"Your father has a lot of plans," Mom says. With a hint of sarcasm.

She adds a laugh to make it sound like a joke, but it's forced and unnatural. Which pretty much describes how she's been acting all morning.

"Go ahead and take Allyson up to her room," she tells Lindsay, but now her tone has the same extra-nervous quality it did the day I accidentally called her from Faircrest, and her eyes are jumping back and forth between us like she's...

Skeptical is the word that comes to mind, but I'm not sure it's right.

"Go ahead," Mom says again. "Dad and I will finish unloading the car."

My sister doesn't respond to Mom's order, not with a nod or even a look. She turns, stone-faced, and zombie-trods out of the room, giving no indication that she intends for me to follow. I trail behind her, through a narrow hallway that ends in a chocolate brown foyer. She takes the steep staircase, slow and methodical, skipping a step with each upward stride. But I have an embarrassing staircase phobia that goes back to a childhood tumble, so I have to take it one step at a time, securing both feet before I can move on to the next.

Lindsay waits for me, seemingly patient—but when I get to the landing, she speeds to the end of the hallway and stops, turning sideways to let me pass through the open door. Her eyes narrow slightly as she tracks my progress.

The walls in "my" bedroom are purple. I knew this already because of the photos Mom showed me, but seeing it now, live and in person is...I don't know. I guess I attached an emotion to those photographs. It wasn't comfort exactly, but at least it was somewhere in the vicinity. What I'm feeling now is closer to what it was like passing that car accident on the interstate after we left Faircrest.

We sat in traffic for all of an hour, inching closer and closer to the flashing lights. I kept telling myself I wasn't going to look, because I was imagining the worst and I didn't want to see something that bad in real life—not today of all days. By the time we got to the scene, I forgot the promise I made myself. I looked. But there was nothing to see because of the way the emergency vehicles were parked. It was like the Universe was protecting me.

Seeing this room now is the opposite. The walls didn't look this bad in the photos Mom showed me. I had myself convinced that it was a good purple—but I was so wrong. This is the color of death by asphyxiation.

And it smells bad, like someone spilled an entire bottle of perfume. It's claustrophobic and toxic.

"You don't like it?" Lindsay asks.