A Pretty Little Parody [PLL]

46. Maybe It's Maybelline ... Or Maybe It's Flammable

The water and whatever else I’d imbibed had definitely gone to my head. I stood there in the dark for a few more minutes, goosebumps rising on my arms.

“BOO!” someone shouted. I screamed and jumped up. But it was only Moby, a trollish grin on his face, cracking up. “Gotcha!”

“Holy shit, you really scared me. I thought you were, like, Henna’s ghost come back for revenge.”

“She’s only been dead for a couple hours,” he said. “If anything, her spirit would be, like, waiting in line to get into heaven.”

“Nuh uh!” I shook my head vehemently. “Some ghosts have unfinished business to do. She’s probably down here right next to us, plotting her next move.”

We both looked around the hot tub room for a few beats. All was still and quiet. The big green plastic cover had been pulled off the hot tub and bluish bubbles rose to the surface. I wondered how long it had sat without anybody using it. Had someone ever thrown a hot tub party here? Had Eli, back before we switched?

Somehow, I had a feeling I would never know.

Moby sniffed the air. “It does smell really weird, though. Like… hair products.”

“Let’s go back in the house. I’m getting a creepy vibe out here.”

“Dude, there was a creepy vibe ages ago. How come you haven’t noticed?”

“Whatever. We can fan out and try to find the source of the smell, and then GTFO of here and bury Henna’s body.”

“That sounds like a plan.”

I stepped back into the main section of the house. Evan and Alec had turned on the Wii and were playing tennis on the big screen. A was nursing something that definitely wasn’t water and typing furiously into his iPad.

“Guys!” I clapped my hands to get their attention. “So Moby and I reached the conclusion that there’s something weird going on with the smell inside this house, so we should fan out and try to find the source.”

A held up his iPad. “I was just trying to investigate what it could be, but your Internet up here is shit.”

“Really?” A big, fancy house like this had to have good connection, rugged Poconos place or not. “That seems a little strange.”

“It was working fine earlier,” Eli piped up from behind the couch. “Tristan and I were looking for good places to dump a body, but all we found were sarcastic answers from ten-year-olds trolling on Yahoo Answers.”

As he spoke, the Wii screen suddenly went blank, then showed nothing but static. “What the hell?” Alec muttered, shaking the remote. Then the lights in the kitchen flickered and went out.

“Guys?” Evan asked fearfully.

We all turned to look at him.

“I hear footsteps,” he whispered. “And… they’re… coming… closer…”

I stepped closer to Moby involuntarily.  Suspense was never really my thing.

Was it?

“BOO!” someone shouted. I screamed, grabbing onto Moby and squeezing the life out of him.

“Jesus Christ!” Moby wrenched me off of him. “You’re gonna give me hearing problems when I’m old if you keep going off like that.”

“It was just me,” said Henry, stepping out of the shadows. “I was just coming back from the bathroom, and saw my opportunity. Sorry if I scared you.”