Read Online Cauchemar by Alexandra Grigorescu - Free Book Online Page A

mewled and hissed as soon as he was deposited in Callum’s apartment. She was surprised by how small the list was. Her love for the house didn’t live in its contents.
    In return, Hannah tossed out bags full of take-out containers from Callum’s apartment, and she grilled whole fish, then sat straight-backed with excitement as he moaned his approval.
    While he was practicing music or out on his boat, she composed recipes. Mae’s dominance of the kitchen had been so assured that Hannah had assumed there’d be more recipe books, but there were just a few notebooks with handwritten scrawls, mostly for teas, broths, and suggested pairings of ingredients.
    When Callum was overworked, she fed him chicken and okra gumbo, sensing instinctively that the smoked andouille and celery-infused chicken would revive him. Persillade, a simple mixture of parsley, garlic, and olive oil, scented his breath as he sang to her on his small balcony. If she squinted just so, the colored Christmas lights still wound around the fire escape became a galaxy, wreathing them.
    Hannah discovered the effects of ground cayenne and paprika for herself. The giggles, the pervasive good mood. The wetness that welled inside her. She doused the apartment with heady fumes of Scotch bonnet peppers, dark roux, and salted pork, and paced the apartment until Callum came home. He learned to recognize the smell, as sure as a pair of red garters dangling from the doorknob.
    The night she prepared sarigue in oregano and hot sauce, she left moist handprints on every wooden surface. He bent her over and she angled herself by straining on tiptoes. They awoke the next afternoon, limbs sore.
    Her life before Callum was beginning to take on the quality of a dream, until she found a photograph of her and Sarah Anne in an old, water-stained copy of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
that Callum had retrieved for her. The terrorizing sweetness of first friendship was written all over Hannah’s face. Shame closed the back of her throat.
    They’d met at Sunday school, one of the few activities in town that Mae had readily permitted as Hannah entered her teen years.
    Sarah Anne had once been as saccharine as her name, all blonde hair, pale lashes, and limpid blue eyes. She had moved through the congregation in a cloud of white lace and curls, and although she was new in town, the townspeople took to her instantly.
    Beside her, Hannah was plain and awkward, with dull hair that couldn’t commit fully to either blonde or red and eyes the color of a half-laundered grass stain. The congregation stiffened their backs and cast suspicious sideways glances at her.
    In the middle of a lesson, something about suffering little children and lambs, Sarah Anne had passed her a neatly folded note. “Hi Hannah,” it said, and when she looked up, Sarah Anne flashed her a radiant smile.
    By that point, Hannah already knew about the cruelty of other children. How they’d snare her with false sympathy only to trip her or throw rotten eggs at her feet. Hannah tossed the paper to the ground.
    Sarah Anne watched the paper fall with an eerily adult expression. A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth, like the tail of a lazy house-cat. “I’ve heard what they call you in town,” Sarah Anne whispered. “And let them talk, I honestly don’t care. I think it’s interesting. I’d like to be your friend.”
    There was not much to say to that.
    After the class ended, Hannah kicked at the marshy ferns that grew by the side of the water, watching Sarah Anne’s dress eddy around her thin tanned legs as she walked. Hannah’s arms remained crossed in mistrust.
    â€œDo you like ice cream?” Sarah Anne asked. She leaned down and briskly wiped dust from her patent shoes.
    â€œYeah.” Hannah looked down at her own shoes, brown Mary Jane loafers that had cost Mae five dollars from a second-hand bin. There was a patch by the heel where the