Read Online The Bargaining by Carly Anne West - Free Book Online Page A

house.
    â€œFind it?”
    â€œHmmm?”
    The breeze returns, carrying the cloud of my breath with it, and the leaves resume their dance without missing a step. The events at the rest stop are too fresh, and I feel my entire body seize up at the memory of that twisted face that couldn’t have been anything other than a tree. Except . . .
    â€œYour camera.”
    I hold up the case, forgetting for a moment that I was holding it. I scan the forest once again before following April back into the house, seeing nothing more than shades of green and brown through the approaching night.
    â€œThis looks to be the master bedroom,” April says when we’re back inside, nodding to a room situated to the right of the stairs. “It has the smallest bathroom I’ve ever seen in there, but it’s a bathroom. There’s one more next to the kitchen. Oh, you have to see the kitchen,” she says.
    She leads me by my wrist into what I first assume is a closet, until I see a large basin sink and what looks like a green and white table with burners attached to the top and cupboards stacked next to it.
    â€œIt’s a Stewart. This has to be worth thousands on its own!” she says.
    â€œDoes it work?”
    April shrugs. “I haven’t checked yet. Look, the interior of the oven is blue. How adorable is this?”
    I have stopped listening to her and am looking out the tiny door leading to the back of the house—what would be a backyard except that the trees have taken ownership of it. I can hardly see past the dark that their canopy creates. A rusted latch that used to brace the door from the inside is bent and warped, hanging on by a single loose bolt.
    â€œWant me to get a picture of that?” I ask, nodding to the door.
    April follows my gaze, grimacing. “That’s pretty common in abandoned houses,” she says. “Probably just squatters. We’ll get a new bolt.”
    â€œOh, just squatters. No biggie,” I say, then remember her moratorium on negativity.
    â€œI say we start with the kitchen,” she says, and just because she says that, I turn on my heel and climb the staircase instead. I think I’m done with April’s ideas about where we should start and what we should do and where we should live and what I should call home.
    â€œPenny, come on,” she calls after me.
    But not today.
    Because April wasn’t there when I lost who I was entirelybehind the equipment shed, Rae’s fist finding the softest part of Melissa Corey’s face while I watched. And she wasn’t there that night when I told Rae I couldn’t be friends with her anymore, that it scared me how much she could color all the shades of gray in my mind before I even had a chance to try. How she could compel me to be someone I thought I wanted to be until I finally understood I didn’t want to be that somebody anymore.
    And April wasn’t there when Rae’s mom showed up and screamed and collapsed in the dirt in front of the cops even though she hadn’t noticed that Rae hadn’t come home the night before.
    And April definitely hasn’t been there each and every time Rae has talked to me since, telling me all the reasons why I will never be able to erase the letters I wrote to her, the ones that I was never going to send. The ones she was never supposed to see, but did.
    I know now it was her in the woods today. What April doesn’t understand— won’t understand—is that Rae isn’t quite done with me yet.

5
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    T HE SMELL IS WORSE UPSTAIRS. It’s equal parts mildew and long-ago cooking odors, but not foods that leave the sort of aromatic life in the air that tells you the house was once occupied by people. It’s old food of the left and forgotten kind, tucked into discrete places I know I’ll likely find during April’s remodeling.
    And there’s something else. A sour odor overlaying it all. Acrid, like a