Read Pretty Dead for Free Online

sold the house as it was and moved to a Craftsman in Venice, where we painted the walls of the main room red and wrote poetry all over them with a Sharpie pen. We were there for only a few months before we left for Seattle. But I knew the house with the red room was where William would go if he returned to L.A.
    Every once in a while, over the years, I’d drive past the house and see if anyone was living there. It hadremained abandoned, boarded up, and I was relieved.
    He can’t find me, I thought. He won’t guess I’m here. My blood has no scent to give me away.
    I was wrong.
    I had no scent, but I was still living in the world, and when William was determined about something, no one could stop him. Besides, six years is nothing to spend searching when you are as old as he is.
     
    With William’s return I no longer felt safe leaving my house. I stayed locked in, as if it were a coffin.
    No, I do not sleep in a coffin. I sleep in a big bed with a headboard of an antique silk Japanese wedding kimono, embroidered with flowers and cranes, though sometimes, I admit, I imagine climbing into my Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. But I have trained myself to behave as normally as possible.
    Still, I do think about coffins. Not the rotting, rat-infested boxes of Nosferatu. Long cherrywood caskets lined with pink satin. Golden hinges andlocks, a golden key. How I would look laid out that way with my hair spread about my shoulders, over my breasts, in the sheer white Victorian lace.
    How did Emily look in her coffin under the earth? I tried not to imagine it. I was so alone without her, my only companion. I kept thinking I heard her laughing in my house. I dreamed of chasing her down the corridors at school, touching her warm, bony shoulder. The girl with the brown curls turned around, but just as in the films it was never her. She was gone, and I had no one left to turn to unless Jared Pierce became my friend.
    No, I do not sleep in a coffin. The night he made me, William Stone Eliot showed me the huge, black, shiny one he slept in. He told me that alchemists used to call coffins “the philosophical egg.” “A place of transmutation,” he said. “Entrapment and rebirth. In what way, my darling, will you be transformed?”
    I wondered why I was transforming now, after the death of my best and only friend. Was there somekind of connection? I thought of the broken nail, the pimple that had started to heal, the five days of blood. All this change and no coffin to speak of, though perhaps one awaited me at last.

The Fires
    I t was October, but the air was hot. The Santa Anas were sweeping wildfire through the hills of Malibu. Thousands of people had evacuated. Every morning the city advised us to hose down our roofs. Movie stars and diet gurus had already lost their mansions. The air was black with smoke, and strangely even I could feel it in my newly vulnerable throat.
    A few days after William’s return, Jared Pierce came to my door. He stood there on the porch with his hands in his pockets. His back was slumped. His pupils looked large and glazed.
    “I need to talk to you,” he said.
    And I let him in.
    We sat on the velvet couch where I used to sit with Emily. She always tucked her feet up under her. She reminded me of a little bird perched on a nest. Quick, bright eyes, quick shoulders like wings.
    I offered Jared some wine, but he refused. He sat tensely upright, looking suspiciously around the room.
    “Why were you following me?”
    “What?” I widened my eyes innocently.
    “Don’t act like you don’t know. I saw you following me. I want to know why.” He moved closer to me. His gaze was menacing, but I saw that really he was just afraid.
    “I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
    He stared at me for a long time. I felt heat rising to my cheeks again. How strange.
    “How did you know?”
    “Know what?”
    “What I was going to do?”
    “So you were going to…”
    “I changed my