Read The Keeper for Free Online Page B

she’d been trying to scratch away the soreness. Or maybe she’d had an allergic reaction to the sheets. Or, well, who knew?
    “Liz, do I have to come up there?”
    “I’m awake, Mom!”
    In the shower, she counted slowly. Fifty Mississippi. A dream. Just a dream. By the time she dressed, pulled a turtleneck over the bruises, and came down for breakfast, thanking her mother for such delicious eggs, the dream was forgotten. Only its feeling, the mood it had carried, remained. Forget it. Let it go. Stop making things up!
    By the time she walked to school in the light morning rain, a tree could have fallen down in front of her, a bus could have careened off the road, and she would have looked at the sight with only a hint of surprise. She would have kept walking, repeating the same refrain over and over in her head. Tap your ruby slippers three times and say it with me: It was only a dream. It was only a dream. It was only a dream.
    At lunch in the cafeteria at the Bedford High School, her boyfriend, Bobby, asked her if something was bothering her. “Nothing,” she told him with a too wide grin.
    “You sure? You look wiped out,” he said.
    “Next week on The O.C. Ryan’s getting back together with Marissa and she’s such an attention whore with all that closet drinking. I can’t even deal with it.”
    “You’re so weird,” he told her.
    By fifth period, while her teacher talked about the function of imaginary numbers when building bridges (“See, they do have a use!” Mrs. Adams chided the class. “Nothing is truly imaginary.”), she found herself thinking about Susan. How long had it been since they’d seen each other? What if the dream was a portent? She remembered the blood in the snow, a circle growing larger, and her brow started sweating.
    Before eighth period, she stopped Bobby in the hall and told him, “I need to visit my sister tonight. Could you drive me?”
    Juggling his books in his hands (for efficiency’s sake Bobby believed in visiting his locker only twice a day), he asked, “Seriously? I thought we were going to the Dugout. Is something wrong?”
    She grinned at him, a pretend grin that worked on her mother, but never on Bobby. “Top secret. They’ll boil me in oil if I tell you.”
    “Who?”
    “The Mormons. They’re very violent. It’s all those wives. They don’t know how to handle them.”
    He frowned. Equipped with Liz Marley radar, he always knew when she was hiding something because, truth be told, she was always hiding something. “You’re weird, Liz.”
    “No, really. I want to visit my sister. Pick me up tonight. Around eight.”
    After school let out, and all the buses had left, and she told Bobby that she wanted to walk home in the rain instead of riding with him (No offense, Bobby. I just feel like walking. I know, it’s raining really hard. If I get pneumonia it’s all my fault. You’re right, Mr. Martin totally sucks. You could light the guy on fire if you took a match to his breath. I’ll see you tonight.), she found herself walking, not home, but to the cemetery.
    Ridiculous, really. She knew it had all been a dream. A fevered nightmare caused by too many late-night Cheetos. But still, she walked. At her father’s stone she saw no roses, just his small marker. Gales of rain flattened her hair and plastered her jeans to her body. She’d forgotten her mittens, and the bars along the metal fence were cold. She peered between them.
    The woods were dark. The backs of the pine trees were bent like crippled old men by the weight of the snow. She wished that she’d asked Bobby to come with her, because these woods weren’t normal. The dioxins that came from bleaching pulp had killed a lot of the river animals and even some of the birds, but that didn’t explain the way these woods made her feel. There were rumors that something lived out here. Something that watched.
    The rain made a plinking sound as it fell on her vinyl hood. Her teeth chattered. She wanted