The Road Out. Deborah Hicks
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nodded and muttered soberly, “Mmmmm.”
“Miss Deborah, you know where I worked for ten years?” said Blair. “In hell.”
“She’s a little demon with two horns comin’ out of her head,” said Elizabeth.
“She’s goin’ down—God, I HATE to see her go that way!” said baby-faced Alicia, who sat next to Elizabeth.
“I’m a smart-mouth and evil bitch!” said Blair. She picked at the corner of her blueberry muffin carelessly, as though eating it were the last thing on her mind.
“And my attic is like Rose Red,” she said, thinking once again of the house that she was photographing. Blair let the fingers of her right hand rest for a moment on the book she had brought from home. On its cover was an image of a bull and the title Rose Madder. On the inside page were accolades from reviews. “A work filled with terror from the very first page,” read one. “Disturbing, haunting . . . King paints a vivid nightmare,” read another.
“Rose Red!” said Adriana, her half-closed eyes coming alive with the thought. “I wanna read Rose Red—actually I wanna see the movie again because I like it when the ghost lady, she pulls that dude’s mom into the closet.”
Blair could picture in her head her own mother, who had been in and out of the household all summer, trying to hold things together after her latest round of rehab. There had been ten babies born to Blair’s mother, and Grandma Lilly could keep only a few of them. Family came first, but there were limits to what even family could do in such desperate circumstances. The trouble for Blair’s mother, I discovered, began with alcohol and drug abuse, things she had tried to correct in sporadic rounds of rehab. In between her stays in rehab and halfway houses, Blair’s mother went around with different men. Blair had never met her biological father, but she knew he was a different man than the man she sometimes called her stepdad, a drunk. The changing cast of characters gave Blair a feeling of being in a crazy house. The only good thing about her mother being in the house was that Blair’s half brothers didn’t act out as much and hit her.
Sometimes her mother sat in the front bedroom, watching television along with everyone else. She was a large woman whose auburn hair fell upon her shoulders in a wild way, as though blown by a fierce wind. Her face was sallow and had a haggard, angry look. She was, Blair would say, very mean; if you saw her on the street, you would feel afraid. Sometimes when she was out of money, she would beg from Grandma Lilly, who struggled to keep food in the mouths of Blair and the other grandbabies left to her care. Other times she would go around and do things to get money from men. Blair didn’t like people like that. As a matter of fact, she didn’t like her mother. She wouldn’t have minded if an evil house like Rose Red had sucked her mother into one of its shape-shifting walls.
“In Rose Red something happens to women,” said Blair. “They end up dead.”
“What’s Rose Red?” I asked innocently. I had missed King’s made-for-television movie when it aired over the winter.
“A haunted house,” said Blair, turning the plastic spoon in her banana YoBaby yogurt like a stubborn three-year-old. When her mother was around the house, Blair wanted to be the baby. At those times, she would come into my class with a pacifier dangling from her mouth. She would crawl on the floor, cooing and making high whimpering sounds. She had acquired a nickname: Itty Bitty.
“And there’s this girl,” said Elizabeth. “She’s magical, she’s the only one that can wake up Rose Red.”
Elizabeth sat next to Miss Susan, nearly opposite the round table from me. She was one of our group’s heartiest eaters, but you wouldn’t know it from her skinny arms that always seemed ready to flail at something. In front of her on the bright pink tablecloth was a tiny junkyard of the morning’s feast: two empty yogurt containers, a banana peel, a pool of muffin crumbs. At the sides of her mouth were the vestiges of the raspberry jam she had smeared on her muffin. Elizabeth spoke in the same throaty tones as Miss Susan. She spit out her words as quickly as she ate:
“That-was-scary, man, when that hand popped out of the refrigerator. I didn’t know that was gonna happen.”
The movie had aired on television in late January. The most important character in the movie is the old mansion itself, a house named Rose Red and set on a hilltop in Seattle. The house is sinister, and has been from the day it was built in 1906 by an oil magnate, John Rimbauer, for his beautiful young wife, Ellen. The house snatched their little daughter, April, born with a withered arm. It added rooms like a metastasizing tumor, and these would shift constantly, with dire consequences for the unsuspecting visitor. But the house has been quiet, a “dead cell,” since 1972, the year that a pocketbook-clutching lady on the Historical Society’s tour had disappeared. All of this is of great interest to Professor Joyce Reardon, out to obtain scientific proof that paranormal phenomena actually exist. Into the house she goes with her strange cortege of hired psychics, including fifteen-year-old Annie, an autistic girl. Then the house begins to come alive. Roses and other plants bloom in the solarium, clocks start to tick, and the trouble begins. One by one, the members of Professor Reardon’s band of psychic explorers are picked off by Rose Red. But sweet Annie is different. Rose Red’s long-term occupants call out to her in barely audible spirit voices: “Annie, Aaaaanniee.”
“She woke up the house,” said Elizabeth, leaning forward on her bony elbows.
The conversation had woken up Adriana herself, and her oval eyes, half-shut before, now revealed their rich lavender tones.
“Okay, this is gonna take a while,” she said. Adriana rarely took the floor for long, but when she did she expected the others to pay close attention. “Okay, in that Rose Red house, something happens to girl—women, and something different happens to—”
As will happen with any group of girls sitting together and eating, Elizabeth and Blair had begun whispering on the side, snickering at some secret joke. Shannon looked distracted. She wasn’t a fan of Rose Red, or any of King’s stories really. Little Alicia was giggling at Blair’s latest bit of food play—crumbling your breakfast muffin into a tiny mound. Our two tiniest girls felt like sisters sometimes, and they were in cahoots this morning.
“Hel-LO RUDIES!” said Adriana, narrowing her long eyes into a look of preteen disgust.
It was my cue to suggest that we clear the table of breakfast and start our reading.
The ground-floor classroom that I borrowed for our class was divided into several sections. Near the front of the room, close to the blackboard, was an eclectic assortment of inexpensive wicker armchairs, old-fashioned wooden chairs, and more modern plastic chairs, all shuffled into a makeshift circle. It was our meeting area, a place to talk about books and the stories and journal entries written by the girls themselves. Against one wall was a pair of rectangular work tables, one of which held our gleaming new Mac computer. Against the other wall, below a row of large old-fashioned windows with wooden sashes, was the round table that doubled as our breakfast nook and, when class had started, as a desk for writing. Placed on the carpet near our meeting circle were two stacks of oversized pillows for plopping up against a wall or lying more comfortably on the thin carpet. Finally, at the far side of these work areas, but facing our meeting circle and blackboard, were some white bookshelves I had brought in myself—sale finds from an office supply store. Miss Susan had assembled them one morning, holding tiny nails in her lips, a hammer in her hand. In the bookshelves were the literary titles I had worked for over a year to acquire: writing grants had become the raison d’être of my weekend life ever since I began my literature class.
Those shelves might have looked like an ordinary collection of books, pretty humble compared to something you would find in a wealthier school. But to me they were special: I had searched everywhere—the Internet, local bookstores, libraries—to find just the right titles. Now there they sat, rows of novels and stories featuring girls as heroines. There was Cynthia Rylant’s sentimental novel about a girl’s coming of age in a poor family, A Blue-Eyed Daisy. There was Alice Hoff man’s magical tale of girlhood friendship and summer love, Aquamarine. There was Frances O’Roark Dowell’s