The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” Lauren said, “please, seriously, Mom, don’t do anything to embarrass me.”

“We’re not doing anything to embarrass you,” Jane said. “We are doing it to save children. None of this is about you, Lauren.”

“I’m doing this to embarrass you, Lauren,” PJ said, and blew an enormous fart between the heels of his hands.

“No, it needs to sound wetter than that to really embarrass me,” Lauren said. “Try it in the crook of your arm.” Lauren, PJ,and Sean blew farts into the crooks of their arms for the remainder of the radio segment.

“You still haven’t told us where Mirela is,” Lauren said to Mom as the station switched to the weather report.

“Dad took her long enough for me to pick you guys up and drive you around to all your stuff, which is my absolute favoritething to do when I’m not driving Mirela around to all her stuff,” Mom said.

“Mom, Mirela thinks there’s a ghost who lives in the trunk of the car,” PJ said.

“She yells and points her finger at the washing machine when it’s turned on,” Sean said.

“And she tries to go to sleep in it when it’s turned off,” PJ said.

“She puts my shoes in the refrigerator,” Sean said.

“When it rains she says it’s her birthday,” PJ said, and goose bumps came up on Lauren’s arms.

“When she goes up the stairs she holds on to the bannister like somebody’s trying to push her off, and she gets angry at them,but there’s nobody there,” Sean said.

“When she goes down the stairs she just lies down,” PJ said.

“She gets upset if she has to wash her hands, but she also gets upset if her hands are dirty,” Sean said.

“She pooped in the bathtub and washed her hands in the toilet,” PJ said.

“She thinks my bike is alive,” Sean said.

Mom turned the dragon wagon onto the driveway of Paula’s house, and Lauren got out without saying goodbye. She heard Seanand PJ pummeling each other trying to claim the front seat as she approached the front door, tapped on the screen, openedthe door halfway to pop her head through. “Hello?” she called. “Mrs. Brunt?”

Paula’s mom was inches away, sitting on the couch in her nurse’s scrubs, watching Oprah. “Hey, honey,” she said dreamily. “It’s nice to see you. Paula isn’t home yet—she’s at a meeting, I think? A club?”

“Yearbook,” Lauren said, smiling.

“Do you want to wait for her here?”

“If that’s okay?” Lauren asked.

“Sure, honey. Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich or something?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Brunt.”

Lauren shut the front door behind her with elaborate care and walked up the wooden steps to the second floor of Paula’s house. Lauren closed the door of the upstairs bathroom, turned on the taps, knelt down, and opened the bottom drawer beneath the sink. There, inside a shoebox-sized plastic tub, were rows and rows of small rectangular boxes. Lauren peeled open the seal on one box. In it were six trays, each as thin as a pack of matches and sealed with gold foil. She took out a tray, which held twenty-eight tiny pills, each packed beneath its own clear dome. Iridescent opals retrieved one by one from the bottom of the ocean. Lauren peeled the foil back. A pill popped into the palm of her hand. She slipped the single pill under her tongue, then took it out and put it into her jeans pocket instead.

Lauren slipped the tray back inside the box and the box inside her backpack. She arranged the boxes remaining in the plastictub so that there were no conspicuous gaps between them. She slowly closed the drawer, biting down on her lip and shuttingher eyes as the wheels on the rail squeaked into place. She hoped that the running tap masked the noise. She flushed the toilet,counted to three, switched off the tap, and opened the door. She was alone.

She shouldered her backpack and went into Paula’s bedroom. The ceilings on the top floor of Paula’s house were too low; morethan once Lauren had bumped her head on their sloping sides. The skirting boards had been torn from Paula’s bedroom walls.A crack in the ceiling snaked down the wall and behind a 10,000 Maniacs poster. Lauren sat down on the edge of Paula’s bed.It was big enough for both of them. Flannel sheets, periwinkles on white, the same as on a nightgown Mom used to wear. Thesheets were musty, dank like the air in the room. “Like you own the place” was something her father said to Lauren and herbrothers when they were messy or rude or loud or taking up too much space for his liking, but Lauren did, in fact, act likeshe owned Paula’s place, coming and going when she pleased, eating the Brunts’ food, using their shampoo and electricity,leaving stray hairs and motes of skin and oil on their bedsheets for Paula’s mother to launder. Drool on her pillowcases,probably. She kept a toothbrush in the bathroom that Paula shared with her brother, a change of clothes on one shelf in Paula’scloset.

Paula and Lauren moved about freely with each other, as if they were alone and unseen, unacquainted with shame or inhibition. They got changed in front of each other, peed in front of each other, reported to each other in forensic detail about their periods and shits. They admitted to each other that they made themselves come although they didn’t tell each other what they thought about when they did it—that was a boundary. And Lauren didn’t do it in Paula’s room, only in the bathroom with the door locked. Another boundary. The other night they’d taken off their underpants, squatted over compact mirrors, and described to each other what they saw, mixing floral anatomy with the raw ruddy language of the butcher’s shop. The reflection was objectively frightening: marsupial pouch, hungry eyeless mouth—if you pulled back the lips you could see if its teeth were coming in. The dark