The Follower Kate Doughty (general ebook reader .txt) 📖

of herself in the mirror and laughs, too. “Oops! I didn’t know I was that gone—” She scans the desktop and frowns. “Wait—I must have left my remover in the bathroom.” Then her eyes alight on her ever-present go bag and perks up. “Here, I can fix it! Just give me a second.”

Rudy and Bella are still chuckling as she reaches into her omnipresent carrying case and pulls out the makeup remover, saturating a cotton ball and then swiping it over her eye.

Cecily is laughing with all of them. Then she is not.

She screams.

She covers her left eye with her hand and then pulls it away, and Bella starts to scream, too.

Rudy chokes on his own breath. He jolts upward, stepping toward Cecily, and when she looks up at him her face is melting. He staggers back then lunges forward and grabs her, picks her up, and stumbles downstairs, shuddering under her burden of her weight as he carries her into the bathroom. He has only one thought, and it’s to get her to the sink.

Cecily’s shrieks become sobs, and then she’s hyperventilating, keening and panicked, as he throws her head under the faucet and turns on the water.

Upstairs, Amber screams for their parents. He hears rushed footsteps, and then the only sound is water and Cecily’s desperate gasps for air.

She comes out of the water and faces him. For a split second, she seems normal. She is his Cecily, just how she used to be. Then she moves soaked hair out from in front of her eyes.

A wet, oozing chemical burn creeps over Cecily’s brow bone. Rudy knows right away that it is not something that water can fix, that they need the hospital, that they need it bad—because Cecily’s face is melted. The remaining skin oozes over her face in a lunar landscape of craterlike burns. Her face is bright and waxy and wrong. Rudy feels his stomach turn; the floor lurches, and all at once he is aware of just how much he’s had to drink. Too much. Too much for this, too much to help her—

He feels his vision blur as he starts to panic. The alcohol heightens the horror of Cecily’s deformed skin, distorts the sound of her screams as she catches a glimpse of her face. The room spins as Rudy whirls around, and his nose is clogged with the smell of something sweet and rotten all at once. Amber is suddenly there, screaming and crying. The hallway is spinning. Rudy tries to focus his vision, but his eyes won’t obey; everything is muddled. Amber and Cecily wash and wash and wash, and the screams don’t stop. Dimly, he’s aware that Jada and Bella have vanished as his parents appear in the hallway.

And then, the world is nothing but noise: a 911 call, Mom’s sobs, the sound of sirens shrieking their way toward the house. And one more. One other sound, much louder than the others, one that threatens to drown them out entirely: Cecily’s high-pitched, anguished keens as she clutches what remains of her face.

CHAPTER 15

Amber

Amber doesn’t realize how long she’s been sitting until she tries to move. Her muscles had frozen up while she sat, hunched over in a plastic white hospital chair next to Rudy as both of them listened to their parents shout at emergency room staff, cry, and then, eventually, fall silent.

That was the worst of it. Amber would take an incredulous “Do you know who I am?” over her mother’s strained silence any day of the week. She has several texts from Jada on her phone, all frantic apologies for fleeing the scene with Bella in fear of being caught drinking. She’ll answer them eventually. She doesn’t blame her, it’s just . . . she’s too numb right now.

The night has stretched on forever, and Amber and Rudy have long since sobered up. And now they sit, dazed, as the ER crowds flow by them.

When their parents finally reemerge, Cecily isn’t with them. Amber lurches to her feet, muscles seizing, but she doesn’t get a word out of her mouth before Mrs. Cole begins to speak. Her mother’s voice doesn’t have its usual peppy tone or commanding snap. In a quiet, lifeless voice, Mrs. Cole explains that Cecily has received chemical burns. Hospital staff are still trying to save her left eye. After that, it’s likely that she’ll need plastic surgery and intense care from an optometrist. “They’re moving her into a burn unit,” Mrs. Cole explains. “We’re . . . not sure if she’ll keep her sight, yet, at least in that eye. We will have to . . .” Her voice breaks. “Wait and hope for the best.”

“Can you think of anything that it could have been?” Mr. Cole asks. Between their parents and the on-call staff, it feels like they’ve been over this a thousand times.

Amber and Rudy shake their heads. “She was just . . . putting on her makeup,” Amber says. “And then she went to remove it, and the makeup remover, it—” She chokes.

“Do you think it could have . . . I don’t know, gotten tainted with cleaning chemicals, or something else for the renovation?” Mrs. Cole asks.

Rudy shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Cole’s jaw tightens. “I can’t believe—Cecily—and you were drunk, no less!” She cuts herself off and brings a hand to her mouth with a strangled sob. “I’m sorry. I—” She swallows, unable to finish the thought. Amber feels a wave of shame wash over her. Her mother is right. If she had just—done something, told Bella that there would be no makeover, called their parents a minute sooner, maybe . . .

Her mother continues. “Cecily is . . . stable. You can go see her. But . . .” Before she can finish talking, Rudy is standing next to Amber. Their parents lead them down a tiled white hallway and into Cecily’s room.

And there she is.

Cecily looks up at them from underneath a bandage covering the entire left half of her face. “Hey.” Her voice is cracked; her visible