Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan

Author:Eireann Corrigan [Eireann Corrigan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780545282949
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Chloe’s door was at the end of the hall, and as we walked past the framed photos on the wall, I wondered whether the camera would pan across them, whether Lila Ann would latch on to the pictures of Cam and shake out the story in them. “Here it is,” I said. “Right down the hall. Chloe’s room is all the way at the end.” I pretty much just kept up the chatter until we got to the door.

I wondered how many kids’ bedroom doors Lila Ann Price has been led to. It felt like those crime shows where they led the goofy psychic lady in and let her sniff around the missing person’s pillow and clothes. But Lila Ann Price never spoke in any kind of faraway, dreamy voice. She was warm and all, but also all business. I was more scared talking to her than talking to anyone—the Caffreys, the cops, Dr. Ace—because Lila Ann Price was a pro. And I figured she had a finely tuned mecha-nism to monitor bullshit.

But it turned out, no. I showed her the windows overlooking the stables and pointed out that you could see my room from Chloe’s. She asked me about our hobbies and I talked about the livestock a little. Then I blanked about anything else we did and ended up describing the hours we spent baking and knitting. Which was untrue. And kind of bizarre.

The truth was that Chloe and I didn’t do a lot of regular girl stuff. We were far enough from town that Girl Scout meetings had been a foreign concept. We never took dance or gymnastics or karate or any of the other classes that most people sign their kids up for. Lila Ann Price might have written that tidbit down in her notebook and used it later on Mrs. Caffrey, but we wouldn’t have wanted to tumble around in leotards with a bunch of other girls. It took a few years for us to blend in with them, for one thing.

Chloe and I had our games and some of them were sicker than others. Mostly I guess we played like any two little girls played—dolls and school, and when we played house, we pretended we’d married twin brothers and lived together in a condo split down the middle. When we hit junior high, we stopped calling it “playing.” By then, we called it “imagining.”

That’s how we did it. One of us would start, “Imagine if…” and then we’d keep going. We played Paparazzi and filled memory cards with images of each other ducking into doorways. We interviewed each other for People magazine and Vanity Fair. We pretended to be famous for being pretty. We strutted like actresses and introduced each other as starlets. But it wasn’t like I was going to sit there and tell Lila Ann Price these things.

Especially because, once in a while, we imagined being famous for other, stranger reasons. For escaping burning cars and collapsing buildings. At the start

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