A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Read online

  ALSO BY KRYSTAL SUTHERLAND

  Our Chemical Hearts

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Krystal Sutherland.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399546617

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Chelsea and Shanaye, and everyone who’s ever been afraid: you are braver than you realize.

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY KRYSTAL SUTHERLAND

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1: THE BOY AT THE BUS STOP

  CHAPTER 2: THE HOUSE OF LIGHT AND GHOSTS

  CHAPTER 3: THE BOY AT THE BONFIRE

  CHAPTER 4: STRING LIGHTS AND SERIAL KILLERS

  CHAPTER 5: DEATH AND HORSE-SIZED LOBSTERS

  CHAPTER 6: THE CURSE AND THE REAPER

  CHAPTER 7: 1/50: LOBSTERS

  CHAPTER 8: THE LOCKER BANDIT

  CHAPTER 9: THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF DAVID BLAINE

  CHAPTER 10: 2/50: MOTHS

  CHAPTER 11: SHAKESPEARE, STARS, AND AN AQUATIC OPTIMUS PRIME

  CHAPTER 12: THE STORAGE KING

  CHAPTER 13: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE DEATH

  CHAPTER 14: 4/50: SMALL SPACES

  CHAPTER 15: THERE ARE SOME MORE DIRECT ROUTES TO DEATH THAN MOTHS AND LOBSTERS

  CHAPTER 16: 5/50: LIGHTNING

  CHAPTER 17: 6/50: CLIFFS

  CHAPTER 18: 7/50: CORNFIELDS

  CHAPTER 19: A NICE DAY FOR A WHITE WEDDING

  CHAPTER 20: 8/50: OPERATING AUTOMOBILES

  CHAPTER 21: 9/50: SATAN INCARNATE AKA GEESE

  CHAPTER 22: AND ADULTS WONDER WHY TEENAGERS DRINK

  CHAPTER 23: THE COLD KISS OF DEATH

  CHAPTER 24: 15/50: DEAD BODIES

  CHAPTER 25: 17/50: DOLLS

  CHAPTER 26: THE BOWEN SISTERS

  CHAPTER 27: 18/50: GRAVEYARDS

  CHAPTER 28: 21/50: ABANDONED BUILDINGS

  CHAPTER 29: THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

  CHAPTER 30: 24/50: BURIED ALIVE

  CHAPTER 31: THE DEATH DOOR

  CHAPTER 32: EUGENE

  CHAPTER 33: THE SHADOW BOY

  CHAPTER 34: BETRAYAL

  CHAPTER 35: THE GREAT ORCHID HEIST

  CHAPTER 36: THE RED WOMAN

  CHAPTER 37: O BROTHER

  CHAPTER 38: THE GHOSTS OF ESTHER’S PAST

  CHAPTER 39: HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE HEINOUS BETRAYAL OF YOUR GOOD FRIEND/LOVE INTEREST IN FOUR SIMPLE STEPS

  CHAPTER 40: A SEMI-DEFINITIVE LIST OF WORST NIGHTMARES

  RESOURCES

  NOTES

  WITH GREAT THANKS

  1

  THE BOY AT THE BUS STOP

  ESTHER SOLAR had been waiting outside Lilac Hill Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for half an hour when she received word that the curse had struck again.

  Rosemary Solar, her mother, explained over the phone that she would no longer, under any circumstances, be able to pick her daughter up. A cat black as night with demon-yellow slits for eyes had been found sitting atop the hood of the family car—an omen dark enough to prevent her from driving.

  Esther was unfazed. The spontaneous development of phobias was not a new phenomenon in the Solar family, and so she made her way to the bus stop four blocks from Lilac Hill, her red cape billowing in the evening breeze and drawing a few stares from strangers along the way.

  On the walk, she thought about who normal people would call in a situation such as this. Her father was still interred in the basement he’d confined himself to six years ago, Eugene was AWOL (Esther suspected he’d slipped through another gap in reality—it happened to Eugene from time to time), and her grandfather no longer possessed the fine motor skills required to operate a vehicle (not to mention that he couldn’t remember that she was his granddaughter).

  Basically, Esther had very few people who could bail her out of a crisis.

  The bus stop was empty for a Friday night. Only one other person sat there, a tall black guy dressed like a character from a Wes Anderson movie, complete with lime-green corduroy pants, a suede jacket, and a beret pulled down over his hair. The boy was sobbing quietly, so Esther did what you’re supposed to do when a complete stranger is showing too much emotion in your presence—she ignored him completely. She sat next to him and took out her tattered copy of The Godfather and tried very hard to concentrate on reading it.

  The lights above them hummed like a wasp’s nest, flickering on and off. If Esther had kept her eyes down, the next year of her life would’ve turned out quite differently, but she was a Solar, and Solars had a bad habit of sticking their noses where they didn’t belong.

  The boy sobbed dramatically. Esther looked up. A bruise was blooming across his cheekbone, plum-dark in the fluorescent light, and blood trickled from a split at his eyebrow. His patterned button up—clearly donated to a thrift store sometime in the mid-1970s—was torn at the collar.

  The boy sobbed again, then peeked sideways at her.

  Esther generally avoided talking to people if it wasn’t completely necessary; she sometimes avoided people even when it was completely necessary.

  “Hey,” she said finally. “You okay?”

  “Think I got mugged,” he said.

  “You think?”

  “Can’t remember.” He pointed to the wound at his forehead. “Took my phone and wallet though, so think I got mugged.”

  And that’s when she recognized him. “Jonah? Jonah Smallwood?”

  The years had changed him, but he still had the same wide eyes, the same strong jaw, the same intense stare he had even when he was a kid. He had more hair now: a shadow of stubble and a full head of thick black hair that sat up in a kind of pompadour style. Esther thought he resembled Finn from The Force Awakens, which was, as far as she was concerned, a very good way to look. He glanced at her, at the Jackson Pollock painting of dark freckles smattered across her face and chest and arms, at the mane of peach red hair that fell past her hips. Trying to place her. “How do you know my name?”

  “You don’t remember me?”

  They’d only been friends for a year, and they’d only been eight at the time, but still. Esther felt a twinge of sadness that he’d apparently forgotten about her—she had certainly not forgotten about him.

  “We went to elementary school together,” Esther explained. “I was in Mrs. Price’s class with you. You asked me to be your valentine.”

  Jonah had bought her a bag of Sweethearts and crafted a handmade card, on which was a drawing of two
fruits and a line that read: We make the perfect pear. Inside, he had asked her to meet him at recess.

  Esther had waited. Jonah hadn’t showed. In fact, she’d never seen him again.

  Until now.

  “Oh yeah,” Jonah said slowly, recognition finally dawning on his face. “I liked you because you protested Dumbledore’s death outside the bookstore like a week after the movie came out.”

  How Esther remembered it: little Esther, seven years old with a bright red bowl cut, picketing the local bookstore with a sign that read, SAVE THE WIZARDS. And then a snippet from the six o’clock news, a reporter kneeling next to her, asking her the question: “You do realize the book was published years ago and the ending can’t be changed?” and her blinking dumbly into the camera.

  Back to reality: “I hate that there’s video evidence of that.”

  Jonah nodded at her outfit, at the bloodred cape held at her throat by a ribbon and the wicker basket resting at her feet. “Looks like you’re still strange. Why are you dressed like Red Riding Hood?”

  Esther hadn’t had to answer questions about her predisposition for costumes for several years. Strangers on the street always assumed she was on her way to or from a costume party. Her teachers—much to their vexation—could find no fault with her outfits as far as the school’s dress code was concerned, and her classmates were used to her coming in dressed as Alice in Wonderland or Bellatrix Lestrange or whatever, and didn’t really care what she wore so long as she kept smuggling them cake. (More on this in a moment.)

  “I was visiting a grandparent. It seemed appropriate,” she said in reply, which appeared to satisfy Jonah, because he nodded like he understood.

  “Look, you got any cash on you?”

  Esther did have cash on her, in her Little Red Riding Hood picnic basket. She had $55, all of it earmarked for her Get the Hell Out of This Podunk Town fund, which now stood at $2,235 in total.

  Back to the previously mentioned cake. You see, in Esther’s junior year, East River High had instituted sweeping changes in the cafeteria until only healthy food was available. Gone were the pizzas and chicken nuggets and tots and fries and sloppy joes and nachos that made high school semibearable. The words “Michelle Obama” were now muttered in exasperation every time a new item was added to the menu, like leek and cauliflower soup or steamed broccoli pie. Esther had seen a budding business opportunity and made a box mix of double chocolate fudge brownies. She brought them into school the next day, where she sold each one for five dollars and made a cool profit of fifty bucks. Since then, she’d become the Walter White of junk food; such was the extent of her empire that her customers at school had dubbed her “Cakenberg.”

  She’d recently expanded her territory to Lilac Hill Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where the most exciting things on the menu were overcooked hot dog and bland mashed potato. Business was booming.

  “Why?” she said slowly.

  “I need money for a bus fare. You give me cash, and I can use your phone to transfer funds from my bank account directly into yours.”

  It sounded slippery as all hell, but Jonah was bruised and bleeding and crying, and she still halfway saw him as the sweet young boy who’d once liked her enough to draw her a picture of two pears.

  So Esther said: “How much do you need?”

  “How much you got? I’ll take it all and transfer you that.”

  “I have fifty-five dollars.”

  “I’ll take fifty-five dollars.”

  Jonah stood up and came to sit next to her. He was much taller than she thought, and thinner too, like a stalk of corn. She watched as he opened the banking app on her phone, logged in, filled in her account details as she gave them to him, and authorized the transfer.

  Funds transfer successful, the app read.

  So she leaned down and opened her basket and gave him the fifty-five dollars she’d made at Lilac Hill today.

  “Thank you,” Jonah said as he shook her hand. “You’re all right, Esther.” Then he stood, and winked, and was gone. Again.

  And that’s how, on a warm, damp evening at the end of summer, Jonah Smallwood swindled her out of fifty-five dollars and pickpocketed, in the space of approximately four minutes:

  - her grandmother’s bracelet, right off her wrist

  - her iPhone

  - a Fruit Roll-Up from her basket that she’d been saving for the ride home

  - her library card (which he later used to rack up $19.99 in replacement fees for defacing a copy of Romeo and Juliet with lobster graffiti)

  - her copy of The Godfather

  - her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares

  - and her dignity

  Esther kept replaying the cringeworthy memory of her Dumbledore protest in her head, and didn’t realize she’d been robbed until her bus arrived six minutes and nineteen seconds later, at which point she exclaimed to the driver, “I’ve been robbed!” To which the driver said, “No riffraff!” and closed the doors in her face.

  (Perhaps Jonah didn’t steal all of her dignity—the bus driver took what shreds he hadn’t managed to scrape away from her bones.)

  So you see, the story of how Esther Solar was robbed by Jonah Smallwood is quite straightforward. The story of how she came to love Jonah Smallwood is a little bit more complicated.

  2

  THE HOUSE OF LIGHT AND GHOSTS

  IT TOOK Esther a total of three hours, thirteen minutes, and thirty-seven seconds to walk to her house, which was on the outskirts of the outskirts of town. The town had expanded in the opposite direction than the developers expected, thus stranding the neighborhood in the middle of nowhere.

  On the long walk there, the sky cracked open and heaved water, so that by the time Esther got to her front steps, she was sopping, muddy, and shivering.

  The Solar house was glowing, as always, a fluorescent jewel in an otherwise darkened street. A soft breeze licked through the trees that had taken root in the front yard, a forest in the middle of suburbia. Some neighbors had complained about the constant lights a few years back. Rosemary Solar had responded by planting eight oak trees in the lawn, which had grown from saplings to giants that enshrouded the property in the space of about six months. As they grew, she hung their branches with nazars, hundreds of them, the blue, black, and white glass tinkling an eerie song whenever the wind moved. The nazars were to ward off evil, Rosemary said. So far, the only people they had managed to scare away were Girl Scouts, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and trick-or-treaters.

  Eugene was sitting on the front steps that lead up to the brightly lit porch, looking like he’d time travelled from a Beatles concert, complete with Ringo’s haircut and John’s fashion sense.

  Esther and Eugene were the twins who no one could ever believe were twins. Where his hair was dark, hers was light. Where he was tall, she was short. Where he was lithe, she was buxom. Where her skin was pocked with freckles, his was clear.

  “Hey,” Esther said.

  Eugene looked up. “I told Mom you were still alive, but she’s already looking up caskets online. Your funeral color scheme is going to be pink and silver, or so I’m told.”

  “Ugh. I have specifically requested a tasteful black and ivory funeral, like, a hundred times.”

  “She’s been watching the emergency death slideshow she made last year, adding new pictures. It still finishes with ‘Time of Your Life.’”

  “God, so basic. I can’t decide what would be more tragic—dying at seventeen, or having the most cliché funeral ever.”

  “Come on. A pink and silver funeral isn’t cliché, just tacky as hell.” Eugene had genuine worry in his eyes. “You okay?”

  Esther wrung out her long hair; it grew red as blood when wet. “Yeah. I got mugged. Well, not really mugged exactly. Conned. By Jonah Smallwood. Remember the kid who left me hanging on Valentine’s Day in elementary sch
ool?”

  “The one you were desperately in love with?”

  “The very same. Turns out he’s a rather talented pickpocket. He just stole fifty-five dollars and my Fruit Roll-Up.”

  “Twice scorned. I hope you’re planning vengeance.”

  “Naturally, brother.”

  Eugene stood and swung his arm over her shoulder and they walked inside together, under the horseshoe nailed above the lintel, the sprigs of dried pennyroyal dangling from the doorframe and the remains of the previous night’s salt lines.

  The Solar home was a cavernous old Victorian, the kind where even the light had a hazy, faded quality. It was all dark wood paneling and red Persian carpets and walls the distinct pale green color of rot. It was the kind of house where ghosts moved in the walls and neighbors believed the inhabitants might be cursed; for the Solars, both were true.

  These are the things people would notice, if strangers were ever allowed inside:

  - All of the light switches were kept in the on position with electrical tape. The Solars loved light, but Eugene loved it most of all. For his benefit, the halls were decked in string lights, and lamps and candles covered every spare surface of furniture and, quite often, much of the floor.

  - Scorch marks from the Great Panic Fire of 2013 when the power went out and Eugene bolted out of his bedroom into the hall, knocking over approximately two dozen of the aforementioned candles in the process and setting the drywall alight.

  - The steps to the second floor were sealed off by a jumble of discarded furniture, mostly because Peter Solar had been midway through completing upstairs renovations when he had his first stroke and all work had quickly stopped, but partly because Rosemary believed the second floor was genuinely haunted. (Like a ghost was only going to haunt half a house and politely let the residents chill downstairs without any Paranormal Activity action. C’mon.)

  - There was nothing on the walls, apart from the taped-up light switches and blinds to cover the windows at night. No pictures. No posters. Definitely, definitely no mirrors. Ever.