But other than that—he was free. At least until the school called his father, Mateo was free to do whatever he wanted.
And what he wanted to do was find out exactly how badly Elizabeth Pike, his supposed best friend, had screwed him over.
He started at home. It was easy enough to head back to the house after Dad had left to start getting ready to open La Catrina for lunch. Harder to go into the storage space beneath the house where Mom’s few remaining possessions were boxed away in a corner, behind Mateo’s old bike and a few sombreros left over from the restaurant redecoration seven years ago.
Mateo stood staring at the boxes, a crooked tower of cardboard. They were dusty. Nobody had ever opened them, not since the day his father had crammed them down here. As fondly as Dad remembered Mom, he never went through her old things; that wasn’t his way. Mateo had thought it wasn’t his, either. But now he began opening the boxes, one by one.
For the most part, they didn’t tell him much. He’d been hoping for a diary, something like that. Instead he found Mom’s clothes—neatly folded once, but now crumpled almost past recognition. And yet he remembered that green dress—she would wear it to Christmas parties. The pink sweater … Mateo had no one specific memory of it, but he knew he’d hugged her while she wore it.
Hesitantly he lifted the sweater to his face and inhaled. But it didn’t smell like Mom any longer, not even her perfume. It just smelled musty, like the back room at the Goodwill.
There were a few other things: some junky pieces of exercise equipment—she’d always had a bad habit of ordering them off television commercials, then never using them. A box filled with her costume jewelry. A folder filled with drawings he’d made for her when he was little; Mateo had to laugh at the crayoned image of him, Mom, and Cookie Monster all hanging out at the beach.
Mom had kept every one.
He hadn’t learned anything by going through the boxes, but for a moment, Mateo thought it didn’t matter. Being surrounded by Mom’s stuff had been comforting rather than painful—a reminder that her life hadn’t been all bad. Most of it had been great. How long had it been since Mateo let himself remember the good times instead of the awful end?
Just as he started repacking the final box, though, a card fell to the floor.
Mateo stooped to pick it up. It was in a lilac-colored envelope, and at first he assumed it must have been a Mother’s Day card he’d sent her. But then he saw his mother’s handwriting on the envelope: just one word, a name. Elizabeth.
Slowly he opened the envelope. Inside, a brightly colored card with glitter around the letters read FOR A VERY SPECIAL GIRL! Mateo read the inscription in Mom’s cursive:
I’m so glad we’ve become friends this year. Nothing has ever made me so proud as the day that you said I was like a mom to you. Well, you’re like a daughter to me! I hope we’ll always be this close.—Lauren
The date was only two weeks before her suicide. Maybe she never got around to sending the card. Maybe she forgot about it, because Elizabeth had wanted her to forget.
She hadn’t just made Mom crazy. She’d made Mom love her. Some of the love that should have been Mateo’s had been stolen away by a girl who was “like a daughter.”Mateo looked down at his pile of pictures that he had colored for Mom long ago. None of them had made his mother as proud as the illusion of something Elizabeth was supposed to have said.
They were friends. At least, Mom had thought they were friends—the same way he had. Elizabeth must have been hanging around the house all the time when he was little, but Mateo and his dad didn’t remember a bit of it … because Elizabeth wouldn’t let them.
Damn her. Damn her.
Stuffing everything back in the box, Mateo prepared to confront Elizabeth at last.
He tore out of the house, got on his bike, and sped toward Elizabeth’s neighborhood. It was a gloomy day—the sky dark and low with rain that wouldn’t quite fall. Mateo felt as though night had been draped over the daytime to blot out the sun.
Elizabeth’s house stood out in the darkness. He could see magic now, and wondered how he hadn’t seen this before. How could anybody not see that this house was deeply, sickeningly wrong? It glowed—no, flickered—it was like firelight, in a way, but not comforting or warm. Instead it looked … the way fever felt. Hot and sickly and inescapable.
The words Mateo wanted to say kept bubbling up inside him, but they changed from moment to moment, contradicting one another over and over:
You killed my mother. You ruined my life.
I thought you were my friend. Make me understand.
I’m going to destroy you if it’s the last thing I do.
Can you shut this Steadfast thing off? Please just end the curse and leave us alone.
If I were ever going to murder any human being, it would be you.
Were any of my good memories of you real? I want at least one to be real, so I know I had at least one real thing.
I hate you. I never knew what hate was before, but now I do.
By the time he’d reached her front steps, he still didn’t know what he wanted to say. Standing this close to her house was like standing within a bonfire; the sickly hot light surrounded him now. Mateo tried to imagine it burning the halo away, but he knew that wouldn’t work. In fact, it seemed to him that he could almost feel the halo now—the circle of thorns cutting into his flesh—
“Mateo.” Her voice came from within the flames. He couldn’t actually see Elizabeth yet. She sounded as gentle and sweet as ever; of course, she wasn’t in school either. “I’ve been worried about you.”