One thing Grace Chasity knows is that what is not supposed to be dead, won't stay dead in Hatchetfield.
The second thing is that what is supposed to stay dead, won’t stay dead, either — especially in Hatchetfield.
And she should’ve been smarter, really; her daddy always tells her that she’s such a smart girl, always thinking ahead, always thinking of others. Her brain, somehow, always manages to figure out the best way to act before she has to. She brings home Abstinence Camp diplomas, year after year, straight As and pride to her parents.
She’s a smart girl.
Bringing a boy over isn’t a smart move. Even if it’s Peter, just Peter, who she really trusts — really, not the kind of pretend–trust in the way the other girls in middle school said they trust her, before laughing in her face when she called herself their friend — and who wouldn’t look at her in a way she didn’t like. Who wouldn’t even try.
So when Peter makes an unexpected movement, just in the corner of her eye, tearing his eyes away from the AP Geometry homework paper for the first time in twenty–some minutes, the hairs on the back of her neck rise up.
His fingers tighten around the pencil in his hand.
“Uh, Grace?”
Her head snaps up — to Peter’s scrunched up, crumpling face, eyebrows drawn down to where his eyes are practically
“I think— I think your pot is boiling over.”
Her eyes drift over to the stove, and—
Oh no.
Oh, big no.
She feels her entire body freeze in an instinctual fear, because out of one of the pots, the big ones, the ones mama uses to boil properly—
Hand.
A hand, a moving hand, an already prepared one, nailless and everything that mama does to them before even beginning the preparations, and Grace rises from her seat as more fingers appear over the edge of it, curling around, trying to get out, like a fly fighting to get out, fight, survive.
Her own body beats her by reacting first.
She opens the drawer to her side, next to the fridge, second from up, third from down, almost mechanically. She’s known where the emergency hammer is since she was old enough to remember — just in case, her parents always said, exchanging nervous glances, just in case, is now the case?
Out,
There’s a murmur behind her, strangely Peter–sounding, and like a chair scraping against the tiled floor, and the hand, it’s scrambling, all muscles bulging and crumpling under the pressure it takes to move, blood and oil running down the pot’s side, pooling at the counter, tainting it.
She takes a good swing,
Out,
Grace smashes the hand with a hammer like she’s playing whack–a–mole.
The hand stops moving, and slowly slides back down inside, like a cartoonish character.
Grace releases a shaky, lung–hurting breath, and finally lets herself close her eyes.
Peter’s breathing uncontrollably behind her, and for a split second, her fingers tighten around the hammer, ready to attack and maim and kill and do all the things that come natural to a Chasity, but then she remembers with a cold wave of new air.
Just Peter. Just Peter.
And,
He saw everything.
“I think you need to go home.” She sounds near hysterical, even to herself, and her stomach twists into painful knots as bile comes up right to her throat. Like someone put a hammer down her throat.
It’s over, she tries to comfort herself as she sets the hammer down on the bloody part of the counter, little droplets of blood splattering as she does. It’s over. You’ll tell mama and daddy once they get home from the church that it’s starting again.
“Yeah.” She hears Peter say, sounding like he’s somewhere far, far away, out of Hatchetfield, out of this world, and after a few thumps of his sneakers against the floor there’s a retching noise echoing around the empty house.
Empty. Hopefully.