The Merciless (The Merciless #1)(4)

I see a flash of white out of the corner of my eye and turn in time to watch Alexis and Riley climb into a car. Grace waves at them from the sidewalk, surrounded by a circle of boys wearing sports jerseys and girls with shampoo-commercial hair. No matter the school, no matter the city, the popular group is always made of the same mix of athletes and the unfairly beautiful. Everything in their lives is just a little shinier, richer—better. Of course I’d want that. Anyone would.

I slip past pockets of kids giggling and talking and start to walk home. I live so close that I can see my neighborhood from the school parking lot. The land here is all flat and dry, and the summers are so hot that I’m already sweating. It’s the end of September and I’m still waiting for the last of the ninety-degree days to cool into autumn.

My neighborhood’s entrance is marked by a four-foot-tall sign with the words HILL HOLLOW HOMES written in scrolling white letters. There’s a fake waterfall and pond, though both are dry now, with weeds and dandelions growing through cracks in the sun-bleached rocks. Past that, the subdivision is a ghost town. The few dozen houses scattered across acres of bulldozed land are mostly empty.

I stare at the toes of my sneakers as I walk past three vacant lots and two identical houses, each with the same blue siding, white porch, and red front door as mine. Whoever chose the color scheme for our neighborhood was very patriotic.

Our place is the lone house on its block. It’s a split-level with a narrow porch, a bay window, and a backyard that stretches for half an acre before the grass gives way to dirt and open land. The shed at the top of the driveway looks like a miniature version of the house itself, matching in color and style. Aside from the Uncle Sam paint job, it looks like every other house I’ve ever lived in.

I climb the rickety wooden steps to the door and let myself in, slipping on a brochure someone wedged under the front door. It’s another advertisement for the Baptist church down the street. We’ve gotten two or three every day since we moved in. Mom hates the brochures so much she actually called the church to complain. She’s always been a little touchy about religion. She never told me the whole story, just that Grandmother didn’t take her getting pregnant out of wedlock very well.

I’m not a fan of anything that says I’m a mistake, either, but sometimes I wish she hadn’t cut religion out of our lives so completely. Grandmother got over the unmarried thing by the time I was born, and I’ve always thought her dedication to Catholicism was beautiful. I stare down at the creepy bleeding heart on the front of the brochure. I should save them and make a collage of bleeding hearts for my wall. Mom would love that.

I drop my backpack on the kitchen table and grab a glass from the perfectly organized cupboard above the sink. We’ve only lived here a couple weeks, but almost all the boxes are already unpacked, our things carefully stored in cabinets and drawers. Sergeant Nina Flores handles everything with military precision.

I fill the glass with water and carry it to my grandmother’s room down the hall. I knock softly before easing her door open.

“Hola, Abuela,” I greet her as I push her door closed with my elbow, blinking in the dark. Light hurts Grandmother’s eyes, so we hung heavy curtains over the windows to block the sun and draped a scarf over her floor lamp to keep her room dim. The scarf turns the room red, and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust.

I carefully make my way over to her bedside table and dig out the plastic container of her pills. Grandmother is sitting upright in bed, rosary beads clutched in her shaking hands. She stares ahead, lips moving wordlessly as she pushes the beads through her fingers.

She used to be beautiful, but it’s hard to see that now. A few years ago, a stroke ruined the muscles on the right side of her body. Skin hangs from the bones in her face like melting wax, and her cheek droops so low that I can see the foggy white bottom half of her eye and the blood-red part inside her eyelid. The right side of her mouth is frozen in a twisted frown that doesn’t match up with the smiling, laughing grandmother I remember.

I force myself to slip the pills past her cracked lips, then lift the water glass so she can take a drink. She’s still the grandmother who sent me funny little poems written in Spanish on my birthday, I remind myself.

Water dribbles out of the right side of her mouth. I wipe it away with my sleeve, then squeeze her papery, soft hand. Her raspy breath interrupts the silence in the room, followed by the click click of the wooden rosary beads against the table attached to her hospital bed. She hasn’t spoken a word since the stroke.

“Okay, exercise time,” I say, setting the water glass down on her bedside table. I move her blanket and carefully stretch her right leg, then ease it upward to bend her knee so her muscles don’t atrophy. I do this three times, just like her last nurse showed me. We haven’t been able to find a nurse for her in Friend yet.

“You would love it here, you know,” I say, putting her leg down. I slide the blanket back over it and move to the other leg. “They sell statues of the Virgin at the gas station.”

Grandmother’s rosary beads click against the table, like the second hand on a clock. She never really notices when I do her exercises. I’m not sure she can feel her legs anymore.

“And it’s hot here.” I grab her ankle and pull her left leg into a gentle stretch. “Do you remember that summer back in Mexico when it was so hot we tried to bake cookies on your windowsill?”