Slice Of Cherry Read Free Page A

never see her, either. If Kit kills you, they’ll lock her up too, and then I won’t have anybody. That’s the only reason you’re alive. Because if I thought I could do it and not get busted, I’d kill you myself.”
    Fancy looked away from the prowler’s horrified stare and finished threading the needle.
    “I’m the Bonesaw Killer’s daughter,” she whispered, almost to herself. “Why would you ever think I was good?”

 
FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:
    A DOCTOR EXAMINED ME AND K IT AND SAID THE REASON WE WERE SICK WAS BECAUSE K IT HAD MY HEART AND I HAD HERS. B UT WHEN HE SWITCHED OUR HEARTS, THEY STOPPED BEATING.

CHAPTER TWO
    “After breakfast,” said Fancy, setting the table while Kit sliced fruit at the counter, “let’s go to Bony Creek. We ain’t been in a while.”
    “Alas, we cannot, Fancy Pants,” said Kit, the blade flashing in the early morning light that streamed in through the kitchen window. “We gotta bathe Franken.”
    Thanks to Kit, the prowler was now covered in so many stitches that she had laughingly renamed him, like a pet. Kit cared for him like a pet too, feeding him, cleaning up his filth. Franken seemed to flourish under her care and rarely screamed anymore, even when she cut him.
    Fancy admired her sister’s knife skills and wonderedwhether Kit had always been so adept or if her time with her cellar playmate had honed her abilities. Fancy herself had developed such first-rate suturing techniques that she could probably get a job at a hospital. She wished Kit would leave Franken alone, though. It was stupid to constantly slice up a guy you were never going to kill. It just created a lot of blood that had to be cleaned up, and Fancy had enough chores to do.
    “Don’t gimme that face,” said Kit. She dumped all the fruit into a bowl and handed it to Fancy. “You’re the one who wanted to keep him alive.”
    “Keep him alive, not keep him
forever
. We spend half the day fooling with him. We never hang out anymore.”
    “We always hang out,” said Kit, keeping watch over the bacon and eggs. “Sometimes we hang out on a train, sometimes we hang out on a plane. We often hang out in the sun, and sometimes even in the rain.”
    “Not at Bony Creek,” said Fancy, ignoring her sister’s poetic exaggerations. “Not since school let out. I wanna look for fairy rings.”
    Kit actually laughed at her. “You don’t still believe in that stuff, do you? That’s just make-believe.”
    “Doors aren’t make-believe.” And they weren’t. It wasn’ta coincidence that Portero meant “doorkeeper.” Portero was full of doors, and not all of them had four sides and a doorknob. Many were much more subtle than that, and sometimes people would pass through one not realizing what it was and end up on a desert with four moons and purple sand and creatures that thought human beings tasted like chicken. “People disappear through doors all the time.”
    “I know that, but not through
fairy
doors. Fairy rings are just mushrooms, Fancy. I can’t believe you’d rather play with mushrooms than a real-life boy in our cellar.”
    Kit had become disturbingly boy crazy over the past year. She pranced around in tight T-shirts and leggings that instead of emphasizing her skinniness showed off her curves, slight though they were. She wore lipstick and nail polish and rubbed blackberry-scented cream into her skin and hair, as if she wanted some boy to mistake her for a pie and eat her.
    “It ain’t about the mushrooms,” Fancy said, setting the fruit bowl on the table. “It’s about the doorway inside the mushrooms. Wouldn’t it be neat if—” Fancy froze, realizing she’d set a place for Daddy, something she hadn’t done in a long time. She lifted the plate she’d set for him and caught a flash of his face on the porcelain surface, but she couldn’t hold on to the image.
    “What’re you looking at?” Kit was watching her closely.
    “Nothing.” Fancy thought briefly about telling