Meeting Lizzy Sneak Peek:

Meeting Lizzy. Copyright ©2008 by Sarah Carter in affiliation with LJW Publishing.

Prologue:

Poor Insulation

          I shook my head as I slammed the apartment door open and turned to take the stairs three at a time. I was breaking the cardinal rule as a habitual hermit, but knew that I just wouldn’t be able to stand it if I didn’t make sure that what I was imagining had just occurred upstairs - was wrong. Something about the noises that had come from the apartment above had made it impossible to dissuade myself that it had been anything other than a piece of furniture falling on top of a person. A girl.

          I swear I even heard her whispered, “Please.” That part I could have imagined. Probably imagined; I don’t know if I could really hear something like that through all the insulation there had to be between the two apartments. I’d never heard any noise from the apartment upstairs before. I didn’t even know who lived there. One result of being a hermit, I guess. You don’t get to know the neighbors. I pushed the hair out of my eyes and turned to go back to my apartment. What was I doing?

          My frustration at having missed the final scene of Law & Order may have been behind the fact that my knock was a little more aggressive than it would have been otherwise. Alright, I was pounding. Just when I was about to stalk back down the stairs, (hopefully I could still see the lying, scheming kid’s jury verdict,) the door swung back so suddenly that I stumbled through the doorway on the momentum of my pounding fist that failed to make contact with the hard surface of the door.

          There was not a thought in my head. I couldn’t even describe to myself afterwards what the apartment looked like. I could feel the thickness of the carpet under my bare feet as they sank in and oddly registered that it was expensive and clean and not the type of carpet you’d expect to have the body of a girl strewn across who, apparently, had just had an entertainment center pulled off of her.

          She was practically crumpled on the floor in front of it. It was obvious that she had lain underneath the unit as it came crashing down on top of her. The TV was smashed and lay beside the DVD player and random pieces of stereo equipment that would have usually occupied the spaces that were now empty, gaping holes with wires stretching out and down to the scattered equipment on the floor.

          I didn’t realize I had been staring at her in silence until she turned her face away and huddled into the massive piece of furniture that had minutes previously been crushing her to the floor. Her hair hung over her face and her shoulders shook. She was probably in shock. I couldn’t believe she was okay.

          I didn’t even know I was moving until a large, beefy hand slammed into my chest. “What do you want?” The belligerent voice matched the face it had come out of perfectly. I felt like I was in a really bad sci-fi movie or a foreign film with inaccurate subtitles. I hadn’t seen the guy’s mouth move. Had he asked me a question? Yup, he had. This realization came as the face became even angrier and repeated said question a second time.

          “Is she okay?” I gestured vaguely to the girl on the floor. She still hadn’t moved, unless you counted the sporadic shaking of her shoulders.

          “What’s it to you? Who are you? I thought you were somebody else. Get out.” I dragged my eyes from the disturbing figure of the girl on the floor and actually looked at the face that the words were coming from. Light hair, blue eyes, no taller than me, but probably 20 pounds heavier; focusing in, I had a vague sense of recognition, but couldn’t place the features enough to connect them with a time or place.

          For the first time, the belligerent look fell from the face of Beef Man, as I was beginning to think of him, and I couldn’t place the odd look that replaced it. Beef man waved nonchalantly behind him in the direction of the girl and said, “She does.”

          “Well . . . then - are your parents home?” The question was obviously directed at the girl since she lived there. How I got the balls to say it I don’t know, since Beef Man’s jaw was about to shatter from the effort he was putting into grinding his teeth as he walked toward me with clenched fists. Standing my ground, the thought crossed my mind that not only had I decided to end my hermit lifestyle tonight, but I had now crossed over into the territory of actual loss of life in general.

          My head was screaming, ‘Forget it! Get out,’ but my feet were now apparently glued to the carpet. My eyes felt like they were going to pop right out of my head and I hadn’t looked at the girl at all since I’d asked for her parents. Beef Man must have thought I meant to stay and push the issue because he stopped mid-stride like his scare method wasn’t working and turned to glare at the girl. Little did he know he had just scared me motionless.

          And since he didn’t know that…he had obviously thought better of his plan to rough me up, which I’m sure had been his intention for a full 15 seconds (they were the scariest 15 seconds of my life up until that point). He turned instead toward the girl now sitting on the floor. He took several steps toward her and I was horrified to find myself shadowing his footsteps. I had a morbid sense of doom at this point, but somehow couldn’t come to grips with the method of my own salvation (running) without knowing what was going on first.

           “Liz.” The name did not come out sounding like an endearment. The guy was scary. I wondered how old she was. The girl apparently didn’t hear him. “Liz.” I was a little nervous about what might happen if she ignored him again. What the hell was I doing? Beef Man leaned over really slowly and flicked the girl’s forehead with his middle sausage finger hard enough to make her head fall back. Neither of them took notice of my surprise because they were obviously involved in their own little, morbid, psycho world that I didn’t understand. The girl glared for a full second, but her glare wasn’t near as effective as Beef Man’s because tears were leaking out the sides of her eyes in a steady stream.

           “My parents aren’t home.” Liz, as Beef Man called her, recited a mantra that she seemed to be receiving by osmosis from Beef Man who was now leaning so close to her face that their eyelashes were probably touching. That could possibly be the point at which the trade of information was occurring, I wasn’t sure, but I was sure that the words coming out of her mouth weren’t hers. A few seconds of silence provided her with further info and she related it in a hollow voice, “I’m fine. I was messing around and I knocked over the entertainment center.”

          I don’t know where the snort came from, I swear. Yes, she was obviously lying, but you’d think I would have thought more of my physical health than whether or not these strangers thought I was idiot enough to believe their crap. In any event, both of them immediately swung around to look at me.

          “I live in the apartment below. I heard.” At this point, Beef Man’s threatening motions alone were all the encouragement I needed to leap off the balcony, but the girl interrupted my dramatic exit and demise.

          “Really – please – really . . .” She was crying again and shaking her head and I knew that this time it was me that made her cry. What was I supposed to do? I’m not all-knowing. I’m only seventeen. I left. Through the front door.

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