Boo, Inc.

Chapter Five

Photo: the driveway to Katelyn's house. Caption: Can you guys believe this place?! Am I an independent college gal or what? The hotel room wasn't haunted, but this place has potential. Love you! -Boozy

There's very little mental transition from the time Boo and I stumbled to the diner the next morning and pulling up the long driveway to the house in Indian Trail. When part of your physical shuts down, your mind kind of floats away alongside it. Like a little balloon full of heroin, the kind I like to imagine personally giving away at Woodstock, either one of the festivals. Only I never went, and I'm not sure if that kind of stuff was really there. I'm a dreamer.

Aunt Sofia- my mother's older sister- bought the house for Katelyn, said she'd get her her own place once she graduated high school. Big enough for all of us, because she knew well that we were coming here one way or the other. Katelyn has texted me like a thousand pictures of the property- including the garage that she turned into a little studio for us- but it really slapped as soon as JT pulled into the neighborhood. It's heavily wooded, all the properties set back on a privacy lot. There's a decent-sized storage shed there and everything, and Lana and I are really pissing smiles at each other as the van crunches up the path.

So, my cousin had the place awhile, but spent many a weekend at her Mom's. Wanted to stay with her as much as she could, because of her older sister. The infamous Sissy I've told you about. Sissy is...weird. Treats my Aunt like shit, the only reason I can discern being is that Sissy is a sociopath, but not my kind of sociopath. She's the type I'd like to teach about my kind, about Boo, Inc. In kind of a bad way, I'd teach Sissy about the company.

Katelyn is twenty, studying Film and Screenwriting at Inca as a Junior. Sissy is twenty-two. Not the college type. She started modeling fairly successfully around sixteen, your atypical giraffe-limbed, flimsy, bleach-white blonde kind of a supermodel bitch. Lightly bronzed skin, piercing green eyes, the works. Katelyn is blonde, too, but her hair is dyed an inky black, falling to just below the breast. Their Dad is out of the picture, though he's pigmented like my father was. The attraction to them must run on my Mom's side of the family. A curiosity to breed brown eyes and olive skin into a pool of Nordic Dolls and start their own printing-press of genetically cryptic Kens and Barbies.

Other than Katelyn's brown eyes, everything about her is black. Lipstick, eyeshadow, clothes and ebony skull-spurred boots. Everything but her skin. She paints that corpse-white to cover the heavy Italian complexion. About five-foot-eight, tall, like me...like I was, when I stood.

She's beautiful, and she's been waiting for her Mask.

Katelyn is already standing on the porch, victoriously thrusting a case of Natural Light into the air and waving her head around with a plaster smile. Dancing. First Freak Chick wins the Super Bowl kind of a thing, you know? She's always been a blunt contrast to Sissy, and her bullshit. Katelyn waits for the van to come to a stop. Flicks her smoke and sets the case down to rush us, her skirts swirling in the forest fog as she bolts into Lana's arms.

"You look so good, you look so good," my cousin gushes as she lifts my little sister up into a hug. Katelyn has the strange ability to gush and remain goth as fuck.

JT breaks up the hug and lifts Katelyn into his own embrace. The yard is alive with laughter and joyful grins. Boo smiles as he helps me into a sitting position, gently setting my bare feet into the yard as I cradle the inside of the van for support. He's letting me know that the ground here is clean; it won't soil my heels. He steps out.

"Boozy, Boozy, Boozy!"

Boo laughs as Katelyn darts past him to straddle me. She's laughing as she snuggles me, kisses my face and undoubtedly leaves onyx lip tattoos on my cheek.