Page 49 of The Intruder

“Well, this one does.” I pick at a loose thread on my sleeve. “Okay, once upon a time, this girl and her boyfriend were riding in his car together. Unfortunately, the car breaks down, and he has to pull over on the side of the road. He tells her he’s going to go walk to the nearest service station, and she should stay in the car.” I pause, making sure she’s paying attention. Her blue eyes are wide, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this story is making her tired. “Anyway, while she is waiting in the car, she hears this scraping sound on top of the car, like somebody is trying to get inside. It starts really freaking her out, so she moves to the driver’s seat and drives away.”

“Wait,” Eleanor says. “I thought the car was broken down?”

“It started working again, I guess,” I say after a pause. “Maybe the engine overheated and just needed to cool down a bit.”

“It feels like you don’t know very much about cars.”

I know plenty about cars. My father taught me to change my own oil when I was seventeen, and I can swap out a flat tire with my eyes closed. But I also know enough about kids that age that I realize it’s pointless to defend myself.

“Anyway.” I give her a look. “She is driving this car to get away from the scraping sound, and that’s when she notices there’s a truck behind her. It’s basically tailgating her, and it keeps flashing its lights and freaking her out. She drives as fast as she can to get home, but when she gets there, the truck is right behind her. She gets out of the car, and the truck driver gets out too, and he fires a shot at her. Except the shot doesn’t hit her, and instead this other man behind her falls to the ground dead.” I pause. “Apparently, there was a man in the back of her car with a hook hand, and he was going to bludgeon her with the hook, but every time he tried, the truck driver flashed his high beams.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

“Well.” I think quickly. “When the girl went back to the place where the car broke down, she saw that her boyfriend was murdered and hanging from a tree, and the scraping sound was his sneakers scraping against the top of her car. Also,” I add, “he was wearing a tie, and when she took it off, his head fell off.”

“His head fell off?”

“Yes, the tie was the only thing holding it in place.”

Eleanor looks at me thoughtfully. “That was a terrible story, Casey.”

I bark out a laugh. “What? I thought it was pretty good!”

“No, you just mashed a bunch of campfire stories together, and it didn’t even really make sense.”

I can’t say she’s wrong. “Well, can you tell a better scary story?”

“Definitely.”

“Then by all means, go ahead.”

Eleanor licks her lips, deep in thought. I’m curious to see what sort of story this girl is going to come up with. With my students, the stories they write for class are always a great window into what’s going on in their lives. Children write what they know.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” she begins. “This old woman named Cassie was at her cabin in the woods when she heard a noise coming from outside…”

Old woman? Okay, whatever. I lean in, eager to see where this particular story is going. “Okay, good beginning.”

“It turned out,” she continues, “there was a girl hidden in her toolshed.”

“Was there?”

Eleanor shoots me another of her withering looks. “Can you please stop interrupting me every two seconds? I’m trying to tell the story.”

“Right, sorry,” I say, hands up defensively, thinking about how I miss my third graders.

“Anyway,” she continues. “Cassie didn’t know how she got there, but because there was a big storm, she invited the girl into her house.” She pauses dramatically. “Once the girl was in the house, Cassie tried to be nice to her. Cassie gave her dinner and cookies, which were a gift from some man that she didn’t want to go out with for some reason.”

Ouch. I’m beginning to suspect this whole story is a blatant dig on my personal life. Is it really so awful that I don’t want to start something up with Lee? This story seems very judgmental.

“Cassie tried to be nice,” Eleanor says. “She made the girl something called an infinity promise, saying that she would never betray her. But Cassie was also very nosy. She kept asking the girl a lot of questions, and the girl did not like that.” She pauses. “And then, when she thought the girl wasn’t paying attention, she went through her backpack.”

Oh crap.

“After that,” she goes on, “the girl couldn’t trust Cassie. The infinity promise was just a lie Cassie made up to trick the girl into trusting her. As soon as the storm ended, Cassie planned to tell other people that the girl was staying with her. She planned to betray her.”

My mouth is suddenly very dry. “That…that isn’t true…”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Did I interrupt you this much during your story?”