Cutting Teeth(42)

DET. BRIGHT: Let’s try to let Lincoln answer, okay?

MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: Not necessarily okay, no.

DET. BRIGHT: Did you want to hurt Miss Ollie, Lincoln?

LINCOLN SAWYER: No. I like Miss Ollie.

MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: See! This is what I’m saying.

DET. BRIGHT: Lincoln, I’m going to ask you a question that you might know the answer to and if you do, you might think you need to keep it a secret, but I’m going to ask you to be honest with me, okay? Can you do that? Do you know who hurt Miss Ollie?

LINCOLN SAWYER: Yes.

DET. BRIGHT: You do? You know who hurt your teacher?

LINCOLN SAWYER: Wait, no. Sorry. I thought you said something else.

DET. BRIGHT: What did you think I said?

LINCOLN SAWYER: I thought you asked if I know who the Poop Bandit is. ’Cause that’s the secret I know the answer to.





EIGHTEEN




This is a bad idea.

Rhea’s concern over the merits of this particular idea comes way too late. The studio comprises two red chairs, angled slightly toward each other, stationed atop a raised platform. Box lights point down at her from the ceiling, making the T-zone of her face go shiny. Behind her, a flat-screen TV mounted to the flimsy temporary wall displays the orange-and-white logo for KNT News.

She pulls out a small tube of roll-on oil she’s stashed in the pocket of her skirt, glides it across her wrist, and inhales the healing scent of eucalyptus.

“Five minutes,” the producer warns, and still Rhea stays fixed to her seat.

Gabriella Becker joins her on the chair directly across from Rhea, pulling notes into her lap and leaning on one arm, all comfortable, like she lives there. “The interview,” she says, without looking up from those notes, “will go exactly as discussed, so no need to worry about a thing.”

“And you’ll mention Terrene? You’ll … give me a chance to talk about it, right?”

Gabriella’s big brown eyes flit up and Rhea holds them like, Yeah, I said it. “Exactly as discussed.”

The night before, Darby prepped her. Get in front of this story, control the narrative. Humanize their children.

Rhea almost told her then. She could have said: Darby, it’s not true, Bodhi isn’t a biter. She thought if anyone would take it in stride, surely it’d be Darby. But then she noticed the tissue-paper-thin skin below Darby’s eyes and how it had purpled. A little bruise seeped along the crook of her elbow, surrounding a pinprick. And Rhea changed her mind.

For the first time, she researched Renfield’s syndrome online, picking at the scab of the internet until it bled out the information she needed. A graveyard of adult sites, grown men and women doing little more than playing pretend, wishing there were such things as vampires and hobbits. There were pictures of pentagrams, a graphic image of a goat with its throat slit and a naked man posing with his tongue out next to it, and Rhea thought: Well, do it then, drink it already.

The children were different. Of course they were different. Without agenda. A benign but disturbing medical condition, one author wrote. An obscure Christian organization Rhea never heard of referred to one group of five-year-olds’ urge to drink blood as a biblical temptation, a precursor to masturbation and women’s menstrual cycles.

Rhea, who has never had a healthy fear of computer viruses, clicked through her search engine indiscriminately, unafraid to visit the hits on pages five and six and seven, which was where she found an abandoned Reddit thread, the last entry dated five years earlier.

Parents. Offering advice, tips, and tricks for raising children with pediatric Renfield’s as though this is the popular breastfeeding website KellyMom.

Rhea read about parents developing Pavlovian responses, wincing whenever they had to brush their child’s teeth or wipe their noses or feed them applesauce. She skimmed casual stories of otherwise precious, normal children with bloodstained teeth, picking scabs, foraging for maxi pads, and sneaking into mommies’ bedrooms for a late-night nip.

She noticed something about the final entry, the one that was written five years ago. It wasn’t written in the same back-and-forth style as the others. It was posted eleven months later than the original flurry. No one responded to the late post, which read simply: They will get blood, one way or another. Let this be a warning.

In the studio, Rhea squints into the spotlights. “About how many people watch, do you think?”

Gabriella bends the papers on her lap, then folds her hands over them. She has a helmet of shiny hair and fake eyelashes that look like spider legs up close. “Considering this will be aired straight through on our parent affiliate, it’ll be roughly two million.” The corners of her lips twitch. So this isn’t a big deal just for Rhea, then; good to know.

Rhea wriggles now, trying to find a comfortable position for her back. Seven minutes, that’s all she has to get through. Seven minutes without screwing anything up.

This is about risk and reward. If she can get through this, she’ll have scored free promotion to literally millions of viewers, and this promotion is about to be buzzy as hell. Watch out; those investors are going to be lined up around the block.

“Three … two…” The producer with the headset holds up his fingers; there’s one more chance to change her mind, to do the right thing. But do the right thing for whom? “One.” Before it’s gone.