Into the Darkness by V.C. Andrews Page A

looked lit in the entire house. What was her problem? Were her paintings the only window through which she would look at the world? I thought artists had to experience reality to capture something they could paint. Were her paintings all about the chaos within her? That would make it seem more like psychotherapy than art. I was anxious to see one and told myself that I would look her up on the Internet tomorrow.
    I was about to close my curtain and go to sleep when I thought I saw a glow in one of Brayden’s windows. It was like the reflection of something bright on the glass, something from outside. And then, suddenly, that glow took the form of his face, but his face seemed to be floating, as if it were painted on a balloon. He was looking out at me, doing, I guessed, exactly what I was doing, keeping the lights off in his room so he could peer out at mine unseen. I thought he smiled as if he could see me peeping, so I backed up quickly, my heart tapping against my chest like a woodpecker on a tree. I took a deep breath and then closed my curtains.
    I stood there thinking and worrying about it. How could he see me in this darkness, anyway? Was that really his face, or did I imagine it? Was it just the glow of someone’s light on the street, perhaps the headlights of a car?
    I approached the window and peered out between the curtains again. This time, I saw nothing, not even a reflection from the street. I waited and watched and then felt silly about it and returned to bed. How strange it made me feel. I’ll never get to sleep tonight, I thought, and did toss and turn almost as badly as someone in a cabinof a sailboat on a windy sea. I settled down some when I heard Mom and Dad come up to go to bed. They paused at my bedroom door and then continued to theirs, whispering, their words spoken too softly to be understood but sounding like air escaping from a tire.
    I didn’t need to hear their words to understand that they were probably worried about me and about the cryptic things I had said about this new neighbor. I was sure my father wasn’t kidding all that much when he often turned to my mother for an interpretation of things I had said. At some age, daughters become a mystery for fathers to solve anyway. Understanding what our emotions say is like deciphering a foreign language for them. What I had said about Brayden Matthews and my short but intriguing contact with him was just another speed bump for my father to navigate in his journey to embrace fully this mysterious creature he called his daughter.
    This whole situation was just too weird, I thought, and decided that it might be better if I didn’t get too involved with Brayden Matthews. After all, he had said himself that they might not be here that long. What did he call it, a test? Well, I didn’t want to be part of someone’s test, and it would be just my bad luck to grow to like him and find out that he was leaving in a few days to go somewhere else. I was sure that wherever it was, he wouldn’t tell me. He was too secretive. Talk about being guarded. Who was more guarded than he was, avoiding the answers to the most basic questions? What were they, a family of spies? It wouldn’t be any fun for me to pry the most inconsequential things out of him. Actually, it was already proving to be quite frustrating.
    I wrapped my blanket tighter around myself and willed myself to sleep by pushing all of these questions back into some cabinet at the back of my mind, a place that was simply labeled Later . There was great logic to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind saying, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
    Tomorrow seemed to come more quickly than usual. It was as if I had only blinked. Dad was always the first one up in the morning. Mom prepared our breakfast, but he liked to find little ways to spoil her, and one of those ways was to turn on the coffee and bring a cup up to her while she