Free The Good Sister by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

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    Carley moves her stuffed animals off her bed, carefully rearranging the collection on the built-in window seat, where they seem to watch her like an audience of supportive friends. Some of these guys, like a fluffy flamingo named Bubblegum, have been sleeping with her since she was a little girl and afraid of the dark.
    Maybe she’d still be afraid of the dark if it weren’t for them.
    Imagine how the girls at school would react if they knew she still sleeps with stuffed animals and sometimes even talks to them in her head.
    Nicki knew that—well, not about the talking-to-them-in-her-head part. But she’s slept over in Carley’s room a million times and she knows Carley sleeps with the stuffed animals carefully arranged around her pillows. She’s the one who gave Carley many of her fake-furry friends, including Bubblegum, as gifts over the years.
    Nicki knows, too, that Carley sometimes still reads Charlotte’s Web and the other books from her childhood, and that she even takes out her Barbies once in a while to change their clothes and brush their hair.
    Nicki knows all her deepest, darkest secrets.
    That never bothered Carley until now.
    Lying on her stomach on her bed, she opens her laptop and pops a third Twix into her mouth before typing in the first few letters of the Web site she visited late last night.
    B . . . U . . . L . . .
    The rest of the link pops up. She clicks it and is transported to a virtual world populated by people who are exactly like her.
    Well, not exactly: Many are female but a few are male; most are kids, though some are adults. They all have one thing in common with Carley, though: They are—or were—victims of bullies.
    They post their stories here in a public forum; stories that tend to begin with lines like: It all started in sixth grade , or I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but . . .
    More often than not, the entries end with variations of: I wish I were dead .
    Yeah. Carley knows the feeling.
    Not that she’s brave enough to actually do anything about it.
    There’s a lot of talk of suicide on the forum, but that, Carley knows, is a sin. If you kill yourself, you don’t go to heaven.
    But sometimes, when she climbs into bed after a cruel day, knowing that tomorrow will bring more of the same, she wishes that she could just go to sleep and never wake up.
    Who cares about heaven when your life is pure hell?
    Q T-Pi is online .
    The message flashes in a corner of the screen like a beacon.
    “Ah, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”
    QT-Pi—whose real name, of course, is Carley Archer—will have just gotten home from school.
    The dismissal time at Sacred Sisters is 3:12, and the metro bus ride home to the South Towns should take anywhere from thirty to forty minutes, with stops. Carley—concealed, or so she believes, behind the QT-Pi screen name and the little portrait of a kitten—usually pops up on the Internet after four o’clock.
    But here she is, and it’s only 3:55 right now. Either the bus was early, or she was in a particular hurry to get online today.
    Probably the latter. Misery loves company.
    “Aw, what’s the matter, Carley, did you have another bad day at school? Is that why you’re here?”
    Here , as in an online forum populated by fellow victims of bullies.
    Safely concealed behind the screen name Angel 770—a meaningful screen name created just for this Web site—it’s tempting to engage QT-Pi in a private chat or at least bait her for comments on the message board.
    But maybe that’s not a good idea.
    No, given Angel’s plan for tonight, it’s probably wise to keep a low profile right now. And in the days ahead, for that matter.
    No one would ever in a million years think Angel might be responsible for what’s going to happen tonight—or, for that matter, to the others, including Carley Archer, when it’s her turn.
    Still . . . you never can be too careful.
    Angel was careful when it came to Sandra Lutz.
    The