My Best Friend Bought Me a Cursed Life novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Nothing in My Name

Annie sells Daisy's closet, remembers a tabby with a brass locket, and walks into the clinic of the vet whose lap she lived on as a cat.

I didn't sleep.

I lay in Daisy's canopy bed with a chair under the doorknob and went through her memories.

Most of it was sad.

A girl who ate lunch alone at a school with a ski trip to Gstaad.

A girl who said "sorry" to the housekeeper.

A girl who never once said no to her mother.

Then I found the grandmother.

A tiny woman in a wheelchair with a voice like a foghorn, who had built Vandermeer Shipping out of one rusty tug.

She'd loved Daisy. Nobody else in that house ever had.

And her money didn't belong to my parents.

It sat in a trust in Daisy's name. My parents were only trustees, minding it until Daisy turned twenty-five.

June second.

Eighty-eight days.

"It isn't spent," I said to the ceiling. "He lied."

Jenna lay in the air above the bed, her see-through curls hanging down.

"Of course it isn't spent," she said. "It's leaking. They've been taking it a little at a time since the funeral. By June there'll be nothing but the shipping company, and the old man owns its debt."

"You knew."

"I had a year in this body, Annie. I knew everything." She smiled. "Knowing didn't help."

I kept digging.

There was one more memory, and it was the important one.

The grandmother in hospice last June, gripping Daisy's wrist hard enough to bruise.

"My real will isn't in that office," she'd said. "The cat has it. In her locket. Don't you dare let your mother near it."

Then she'd died, and Daisy had cried for a week and done absolutely nothing.

The cat had disappeared after the funeral.

My mother hated cats. Daisy only knew it went "to some vet downtown."

But I knew more than Daisy did.

I sat straight up in bed.

An orange tabby. Fat, furious, one white paw.

A brass locket on her collar, dented at the hinge.

She'd lived in the top kennel at Ben's clinic my whole first year there.

She bit everyone who came near that locket.

The tag on her collar said VANDERMEER.

I'd been a cat. I couldn't read it then, not really, but I'd stared at the shape of that word for a year.

"Oh my God," I whispered.

Jenna rolled over in the air. "What?"

"Nothing," I said. "Go haunt someone else."

In the morning I took inventory.

Every card was dead. The checking account had forty dollars in it. The car keys were in my father's study, and his study was locked.

But Daisy's closet was the size of my old apartment in Queens.

It had a chandelier.

It had eleven handbags that cost more than my first car.

It had a whole wall of shoes she'd worn once, and racks of gowns still in their garment bags.

They were all in Daisy's name. She'd bought them herself, with the allowance.

I called a resale dealer on Madison Avenue whose card was tucked in Daisy's jewelry drawer.

"Everything," I told her. "Today. I'll take a fair price if you bring the movers."

She was at the door by ten with two men and a rolling rack.

My mother had gone to her Friday lunch at the club.

My father was at the office.

Bradley was asleep, sedated, with his hand on a pillow.

The butler held the front door open for the movers and looked at the ceiling.

Jenna went berserk.

"You're selling the Birkins?" She swooped through a rack of gowns. "Annie! I would've killed for that green one!"

"You did," I said. "Indirectly."

The dealer gave me a look.

"I'm on the phone," I said, pointing at my earbud, which wasn't connected to anything.

By three o'clock the closet was empty except for jeans, sweaters and sneakers.

By four, I had a new account at a bank my family had never heard of, with two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in it.

It was the first money in either of my lives that was all mine.

I sat on the floor of the empty closet and laughed until I had to wipe my eyes.

Jenna hovered in the doorway.

"You think that's going to save you?" she said. "That's a month of their wine budget. You don't know what you're fighting."

"I know where the will is," I said.

She went very still.

"There isn't a will," she said. "There's an old one. They read it at the funeral."

"There's a newer one."

"Where?"

I got up, pulled on Daisy's oldest sneakers and walked out past her.

On Saturday morning I took the subway to the Lower East Side.

Daisy's body had never ridden the subway. Annie's soul had ridden it ten thousand times.

My feet knew the way before I did.

Down Delancey. Left on Clinton.

There it was.

A narrow brick front between a dumpling place and a laundromat, with a hand-painted sign. HOLT ANIMAL CLINIC. WALK-INS WELCOME.

The dumpster I'd been born under, the second time, was still in the alley.

My heart was going so hard my stitches throbbed.

I pushed open the door.

The bell over it jingled, the same bell, the exact same flat little note.

It smelled like disinfectant, and wet dog, and burnt coffee.

Like home.

Behind the counter, a tall man in blue scrubs was bent over a wheezing pug on the exam table.

His wire glasses were pushed up into his messy hair.

Younger. Thinner. No gray at all.

Alive.

He looked up, and his brown eyes went right through me.

"We're closed," Ben said.

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