My Best Friend Bought Me a Cursed Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Memory Auction
Annie dies beside her best friend and wakes at an auction for other people's lives; Jenna hands her the heiress's cursed life, and Annie wakes in Daisy's body with a knife in her hand and her brother screaming, just as her parents announce her fiancé is coming to dinner.
Jenna and I died holding hands, and for the second time we woke up at the auction.
The railing on the rooftop bar had given way under both of us at once.
One second there was music and a lime in my drink.
The next there was a gray hall with no walls, and rows of folding chairs, and a man at a podium who didn't have a face.
I knew this place.
So did Jenna. I felt her fingers go tight in mine.
The rules hadn't changed. The auctioneer read them off in a voice like a dial tone.
Every soul in the room had a lamp. You lit it with what was left of you, your soul's strength, whatever you hadn't used up living.
The highest lamp won a life.
Not a new one. Somebody else's, somebody dying right now, with their memories and their money and everything in their closet.
You woke up as them.
If you spent everything and lost, you didn't wake up as anybody. You drifted until you came back as an animal.
"Lot one," the auctioneer said. "Daisy Vandermeer, twenty-four. Upper East Side. Heir to the Vandermeer shipping fortune."
A picture of her hung in the air. Platinum hair. A face like a perfume ad.
Jenna let go of my hand.
I remembered the first time.
Last time, Jenna had burned every drop she had on that lamp. Hers had blazed so bright the whole room squinted.
I'd had almost nothing to bid with. I'd lost.
I woke up as a gray stray cat with a torn ear, under a dumpster on Clinton Street in the rain.
A vet found me there.
His name was Ben. He had cat hair on everything he owned and terrible coffee breath and the gentlest hands I've ever felt.
I lived nine years on his lap.
Fish treats. Afternoon naps in the window. His voice saying, "Hey, Gray. Hey, pretty girl," every single morning.
It was the best life I ever had.
Jenna got Daisy's.
The Vandermeers turned out to be monsters. A father who counted every penny he spent on his daughter. A mother who wanted her married up. A brother who hit.
They sold Jenna, in Daisy's body, to a shipping rival who was eighty-one years old.
A year later she went off the roof of his penthouse on Central Park South.
I know because I saw her fall.
Ben was carrying me home through the park in the sun. I was asleep against his chest.
She looked down from the roof and saw me.
The last thing she ever said, she screamed at me.
"Annie Price, I hope you never get to be human again."
Now here we were.
Same hall. Same chair. Same lot.
Jenna stood up.
"I'm out," she told the auctioneer.
Then she turned and looked straight at me.
"But I'm spending everything I've got on her lamp. Let her have it."
My lamp flared white.
Nobody else even tried.
The gavel came down.
Jenna leaned close, and she smiled at me the way she used to smile at girls who beat her in spelling bees.
"Enjoy it, bestie," she whispered. "Everybody's going to be watching."
Then the gray hall broke like a window.
The pain came first.
Then the noise, glass smashing on wood.
Then something warm and sticky running into my left eye.
"Get up, Daisy! Stop faking!"
A man's voice, young and whiny.
"Mom and Dad said five hundred thousand, and you're not leaving this room until you transfer it."
I opened my eyes.
Red. Everything was red on one side.
I was on my back on a silk rug in a library full of leather books nobody had read.
A young man stood over me holding half of a heavy crystal ashtray.
Bleached hair. A round, soft face. Small mean eyes.
Daisy's memories dropped into my head like files falling out of a cabinet.
Bradley. Her little brother. Twenty-one. Half a million dollars in debt to an online bookie.
This was the minute, last time.
This was where it started for Jenna.
He'd beaten her within an hour of her waking up. Then the parents had come in and finished the job, and Jenna had transferred the money with a broken finger.
After that, they knew she'd break.
I touched my forehead and looked at the blood on my fingers.
Above Bradley's shoulder, something flickered.
Jenna.
She floated near the ceiling, see-through, her curls hanging around her face.
She had nothing left. She couldn't touch anything. She could only watch.
And she was laughing.
"Welcome home, Annie," she said. "That ashtray was the warm-up."
Bradley mistook my silence for shock.
He reached down to grab me by the hair.
There was a fruit plate on the coffee table beside my head, with a little silver knife on it.
I'd spent nine years as a cat.
I knew how to move before a hand landed.
I rolled, grabbed the knife and drove it through the middle of his palm.
He screamed so loud the windows hummed.
He went down on his knees, holding his wrist, blood spattering the silk rug.
I got up.
I stood on his good hand with the heel of my house slipper, not hard, just enough to hold it there.
"Five hundred thousand," I said. "That's a lot. Here's a better idea. You call the bookie and tell him you've retired."
Above us, Jenna had stopped laughing.
"Annie. Are you insane? He's their only son. They'll bury you."
I looked up at her.
I smiled. I really meant it.
"You never figured it out, did you?" I said. "This house was only hell because you let them see you bleed."
Bradley was sobbing.
I took my foot off his hand.
The library doors flew open.
A gray-haired man in a cardigan and a woman in pearls came in together.
Daisy's mother looked at her son on the floor, bleeding into the rug.
Then she looked at me, and the blood on my face, and the knife.
She didn't scream.
She didn't call anyone.
She stepped over Bradley and straightened my collar with two cold fingers.
"Wash your face, Daisy," she said. "Your fiancé is coming to dinner at eight."
Up by the ceiling, Jenna started laughing again.
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