All the Rage

by Courtney Summers

  The bell rings.

  McClelland turns the television on. After a brief delay, the screen fades in on Penny’s photograph, nothing else, and now she’s too here. It’s the same photo they used on the MISSING posters, clearer on the monitor than it was on paper. Not blown-out black-and-white, but color and her eyes look—more alive than they did when I thought there was a chance she still might be.

  McClelland stands, resting his hands against his desk.

  “We have been advised to take a few moments this morning to talk with you about—” He runs his hand over his mouth, already overwhelmed. “About the death of Penny Young. Penny was—” He stops again. “A light … in the lives of all those who knew her. We were privileged to know her. This loss is unfathomable. This loss is cruel.”

  I stare at the two empty seats at the front. What if her empty seat was mine?

  What would they say about me?

  “There are guest books in the library and you are encouraged to leave your memories of Penny and your condolences in them. At the end of the week, they will be sent to Penny’s family. A memorial assembly is being planned. We will keep you notified of when the funeral—” He can’t deal with this word, presses his lips together for a long moment. “Reporters have begun to arrive but we ask you to please honor our friend and classmate and her loved ones by not speaking with them.”

  McClelland sits. Speech over. He stares at the clock. I follow his gaze and watch the second hand tremor forward until the bell rings. I tally the missing. Brock, Penny, Alek. But that seems to be it. Everyone else is here to share in the devastation. The bell rings again and again, and by the time it’s Phys Ed, there’s a little more life in the halls. The presence of the news vans outside have made this no less a tragedy, but—more of an event. It’s what Cat Kiley is talking about in the locker room.

  “Are you going to speak to them?” she asks Yumi.

  “No,” Tina says before Yumi can answer. “And neither are you.”

  “Why not?” Cat asks. “Marie Sinclair went out there and said they only wanted a sound bite about how people were taking it—”

  “Penny is not a fucking sound bite.” Tina takes her shirt off. Cat makes a face and turns away. Tina throws her shirt at Cat. It nails her square in the back. Cat whirls around, furious. “Do you hear me? You say anything, Cat—”

  “Fine.”

  Cat picks up Tina’s shirt and throws it back to her.

  “That goes for the rest of you too.” Tina’s eyes skim over everyone before settling on me. “If I see you on TV tonight, you better hope to hell it’s worth it tomorrow.”

  We size each other up from opposite sides of the room, looking for cracks. She’s radiating anger, holding it to herself, keeping it close and not making room for anything else because anything else would be too much. She won’t let anyone see her pain, but you’d have to be a fool to think it wasn’t there.

  “So what do you think happened to her?” Yumi asks quietly.

  Tina finally tears her gaze from me. Throws her shirt onto the bench and goes into her locker for her gym clothes. “Doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “Were you talking to Brock? Did he say…?”

  “What would Brock have to say about it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he talked to Alek. Maybe Alek heard it from his dad…”

  “Sheriff Turner won’t tell Alek anything now,” Tina mutters.

  Cat crosses her arms over her chest. “I’ve got a curfew, so does my sister. Eight o’clock. Just in case some creep had her and he’s still out there. That’s what my mom thinks. She thinks Penny got raped. She thinks that’s what they’re not saying because—”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  I’m expecting anyone’s voice but my own, don’t even realize I said it until it echoes back at me in my head. That was me. It was me. I stare at my open locker, my hands at the edge of my shirt. I forget what I was doing. I forget what I’m here for. There’s a point to all of this but I don’t know what it is anymore.

  It’s quiet, and then, “What did you say?”

  I bite my lip so nothing else accidentally comes out.

  “What did you say to Cat, Grey?” Tina asks.

  I close my locker and face the room. They’re all staring. Cat seems closer to Tina now. Tina may bite, but I’m the one that walks away from fights covered in blood.

  “I told her to shut her fucking mouth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “And you do? Really?” Tina runs her tongue over her teeth and I’m so sorry I started this. I don’t want to be the place she puts her anger. “Well, wait. You’re good at playing pretend about this kind of stuff. So you think she was raped before she was in the water?”

  Cold. I’m cold. I don’t feel the floor under my feet, don’t feel anything. I flex my fingers and I wouldn’t know they were moving if I wasn’t watching them do it. I blink and the girls are still staring and I want to ask them if they feel it, that cold, because it can’t just be me.

  “You—” Tina stops.

  You.

  If it had been me instead of Penny, no one would call me a light. No, they’d think of me the way they think of me now, think of it as some kind of natural conclusion to my story, sad, maybe, deserved it, well no, of course no one does, but. That girl. You can see it. It’s written on her.

  They wrote it on her.

  “Come on, I want to hear it from you,” Tina says. “What if she was?”

  “Then she’s better off dead.”

  * * *

  in the girls’ bathroom, I run the water hot and hold my hands under it until I feel

  a reporter tries to flag me down in the parking lot, some Ibis news station. He wears a stiff-looking suit and tie, smells like a sickening combination of hair spray and cologne. Would you be willing to say a few words about Penny Young? I shake my head and make my way to the other side of the street, where Todd waits in the New Yorker. I glance over my shoulder, pausing briefly to watch the reporter try and fail again to get someone to say something about Penny, and then finally—a bite. A willing freshman who must like the idea of being on television more than he fears the consequences. I climb into the car. Todd waits for a few walkers to go by before pulling out. I rest my head against the window and watch the school get farther and farther away.

  “It should settle down soon,” I say.

  “What’s that?” Todd asks.

  “Everything. After they bury her.” I don’t have to look at him to know I made him cringe. “And then everyone will go back—” Back to where they came from. Todd doesn’t say anything, so I say it again. “Everyone will go. Right?”

  “Likely, yeah,” he finally says.

  “You think we should worry if someone’s out there? That did this to her?”

  “Well, it’s crossed our minds. Your mother’s and mine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, we’ll be driving you to work and picking you up. Should’ve been doing it sooner. I don’t know what the hell we were thinking.” He looks like he wants to say more about it, but he doesn’t. A few drops of rain hit the windshield, and a few more. “I’ve got to stop at the hardware store and pick up a shelf kit for your mother. It’ll just take a second.”

  We head up the main street and park in front of Baker’s Hardware. At first, I think I’ll stay in the New Yorker, but then I think about who might walk or drive by and see me. I follow Todd in. The manufactured scent of pine fills my nose. Manufactured pine and real dust.

  “Howdy, Bartlett,” a feeble voice says. I follow it to the cash register, where Art Baker sits. He’s the kind of seventy-five that acts ninety. “Romy.”

  “How you doing there, Art?”

  “This rain keeps up, it won’t come down.”

  Todd chuckles politely. “That’s for damn sure.”

  “Shame about the Young girl, huh?”

  “Yes
, very.” Whatever trace of a smile was on Todd’s mouth disappears. “Really is. We were hoping for a better outcome.”

  “We all were.”

  I wander a little down the aisle to the fishing supplies, start picking through the lures. My dad tried to teach me how to fish once. Short-lived, failed experiment. I loved the lures, though. The flashers. They were too interesting for such a boring sport.

  “Ken Davis near killed three kids out looking for her the other week,” Art is telling Todd. “Searching the back roads in the dark, none of them wearing reflective anything. I put a sale on some reflective tape. Thought it would drum up some business. That was right before they found her.”

  “That’s … how about that.”

  Missing girls. Good for business.

  “How about you? You loving your domestication?”

  “I got a family now, Art. What’s not to love?”

  Art laughs. “You got a breadwinner, is what you got and now you have even less to do.” The ancient asshole. I glance at Todd and he just stares at Art, doesn’t join in on the laugh at his expense until Art is uncomfortable he made the joke in the first place. “Anyway—I missed what you needed. What was it?”

  “I didn’t say. But a shelf kit. Those ones in the flyer?”

  “Right. Yeah. Follow me.” Art shuffles out from behind the counter and leads Todd through the store. He could just tell Todd where it is—this place is barely two rooms—but no doubt he wants the excuse to keep talking. He touches my arm as he passes. “You doing okay there, Romy?”

  I don’t look at him. “Yeah.”

  They disappear, but Art’s voice carries. I tune it out and walk over to the front window. It’s raining harder now. The main street can’t even pretend it’s something nice in this kind of weather. I turn away and a display at the cash register catches my eye.

  POCKET KNIVES

  MUST BE 18 OR OLDER TO PURCHASE

  The knives rest in a box, propped up by a plastic display stand. One knife is open across the top and I can see myself, a distorted mess, in the blade. I scan the colors and patterns laid out below. The knives on the left side are different from the ones on the right. They are steely grays, forest greens, browns, and solid reds. On the right, the colors seem softer. You wouldn’t call them for what they are, but give them names like blush, rose … there’s a pink camo pattern. I’m sure it’s the perfect knife for some girl out there, but I wonder what, if any, kind of sincerity the manufacturer made it with. If they were thinking of that girl, or if they just thought it was a joke.

  Maybe they don’t know how easily a girl could make this knife serious.

  I reach my hand out.

  “Romy.”

  I step back. Todd and Art make their way toward me. Todd holds up his shelf kit.

  “I’m ready. Are you?”

  “Yeah.”

  I stare at the open knife while he pays.

  I wonder if it would have made a difference.

  * * *

  leon’s waiting outside for me when Mom drops me off at work. She honks the horn at him twice, and he waves. His eyes light on me, concerned, like when he first saw me after the road. I don’t like being reminded of that. He asks me if I’m okay and I tell him I’m not the one they pulled out of the river. He frowns.

  “They’re not giving you a hard time about it, are they?”

  “Leon, that’s what they do.”

  “You can talk to me,” he says. “If you need to.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m really sorry, Romy.”

  “It’s okay.”

  We weren’t even friends when she died.

  He hugs me before I can do anything about it. I like when Leon touches me, but not like this. I don’t want to feel anything about her in the way he’s holding me. He pulls away and I give him a weak smile and we go inside. Holly tells me she’s been having nightmares about Annie, terrible things happening to Annie.

  “She won’t listen to me,” she says. “And I can’t watch her all the time. She just wants to push me, she doesn’t think. This thing with the Young girl—I can’t convince her to be afraid of it. I don’t know how to make her scared enough.”

  “She’ll grow out of it,” I say because I don’t know what else to say.

  Holly pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her apron pocket.

  “Yeah,” she mutters. “If she lives that long.”

  I work my station, try to lose myself in the repetition of walking the floor, waiting on the tables, taking orders, placing orders, but I can’t. I feel uneasy, like something’s not right beyond everything that’s already wrong and that feeling gets worse the more the night goes on. It gets so bad I end up stopping in the middle of my shift, looking for its cause, so I can make it go away.

  Penny’s MISSING posters.

  They have to come down. I can’t believe no one here has done that already, that it wasn’t the first thing they did. That not one customer has said anything about it yet.

  But—they would have, if they’d seen her.

  Penny stares at me. She stares at me until I rip the posters down.

  They didn’t see her and now it’s too late.

  when the weekend comes, Leon says maybe it would take my mind off things if we go to Ibis and see the baby and I say yes because there is no good way to say no. I paint my nails and my mouth and then I’m ready. I sit on the couch and watch TV until midafternoon, when Leon’s Pontiac pulls up. I have a feeling there’s no point in trying to beat Mom to the door, so I let her and Todd answer it while I fill a cooler with the week’s worth of frozen food she and I made for Caro and Adam.

  “Uncle Leon!” Mom opens the door for him and he laughs. “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah,” Todd says. “Good to have good news these days.”

  I drag the cooler out. Leon stares, impressed. “You really didn’t have to do that but they’re going to be thrilled you did. Thank you.”

  “Anytime,” Mom says. “Give them our best.”

  Leon and I leave. There’s a break in the rain today, clear enough to run and I’m sorry I’m not doing that instead. He turns the radio on and I don’t know what to talk about, so I let the music fill the silence until he can’t seem to stand it anymore.

  “Reporters finally clear out?” he asks awkwardly, when we’re almost there.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I forgot to tell you. The last of them left Wednesday. I don’t know what took them so long.”

  “Maybe they were waiting for the Turner kid to show. Hoping for something from the Grebe Auto Supplies heir. Makes it all a little more interesting.”

  “Because it’s so boring, otherwise.”

  “Hey, that’s not what I said. News loves a good tragedy, they love known quantities. You get the tragic, known quantity and you’ve got something.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be seeing Alek soon. I don’t know if he’ll even be able to handle the funeral on Tuesday.”

  “You going?”

  “It’s private,” I say. “They’re having an assembly at school on Monday and the visitation is Monday night.”

  When we reach Caro and Adam’s place, I get out of the car more nervous than I was my first time here. If Leon notices, he doesn’t say anything. He hauls the cooler out of the backseat and I follow him up the driveway. Caro opens the door before we even reach it.

  “Excited to see us, huh?” Leon sets the cooler down and gives her a hug.

  “Ava’s sleeping. I wanted to beat you to the doorbell, so I wouldn’t have to beat you at the doorbell,” she says. “She should be up soon, though.”

  She lets Leon go and turns to me and there’s this brief moment where we look each other over. I want to see how motherhood wears on her. She wants to see how a dead girl wears on me. Caro’s in a pretty blue tunic and black leggings and a pair of slippers. She looks tired, but her contentedness makes the tired look good. She takes me in and I don’t think I work my look so well, because the corne
rs of her mouth turn down.

  “I’m so sorry about Penny,” she says.

  “It’s okay.” I don’t know why I can’t think of something better to say than that because it’s such a bad answer. It’s not okay.

  “Leon told me it was complicated, between you and her,” she says and he looks away from us. “But still. A shock. I hope you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. I’m…” I force the next words out. “I’m excited to meet Ava. Oh—and I brought you some food.” I point to the cooler. “My mom and I made it. There’s about a week’s worth of meals in there for you guys, all freezable.”

  “Oh my God, thank you.” She gives me a big hug and I let myself fall into it a little. “We just finished the last casserole a friend sent over. I get so intense about making sure the baby stays alive, by the time that’s taken care of, I can barely muster an interest in keeping myself watered and fed. Thank your mom for me.”

  Leon takes the cooler inside and we follow after him. Caro assigns him the task of quietly filling the freezer while she asks me if I want anything to drink. I turn red, even though she doesn’t mean it that way.

  “Where’s Adam?” Leon asks. “He around?”

  “Milk run. He’ll be back soon. He gets separation anxiety.”

  “That softie.” Leon closes the fridge.

  “So how was it?” I ask. “Having her?”

  “Disgusting,” Leon says.

  “No one asked you and you weren’t even in the room,” Caro says, smiling at him before telling me, “Disgusting. But easy, I think. With an epidural. No complications. It was—gross, though. Childbirth is a messy business.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you last week,” I say. “With Penny…”

  “No, that’s fine.” Caro waves her hand. “I wanted to see you, but Leon wasn’t thinking, bless him. We were a little too overwhelmed for visitors that soon.”

  “Bless you,” Leon returns. He glances at one of the casseroles. “Oh, lasagne. This looks great. Want me to pop it in the oven? I’m starved.”