by Kali Wallace
Give me your rotten little heart, she had said. You won’t miss it a bit.
“What I want is for none of this to have happened,” I said. “But that’s not an option, is it?”
I couldn’t bear to talk to him anymore. I couldn’t stand there on that quiet Boulder street, outside a house with a blood-splattered bathroom and a homicidal house elf in the basement, pretending everything would be fine.
“I’m leaving now,” I said.
“Don’t get yourself killed for real,” Zeke said.
I kicked off, and I waved as I rode away.
FORTY-THREE
IT TOOK ME four days and five different rides to get back to Chicago. I could have made the trip faster if I had tried, but I didn’t, and I didn’t think much about my reasons for taking my time. I hitchhiked from Boulder up to Cheyenne with a couple of engineering students on their way to Montana for a camping trip, turned east at Cheyenne with a trucker named Joe who spent the entire time telling me about his daughter who traveled around the country just like me, relying on the kindness of strangers, sometimes on the highways and sometimes on the trains.
“Sure I worry,” said Joe, in response to a question I wasn’t going to ask. “But she’s a smart girl. She can take care of herself.”
Joe and I parted ways in Kansas City, and from there I rode to St. Louis with two college lacrosse players with identical blond ponytails who spent half the trip arguing about how Taylor Swift had become a feminist icon, then up to Bloomington with a cheerful, chatty woman named Sandra who was road-tripping after her divorce, and the final stretch into Chicago with a Northwestern journalism student named Laurie who was thinking about giving up the news entirely to go learn yoga at an ashram in India.
“It’s just so hard to care when nobody else cares,” she said. “Nobody wants to hear about anything that matters anymore.”
But her car radio was tuned to NPR and she turned it up for the international updates, shaking her head and offering out-of-context commentary I pretended to understand. She was dismayed to learn that I didn’t have an opinion on the situation in Gaza. I didn’t try to explain that I had spent an entire year underground and missed a lot of important world events.
None of them were killers, the people I rode with, and if they were monsters, they hid it well. The only shadows they dragged behind them were the ordinary kind, the kind that everybody collects going through life, waking up every day to make a series of good and bad decisions, going to bed with the consequences, doing it all over again in the morning.
I didn’t approach any old women. Sometimes when I closed my eyes I felt her claws on my wrist and heard the whisper of living sand, but when I opened them again there was only the car, the country, the driver who was kind enough to help a stranger.
Laurie would have taken me into Evanston if I asked, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. After she dropped me off, I used some of Jake’s money to head downtown. I used a little more cash to buy a phone, because tucked in with the bills was a note with their phone numbers and the admonishment to let them know I was okay. It made me roll my eyes, but it also made me smile. It felt odd to have a phone in my pocket again and somebody to call, like the earth’s gravity had increased and every step I took carried a bit more weight.
I spent the rest of the day at the Field Museum, which was probably not what Jake had given me the money for, but rooms full of dead dinosaurs and noisy school kids were soothing after days on the road. I wandered around, reading displays and staring at skeletons, and nobody noticed, nobody cared, nobody wondered if I belonged.
I stayed with Sue the T. rex and all of her dinosaur friends until the museum closed, then I took the train to Evanston.
FORTY-FOUR
I WISH I HAD a better story to tell about the night I died.
That should be part of the deal. Die young, come back to tell about it, at the very least it should be an exciting death.
But nothing about that day was unusual. There was only one more week of school before summer. I went over to Melanie’s house in the afternoon before Nate’s party. Her parents were more easygoing than mine. Not that Mom and Dad were ever very strict, but Alan and Lillian—they insisted I call them by their first names—let Melanie take the car every time she asked, never enforced a curfew, only laughed when Melanie’s little brother, Ryan, tried to tattle on us for breaking the rules. We were good girls, mostly. We never gave them much reason to worry.
Melanie had been dating a senior since January. His name was Lawrence but everybody called him Lucky. He even called himself Lucky, because he was the kind of guy who sometimes talked about himself in the third person. He was going to William & Mary in the fall to study English literature, and he had been trying to convince Melanie to apply to the same school, casually at first, almost a joke, but more and more insistently as graduation drew closer.
“I mean, I like him,” Melanie said. She was always careful not to say love when she didn’t mean it. “But every time he brings it up I just want to stab myself. Seriously, who wants to go to college in Virginia?”
I was lying on her bed, flipping halfheartedly through my World History notes, glancing over names and dates but not absorbing much. I never had to study much for math or science exams, but anything involving people required work. Melanie was sitting at her computer, playing music from indie bands Lucky wanted her to like. Melanie started each song, listened for a few seconds, clicked to the next.
“Where do you want to go instead?” I asked.
“Somewhere besides Virginia,” Melanie said with a laugh. “New York, I think. I’d love to live in New York. Maybe Boston, since you’ll be at MIT.” She played another song, made a face at the vocalist’s reedy voice, moved on. “I don’t know. Why do I have to decide now? Lucky’s acting like I should know everything I want already or I’m going to end up taking accounting classes at community college. Does he really think anybody our age has everything figured out?” She spun around in her chair. “Except for you. But you’re not exactly normal.”
I could remember when Melanie had wanted something as much as I wanted to be an astronaut. For her it was medicine. She wanted to be a doctor, a pediatrician. Not the vaccines-and-lollipops kind of pediatrician, but the kind who took care of kids with cancer, with genetic disorders or degenerative diseases, the kind of pediatrician whose patients were too sick to play or go to school or have a normal life. When most of us were signing up for community service to fulfill the National Honor Society requirements and add another accomplishment to our college applications, Melanie was already volunteering at the children’s hospital. She read to the kids and talked to their parents, commiserated with the nurses and shadowed the doctors. I hadn’t realized until that afternoon it wasn’t her dream anymore.
Melanie did end up going to New York. I looked her up eventually, when it didn’t hurt so much. She was studying film at NYU. I found a picture of her with her freshman roommate at a Halloween party. They were dressed up like starlets from 1940s Hollywood, with clinging dresses and curled hair. Red plastic cups in hand, bright matching smiles, skin shiny in the camera flash, they looked happy. “Me and my bestie!!!!!” Melanie had always used too much punctuation. It looked like a night on another planet, in another universe, one I could barely imagine anymore.
But that was later. That afternoon, the last day of my human life, I didn’t ask when Melanie had stopped dreaming about helping sick kids, and she didn’t notice my silence.
“You think Devon will be there tonight?” Melanie said, and I understood that there were things she had missed too. Devon was a guy I had hooked up with a few times in the winter, but not since March, when his ex-girlfriend in Portland had called up to say she wanted to try the long-distance thing for real. We had never been into each other that much anyway. The full extent of our relationship, if that was the word for it, was to head over to his house after school, do our calculus homework, have sex, and play video games until his parents got ho
me. It was fun, for a while, but two months later I didn’t think about him much anymore.
Later, after I disappeared and the police interviewed everybody I knew, Devon had only nice things to say about me. I appreciated that. Everybody else in school was getting a lot of mileage out of sharing every sordid story they could remember or make up about me, but all Devon said was that I was a friend who was good at math but terrible at Call of Duty.
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe.”
“Everybody will be there,” Melanie said, and she moved on to talking about our friend Tatiana’s car, an old Firebird she and her stepmother were rebuilding in their garage. They were taking classes, buying books, peppering every employee at every auto parts shop in town with questions. It was all Tatiana talked about anymore. We were already planning a road trip for after graduation.
There should have been something significant about that day. Something ominous. A sign, in retrospect, that it was the last day of my life. But there wasn’t. It was an ordinary day.
For dinner we had Indian takeout with Melanie’s family. Ryan was going through a phase where he claimed to be training himself to eat the hottest foods he could find. He spent the meal teary and red-faced, gulping water between bouts of laughter. We cleaned up the dishes. We got ready for the night. Melanie promised not to drink and drive; I promised not to let her. We went to Nate’s party.
I had a few drinks. I danced. I hugged my graduating senior friends. I kissed my best friend and her lips were warm, sticky with mint-flavored gloss. She said, “What the hell?” and she slapped me. It was no secret I was bisexual, and Melanie had never cared, but she cared about that. I wasn’t even sure why I kissed her. I had never wanted to before, and probably wouldn’t have again, if I had lived. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
I locked myself in Nate Havers’s upstairs bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Melanie’s hand had left a red smudge on my cheek. Somebody pounded on the door and shouted that he was going to piss in the hallway if I didn’t let him in. I wanted to go home. My dad always said I could call if I needed a ride when I was out with my friends, for any reason, even if I had been drinking, even if I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. I wouldn’t get into trouble, he said, that was a promise.
I didn’t call my father. The police found my phone in the bathroom at Nate’s house. I don’t remember leaving it there.
I decided to walk. I stopped on Nate’s front steps to take off my uncomfortable sandals, and a girl I recognized but couldn’t name said, “Awesome shoes!” She lifted her Corona in a toast. I stared at her, didn’t even remember to smile, and she was gone, dragged laughing into the house by a friend.
Nobody noticed me leaving. That’s what they all said later.
The grass on Nate’s front lawn was cool beneath my bare feet, a soft tickle on my ankles. I wanted to walk in the grass all the way home, cutting through yards, over hedges and fences, staying in the shadows.
I was standing there at the edge of the grass, trying to decide if I could jump the flower bed into the next yard over, when I heard my name.
“Breezy. Hey, Breezy. Hey, are you okay?”
I turned around and I thought: God, it’s that kid, what is he even doing here?
And: What’s his name, what’s his name, he’s always saying hi to me in the halls, what is his name?
And I thought about the stupid letters he used to send to me, his messy handwriting on the envelopes and torn-out notebook paper. I had a whole stack of them from middle school, from freshman year. Melanie and my other friends used to laugh, told me I should be flattered, maybe he was a nice boy beneath all the shyness, maybe I shouldn’t be so mean to him. I stopped telling them, eventually, when it wasn’t funny anymore. I wondered how he had even known there was a party at Nate’s house. He wasn’t friends with Nate. He was on the track team; he hung out with a different crowd.
“Hi, Ricky,” I said.
“Are you leaving?” Ricky said. “Do you need a ride?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? I can give you a ride.”
“I’m sure.”
“Come on, Breezy, I just want to talk.”
I said no. I said I was fine. I kept walking.
And he followed me. Nobody saw him. Nobody was watching.
The cops never talked to Ricky Benning.
I don’t remember dying.
I remember telling him to leave me alone. I remember that he grabbed my arm. I remember that he shoved me and I stumbled into a car and hit my head on the window. I remember shouting for help, or trying to, dazed and dizzy and nauseous, and the pressure of his hand on my mouth, his fingers on my neck, his babbling, panicked plea for me to be quiet, be quiet, please shut up, shut up, shut up, somebody might hear. I don’t remember the snap of my hyoid bone. I don’t remember my trachea collapsing under the pressure of his hands. He shouldn’t have been strong enough, but he was angry and scared. I don’t remember the blood vessels in my eyes rupturing.
It only takes a few seconds for a person to lose consciousness from strangulation. I don’t remember anything after that.
FORTY-FIVE
THE BENNINGS HAD lived in the same house since Ricky was in kindergarten. For a few years they had invited everybody in the class over for Ricky’s birthday. I remembered those parties in a vague blur of sticky frosting, melting ice cream, colorful paper streamers, and once, maybe, a clown that made Jill Patterson cry, but that might have been somewhere else.
The house was dark. It didn’t look like it had in the nightmare I’d had at Ingrid’s. It was smaller, brown rather than gray, and there was no light in the upstairs window.
He was home. I could feel him.
I stashed my skateboard at the edge of the lawn and ducked into the shadows. I changed into the mud-stained party clothes I had been wearing when I died. The shirt was Melanie’s; I had forgotten until I pulled it over my head. She had told me not to spill beer on it and not to have sex in it, and we had both laughed. She hadn’t said anything about getting murdered in it, but I felt guilty anyway. It was one of her favorites.
I left my backpack in the grass and walked around the house, looking for a way in. They had locked all their doors and windows on the first floor. I could break a windowpane, but I didn’t want to wake anybody up. I found my way in when I spotted the dog flap in the back door. It was closed up with a plastic board on the inside, but the board wasn’t locked into place. I slid it out and squeezed myself through the dog door.
I was in the kitchen before I remembered that dog door means dog. A low growl rumbled in the darkness. A big, angry German shepherd.
But it was only a dog, and I’m not human anymore. I stepped toward it and growled right back. That big German shepherd backed away with an alarmed whine and cowered in the corner by its food bowl.
“Good dog,” I whispered.
I followed the shadows upstairs, slipped into Ricky’s room, and shut the door behind me. In the light from the street, I could see him asleep on his twin bed. There were clothes and shoes scattered all over the floor. On the desk was a square graduation cap with the tassel dangling over the edge. The room smelled like teenage boy: sweat, dirty socks, the chemical offense of cheap body spray. The clinging shadows of his guilt filled the room with a darkness I felt more than saw. It reminded me of a nature program I had watched once, a diver’s view of a kelp forest off the California coast, impossibly tall dark stalks swaying and drifting against the distant, wavering sunlight.
I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand over his mouth.
I said, “Hey, Ricky.”
He woke slowly, eyes blinking, lips moving beneath my fingers. His breath was warm and damp on my palm. First there was disbelief, confusion, the narrow-eyed squint of somebody who thinks he’s in a dream.
Then he inhaled, and he was awake. He tried to sit up and scramble away from me.
“Shh.” I pressed my hand
harder over his mouth, pushing his head into the pillow. “Don’t do that. I just want to talk.”
Ricky’s eyes were wide and pale and he began to shake his head, back and forth, back and forth, hair whispering against his pillow.
“Isn’t that what you told me? You just wanted to talk. You didn’t care if I wanted to listen.”
He made a noise in his throat. It sounded like the scared whimper of the dog downstairs. His hands clenched uselessly at the edge of his sheet.
“I’m wondering how surprised you are to see me,” I said. He flinched and his eyes twitched rapidly. “You must have freaked out when you heard about that dead guy they found where you buried me. You must have pissed yourself, thinking they would find me next.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll let you talk, because I want to hear the answer to that,” I said. I put my other hand against his neck. His skin was warm, sweaty; I made a disgusted face but pressed my fingers into his throat. “If you try to scream, you’ll be dead before you take a breath. Just tell me. Are you surprised to see me?”
I removed my hand from his mouth.
“You’re dead,” he whispered.
“Wow, you’re a genius. You want to see something?” I tilted my chin up, let him get a good look at the bruises around my neck. “See that? I still have the bruises. The bruises you gave me.”
I caught myself as my voice rose, pressed my lips together and breathed.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up.”
