People Like Us

by Dana Mele

  I turn to Nola, dread spreading through me slowly like a fever. “What did you do?”

  “It was an accident.” She presses her face into her pillow and lets out a muffled shriek, and then lifts it. Her eyes are bright red and watery, and her mascara is smudged. “I didn’t take him. I just found him. At least I think it was him. He was in the creek. Alive, but just . . .” She trails off, her eyes overflowing, her nose swollen, lips trembling. Her voice wobbles. “His body was flattened and his fur was matted with blood and in the water it wasn’t even red, it was brown and pink, it was so creepy.” She chokes and I put my arms around her awkwardly.

  “I never saw anything dead before,” she goes on, getting more and more worked up. “And everyone was so upset, and I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have any friends, and I was afraid if I said something, everyone would think I did it. Or if they found him, they would say, hey, Nola was out walking by the creek, isn’t that a funny coincidence. And she’s so weird.”

  A huge, wrenching guilt rips through me as I remember how nasty we were to her when she showed up with her dyed raven-black hair, black nail polish, and goth makeup. Necro. We didn’t even give her a chance. We made jokes about her sleeping with corpses and worshipping the devil. Of course it caught on. Everything we do eventually does. No wonder she was terrified. I open my mouth to say I’m sorry, but instead I just say, “No one would have thought you did that.”

  She looks at me sharply. “Everyone would have thought I did it.” She sniffles and slumps into my shoulder. “So I picked him up, and just ran. Through the woods, in the snow, as far as I could. Then I put him down to bury him, but everything was frozen, so I covered him with stones. But the snow all around was covered in blood. For a while, I thought about just sinking into it, and just letting the snow surround me and freezing to death. It sounded like a painless way to die. But I chickened out.” She suddenly sits up and blows her nose on her sleeve and then looks at me. “Do you know why?”

  I shake my head. “Why?”

  She walks across the room and points to one of the columns of writing on the wall. “‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.’”

  I squint at her. “Shakespeare saved your life?”

  She looks disappointed, almost disdainful. “Hamlet. He couldn’t kill himself, because no matter what torments this life holds, the afterlife could be worse. We can’t do it if we don’t know.” She looks so earnest that I nod, although she’s dead wrong. Hamlet might not have been able to do it, but some people can. Megan did. I kind of doubt Shakespeare could have saved her, even if all his words covered all her walls.

  “What if each of us dies and goes to an individually designed hell filled with our deepest and darkest fears?” Nola says, flopping back onto her bed. “If that’s true, you can’t possibly allow yourself to die one minute sooner than necessary.”

  “Sure.” I try not to think of death too often since Megan and Todd passed away, but when I do, I like to frame it in more optimistic terms. “But it’s just as likely that the opposite is true. Maybe when we die, we instantly enter our own dreamland. A rerun of all our best memories.” A smile crosses my lips, thinking of Todd and me as kids running around the backyard on the Fourth of July, the smell of hot dogs and burgers filling the air, fireflies and sparklers illuminating the twilight, the grass slick under our bare feet. That would be one to add to the reel. I hope he’s somewhere like that right now.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Nola says. “But still. It gives us pause.” She sighs and looks back at the computer screen. “If Jessica knew I buried Hunter, she knew exactly where his body is. You know what we have to do now.”

  A sick feeling churns in my stomach. “We?”

  “If you want the rest of the passwords, that is.” She eyes me challengingly.

  I stand, pulling my hair into a tight ponytail, and slip my coat on.

  9

  It’s a clear night, but bitterly cold, with occasional gusts of wind that sweep the breath right out of my lungs. I decide the freezing trek around the lake and into the woods is worth wearing my Todd coat, and if we run into anyone carrying a corpse, I have more to worry about than fashion. The woods are on the far side of the lake beyond the main road, and we make the walk silently, me with my chapped red hands shoved deep into my pockets and Nola swinging her arms occasionally and doing half pirouettes now and then. As we spend more and more time together, I notice these things about her. She dances when she walks. Just little bounces and glides scattered here and there. Her gestures are graceful, and she sometimes stands en pointe, casually, as if without realizing she’s doing it. She also speaks lyrically. Her speech pattern falls into a rhythm at times, and she taps her fingers and feet when she sits still for too long. When all is quiet, she begins to hum under her breath, and now I have to shush her once or twice, because if I don’t, her voice will gradually rise until she is singing out loud, and eventually we’ll be caught traipsing through the woods with a sack full of cat bones, merrily belting out show tunes.

  “Are you sure you can find your way back to the spot?” I ask her as we beam our flashlights around the dark wood.

  “I think so,” she says. “There were landmarks. An old red barn on the right, an abandoned tractor on the left. A boulder with the initials IKC carved into it. A pink property-line ribbon and a hiking-trail marker, and three trees down, the stones.”

  I glance over at her in the dark, my flashlight bobbing low. “Good memory.”

  “Well, I had to trace my way out again,” she says.

  I pick my way slowly over the roots and stones, careful not to slip on the slick, frosted leaves. The last thing I need is an injury once I get the season jump-started again. We round a large downed oak tree with enormous, rotting branches sticking up from the ground, and Nola halts.

  “Right there,” she says, pointing.

  I look where she’s indicating but can’t see anything. She makes her way across a small clearing, her sneakers brushing frost-encrusted leaves aside, and then begins removing stones from a small pile. I hesitate. I don’t want to touch it. If there’s a rotting corpse underneath, those stones are probably crawling with disease. I hang back and fumble with the zipper of the canvas backpack she decided we would use to transport the body. I shift my weight back and forth from one foot to the other as she rapidly removes the stones and discards them behind her. At any moment the body will appear. It’s been there for quite a while and I don’t know what to expect. It could be pretty macabre. I haven’t seen many dead bodies.

  Jessica was freshly dead, cuts and skin preserved by the icy water and the newness of her death. Megan was cremated. Todd was painstakingly made up to look like he hadn’t been crushed by Megan’s brother’s truck. His rib cage was reconstructed under his brand-new navy suit. His hands were painted and powdered and fastened together to lovingly hug a football to his chest. They covered a big laceration on the side of his face and sewed his lips and eyelids to make him look peaceful. And then layers and layers of paint and powder, paint and powder. The most grotesque Halloween costume of all time.

  I had begged my mother not to make me go to the wake, not to make me look at Todd’s body, but she’d just stood there wordlessly, watching my mouth move. She was on so many pills, she couldn’t comprehend a thing I said. It was all too much for her, Aunt Tracy had explained. I would never, ever know the depths of her despair. And yes, I had to go. It was expected. But when I stood there, staring down at the wreck of my brother’s body, I thought maybe I understood the depths of my mother’s despair a little. Only it didn’t feel like sadness, or a pill that emptied my mind, or rage that made me shout things about lawyers or hell or revenge, like my dad did behind doors before I heard his sobs break through the house as loud as laughter. For me, it felt like little pangs, little jolts of impulsivity. Reach into th
e casket and try to reposition Todd’s cold, posed hands. Drain Dad’s bottle of special bourbon. What is anyone going to do about it? And later, at Bates. Run against the team captain sophomore year. Make the new girl eat a dead spider or write Coach a love poem or fake a seizure in the middle of chapel. Steal the prettiest clothes from the locker room and wear them around campus, because if you don’t hide it and you don’t back down, no one is going to call you on it. Jump into the lake after the Skeleton Dance. Whatever pops into my mind. Just to see what happens. Who’s going to stop me? What’s anyone going to do? Why does any of it even matter?

  And then the world started spinning on its axis again. I did become team captain. Mom and Dad latched on. It all became real. Everything started to matter. I don’t want to fall back into that wild spinning nothingness again. Because once you’re in it, there are no footholds. It takes something extraordinary, a cosmic alignment of divine proportions, to pull you out. Meeting someone like Brie. Finding I do have a place in a school like Bates. A place where I can be sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that what is ahead of me is better than what I left behind. But the balance is so fragile.

  I pretend to sneeze so I have an excuse to place my fingers over my face and I leave them there, peering out through the cracks. I do not want to see a rotting cat corpse. Nola removes another stone and I fidget in place. “What are we going to do with the body? We didn’t even talk about that.”

  She doesn’t look up. She removes another stone and discards it carelessly. “Rebury it.”

  “Where? How? We don’t have shovels and the ground is frozen.” I take a step backward into the darkness, so that the grave and the thin beam of flashlight illuminating it are almost blocked by her bent figure. But I can still see a sliver of her pale face curving over the ever-shrinking pile, her expression of concentration, the dirt accumulating under her fingernails.

  “Not in the ground. That would be too obvious. It would just turn up again.”

  I take another uneasy step backward and scream as something touches my shoulder. A tree branch. I’ve backed into a tree.

  Nola turns and glares at me. “You’re going to get us caught.”

  “Sorry,” I say meekly.

  “You could help, you know.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll stand lookout.”

  She removes one more stone and peers down. “Toss me the bag.”

  I throw it to her, unable to force myself to move closer or to back up farther, unable to look away or to make any effort to peer around her. What I see is this: hard-packed earth, tufts of fur, and bones. It’s almost more shocking than everything worse my brain was conjuring because it’s so simple and staged looking, like a museum exhibit. Fossils. The creepiest thought occurs to me. Nola had said Hunter wasn’t dead when she found him. I edge closer and we stare down at the bones wordlessly, and I wonder. I almost ask. But then she carefully scrapes the bones and fur off the ground and into the backpack and wipes her filthy hands in the dirt.

  She looks at me with unmasked disdain. “You’re gutless, Donovan.”

  I’m beginning to agree. But it’s not going to sway me into touching Hunter’s remains. A sudden, paralyzing fear seizes through me that I will answer for his death, one way or another. That by witnessing his bones, I am somehow responsible. And then the fear explodes, and it’s not just Hunter, it’s Megan and Todd and Jessica. Death is a chain reaction, a butterfly effect. I shiver and begin to scatter the stones back around the clearing with my sneakers. “So what’s the plan? We’ve got the bones.”

  She slings the backpack over her shoulder and heads down the path toward the main road. “We lay them to rest.”

  “You said they couldn’t go back in the ground.”

  “Exactly. They’re going where they’ll never resurface.”

  The realization makes me shudder. “Don’t you think the lake is under enough scrutiny right now?”

  She picks up her pace and I try to match it. “Not near where Jessica was found. Near the main road.”

  I fall into step next to her. “Nola, think this through. If anyone ever finds this, it’s way more incriminating than the grave. They can trace the backpack to you.”

  “How? Have you ever heard of running a DNA test because of a dead animal?”

  I fall silent for a while, but I’m uneasy. A lot could go wrong. I pull my cashmere hood over my head as we near the main road and peer down into the darkness in both directions before sprinting across. All is quiet. At the edge of the lake, Nola kneels and unzips the backpack, and I gather stones to weigh it down. Accomplice, a voice in my head screams. Accessory to murder.

  I lift a heavy rock, slippery with moss and algae, and slip it into the bag. It crunches the bones and other stones beneath it. “So, I guess after this, we’re done.”

  She pushes her sleeves up and wipes the sweat off her forehead. “Not half. These are pebbles. Give me something to work with.”

  “With the revenge blog.” I pause and begin working on another large stone. “Obviously I can’t continue to work on it without the software, but just show me how to use it, and we’re cool.”

  “I didn’t say I was done.” Her face is a mask of stillness, but her arms are wrapped tightly around her waist, almost protectively.

  “Well, I’m saying it.”

  She lets out a sharp laugh. “You are not firing me.”

  “I’m not putting you in any more danger. We’ve destroyed your evidence but your name is still on the list. Just do me one more favor and take your name off the class roster like you did with Tricia. And teach me how to use that stupid password software. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Like you have any control over this shit storm?” She smiles up at me in the moonlight. There’s always an air of cynicism in her smiles, but for just one moment, with the breeze softly blowing strands of velvety hair around her pale face, her eyes luminous, she looks hopeful.

  Then I remember why we’re standing here, and the fact that I am directly responsible for her involvement.

  Apologize. Do it now. “Fine. You’re the foul-mouthed sidekick, though.”

  “I behave ever like a perfect lady.” Nola helps me yank the stone out of the ground and stuff it into the backpack. She zips it up, then stands and attempts unsuccessfully to lift it. “Good sweet holy crap, this is heavy. Give me a hand.”

  I brace myself against the rail separating the lake from the road and slip one of the straps over my shoulder and lift. Suddenly a white beam of light swings out over us.

  “Duck.” Nola lets go of the backpack and flattens herself on the ground, leaving me holding it alone.

  Like a deer staring into the signals of its own doom, I freeze, equally expecting to look into a pair of headlights and the ghost of Jessica Lane hounding me for disturbing the dead. But it’s neither of those. In fact, it’s much worse. It’s Detective Morgan herself, marching down the lake path brandishing a flashlight.

  I drop the backpack and start running.

  “You! Stop right there!”

  I hear Nola shriek and a pair of footsteps pounding behind me. I have confidence in my ability to outrun Morgan. I am in peak physical fitness, seventeen years old and conditioning daily, at the top of my game. She’s probably around thirty-five and may have been an athlete once, but let’s face it, there aren’t many criminals to chase around here. She doesn’t call to me by name, and that gives me hope. I might have a fighting chance to get back without being caught. Nola, on the other hand, is a wild card. Although she’s short, she has to be in pretty good shape if she dances regularly. I can’t afford to stop and look back, but I have to hope that she either split off in another direction or stayed hidden. If she gets caught, I’m as good as caught, too, because I have no reason to believe she’d protect me.

  I pound my sneakers on the lake path, taking the curves hard, and then cut a
way from the dorms toward the gym, hoping to outlast them both. Even if Morgan is fast, I’m going to bank on having more stamina. I round the gym and slow down, listening for footsteps behind me. I can’t hear anything. My heart hammering, I take my phone out of my pocket and consider texting Nola to see if she made it back. I can’t, though. If she’s with Detective Morgan right now, and by some miracle didn’t rat me out, then texting would implicate me.

  I duck into the gym and head into the locker room for a quick shower before I go home. Just in case. When I’m toweling off and slipping into the spare change of clothes I keep in my locker for rainy day practices, I see that Nola’s texted.

  Close one, she wrote.

  My body is still shaking with the adrenaline of the chase and the terror of almost getting caught, but I also feel oddly exhilarated and defiant. It’s the Nola effect, I decide.

  You owe me, I text back. I grin and head back to the dorm.

  10

  By the next evening the news is all over campus: The body of a cat was found near the lake.

  “It was probably the same person who murdered Jessica,” Cori says at dinner. “Apparently, the killer was using cats to whet their appetite for human murder. That’s how serial killers start out. Everyone knows that.”

  Brie kicks me under the table and smirks. Cori was a major player in the original missing-cat story because she was a family friend of Dr. Klein and, as such, had known Hunter from the time he was a kitten. She took his kidnapping very seriously and led student search efforts. As a person who had regularly been in Dr. Klein’s mansion, she was also the leading authority on how someone could have gotten in and out without being seen while Dr. and Mr. Klein were having dinner, where Hunter was likely to have been at the time, and other forensic matters. She even started a short-lived true-crime podcast about Hunter’s disappearance, but quickly grew bored and dropped it when it became apparent that it was not going to be the next Serial.