Slasher Girls & Monster Boys

by April Genevieve Tucholke

  The diner isn’t crowded, but there aren’t that many free tables. Seems a solitary long-haul trucker can fill a booth as well as a family. Waitresses stand behind the counter, writing on their pads or bullshitting with guys in caps that maybe they’ve seen before. EmmaRae makes eye contact with the nearest waitress, and turns over the coffee cup in front of her. The woman, in her early forties with dishwater frizz hair pulled back in barrettes, frowns, annoyed, but she comes over, and grabs the coffeepot on the way.

  “Sorry,” she says, and hands EmmaRae a plastic menu. “Thought you were waiting for someone.”

  “No, ma’am.” EmmaRae scans the diner’s offerings: biscuits and gravy, a Denver omelet, a couple of grilled sandwiches. She feels the woman’s eyes on her and for a second it makes her squirm. The woman is about her momma’s age, and she recognizes the feel of the look she’s getting.

  “That accent. Sounds like you’re a long way from home. Where are you coming from?”

  “Just south of Batesville, Mississippi,” says EmmaRae. She looks up from the menu and wishes the waitress really were her momma, that she’d slide into the booth on those long legs of hers, legs just like EmmaRae’s, and kiss EmmaRae on the cheek. But the waitress is already scratching coffee onto her pad, and she doesn’t look much like Momma anymore.

  “I’ve never been there,” the waitress offers. Her gold name tag says Tina. “I grew up in Spokane and came down here with my husband. Well. My fiancé, back then.” Tina nods over her shoulder, toward the windows and through to the lot, where semi-trucks and trailers are lined up in massive rows. Most are parked and quiet, but a few sit idling, or pull through to refuel and get back onto the I-5. The constant hum of engines is audible even through the glass.

  “Did you ride all the way out here with your daddy?” Tina asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” EmmaRae lies. “But he’s sleepin’ now.”

  “Well, sit inside as long as you want, okay? And there’s a shower in the women’s restroom if you need one.” Tina points her pen at the menu. “Do you want to order food now? Or wait?”

  EmmaRae glances down. She isn’t exactly hungry, but she’s not unhungry either. As if wanting something as badly as she wants it has made her start to want everything, a little bit.

  Something rumbles in the kitchen, the big Rubbermaid rumbling of a trash can, and a boy’s voice calls that he’s headed out back. It makes EmmaRae’s whole body tingle.

  “Can I, um . . .” she says quickly, “start with apple pie?”

  Tina gives her a look, one eyebrow raised, but EmmaRae’s always had one of those faces. The kind you can’t say no to. Momma used to say it was the curse she’d passed on.

  “Since your daddy’s asleep.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  And she means it. Tina doesn’t look at her like she thinks she’s trash, and she doesn’t look at EmmaRae’s budding chest either. She looks at her like what she is: a girl.

  EmmaRae waits until Tina is back behind the counter before sliding out of the booth, her thighs coming unglued with a rubbery, tearing sound. She leaves the bag so they know she hasn’t gone for good and slips quickly around the side of the building, to the dumpsters in the back.

  She sees the kitchen boy right away, hard to miss in a grease-stained white apron and blue jeans, dragging a sack of trash near as big as he is.

  “Hey there!” she calls.

  The boy stops short. He even jumps a little, like he’s scared of her, and that makes her like him, even if there are splotches of zits across his forehead.

  “Hi,” he says, and still sounds unsure. He’s older than she is, but only a little, with dark brown hair and a square jaw that’s going to make him look close to mean when he grows up. But for now, he’s caught off guard, tongue-tied by the pretty girl with long chestnut hair and lean legs.

  “You got a smoke?” she asks. “I’ll help you with that trash if you do.” She grabs the garbage bag and drags it away from the dumpster with the open lid, hauling it toward the one nearest the kitchen door. He helps her open it up, and they toss the bag in, EmmaRae putting on a good act of huffing and puffing, even though she could’ve tossed it with a pinky finger.

  “How about that smoke?” she asks, and he fumbles in his pocket for one.

  “My name’s Jason,” he says as he lights it.

  “EmmaRae.” She exhales. The smoke tastes different now, like everything tastes different, and it feels like she could smoke a million. It’s an empty, unnatural feeling, and suddenly she wants nothing to do with the apple pie she ordered inside.

  “You just passing through?” Jason asks.

  “Yep.”

  He looks so disappointed, she’s almost sorry. But it isn’t her fault she can’t stay, and he’s none of her concern anymore, now that he’s away from the open dumpster. Doesn’t seem to be much point in flirting. Don’t you lead them on, EmmaRae Dickson. Men will follow you to the ends of the earth, so don’t you lead them on. As if it was her fault. As if she threw ropes around their necks.

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Fourteen.”

  “No way.”

  She is fourteen. An old fourteen, and for how many times she’s heard that, she can almost believe it really was her fault. That maybe some girls really are nothing much more than meat on spits.

  “I should probably take that cigarette back,” he says.

  She holds it out, and something in her eyes makes him stop smiling.

  “Nah,” he says. “It’s all right. Just don’t tell anyone. I’ll see you around.” He heads back into the kitchen, rubbing his hands on his apron like they’re filthy. EmmaRae listens to the dishwasher running and plates and silverware clinking around. Then the door swings shut.

  She whistles through her teeth in one long exhale.

  “Close call,” she says to the girl in the open dumpster behind her.

  The girl says nothing. But EmmaRae knows she’s in there. She felt that itch from forty miles down the freeway. EmmaRae takes another drag off the cigarette and walks slowly backward. She puffs and paces and kicks stones until she’s close enough to the dumpster to stand on the overturned plastic crates stacked beside it and peer down inside.

  It was a sloppy job, whoever did it. Good thing she’d come out and redirected the trash, or old Jason would have had the fright of his life. His hand would have probably rubbed right up against the murdered girl’s calf.

  EmmaRae reaches in and shoves aside the bags and garbage until she can see her face. She was pretty. Fine cheekbones and light brown hair, not unlike EmmaRae’s own. There are bruises on most of her, and circular ones around her wrists where she was likely bound. No ring around the collar though, so she figures there are stab wounds somewhere she can’t see. Or maybe she was smothered. The girl’s eyes are half-open, and EmmaRae wants very much to reach out and close them.

  “Not what you’re here for,” she says to herself, and takes another drag. Whoever the girl was, she hasn’t been in the dumpster long. Not long enough for bugs to really make a meal of her, or take up residence in her hair, and EmmaRae is right grateful for that. She does stink, though, like rot and discard. Or maybe that’s just the smell of the dumpster she’s in.

  EmmaRae leans in to inspect a spattering of cigarette burns on the girl’s calf, small dark circles in a pattern that could be some sinister constellation. The burns are dull, without red rings or inflammation around them.

  “I wonder if they did that to you when you were alive,” EmmaRae whispers, “or if they just hated you so much, they did it even after you were dead.” She thought it looked like the latter, but it wasn’t like she was some kind of gardamn medical examiner.

  That almost makes her smile. Even though it isn’t the right time, she can’t help it. Thinking of Gran shouting from some other room: I don’t know what you want me to
do with this bankbook, Rebecca Jean! I ain’t no gardamn financier! And Momma looking at EmmaRae, and them laughing while Gran goes right on shouting. Gran and Momma. She should have listened to them and stayed home. Now she’d probably never get to see them again.

  EmmaRae tosses her cigarette onto the ground. Looking at the dead girl, a feeling of calm settles into her bones. She takes a breath, and carefully arranges the plastic bags over the top of her, doing a fine sight better than whoever dumped her there in the first place. Then she pats the trash softly and hops down off the crates.

  It won’t be long until dark, and then the two girls can really get started. Starting out fresh, and starting up finishing.

  × × ×

  Time in the diner passes slowly. EmmaRae eats slices of pie that taste like nothing and listens for anyone in the kitchen going out the back doors, but no one does. She waits for the sun to go down and give her cover.

  Tina leans over the table to warm up her coffee and slides a slip of paper across.

  “Almost the end of my shift, sweetie,” she says. “Have to close out my tickets.”

  “Sure,” says EmmaRae. She digs cash out of her pockets and counts out what she hopes isn’t a completely shitty tip. “I don’t have to go, do I?”

  Tina looks at her carefully.

  “You’ve been here a long time,” she says. “Your daddy must be a good sleeper.”

  EmmaRae looks right back, knowing that Tina suspects the truth: That there is no daddy, that none of those men in any of those trucks know anything about this girl from Mississippi, where she came from or why she’s there. That suspicion will eat at Tina for weeks afterward. That maybe she should have helped that girl. Maybe she would have, if there hadn’t been something so inexplicably off about her.

  In the end, Tina shrugs and takes the cash. Someone with a new name tag will come over and tend to EmmaRae, or maybe she’ll be gone by then.

  The night has come on cool, and made the diner chilly; EmmaRae has put on a faded red zip-up sweatshirt. Again, not hers, but it will do. In fact, it makes her almost warm. It belonged to the beast, and feels a little like wearing skin. An oversized skin that smells of sweat and spilled whiskey.

  The trucks are louder now as the night drivers get ready to head onto the interstate, and the diner picks up with orders for to-go sandwiches and coffee. The buzz of the dead girl out back in the trash vibrates through EmmaRae like a song. It’s hard to wait for the night drivers to go. The urge grows in her chest until she wants to bite, wants to run fast as a colt, wants to scream up loud to the black heavens until she can’t scream no more, no more screaming for EmmaRae Dickson, no thank you, no ma’am, she’s had plenty of that. Time now to let her lie down and puff away like a stepped-on seedpod in the dirt.

  She’s so full of that urge, she doesn’t notice the other, darker feeling until the door of the diner swings open. As soon as it does, as soon as he walks in, she lifts her head and sniffs like one of Randy’s coonhounds and smells his smell clear as if it trailed green fog to her nose.

  For a mad second she wonders if this is the one who did the girl in the dumpster. If he’s come back now to double-check his work, or maybe try to slide the girl back out of the trash and leave her someplace better. Someplace with less people and more scavenging animals, or a nice hole with lime in the bottom. EmmaRae’s fingernails gouge into the plastic-coated tabletop and rake back a quarter inch of the stuff. She’s waited long enough for her dead girl, for the right dead girl, and she isn’t interested in hanging around another diner or another muddy riverbank for the next one.

  But the monster looks her way, and smiles, and EmmaRae relaxes. He isn’t the one. Not the one who burned those cigarette marks into the dumpster girl’s calf. He’s just another one. A different monster, a different beast, walking the same walk and smelling of that same sour, sweaty reek. He even looks a little bit like her own beast, only older. She could almost believe it is him, that she’s gone forward or back or sideways in time, if she weren’t already wearing her beast’s red, zip-up skin.

  EmmaRae sips what’s left of her coffee, room temp and turning bitter. She listens to the whisper of the dumpster girl and tries to ignore this new beast. She thinks to herself how he should mind his own. Mind his own and leave her alone, have some sense when she’s got just this one last thing to do. She thinks that even as she wonders how another one has managed to find her, and wonders how many there are. How many terrors in the world, so many more than all the hundreds her momma and gran warned her about.

  Leave me alone, she thinks again, as he puts his eyes on her. See that I ain’t afraid. That I ain’t got no needs, no wants from a man like you. Leave me alone. She’s thought that before. Many times back in Mississippi. And not a man in her life has ever left her alone.

  He slides into her booth and she imagines what it could be like, if she could reach out and slap him or show him the blood under her fingernails, show him the blood stuck in the underside of her hair, blood and rage he would see if only he’d get his eyes off her parts and back to where they should be. But those don’t seem to be the rules, if there are any rules, and besides, if she’s honest, the scent of him in her nose disgusts her and makes her mouth water at the same time.

  He smiles and asks her name and she says, “EmmaRae.” He’s not from the I-5. He’s gussied up in business clothes, driving a car instead of a semi, but that’s not right, she thinks. He’s no trucker, but he is from the I-5. He’s driven up and down and through state lines, turning a stretch of road into a hunting ground. He’s done it for years, and he’s not hardly afraid anymore, of getting caught.

  “Where are you from, EmmaRae?”

  “Batesville, Mississippi.”

  “Is your daddy out there in one of those trucks?”

  She chuckles a little and shakes her head.

  “What’s so funny?” he asks.

  “People out here,” she says. “They say ‘daddy’ on account of the way I talk. Because of where I’m from. Daddy, like that’s what I’d call him, if I knew him at all. But I didn’t. And if I did, I’d have called him Pa.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and his face is a good face. Handsome and trustworthy, like her own beast’s was when he picked her up on the side of the highway. Like he had a family, and friends, and a daughter or two of his own. She doesn’t know why God gives those kinds of faces to these kinds of men.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “Weren’t his fault. Momma didn’t know who he was, so she couldn’t tell him. Weren’t her fault neither.”

  “I’m still sorry. Is your momma gone now too?”

  “Yes,” she lies, and her face is an angel’s face.

  “Where are you on your way to, EmmaRae?” he asks.

  “Los Angeles,” she says, and listens while he tells her it isn’t safe by herself on the road.

  × × ×

  The girl in the dumpster is a buzz down her spine as the man called Charles drives EmmaRae away in his long gray sedan. Hush, EmmaRae thinks. Hush your dead ass right up, and I’ll be back soon. She doesn’t think that the girl is telling her to stop, really. Only that she’s afraid, and doesn’t want EmmaRae to go so far away. But that’s stupid. Fear isn’t for dead girls in dumpsters. EmmaRae turns the radio on to drown her out. Of course it does no good.

  “And what do you think you’re going to do, down there in Los Angeles?” Charles asks, and she shrugs. “I mean, what brings you all the way out here, from Batesville, Missouri? Family? A boyfriend?”

  “No boyfriend to speak of,” EmmaRae says.

  “I can’t believe that. A pretty thing like you? You must have them falling over.”

  “I suppose I do, mister.”

  “Charles,” he says, and smiles. “So what, then? One of those stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame got your future name on it?”

  There’s s
omething a little mean about that smile, a little mocking, and EmmaRae grinds her teeth. What nerve this beast has. Not that the mocking touches her personally. She had no designs on acting in movies or becoming America’s Next Gardamn Top Model. It was just that home seemed so small and so close. Everything there she’d already seen, twice or more. All that Mississippi had to offer, the pretty and the not so pretty and all of it in between.

  “I suppose I just wanted to get out of Batesville,” says EmmaRae. “We weren’t even in Batesville proper. We were south. In the country. Seemed like an easy thing, to get up to Memphis and ride the forty all the way.” On the map it looked like a straight line, straight as an arrow. “But I never got there.”

  “Well, we’ll get you there tonight.”

  “Sure we will, mister,” she says in a way that seems to give him pause. But not enough to stop. Not enough to let her out of the car. This one never lets them out of the car. This one takes them to the woods or to the desert, and EmmaRae can still smell their fear, and their blood, and their decay all over the seats. It mixes in the air with his stink. Their bodies vibrate a little in her bones too, but they’re gone, spread out far and wide, and sometimes in pieces, and she tells herself not to listen. Not when she’s got a dead girl fresh and found back at the diner. A dead girl she’s already promised. She watches the highway lines flicker by and vaguely recollects a poem she learned in school.

  This is my last mile, she thinks. My last mile before I sleep.

  When the car pulls off the I-5, she hears herself ask where they’re going, just like she should, and listens to his answer, so thick with bullshit that it almost makes her laugh.

  He drives a long way, down deserted roads, into the middle of nowhere. EmmaRae knows that even though no one would hear you scream out here, lots of girls have done it. She did it, not too long ago, in her own middle of nowhere.

  “I don’t know what I was thinkin’,” she says to no one in particular. “Goin’ by myself out there. Fourteen. What kind of job did I think I was goin’ to get? What did I think I was goin’ to do?”