Mean girl_A dark, disturbing psychological thriller

by Natasha A. Salnikova

  “What do you want?” Corby picked up the earrings and the pendant and stuffed them back into the bag, and put the bag in the far corner of the nightstand.

  “I just want to wish you good night.”

  “Good night!” Corby slammed the door of the stand, took off her robe, and crawled under the blanket.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Come in if you need to.”

  Mom didn’t wait for another invitation. She entered the room dressed in her pajamas, with a green mask on her face, and walked over to her daughter.

  “Corby, are you all right?” She looked at her then around the room.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. You ... I don’t know ... you’re acting different lately.”

  “Of course. I’m growing up.”

  “Well, yeah. Did you cry?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Your eyes are red.”

  “I took a shower and rubbed them probably.”

  “Okay. You’re right. You’re growing so fast I don’t have time to catch up. You’re still a small kid to me. My baby.”

  Mom leaned toward Corby, probably for a kiss, but Corby stopped her with her hand.

  “Not with that on your face,” she said.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Mother said. “I have to wash it off. It’s some new mask. It’s firming and all that stuff. Got to run. I had it on for too long already. Good night, Darling.”

  “Good night, Mom.”

  Mom turned off the light before she closed the door.

  “I wish I had your problems,” Corby muttered, turning on her side. Her stomach growled and Corby remembered that she didn’t eat anything for dinner, only drank hot chocolate and her stomach was completely empty.

  “I’m not even hungry,” she said and closed her eyes. Sylvia appeared before her in that same moment. She wasn’t alive, she was dead and her face was a messy, red mask.

  Corby opened her eyes and stared out the window then took the last pill that she had and swallowed it without even drinking water. She hoped it would save her from Sylvia’s image and help her to fall asleep.

  CHAPTER 17

  Corby knew that everyone at school would be talking about Sylvia and she was right.

  She came into the classroom first and sat down at her desk, waiting for the others to arrive. Jane was one of the last to enter the room and as soon as she stepped her foot over the threshold, the class started to roar. She had known about her best friend’s disappearance since last night and had sent messages to Molly and a couple of other friends and those, in their turn, sent the news to the others, so by morning everyone was informed. Still, people gathered around Jane, giving her all the attention (which she loved) and listened to her update with their mouths open. Corby strained her ears with all her might in an attempt to not miss a single word.

  “She told her mother that she was meeting me, that’s the weirdest,” Jane said. “Then she called me, I told her mother about it, but the conversation was even stranger. She called me for just like a second, asked what I was doing then said that she had to go. At that time, she wasn’t home yet. That’s not like Sylvia at all. Her mom said that she started to call her earlier, but all her calls went directly to the voice mail. So weird.”

  “Maybe she met someone?” Molly suggested.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious!” Jane said.

  “Don’t yell at me,” Molly pouted.

  Jane rolled her eyes before continuing to speak.

  “She told her mother that she was meeting me, but she didn’t even warn me about it. I mean, seriously. Maybe she wanted to tell me that when she called, but had no time. The person she was meeting with probably showed up. That’s what I assume.”

  “Do you think it was a guy?” one of the girls asked.

  “I have no idea,” Jane shrugged. “She didn’t tell me anything at all and I don’t want to suggest anything. Not in this situation. Vera’s gone and now Sylvia ... Both of them are my friends.”

  “Maybe aliens took them?”

  Corby turned to Jacob, but only for a second. She didn’t notice when he came in. He was handsome as always, also fashionably dressed, and had a smirk on his face. Corby became suddenly hot and didn’t know why. She also wanted to hug him and this made her feel ashamed and even hotter. She lowered her eyes so that no one would notice her discomfort, but continued to listen to the conversation. The first bell rang with a few minutes left until the beginning of their first class. They usually had a few students who were late, but today everyone came on time.

  “Very funny.” Jane winced. “It’ll be especially funny if something happened to them.”

  “What happened?” Jacob passed Corby and she watched him walking without looking up. He sat on Jane’s desk and she shook her head, but said nothing about it.

  “Sylvia didn’t come home last night,” she said.

  “Seriously?” Jacob dropped his bag on the floor.

  “No one told you?” Jane was surprised.

  “I didn’t check my phone last night or this morning,” Jacob replied.

  “We don’t know anything,” Molly said.

  “Captain Obvious,” Jane teased and Molly moved to another desk without saying anything. “If the police come again, I’ll tell them how it was and that’s it. Where were you yesterday, Glasgow?”

  “What? Me?” The guy grinned. “What do I have to do with it?”

  “You have a lot to do with it. Sylvia liked you.”

  Corby looked up to see the utter confusion on Jacob’s face. As she assumed before, he didn’t know. Corby chuckled inside, but then she remembered Sylvia’s face, a bloody mess where it should have been, and felt nauseous. She didn’t expect such a reaction from her body, and she jumped from her seat, and rushed to the bathroom with the sound of the second bell, without greeting her Spanish teacher who was entering the classroom.

  The waffles with maple syrup she had eaten for breakfast this morning went into the toilet. Fortunately, no one was in the restroom, so Corby washed her face and remade her ponytail without hurrying or hiding. She looked in the mirror for some time, waiting for her breathing to regulate and her complexion to return to its former state, thinking that her face was somehow different. She ran her hand over her cheek, trying to understand what had changed and then went back to the classroom.

  “Are you okay, Mackentile?” an elderly Spanish teacher, Mrs. Ramsay, asked. She was a small woman with thick eyebrows who was a native of Cuba and who was so strict that even Jane didn’t argue with her.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Corby minced to her place with her head down and glanced at Jacob. He looked back at her.

  “Okay. Then I want to see your homework.”

  Corby pursed her lips, she felt sick again. The teacher didn’t know that she was killing her classmate last night instead of writing an essay in Spanish on her favorite city. She did her math, but didn’t even remember about Spanish.

  “I’m not ready,” she said quietly.

  Someone gasped, someone laughed, someone whistled. Corby knew that all eyes were on her and she wanted to press into the seat or fall through the floor. She felt that now they would figure it out. Now they would know. How could she forget about Spanish?

  “Mackentile didn’t do her homework,” Jane said. “And Sylvia is gone. Twilight Zone.”

  “Are you sure everything is okay?” the teacher asked.

  “Yes ... I just have a headache.”

  “Sit down then.”

  “Your head has a boo-boo?”

  Corby eyed the speaker and Jacob bowed his head, though he continued to smile. Corby pressed her lips and sat down at her desk. If he knew, if he only knew what she had done, he would be afraid to say anything bad to her. Stupid idiot. He’d better not make her angry. He’d better not. And he apologized to her! Why?”

  “Wow!” Jane said. “Did you see the way she looked at him? Wow!”

  “What
’s going on here?” the teacher asked. “Jane, it seems like you want to tell us your story? Go ahead.”

  “No problem.” Jane rolled her eyes and opened her notebook. “You, by the way, have a missing student and you didn’t even mention it.”

  “La policía hablará con usted sobre ellos, te enseño español. Hacia adelante,” the teacher said and raised her thick eyebrow.

  Corby didn’t hear what the most popular girl in school said. She thought only that Glasgow was asking for trouble. Jane was too. Neither of them knew who they were dealing with. They didn’t know the Corby Mackentile they bullied no longer existed.

  This idea struck Corby so unexpectedly that she almost jumped on her chair. She became different. Did she? Of course she did. Who wouldn’t become different after killing a human being with their own hands? When she looked in the mirror, she didn’t understand what had changed in her appearance, but maybe she just didn’t recognize the different person.

  “Mackentile, you said you have a headache,” the teacher interrupted her thoughts. “Why are you smiling?”

  Corby shook her head and looked down.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Go ahead Jane,” the teacher said.

  Corby also went ahead. She smiled, but only inside.

  CHAPTER 18

  This time when the police came, the school was a madhouse. Another girl was gone! She was a friend of the first one! Sensation! Mystery! Shock!

  Corby couldn’t believe that she stood in the center of it all. That she was the culprit of turmoil and unexpected fears. She heard many different theories, but one of them was the funniest. Someone suggested that both girls were kidnapped by a maniac. If they only knew this maniac walked among them. A fat, clumsy girl who was liked by no one and who had been bullied constantly by the missing students. If they only knew. Corby wanted to tell them, but her free life would end when she finished the story. Probably her life in general would end.

  So she walked slowly down the hall, with her head down, clutching her textbooks, and glancing around, trying to hear and see everything. She went to the office where the investigators waited for her second interview. The same detectives who came to her house and asked her questions about Vera. Corby was scared, she worried that they would read all the answers they needed in her eyes, but she grew calmer with every step. She was able to remove three pills from a bottle in her mother’s medicine cabinet that morning and took one after she heard the police were calling everyone in for questioning. The girls entered in groups of two and three and only Corby and Jane were called solo. She knew why. Jane was Sylvia’s best friend and she, Corby, was the last person who saw Vera before she went missing. She needed to be very, very cautious not to give away her meeting with Sylvia or their conversation. She hoped that no one saw them together in the locker room and that she took Sylvia’s car far enough to eliminate any connection with her father’s shop.

  The investigators, Herring and Dodge, were already seated when Corby entered a small room near the teacher’s office and the mustachioed Herring motioned to the couch for her to sit. Corby sat down and smoothed the creases on her jeans. She had never been in this room. There was a microwave, a small refrigerator, and a small table. It looked much like the room in her father’s shop where the workers ate lunch. It was probably used for the same purpose.

  “We need to talk to you again, Ms. Mackentile,” Herring said.

  Corby nodded. She decided not to say anything until she was asked a direct question and she would answer shortly. When you say too much, some unneeded words could easily slip.

  “Your classmate Sylvia Ferro vanished without a trace. Do you know about this?”

  “Everyone is talking about it,” Corby said. Nothing else. A short answer was covering all the details.

  Dodge nodded.

  “Tell me, are you and Sylvia Ferro friends?”

  “No,” Corby answered honestly. She was calm.

  “Before we started interviewing the kids,” Herring began, stood up, and walked across the room from one corner to the other, “we talked with the teachers. Sylvia is one of the most popular girls in school. Your gym teacher, Mr. Wilson, said that Ferro and her friends came into conflict with you a few days ago. He found all of you in the midst of some incident. He didn’t see anything wrong and all the girls, including you, convinced him that nothing was going on, but he suspected that you had some … confrontation. I’d like to know more about it.”

  Dodge shifted in his chair where he fit tightly, turned his neck from side to side so hard that something snapped.

  Corby felt anxiety, but it was barely noticeable. Mom’s pills affected her more than usual this time, but she didn’t want to sleep at all.

  Just basic information, she told herself before speaking.

  “We didn’t get along,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “They didn’t like me.”

  “Did they bully you?”

  “Me and a few others.”

  It was true. Jane wouldn’t be Jane if her coolness extended only to Corby. Almost every girl in the high school hated this group. They cornered the youngest girls in the bathrooms and no one knew what was going on inside. The mom of one of the girls complained to the principal, another girl’s mom threatened Jane with a lawsuit and Jane left them alone. They got it because they were younger, but Corby—because she didn’t look like everyone else. She got it more than anyone, but the detectives didn’t need to know that. Corby hoped they would never find out.

  “Yes, we know about it,” Herring sighed. “What happened between you and them on the day when your teacher caught you?”

  “Nothing unusual,” Corby said. She had already pondered the answer. “They called me fat. As always. When the teacher came, they left. That was all.”

  “I see,” Dodge said, still trying to get comfortable.

  “How would you describe the relationship between Ferro and River?” Herring said.

  “I don’t know. They are best friends, I guess.”

  “Best friends. Did they argue? Was there any competition between them? Did they divide the territory of influence?”

  Corby thought it over, really thought it over, and shrugged.

  “I think you know something, Ms. Mackentile, Dodge said.

  Corby really had an idea in her head and apparently it reflected on her face. Emotions were hard to hide.

  “I’m not sure if it’s important or not,” she said.

  “You tell us and we’ll decide.” Dodge said.

  Corby sighed.

  “Sylvia has a crush on one of the boys in our class,” she said, remembering yesterday’s call from Sylvia to her friend Jane.

  “Who is it?” Herring asked, as he opened his notebook.

  “Jacob Glasgow.”

  Herring and Dodge looked at each other.

  “He plays football, right?” Dodge said.

  “Yes,” Corby nodded. “This morning Jane said that Sylvia liked Glasgow, but it seemed he didn’t know about it. He said that. He said he didn’t know.”

  “Yeah,” Herring wrote something in his notebook.

  “I don’t know if it’s important,” Corby said and paused. It was one thing to lie to her classmate whom she was going to kill and totally another to fool the investigator, who seemed to see through you, but who didn’t see anything at the same time. For now. She wasn’t just going to lie. She was going to get rid of all possible suspicions.

  “Everything is important for us,” Dodge said, leaning forward. He looked ridiculous in the chair that seemed to squeeze him. Perhaps she gave the same impression because she didn’t appear much thinner than him.

  Herring came closer and tapped the pen on an open page of his notebook as if he were impatient.

  “When Vera came to our shop on the day she disappeared, she said that Sylvia was stupid for telling Jane everything about Jacob, because Jane also had a crush on him,” Corby said.

  “Did she tell you
that?” Dodge asked and Corby wanted to tell him that he was an idiot. That was what she just said.

  “Yes,” she confirmed.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this in the first place?” Herring said.

  Corby pretended to be scared even though she didn’t have any fear. She was calmer than ever in her life. “I didn’t know it was important.”

  “Okay,” Herring waved and wrote again in the notebook. “Anything else you can remember? Important, or not important?”

  Corby shrugged, bit her lip, then shook her head.

  “All right, go,” Herring said. “If you recall anything about the relationship between River and Ferro that you think we need to know or any details that might help in the investigation, please report it immediately.” He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Corby.

  She took the card, looked at it, and left the room, wishing the investigators a good day.

  She walked down the hall to the classroom as slowly as before so she could notice and hear everything, but now she was holding her back straight and her chin high. She felt fine and no longer scared of anything, because now she could do anything. Without the two girls who spoiled her life, school didn’t seem like a house of horror anymore, like a place where she was afraid to walk every day. It was now her home.

  CHAPTER 19

  Her parents said she didn’t need to go to the shop in the evening because two girls from her school were missing, so, Corby sat at the table at seven with a plate full of Chinese noodles facing her. Her mother always bought food in the Chinese restaurant on the corner on her way home. It was one of Corby’s favorite dishes, but she didn’t want to eat. Before, she was always hungry and now she was the opposite. All she wanted to do was go to the shop and talk to Vera and her new neighbor Sylvia. She wanted to find out how they were doing and how much they enjoyed spending time together. She wanted that instead of dinner with her parents, listening to their annoying debates.

  “They advertise artificial life on your TV!” Dad said enthusiastically, almost banging his chest with his fist. “Kardashians, some wives from New York. Nothing addresses the incunabulum. Something with meaning; a soul.”