by Mintie Das
“Here’s what you never seemed to understand about storytelling.” Naomi smirks. “People love a good comeback. And they love a villain even more.” Naomi holds her cell up.
“What the f—you recorded this?”
“Payback is a bitch, bitch.”
There’s a light drizzle that is getting heavier now and Naomi turns to leave. There’s nothing much more to say to Tessa. She stays cool on the outside because she knows how to do that but her insides feel like they’ve been ripped out. There’s never been a breakup that has hurt this much; the bitch-out in the gym didn’t compare. She knows her heart is broken and it will never heal.
Naomi struggles to keep her composure and doesn’t even notice Tessa charging at her with full force. She knocks her down on the blacktop and Naomi’s mobile tumbles to the ground. Tessa pins Naomi.
“Tessa! Stop!” Naomi shrieks.
But it isn’t just Tessa. Naomi sees it lurking inside her best friend. It’s a monster. The preta gives Tessa the strength to pick up the large rock next to her. She holds it over her head.
“No, Tessa!” Naomi cries out as she turns her head quickly. Fear pulses through her entire body.
Before Naomi can stop it, the rock lands on the side of her face. It takes only one blow to crush her skull in. Tessa lifts the stone to strike her again but a man comes running out of the school building. “What’s all that noise?” the stranger calls out. “What’s going on out there?”
Before he can get any closer, Tessa grabs Naomi’s phone from the ground and, still holding the rock, races away. Blood gushes out of Naomi’s head and onto the blacktop. The man crouches down next to her but it is already too late. Naomi Talbert is dead.
I turn and find that Bhoot Naomi is gone. Across from me at the funeral, Tessa stands up, but before she can escape, Alvarez and Sanborn grab her. I watch as the preta beast beside Tessa shrinks until it disintegrates into thin air.
There are about a hundred different emotions running through me and even more questions flying around in my head. I blurt out the first one that I can manage to ask. “How did Naomi send the message with the recording if Tessa had her phone?”
“Don’t ever underestimate what the Aiedeo can do, Violet. That’s a rule to live by,” Lukas says. “The Aiedeo retrieved the phone from Tessa’s possession and sent the video.”
“Wait, what? The Aiedeo knew Tessa was Naomi’s preta?”
“It was your shama, not theirs.”
I shake my head. “Shady bitches.”
Suddenly, I feel this enormous energy being sucked out of me. I jerk back and forward. Then I freeze for a second as I see my bhoot standing outside of my body. I don’t know why but I want to reach out to it but before I can, it disappears.
“Now that you’ve been fully reinstated to human,” Lukas says evenly, as though what we just witnessed were an everyday occurrence (it might be for him, but I’m temporarily stunned), “I need to attend to my other tasks.”
I want to say something but I can’t really form the words. But I guess it doesn’t matter to Lukas because he turns around and leaves.
I slowly start to stand up when I’m suddenly wrapped in hugs and covered with kisses.
“Mami!” Dede cries out.
“I’ve been so scared. If anything ever happened to you—” Meryl’s voice cracks.
My face is drenched and I don’t know if it’s their tears or mine. “I’m okay,” I whisper.
In the distance, at the far end of the cemetery, I see Lukas lead Bhoot Naomi away.
Twenty-Three
LUKAS PULLS THE CAR into the Talbert Funeral Home parking lot. I finally let go of Dede and Meryl and let Lukas bring me here because there’s one more thing that I need to do. The guests from Naomi’s funeral will soon be arriving for a small reception, but right now, most of them are still at the cemetery trying to figure out what just happened.
I’m continuing to collect info, but from what I gather, the funeral guests didn’t receive the full movie that I got; they heard a lengthy audio recording of Naomi’s death. I don’t know how the Aiedeo managed to pull it off, and despite me plying Lukas with questions during our entire fifteen-minute car ride, he’s been tight-lipped as usual. I overheard Naomi’s parents and the police speculating that the message was sent from someone who secretly knew what Tessa had done and wanted to do the right thing. It sounded totally lame but how else are people going to explain a text from a dead girl? And I sure as hell am not going to bring up the Aiedeo’s involvement.
As I turn to open the car door, Lukas grabs my arm. A jolt of electricity runs through me and makes me jump. I look up at him quizzically. “What?”
He doesn’t say anything at first. I realize that his hand is still touching me and I don’t move. “You did really well, Violet.”
There’s not a hint of sarcasm in his voice and I’m taken aback by the sheer genuineness of his words. I don’t know how to respond except to thank him. I think back to the skull chain he threw me earlier and I actually mean it. “Thanks for sticking your neck out for me with that beast.”
He nods. “The weapon definitely helped but I think you’re more powerful than you give yourself credit for.”
“Probably. But I’m just so damned happy to be alive that I don’t want to think about any of that right now.” I beam with way more cheer than I think I’ve ever had. Even more than when I’m actually cheering.
“Great,” Lukas says wryly. “One more thing, Violet. Could you try to act a bit more somber, given this is Naomi’s funeral reception you’re about to walk into?”
I realize that I’m totally cheesing it and screw my face up into what I think is a mournful expression. “Is this better?”
I see Lukas’s eyes brighten although the rest of him is deadpan. “Absolutely not.”
I laugh and he does too. We’re like that for a couple of seconds before Lukas becomes serious again and I feel him let go of my arm. “You should go see Naomi now. Like I said, keep it brief.”
I nod although I don’t plan on obeying him. This is one goodbye that I’m not going to rush. Lukas opens his car door and I walk into the house.
Despite what he said about being somber, I’m actually whistling like one of the Seven Dwarfs as I walk up the stairs to Naomi’s bedroom. I’m back, baby! Alive and kicking! I strut inside, feeling every bit the hero who just gave Naomi eternal peace, then pause. She’s sitting on her bed with her face in her hands.
“My best friend murdered me,” Naomi says, looking up at me. Her eyes are red and puffy, like she’s been crying for years.
“Yeah.” I heave a deep sigh and plop down on the bed next to her.
In the story that I created about Naomi, I believed she was invincible. That nothing could bring her down. Seeing her now, I realize how wrong I was.
Tessa, Nate, Trent, and even her parents were the people that Naomi trusted the most in her life and they all betrayed her in one way or another. While the rest of us—her classmates, the townspeople, and her other sycophants—helped twist the knife in farther.
A massive load of guilt drops onto my shoulders. I’ve been on such a high from destroying the preta that I didn’t even stop to consider the impact that discovering its identity would have on Naomi. Tessa. I still can’t believe it. I realize it must have been difficult to be Naomi’s BF—bitch forever—but I really believed what they had was real. As genuine as what Meryl and I have.
But that’s the thing with stories. It all depends on who’s telling them. I only knew Naomi’s side and I never bothered to learn Tessa’s.
I try to think of something comforting to say and I can’t. But I don’t have to because Naomi apparently has a lot to say.
“Don’t try to tell me it’s not my fault because that doesn’t fly for this,” Naomi snaps. “The only person that I think I truly ever loved killed me. She might have had a preta inside of her but it’s not all on Tessa.”
She’s right. Everything that Tessa sa
id about the way that Naomi treated her was true. But I let myself believe that Tessa loved Naomi so much that she didn’t care that she was always in her shadow. Like most everyone else, I had no idea about the amount of hate that was growing there in the darkness with her. Tessa fooled us all.
That’s the part that eats at me the most. I could have seen what Tessa was becoming and I didn’t need my Aiedeo powers to do it. After all, I’d known Tessa longer than Naomi and I was there at that first sleepover when they solidified their friendship. Yet, like most of us, I paid attention only to Naomi and ignored Tessa.
This doesn’t exonerate Tessa, nor does it justify murder. But like Naomi said, it wasn’t all on her. “It’s on all of us.”
“But mostly me. I was such a horrible person,” Naomi says, more to herself than me. “Don’t try to say otherwise either.”
I don’t. “You were terrible.”
Naomi looks at me and she’s not mad. Instead, her eyes are soft as though she’s relieved to hear the truth.
“I don’t know when I stopped being me and I started being her,” Naomi says as she points to a photo on her nightstand of her in full Naomi Talbert splendor. “If I was ever me at all.”
I nod toward the pic. “From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t sound like you had much of a choice in whether you wanted to be that Naomi Talbert. Your parents pushed you pretty hard, and so did everyone else.”
“Yeah . . .” Her voice trails off. After a couple of seconds, she picks up where she left off. “There was definitely a lot of pressure. Especially as everything just got bigger and bigger with my blog, with Trent, with my life. I was just so scared.”
“Of what?”
She shrugs. “Of all of it. Of everyone finding out that the real me was just a freaky nobody.”
“No way,” I exclaim, because this part I just can’t buy. “Naomi Talbert is the ultimate insider who decides who the freaks are.”
“Exactly. Naomi Talbert bullies everyone around her so that no one notices what an outsider she really is.”
I shake my head. I’ve been the one who doesn’t belong my entire life and it almost makes me angry for Naomi to suggest that she could even come close to knowing how that feels. I grab the framed photo of her from her nightstand and shake it in front of her face. She looks like the goddamn American dream with her perfect white skin, light hair, and bright eyes standing next to Trent, her real-life Ken doll. “You don’t know shit about what you’re saying. There’s nothing freaky about you.”
“No, there’s nothing freaky about her,” Naomi shouts as she points to the picture. “That girl lives in perpetual fear and so she hides everything. That Naomi Talbert is as manufactured as—” Naomi stops herself.
“Go on. That Naomi Talbert is as manufactured as?” I ask but the anger stirring inside my belly already tells me the answer.
“Violet Choudhury.”
I spring off the bed. “Screw you. We’re nothing alike.”
There’s so much rage filling up the room that if either of us says or does anything, we’re gonna explode. I walk to the window and watch a puffy white cloud roll by. After several steely minutes, Naomi speaks. Her voice is calm.
“I’m not going to pretend to understand everything you’re dealing with, Violet, but I have some clue. We’re both scared and we lie and deny our way through it all.”
She takes a long deep breath and I think about how both Naomi and Tessa said I was a coward. Maybe that wasn’t their exact word but it was their sentiment and it stung like hell.
“The difference is that I’m a mean girl. I can even say that, sometimes, I enjoy the power that being a mean girl gives me. In fact, I’m such an uber–mean girl that my best friend killed me.”
I turn around and face Naomi again.
“I could have also been the funny girl. The smart girl. The artsy girl. But I was too afraid to show them anything else but the mean girl.” Naomi’s voice breaks and she looks away. “And now I’m dead and that’s all I’ll be remembered as.”
The fury I felt a few minutes ago melts into a pool of heartache. I stare at Naomi’s slumped shoulders and her splotchy face and I realize that she’s never looked as human to me as she does now. My lips tremble.
There is so much to Naomi that I will never get a chance to know. None of us will. She’s probably shown more to me than most. Not just over the last few days, but in those early years, and even in small glimpses later on. I just chose to forget them in my quest to tell myself the story that I wanted to believe about her. We all had a hand in building Naomi and tearing her down.
“It’s time to leave,” Lukas says as he walks into the room.
There’s an overwhelming sadness that follows his words and I notice that the calm in Naomi starts to crack.
“I’m not ready.”
I don’t see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel like they show in the movies, but nevertheless, isn’t she supposed to feel some kind of happiness at this part? But if I were Naomi, I wouldn’t be thrilled about walking off into eternity when my life here was cut so tragically short either. Hell, I was almost permanently dead like Naomi just a couple of hours ago, and I let a beast practically ravage me just so I could become undead. I think fast.
“Don’t take her now, Lukas.” I try to sound confident but it comes out whiny. I push my shoulders back and sit up straight. “Let Naomi stay for a bit longer, and when she’s ready, you can come back for her.”
Naomi crosses her arms. “That works.”
“Do you really believe that I have the power to make that decision?” Lukas says in an exasperated tone that sounds like a stressed-out dad talking to his two twitty teenagers. “It simply doesn’t function in that manner. Dead is dead.”
“Except for Violet,” Naomi blurts out and I don’t blame her for the resentment in her tone. “It’s not fair.”
“No.”
The guilt on my shoulders grows heavier. Maybe Naomi would have stayed a mean girl or maybe she wouldn’t. We’d never know because Naomi wasn’t going to get what I got today—a second chance.
Lukas places a firm hand on Naomi’s back. “We need to leave.”
Naomi and I stare at each other. We both know we can continue to argue with Lukas but we’re not a team anymore. Our destinies are no longer entwined and now we have to go our separate ways. Even though we technically won, it doesn’t feel like a victory.
“Don’t die, Violet.” Naomi grabs my hand. “Because it sucks.”
“I love you.” I know at one time that I did and I realize now that I still do.
“Ditto, Molly.”
I smile at the reference to Ghost. We stand together for a few more minutes until tears run down Naomi’s face so hard that they stain her cheeks. Neither of us says anything else to each other as Lukas leads her away.
He’s standing with his shoulders back and he looks every bit the professional but there’s a tenderness to the way that he handles her that I didn’t know he was capable of. Naomi leans her entire body into him and he supports her fully.
They walk through the window and continue on a straight path through the clouds. As I watch Naomi, I feel that hole inside of me—the one that started with my mother’s death—rip wide open. It’s raw and it pulsates from somewhere so deep that the pain reverberates through me. I see the last swish of Naomi’s long, honey-colored locks in the distance and then I collapse to the ground.
Twenty-Four
Day 11: Alive
I STARE AT THE MURDER BOARD on my wall. At the center, under Victim, there’s a photo of Naomi from our school trip to Six Flags last year. She’s eating a massive stick of pink cotton candy and laughing because most of it is stuck in her hair and on her face. I didn’t think the pic looked murder-board appropriate but she insisted that I use it.
Under Suspects, we’ve got photos of Nate, Caleb, and even Trent, but there’s no Tessa. Neither Naomi nor I imagined that she was a possibility. It didn’t even occur to
either one of us that Tessa was capable of killing anyone, let alone her best friend. Even now, after seeing it all unfold, I can’t quite believe it.
Dede brought me home from Naomi’s house on Friday and I climbed into my bed. I haven’t gotten out since. All the shades are drawn in my room so I don’t really know if it’s morning or night except that I can hear those damn cheery birds outside my window.
Dede leaves trays of food by my door but I haven’t touched them; Meryl stopped by but I turned her away. Not because I’m angry with either of them specifically but because I’m furious with the entire world and beyond. Sleep is my only reprieve from the mishmash of emotions that I can’t allow myself to feel right now.
The next time I wake up, it’s to the sound of a cow’s moo. At first, I think it’s a part of my dream, but then I realize it’s coming from my phone. I rub my eyes and check my mobile. It’s Sunday morning, which means that I’ve been sleeping on and off for the last thirty-six hours or so. Still, I feel completely depleted.
I click on the message before realizing that it leads me straight to Heffers and Hos. An image of Tessa under the headline “Mad Cow” appears. This is a special segment on H and H that usually showcases psycho girlfriends. My body trembles as I watch the video of the last minutes of Naomi’s life on that playground. It’s right next to a constant loop of what I now understand H and H refers to as the “rape tape.”
H and H is mocking all of it—the rape, the murder, everything. Apparently, the cops still haven’t found a way to take the site down. Which means that all of this has been turned into a joke. And Naomi is the punch line.
The gaping hole inside of me hurts more than ever. I can’t bear the pain and so I retreat back to my bed, pull the covers over my head, and try to make it all go away.
* * *
Freak. Freak. Freak. Their chanting fills my ears. I sit up straight in bed. I’m wide awake now but I relive that moment in school with the skinless humans as though it is a nightmare. I’m mired in fear, shame, and hate. Beads of sweat form along my forehead and I take a huge gulp of water from the glass on my bedside table.
