Now that I’m here, now that I see her, there’s a part of me that feels like I was meant to be here all along. And that part of me overflows with anger. It takes me over like an otherworldly force. The rage is outside my control. It wants to hurt someone. Badly.
She is absolutely terrified of me, and I’m even mad at her for that. Because even this anger is her fault.
“Samantha,” she snivels, “I’m so sorry I forgot about the essay. My hamster died and I—”
My memory flashes, and for a brief moment I am back in my backyard with my mom at my side, tears in my eyes as we turned away from NomNom for the last time. Then I blink, and I’m back, and I’m somehow angrier than ever.
“I don’t care about your stupid dead hamster!” I shout. “It’s your fault. All of this is your fault!”
She cowers. “I’m sorry,” she says, her words trembling. “I’m so sorry I—”
“I don’t care about sorry, either!” I yell back.
I don’t want her to be sorry.
I want her to fight back.
I want her to yell at me and tell me I’m wrong, to justify my anger with her own. But she just stands there, looking at me like I’ve turned into a monster, unwilling to fight. She bows her head, just a little, and I know I won’t get a battle out of her.
At least, not like this.
I push her.
Just a little shove. Enough to make her gasp and wobble.
“Come on,” I taunt. “Fight back. You know you want to. You know you want to hurt me. You’ve always wanted to hurt me. Even more than you already have.”
“I’m not going to fight you,” Rachel says. “I’m sorry I hurt you before. We don’t need to fight. We don’t—”
“Oh, we’re going to fight,” I say, then push her again. “I’ve had it with you, Rachel. It’s your fault I’m failing. Your fault I’m not going to the adventure park. Your fault my parents—” I cut off. She doesn’t know about my parents fighting, and she’s not going to.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. So softly, almost soothing, like she’s trying to calm an angry dog.
It makes me hate her even more.
I push her again. A little harder this time. She takes a step back to right herself.
Her foot is only a couple steps from the edge of the pier.
“You’re sorry?” I yell. “Sorry isn’t good enough, Rachel! Sorry—”
I tap her shoulder
“isn’t—”
I push her other shoulder
“enough!”
I shove both her shoulders. Harder than either of us expects.
She stumbles backward, arms cartwheeling for balance.
One step.
Two steps.
No—
Her wide eyes lock onto mine, and that one glance is almost enough to quell my rage.
I have never seen her that terrified before.
Splash!
She falls backward into the lake before I can reach out to stop her—and I stand there, watching the waves ripple. Watching the slight foam. My breath heaves in my chest and my blood is so hot I feel like I’m going to burst.
That same small voice from before tells me I should help her.
I don’t.
She’ll be fine.
It’s not even that deep.
I wait for her to surface. Already, my anger is turning to humor. She’s going to have to walk home sopping wet. Her clothes will be ruined. That, at least, will make up for the mess she’s made of my life. I laugh at the thought.
Yes. I stand there and laugh.
Twenty seconds pass.
The water stills.
My humor starts to fade.
Thirty.
No more waves. No more bubbles.
Forty.
“Rachel?” I whisper.
Sixty.
Seventy.
I look around the lake, thinking maybe she surfaced near the shore. But everything is still and silent.
Everything is waiting.
I wait, too.
Three minutes pass, and when I hit one hundred and eighty seconds, I know there’s no point waiting anymore.
I know I should try to help her.
My mom’s voice is screaming in my head to go find help. Call 911. Grab a stick and reach in and try to fish her out.
Or jump in.
Swim.
Dive.
Find her in the seaweed.
I know how to swim.
Rachel doesn’t.
I should be trying to help her. I should be trying to save her life.
But I am frozen at the edge of the dock.
Frozen by fear. And by something else. Something I can’t quite place.
Like the rage before, a calm settles over me.
Immobilizes me.
Soothes and stills my mother’s rational voice inside. It’s okay. It’s all okay.
This is precisely what I wanted to happen.
Precisely what was supposed to happen.
I don’t know how long I stand at the edge of the pier.
Waiting for Rachel to surface, even though I know she won’t be surfacing by now. No one can hold their breath that long. Especially not her.
I stare out over the crystalline waters, at the clear blue sky, and for the first time all day, I feel—horrible as it may sound—at peace.
Rachel is gone.
And since she was the reason my life was bad, that means my problems have to be gone as well.
I look down and see the sketchbook still on the edge of the dock. It teeters on the corner, just about to fall in. The sight of it brings me back to motion; I lean over and grab it.
The moment I touch the water-flecked cover, my calm fades.
Reality sinks in.
Rachel isn’t coming back.
I’ve killed her.
I’m a murderer.
Quickly, I glance around, but there’s no one else in the woods or by the lake, no one who would have seen what happened.
No one knows.
No one knows that she was here.
No one knows that I was here.
I need to keep it that way.
At that moment, as panic starts racing through me, the only thing I can think of is getting out of here before someone walks out of the woods and discovers me. Starts asking questions.
I take one last look around at the placid lake, then run to my backpack and shove the sketchbook inside. I don’t pause or look back.
I keep running, and I don’t stop until I leave the woods.
Rachel is dead.
She isn’t coming back.
And no one knows it but me.
“Are you feeling okay?” my sister, Jessica, asks. “You look like you’re getting sick.”
I glare over at her as I push mushy carrots around on my plate. I don’t answer her, because any answer I give would be rude, and I need to fly under the radar right now.
This is the point where my parents are supposed to look over with concern on their faces and check my temperature or something. But they don’t, because my mom is eating in her home office and my dad is reading something on his phone.
Another normal, happy family meal.
I haven’t said anything all night. Which isn’t that strange, really, because none of us talk during dinner. But I feel sick, and I can’t bring myself to eat anything. My stomach is in knots; eating is the last thing on my mind.
It’s hitting me then that I should have run home and pretended that I’d been there all along so Jessica would be able to back me up if anyone asked. It would have been easy enough to do—she never pays attention when I come home, anyway.
Stupid, I yell at myself. It’s too late to do it now without calling too much attention to myself. I can always ask her to back me up later if I have to. Though I doubt that would work; if she knew it involved breaking the law, she’d rat me out faster than I could blink.
I keep waiting for the phone to ring.
Some kind of message.
Some kind of news.
Rachel is missing, have you seen her?
Finally, when it’s clear that I’m not going to actually eat anything tonight, I excuse myself and toss my food in the compost before running upstairs.
Thankfully, no one asks where I’m going or what I’m doing. No one cares.
It’s probably the first time I’ve felt thankful about that.
* * *
I rush up to my room and lock the door behind me.
My room is a mess, but I don’t care. Clothes in the corner beside the hamper, old toys and things I don’t play with anymore piling up in my closet, a few trophies from when I actually cared about stupid things like school and sports. My mom used to get on my case about keeping things tidy, but that was a while ago, before she and my dad started really fighting. Which is good, because I currently have Rachel’s sketchbook shoved under my dirty laundry. No one would dare look in there.
I switch on my laptop and immediately go to the local news. I even turn on the TV on my bureau and flip it to the news as well. Then, even though I don’t know how I’m going to focus, I grab my pile of homework and try to slog my way through while the news mumbles quietly in the background. I’m definitely focused on what the anchors are saying more than the questions on the page. But I need to at least try to get this done. I don’t need any more trouble at home.
I keep glancing at the pile of clothes. Like I’m worried it’s going to move or Rachel’s sketchbook is going to jump out and start screaming SHE DID IT, SHE MURDERED ME!
But of course that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t help my nerves any, though.
Especially because the news doesn’t tell me a thing.
There are the usual stories, sure, but nothing about a missing girl. I scour the Internet and keep looking at the live news.
Nothing.
It makes my skin crawl.
Maybe Rachel’s parents haven’t reported her missing yet.
Maybe no one’s been to the lake since we were there.
Maybe her body sank. Maybe she’ll never be found.
Maybe her parents will think she ran away.
Maybe I’ll get away with it.
The thought feels dangerous. I can’t let my guard down. There’s no way I can get away with it this easily.
There’s no way you should get away with this so easily. It’s my mother’s voice, and I know she’s right.
Now that I’m here, alone, my adrenaline starts to fade. The anger I felt earlier melts. Just enough that I start to fully realize what I’ve done.
I’ve killed someone.
I always knew I was a bad person, but I never thought I was a horrible person.
Not like this.
But it was an accident! I remind myself, over and over.
It was an accident.
It was an accident.
I didn’t mean to kill her.
I only wanted to scare her.
To make fun of her.
I’d never actually hurt her.
Not really.
Not like that.
But you would, a cruel voice inside me whispers. You have, and you would. And you would do it again.
Someone is going to find out. Someone is going to trace it back to me.
I blink, and a tear drops down to my laptop keyboard.
The trouble is, I can’t tell who or what I’m crying for.
For the girl whose life I ended?
Or for me?
Because now I know that my life is over, too.
I dream of drowning.
I thrash against the long strands of seaweed that twine around my ankles and wrists, but it’s no good. Every time I move, they twist tighter. Bubbles rise from my nostrils and float slowly toward the surface glittering brightly above. My lungs burn.
I have to get out of here.
I have to get free.
I struggle harder, trying to rip out the seaweed—and it’s then that I realize there are more than plants down here.
There are other shapes trapped by the seaweed.
At first, I think they are dolls. Or mannequins.
Then one turns to me, eyes and mouth wide open in a long-silenced scream.
Rachel.
I scream as well, my world exploding into bubbles. And as the final bits of air leave me, I feel the seaweed dragging me down.
Deeper into the lake.
Deeper amidst the bodies.
Deeper, to the place where my darkest secrets have drowned.
When I wake up I am covered in sweat. For a moment, I wonder if maybe Jessica was right and I really am sick. But then a few minutes pass and my pulse slows and my dream comes back into focus.
I’m not sick. I’m still reeling from the nightmares.
A part of me considers pretending to be sick. Staying home. It wouldn’t be that much of a lie, anyway: The idea of going to school and pretending that everything is okay makes me sick to my stomach.
Rachel’s parents have to be panicking by now. Even if they don’t know she’s dead, they know she’s missing. And that kind of news will travel fast. The school will be a chaos of rumors and questions. I can see it now—kids crying and hugging in the halls because one of their classmates is missing, teachers scared because they think a killer is on the loose—and they’d be right, though the killer wouldn’t be some mysterious stranger. The killer would be wandering the halls with them.
Worse, I’m sure there will be cops there.
We’ll be questioned.
They’ll want to know who saw Rachel last. Or if anyone would want to hurt her. And everyone will point at me and say that I’ve been bullying her for years.
They’ll say if anyone is a suspect, it’s me.
This makes me want to stay home even more. But I realize that staying home would seem awfully suspicious. If the cops came here to question me and realized I was lying about being sick, they might think I’m lying about Rachel, too.
I can’t risk it.
Even though it’s the absolute last thing I want to do, I roll out of bed and start to get ready. I feel like a zombie even after I shower, and nearly stumble down the steps on my way to breakfast.
Jessica notices.
“Didn’t sleep?” she asks me. There’s a textbook beside the cereal bowl in front of her. Not because she’s cramming last minute like I would have done, but because she probably just wants to make extra sure that she knows everything. Because she always knows everything. Even, apparently, when I’m not sleeping.
“Bad dreams,” I mutter, and even that feels too close to the truth. I expect her to ask what they were about, but she just grunts and goes back to her reading.
I go to the cabinet to grab my own bowl when Mom comes in. She works as an interior designer, so she’s almost always home unless she’s out with a client. Most of the time she just ignores us, and I try to avoid eye contact so she’ll do just that. But my luck today has already run out.
“Did you get all your homework done?” Mom asks.
I stall.
“Um …”
“Samantha Jean,” she says, her voice taking on the stern tone I’ve grown to fear. “If I get one more note from your teachers that you’re failing a class, we are going to have a discussion.”
Discussion, I know, is code for yelling at you for hours and grounding you until you’re eighteen.
“I got it done!” I say. It’s not a lie. Not really. I finished all my homework—I just don’t know if I did it well. I couldn’t focus with worries of Rachel running through my head.
Mom looks me in the eye. Her eyes are about as fierce as her tone.
“If I find out you’re lying,” she warns.
“I’m not.” I lower my gaze. I don’t want her to notice anything else in my expression, don’t want her asking why I look like I haven’t slept.
“Why couldn’t y
ou be more like your sister?” she asks with a sigh and goes over to kiss Jessica on the top of her head.
Jessica, at least, doesn’t look proud of the attention. She just buries herself in her textbook.
“I expect a passing grade from you this semester,” Mom says as she pours more coffee for herself. “If you don’t start applying yourself now, you won’t get anywhere in life. And I refuse to have a failure as a daughter.”
That stings. I hold the empty bowl so tight I expect it to shatter in my hands. Mom stomps out.
“She didn’t mean it,” Jessica whispers. I turn around to see her staring at me nervously.
“Yes,” I say, fighting back the tears. “She did.”
“I—”
“Shut up, Jessica,” I say.
Thankfully, she does.
I pour myself some cereal even though eating is the last thing on my mind, then sit at the table as far from my sister as possible.
The TV is playing in the other room. Dad has the news on before he heads to the office. I keep my ears peeled but try not to seem interested. I don’t hear anything about a missing kid. I don’t hear Rachel’s name. And when I trudge back upstairs to grab my things, I check the Internet one more time.
Nothing.
How has no one reported this yet? How has no one found her body? Why haven’t her parents called her in as missing?
The complete lack of coverage has me on edge.
If they already know what you did, there’s no need to announce it. They’re probably on their way here now.
I delete my browser history so no one can wonder why I was looking at the news in the first place.
I’m just about to leave my room when I have an idea that sends chills down my spine.
It would be just my luck that Mom would pick today to be a good parent and clean my room for me during one of her work breaks. But there’s no time to find a safer place. Still, I run to the dirty clothes and reach into the pile, just to make sure I hid it properly. Just to make sure it’s still there. My hands close around the sketchbook.
I tell myself it’s my imagination, or maybe a leaking water bottle, but I swear that the sketchbook feels wet.
I feel sick the entire way to school.
Not just nervous. No, this is way beyond nervous. Every few steps I have to pause and tell myself to stop being ridiculous, to stop looking scared, and to stop feeling like I’m about to throw up. I keep looking around, waiting for a cop car to whiz past on its way to the school or pull up behind me with its lights and sirens blaring. I watch the faces of the kids who walk along the street with me. They all look away—they know not to mess with me—but they don’t look sad. No one is crying or looking more scared than usual.
The Undrowned Page 2
