Teen Killers Club

by Lily Sparks

  “Great! Now I just have to see if I can get my clothes on,” I joke, and Erik, walking by, rolls his eyes at me.

  “Weakling.”

  As everyone else departs for the field, Dennis and I follow Kate to the main cabin, to a small nurse’s office down the hall from the dining room.

  There’s a sun-bleached CPR chart peeling off the wall next to a metal first aid kit hanging open, empty. What would Dave have done if I’d fallen and actually broken my leg? I don’t want to know.

  Kate unlocks the drawer of a dented metal desk and pulls out a stout chrome briefcase with a military laptop inside. She plugs it into a generator under the desk, then pulls out a blinking cordless Wi-Fi hot spot from her pocket. Once the laptop powers up, she types in several lines of code and only then is Dennis allowed to take his place at the keyboard.

  “And this is for you.” She hands me a door lock cut in half with a panel of clear Lucite so I can see the tumblers inside. She points to a pile of paperclips by an ancient office chair.

  “You get this open while he works on the pacemaker.” She pats a small lump in her pocket absently. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Holler if you need anything!”

  Dennis gives me a look as we take our respective seats across the room.

  “Thanks for getting me out of obstacle course this morning,” he says haltingly, his hands fluttering over the keys.

  “No prob, bob,” I say, straightening a paper clip. “I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do that course every day. I almost passed away trying yesterday and I’m already dreading the thought of doing it tomorrow.”

  “The obstacle course is a waste of time.” Dennis shakes his head. “They know I’m going to be taking all my targets down with a computer, yet they still insist on making me crawl up buildings like Spiderman. It’s ridiculous.”

  “How do you kill someone with a computer?”

  “I can hack the brake systems in most modern cars. Ditto navigational devices and landing gear on private and small commercial planes,” he says with a sniff. “I’m almost there with hacking pacemakers, except I can barely get Kate to give me two hours in a row with the camp laptop, and she’s built like a million stupid firewalls to keep me in the training program, which cause more bugs than I’d ever actually need to deal with.” His tone is almost comically monotone when he adds, “It’s truly infuriating.”

  Dennis, with his button nose and sprinkling of whiteheads across his chin, can make planes fall out of the skies. Okay.

  “The reason I bring it up is, you helped Jada last night, and now you’re helping me this morning.” His large eyes fasten on my face. “Why?”

  Because Nobody had made me think about what Jada might have been through. But I don’t want to start spreading rumors, so I’m not sure how to answer this.

  “Class As are deficient in empathy,” Dennis goes on, his lenses opaque from the blue glow of the laptop screen. “Some can pretend to be empathetic. But it’s always to shield a larger, self-serving agenda.”

  I blink at him. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I’m not fooled by your nice-girl act.” He drops his chin, peering over his glasses. “And I want to know what this favor is going to cost me.”

  “It’s not an act!” But it is, just not the one he thinks; I’m trying to act like one of them and failing miserably. “You of all people should know being a Class A doesn’t mean being a heartless psychopath. Didn’t you turn yourself in before you could hurt someone? That’s like, a noble thing to do.”

  “Turning myself in was ultimately self-serving,” Dennis says. “I didn’t want to be punished when I inevitably caved to my impulses.”

  “So you sent yourself to jail? Sorry, that doesn’t seem self-serving to me. That seems kind and good.”

  Dennis’s face tightens, but his voice doesn’t change. “I know what I want, Signal. I want to cause someone pain.”

  “But you don’t,” I push, waving a straightened paper clip at him. “You don’t cause anyone pain. Because something in you is stronger than that urge. Call it self-preservation or kindness, it amounts to the same thing. Strength of character.”

  He stares at the screen without answering, but his keyboard is silent.

  “You’re an awfully positive person,” he says at last, in the same icy monotone.

  “You’re the first person who’s ever gotten that impression of me.”

  “And you’re the first person who’s told me I was strong.” He pauses. “But like I said, you don’t fool me.” And his keys clatter momentously.

  You don’t fool me.

  Exactly what Janeane had said at my trial.

  Rose’s mom had loomed large in my childhood: long-limbed and beautiful like Rose, with an irreverent sense of humor and ever-present American Spirit cigarette. But when she started dating Tom, he made her drop the smoking, and my mom as a friend. After they married she became someone who frowned instead of laughed at off-color remarks; she kept her hair in an angled bob and diligently jogged. Still, you can’t admire someone that much when you’re that young, and then stop caring about them.

  That’s why I broke down when she took the stand as the last witness for the prosecution and testified against me. When she told the court I had always been a little off. And that I had been obsessed with Rose.

  “The defense keeps saying, she’s just a girl, whatever she did, she’s just a girl. That’s what I kept telling myself. What can she do? She’s just a girl,” Janeane told the court in a broken voice. And then she turned to me, and I made the mistake of looking in her eyes.

  Janeane’s face was not one I knew. The pain, the rage as raw as if her skin had been flayed off and every bloody nerve laid bare to the staid municipal courtroom.

  “Well, you don’t fool me anymore, Signal. You don’t fool me.”

  I curled up then, hands covering my face, and heard myself plead, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “I saw those photos! I saw what you did to my baby!” she wept. “You’re sorry! You’re just a girl, right? Just the girl from hell!”

  Quick footsteps and Kate runs in beaming and holding up the pacemaker, which blinks red.

  “I’d be dead on the floor if this was attached! Great job!” She throws her arms around Dennis. He looks embarrassed but pats her shoulder.

  “Our goal for next time will be turning it off entirely.” She shifts him out of the chair and Dennis sighs with exasperation.

  “If you let me back on I could—”

  “That’s enough for today, Dennis. How’s the lock coming, Signal?”

  “Almost there,” I lie, looking down at the lock in my lap with two straightened paperclips jammed into it.

  “Well. You can finish up later, everybody’s in the kitchen,” she says. “Dennis, you go on ahead, and Signal if you could stop at the pantry on your way and grab a box of the latex gloves? It’s right next to the lost-and-found closet. They’re on the top of the right-hand shelf.”

  I make my way down the hall to the pantry, throw open the door, and pull the cord swinging from a bare lightbulb. The pantry is the size of large coatroom and crammed with aluminum shelves from floor to ceiling. Most of the food appears to be from the same era as the lost-and-found clothes: dusty vats of cling peaches, a laundry detergent-sized bottle of something called “Gravymaster.” I suspect if I turned the light off again I’d hear the discreet chewing of mice.

  I spot the latex gloves on the top shelf, but when I yank a step stool from behind the rack it dislodges something. There’s a flutter of paper and I see a printed, black-and-white face for just an instant before the paper lands under the shelf.

  Rose’s face.

  It’s Rose’s face or I’m losing my mind.

  I crouch down and slide my hand under the bottom shelf, pushing past my repulsion at the grime, reaching until I touch smooth newsprint. I carefully slide the newspaper out and smooth the creased front page of the Washington Times.

&nbs
p; The hideous bulk of the shed, with its one little window like a gouged-out eye, stares back at me in black and white. I lay my cheek against the gritty floor and look under the shelf to see a curve of folded newsprint. I reach again and pull out a stack of clippings: several from when the trial started, another with my own yearbook photo and the all-caps headline: “THE GIRL FROM HELL.”

  But what about Rose’s face? I slide my hand behind the shelf, forcing it between the tightly packed broth boxes and rough unvarnished wall, the wood scraping my knuckles, and grab it just as the door creaks open.

  “Signal? Signal, are you still in the pantry?”

  Chapter Nine

  Remembering Rose

  I drop the clippings back under the shelf just as Kate looks in, an edge to her voice: “Find those gloves alright?”

  “Yeah, but I was looking for the step ladder and I knocked something down behind the shelf,” I say, my tone bored. I don’t know whether to be reassured or frightened at how well I’ve learned to compartmentalize.

  “No worries,” Kate says, the aluminum ladder shrieking in protest as she opens it up for me. I hop up, grab the box, and hand it down to her with a tight-lipped smile, my mind still reeling.

  Kate nods for me to walk ahead of her into the kitchen for the next class, or lesson, or activity, or whatever you want to call these life hacks for assassins.

  “Okay, campers.” Kate claps for everyone’s attention. The rest of the campers, cleaned up after the obstacle course, are ranged about the long wood laminate counter that runs along three walls of the narrow, homey kitchen. On a worn butcher’s block, in the middle of everyone, is a pile of rotten meat.

  “We’re cleaning out the fridge today!” Kate announces cheerily. “By learning how to dissolve organic material in an acid bath! We’ll be using a proprietary blend of commonly available chemicals we call ‘Zap Sauce’!” She points out the four trays set out at intervals along the counter, each with a neat row of household cleansers and a graduated cylinder. “Who can tell me in what circumstances an acid bath is the best way to dispose of a target?”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and swallow the rising bile in the back of my throat.

  “When you can’t move the body from a building without being seen?” Kurt offers.

  “Exactly. Remember: if there’s no body, there’s no crime, and that equals more lead time to make your getaway. Some of your targets are going to be in urban environments with CCTV on the street, and you won’t be able to just wrap them up and throw them in the back of a car. But as long as you have a plastic tub, some housekeeping supplies and a toilet, you can use this method. Because what did we come here to learn, guys?”

  Kate raises her eyebrows and looks around the room.

  “How to not get caught,” we say in unison, and she smiles, her cheeks dimpling.

  “Exactly. Now, safety first: put on your gloves and goggles,” she says, and pairs us off, giving each pair a plastic tub filled with rotten meat. Dennis and I get three roast chicken carcasses. Kate explains how to combine the acids we’ll be using, how to neutralize and dispose of them. Then she has us weigh our leftovers on the kitchen scale, measure our containers’ volume and, using what she’s taught us about the Zap Sauce, determine the amount needed to dissolve everything in two hours. I barely make it to the kitchen scale and back without heaving; if raw meat is gross after five years of being a vegetarian, rotted meat is positively harrowing.

  Kate also hands out packets of worksheets with various word problems: given X amount of weight, Y amount of time, and Z being the volume of the container, how much Zap Sauce is needed to dissolve the target?

  The smell of the Zap Sauce meeting the leftovers sends us all flying outside to the covered porch so we can breathe while finishing our packets, and gives me virtually no chance of surreptitiously sneaking back over to the pantry.

  I look over my shoulder at Erik and Javier’s table. Erik has gone over to talk with Troy, and Javier is staring at me. When our eyes connect he smiles, the flash of it sending the tiniest bolt of lightning through me. He left the note; now it’s my turn to be brave.

  “Hey,” I say, walking over to him like I go up to guys all the time, no big deal. “Thanks for your drawing. It’s incredible. I like, want it tattooed on me.”

  One of his eyebrows tilts upward in mild disbelief. “Do you have any tattoos?”

  “No! I mean, I used to have big plans for getting one on my eighteenth birthday, but I’m not exactly sure if that’s going to pan out.”

  “What were you going to get?” he motions for me to sit. I slide onto the bench across from him feeling like I’m at the edge of a high dive.

  “I wanted a skull with roses in its eye sockets.” I roll my eyes in embarrassment.

  “That could be cool.”

  “Eh. It seems kind of cringe-y now. Or maybe it’s just that everything death related has lost its appeal to me.”

  “Whereas before …?”

  “Don’t laugh, but I used to be sort of a goth.” Ooooh, why am I saying this? How did we get here? “Not like, super goth. As goth as you can be when you’re broke.” Better and better!

  “So like, you went around in a trench coat and tiny sunglasses?” Javier’s brow creases in something like concern, and I frantically shake my head.

  “Noooo, just like, a lot of horror movie T-shirts. All black every day. Shared lots of Instagram quotes about wanting to hurry up and die.”

  “That’s really hard to picture.” He closes one eye, a slow smile spreading across his face. “But I bet you made it work.”

  “No, I did not,” I laugh. Why am I sitting here laughing at myself?! What is wrong with me?

  But Javier laughs too: “Yeah, right. I bet you were breaking all the goth guys’ hearts.” And I really do laugh at the idea of goth guys in Ledmonton, and it’s okay. Maybe I’m not that weird—he doesn’t think so. He goes on: “Back before, death was just something in movies. It was more of like, an aesthetic than reality? Whereas now …”

  “It’s waiting at the bottom of the obstacle course?”

  “Not while I’m around.” He lifts his chin slightly at me. “So now that you’ve ditched the tiny sunglasses, how would the Signal of today represent herself?”

  “Your dandelion.”

  His eyebrows go slightly up, his smile huge. “Seriously?”

  “It’s such a cool drawing. And dandelions are the best. They’re sunny, they’re strong—”

  “And mislabeled?” he says, catching me off guard.

  Can he tell I’m innocent?

  I’m not sure how to react. If I smile back like I understand, am I telling him he’s right? Or is this all just in my head?

  “Well,” Javier continues, smoothing over the hiccup of silence. “If you want I could give you a temporary version.”

  “Oh yeah? Do it.”

  He reaches for my wrist, then pushes up my sleeve and cradles my bare arm in his hand. With a ballpoint pen he slowly and deliberately draws a line up the inside of my wrist. The brush of the side of his hand as he works makes goosebumps rise along the back of my arm, and I can feel the warmth of his breath against the thin skin. Then he pulls away so I can admire it: a dandelion, on a strong stem, its face turned to the sky.

  “That’s perfect.” My voice wobbles, his hand still holding my wrist.

  Kate marches out onto the porch, holding up a beeping kitchen timer.

  “Okay, campers! Time’s up! Go check on your victims!”

  Javier’s fingers slide away from me, and when I stand I’m dizzy.

  Dennis and I find our chickens are now a tapioca-colored slush.

  Kate beams down at the beige goo. “This is by far the most successful application of Zap Sauce I’ve seen today! Well done, you two!” Dennis and I high-five. It’s disgusting, but I’m finally not failing at something.

  * * *

  I’d been counting on the group being sent off to the field or lake to give me an opportunity
to sneak back to the pantry. However, Kate and Dave keep us close to the main cabin because of Dog Mask, whose presence hangs over the day like the promise of bad weather.

  I’m feeling pretty hopeless until I learn Erik has kitchen duty tonight. He can easily get the clippings. I just have to get him alone and ask. Which, when you share a single cabin with seven people, is almost impossible.

  I get so desperate as it gets closer to dinner I actually follow him into the bathroom; and of course Troy is already in there, and feeling chatty. I stare desperately at Erik in the long, speckled bathroom mirror, half willing Troy to leave us alone and half terrified he will.

  “These water bugs are getting bold, man!” Troy brays at Erik, who is wrapping tape around the thumb he sprained on the obstacle course. “The other night I came in with my lantern when it was all dark, and one comes striding right up to me right when I’m peeing. And this thing is huge, I seriously thought it was like a turd, but then it walked. So I’m all, BAM!” he stamps, then sighs and shakes his head, “Dude … He just looks at me like ‘You strike at the King, you better make sure he’s dead!’ and then rushes my freaking foot!!” Erik smiles, not looking up from his hand.

  Can he tell I’m waiting to talk to him? Or does he think I just really need to wring every last bit of moisturizer into my hands?

  “I booked it, I was flying,” Troy laughs, oblivious. “Anyway, see you out there, man.”

  The second the door swings closed Erik and I turn to each other.

  “I need your help,” I blurt awkwardly. “I saw some newspaper clippings on Rose’s trial.” And for some reason I’m blushing, and I know it, the worst combination of two things you can be. “I hid them all under the bottom shelf of the pantry and if you get them then we could, like, read them later?”

  There’s a long pause during which we can hear the others exiting the cabin, Jada calling:

  “Errrik, come on!!! Those onions won’t peel themselves!!”

  “You hate onions. You always pick them out …” Troy’s voice fades out the door. And then there’s a beat of silence that feels like the first dip of a roller-coaster before Erik says,