What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  Years from now we’ll all still be feeling its aftershocks.

  Marcy and Myers don’t protest when I steer the car down Merriweather Drive and past Primrose Lane. Marcy stares longingly at the gently sloping hill leading up to her house, but she’s already internalized the fact that we’re not going home yet. We have something more important to do.

  We want to see the Pavlovich house.

  We need to see the Pavlovich house.

  There’s something about an issue more perverse than our own that helps ground us. I don’t know about the others, but a multiple homicide trumps big black eyes and the sounds of sheep in my head. It even trumps the little burning triangle on my arm.

  Besides, there’s no way I’m bringing Anders home to his mother right now. He’s obviously still in shock, although I don’t know why. He might be talking, but he’s not all there. I don’t think any of us are. The cotton fluff inside our heads is still . . . fluffy. Thankfully, we seem to be a little better than when we first woke up this morning, but a fog is still covering everything, making it hard to believe that this isn’t one, huge, never-ending nightmare, and I’m really tucked beneath the covers in my own bed, in my own bedroom.

  I drive farther down Merriweather, past the swampy dingle with its memories of better times playing hide and seek and catching pollywogs, and head off toward the other side of town.

  The clock on the dashboard reads 10:02. So much has happened this morning that it’s hard to keep everything straight. I’m living someone else’s life where things are far worse than mine. I’m driving through someone else’s town where murders are an honest-to-goodness thing, and losing one’s memory is the norm.

  A few years ago, this girl who worked at Brightstar’s Pet Emporium over in East Meadowfield was killed along with her boyfriend. They were in a car by Corbin’s Island, the sewage plant near the Western Mass Electric Company on the other side of the Connecticut River. That double homicide should have been a big deal. Supposedly they were parking and making out, although I don’t know why anyone would want to make out with the stench of shit choking the air, but that’s where they were parked and that’s where they were found, brutally butchered.

  Those murders went in and out of local news rather quickly because it was the murder of an East Meadowfield girl and her boyfriend, instead of a Meadowfield couple. East Meadowfield has always been considered our town’s poorer cousin. Bad things can happen there and that’s a little expected. But not in Meadowfield. We’ve always known that once you cross the border separating East Meadowfield from Meadowfield, the rain stops, the sun shines, and there are bluebirds and bunnies frolicking on everyone’s perfectly manicured lawns.

  Now, Meadowfield is no different from East Meadowfield. As a matter of fact, Meadowfield is worse. Instead of a dead pet shop clerk and her boyfriend, we have the den of a serial killer who’s been getting busy for a while now.

  Dr. Viktor Pavlovich.

  Something invisible touches the back of my neck and the hair there stands on end. If Beryl had ever deigned to make me see a doctor who had a name like that, I would have flat out refused because of the absolute certainty that bad things would happen.

  Just like I think bad things would happen if the four of us went and hung out at the Stumps—but I don’t have to think. I know. Like Grafton Applewhite said, we were at The Stumps, and bad things did happen.

  The invisible thing on the back of my neck starts to move down my sides, stroking my arms with spider silk. My heart starts thumping in my chest.

  “Look,” says Myers, as I make a right near the back entrance to the middle school. There are flashing lights up ahead. They’re still blocks away, but there are so many of them that we could be over the border in Connecticut and still see the twirling red and blue strobes. I slow the car down. There are other cars parked alongside the street, and there are people walking toward the flashing lights.

  “Pull over,” says Marcy as we all stare straight ahead. Even Anders is looking forward, his eyes a little glazed.

  “You okay back there?” I ask him.

  “Sure,” says Myers. I sigh and roll my eyes. He sees me do it through my reflection in the rearview mirror, and silently mouths, ‘Oh.’

  Anders doesn’t say anything. Marcy turns around and stares at him. I have to think that she’s monumentally pissed off because of what he said about Sandy Berman.

  She was good.

  I suppose Marcy could take the high road and decide Anders was saying that Sandy Berman was a good person, but we all know that’s not what he meant.

  Still, Marcy seems to be swallowing the last of her anger. She can’t ever stay mad at him for long. She’s melting all over again about the possibility that Anders does actually care about her after all.

  “Anders?” she says.

  Nothing.

  “Anders?” she whispers once more. As I pull over the side of the road, hitting the curb harder than I should because I’m more interested in staring at my friend through the rearview mirror, he blinks once and his face goes white.

  Then he opens the car door before I’m even fully parked and pukes on the road.

  Just like the rest of us.

  20

  LAST YEAR’S WESTON Kahn would have never joined a group of spectators clamoring to see a bunch of dead bodies being pulled out of a murder house. Last year’s Weston Kahn would be eating a box of Little Debbie’s Cosmic Brownies in his bedroom, playing video games and waiting for his miserable life to end.

  This year’s Weston Kahn, one third smaller, no longer hides behind a fat suit of his own creation. This year’s Weston Kahn is a different person altogether.

  Right at the beginning of the school year, Mr. Tomlinson, the hipster music teacher with the skinny jeans and man bun, called me into his office for a chat. This girl, Lizzie Glickman, who has black poodle hair and is the lead of Cantori, the elite choral group at school, whispered something to her friends as I walked toward his office, but I chose not to listen.

  “West,” Mr. Tomlinson said as he motioned for me to sit down, “I gotta say I’m looking at a new you.” I wrapped my arms around myself, my hands now able to touch my sides instead of the mounds of blubber that had plagued me for almost as long as I could remember.

  “Thanks,” I said, not really sure that I was all that thankful. The fat kept me hidden. The fat kept me safe.

  “So about Cantori,” he started. Mr. Tomlinson’s man bun and studied five-day-beard seemed like a desperate cry to be in, or cool, or whatever his generation calls affectations like that. “You know that there are only eight spots and lots of people tried out.”

  I waited for him to say something else, but he let an awkward silence nestle between us. Finally I filled it with the obvious. “I didn’t get in,” I said flatly, knowing with certainty that what I said was true. “I get it.” I wasn’t mad or disappointed. I think I was relieved.

  “You’re very talented,” he began, but his words flew out of his mouth, up to the ceiling, and disappeared like ghosts. I think he wanted me to thank him again, but I wasn’t in a thankful mood. I wanted to leave his office, push past Lizzie Glickman with her poodle hair, and leave the choral room.

  “It’s only that, well . . .” He looked out his window and across the front lawn of the high school where the beginning of autumn leaves gathered at the base of the flagpole like kindling. I was waiting for him to say that there were other kids, more popular kids, who would be a bigger draw at the concerts, but that wouldn’t have been politically correct of him. I think waiting for me to draw my own conclusions was all he had in his arsenal.

  Fuck politically correct. “No biggie,” I told him. I was used to stuff like this happening. So what if my friends weren’t exactly the popular crowd, except for Anders?

  “I’m sure there will be tons of opportunit
ies for in-class solos coming up this year. You never know.”

  I took a deep breath and stood up. “I’m sure,” I parroted back, then without asking or waiting to be dismissed, I left his office. Outside, Lizzie Glickman was sitting on the risers in the choral room with Cleo Collins and Nora Jameson. They stopped talking when I trudged past them. I could feel their eyes on me.

  “He’s cute now,” whispered Cleo. I think she thought I couldn’t hear. “Who would have ever thought that Weston Kahn would be cute? He was so fat.”

  I closed my eyes and kept walking, wishing for all that fat to come back so I could hide behind it.

  That’s how I feel now as the four of us slowly follow the rest of the herd gathering this side of a police barrier near the Pavlovich house, across the street from where Sandra Berman used to live. I feel utterly exposed.

  I see Mrs. Berman on her front lawn. I never knew Sandy’s father, but there’s a tall guy going bald, with one arm held rigidly over her shoulder. The two of them are standing, watching the commotion across the street at the murder house. No one strays near them. I think everyone is afraid of the explosion that might happen if Sandy Berman is pulled out of that house.

  Christ, she disappeared years ago. How would the guys doing the dirty work even be able to identify her?

  I close my eyes and bite my lip as a wave of pain from the little triangle starts sending tendrils of prickly static up and down my arm.

  “Jesus,” says Myers as we get closer. There are so many people, and there are trucks. I see a van from Channel 40 and another from Channel 22. Then there are others—bigger stations that broadcast nationally. Reporters have strategically planted themselves on neighbors’ lawns, busily speaking in front of cameras and pointing their microphones in residents’ faces.

  “I don’t want to be on TV,” says Anders. He shoves his hands into his pockets and stands behind Marcy. He’s sort of like a giraffe trying to hide behind an antelope because Anders is tall and Marcy isn’t.

  “Chill,” I say to him, trying not to notice that his face is the color of ash. He’s definitely in shock. He has to be. Nothing else makes sense for how he’s been acting. After all, it’s not every day you wake up covered in blood.

  I look back over the growing crowd of people and the dark red house that bodies are coming out of in a stream, and my heart turns into heavy shards of glass that start stabbing me from the inside out.

  There’s an ambulance there, with its back doors open and a figure sitting on the floor, miserable and hunched, facing out. I gulp. Instinctively I know whoever it is has survived something terrible.

  I can’t be certain, but I think the person is a girl.

  If it is a girl, her legs are dangling out of the back of the ambulance. She’s wrapped in a sheet and surrounded by wary people. I don’t know who she is, but I don’t need to know her to realize that her life right now is a living hell. Her head is shaved and it looks like someone has drawn dotted lines all over her scalp. Her face is dotted with lines, too, bisecting and quartering the flesh. The whole effect is that of a discarded doll that once belonged to a twisted little girl with a knife.

  There are reporters and police and every type of town official all around her, and she looks like she is already dead and only waiting for the finality of death to catch up with her body.

  “Who is that?” I murmur as I stare at her. There’s something about the girl that seems familiar but I can’t put my finger on it. She’s not Sandra Berman all grown up, that’s for sure. She looks nothing like how I remember her, dotted lines or not—hair or no hair.

  Still, there’s something about her that feels concrete. There’s no other way I can put it. I feel connected to her, but I don’t know how. Maybe it’s that she’s about my age and is going through some sort of torture, like the four of us are being tortured. I don’t know.

  Still.

  She sits alone, her bare knees touching and her feet pointing inward, quietly rocking back and forth. Once or twice, paramedics try to reach out to her, but she rudely brushes them away. If anything, she seems ever so slightly unhinged, but I can imagine if she was inside Dr. Viktor Pavlovich’s house, she has every right to be unhinged.

  “Who is that?” Marcy says, echoing my words. Myers has his head cocked sideways in thought. Anders stares at the girl over the crowd, his skin getting grayer as the blood drains from his face.

  Across the sea of people in front of us, as they watch the door of the Pavlovich house, waiting to catch a glimpse of a dead body to feed their curiosity, the girl slowly lifts her shaved and dotted head.

  A manic, horrific, and slightly demonic stare immediately finds the four of us among hundreds. Why us? What did we do? What’s going on?

  I immediately get dizzy as a wave of nausea washes over me.

  Meanwhile, the girl’s mouth drops open, almost further than a mouth can open, and a high pitched squeal comes out of her that makes the crowd of onlookers hush in stunned silence. Her elongated scream goes on forever until I want to clamp my hands over my ears. The whole time, she’s staring at us—at me—and I can feel the skin leaving my bones just like the fat left them, exposing a monster beneath that should have eaten itself to death a year ago by gorging on devil dogs and Yoo-hoos.

  Suddenly she stops. The lack of noise is jarring. Silence lingers because everyone is too stunned to speak. As people finally start to whisper again, confused and scared, the girl starts raging. She babbles incoherently as she flails her arms, kicking and scratching but never once releasing her eye-lock on us. We’re rooted to the spot as she screams and screams while heavy hands hold her down and someone with a red-cross arm band pulls a needle out of thin air and plunges it rudely into her arm.

  Thankfully, no one follows her laser stare as she continues burning a hole through me and my friends while managing an Oscar-winning freak out that the nightly news will show over and over again.

  I don’t understand any of this. I almost want Beryl right now, so I can fold my chubby, pre-adolescent digits into my mommy’s hand and hope by some miracle that I can milk safety out of her numb fingers.

  Abruptly, Anders turns and leaves, walking quickly back toward Marcy’s car, his hands still shoved inside his pockets, his head pointed toward the ground.

  “Wait,” Marcy calls after him, and leaves, too.

  For that matter, we all leave. I don’t know why, but something inside my brain—the primitive part that controls flight or fights, urges me to flee.

  No one notices our hasty retreat. They’re too busy staring at the bald girl as she continues to unleash a meltdown that they will all remember for years to come.

  And through it all, the eyes and the animal cries, the blood and a missing glass eye, a burning triangle and Marcy’s lack of pants, I hear Myers wailing inside my head.

  I don’t want to.

  I don’t want to.

  I DON’T WANT TO.

  21

  WE’RE UPSTAIRS IN Marcy’s house, sitting at her kitchen table. The pizza box is still there. None of us have bothered to move it. Marcy’s parents don’t plan on coming home until tomorrow night so her house seems like a safe place to be. However, we’re not sure if the Coles are going to hear about Dr. Viktor Pavlovich on the news and come rushing back to Meadowfield or not.

  That scenario is unlikely. Every family has weird rules and Marcy’s family is no different. Her parents unplug from the world when they travel, and that means leaving their phones behind. They call being phoneless their ‘alone time.’ Marcy has the phone number for the hotel at the casino so she can always get in touch with them in an emergency, but if there isn’t an emergency, her parents’ motto is ‘no contact is good contact.’

  Just like Beryl, but nothing like Beryl at all.

  Marcy’s round house with its big windows and sun-filled rooms make m
e feel like I’m still back in Prince Richard’s Maze. I want to be in a closet some place, deep and dark, tucked in around coats and shoes where nothing can get me.

  Myers is on the house phone with his mother and she is in the middle of one of her perpetual rants. I can almost make out the drone of her screaming through the wires.

  “No,” whimpers Myers as he gingerly holds the phone away from his ear so that his mother’s fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck of a freak out doesn’t burst his ear drums. Myers has been at it for five minutes now. He’s gone from whining, to crying, to whining again. Now he’s at the end stage of a Mrs. Myers swear-fest, and we’re all waiting for the final results.

  Our goal is for him not to leave Marcy’s house until our brains clear and Anders is more like Anders instead of a total basket case. At least that’s what we’re all hoping for. Also, Myers is wearing a pirate patch on his face. That patch is a blatant telegraph to his parents that he’s lost his eye again. It’s not that Myers hasn’t lost one before. Most often they’re bullied out of him in one of the bathrooms at school by a major asshole like Arnie Lewis or Pavel Vagin, who everyone calls ‘Vaj.’ You have to be a complete dick to pull off a nickname as bad as ‘Vaj,’ but Pavel manages it fine. Everyone’s scared of him. Even teachers.

  Myers losing his eye is bad and punishment-worthy, but not calling his parents, especially after they shelled out what Mrs. Myers calls ‘a shitload of money’ for a new cell, is a much bigger deal. The best lie Myers can come up with on the fly is that he dropped his phone in the Coles’ toilet last night, and it’s now sitting in a bowl of white rice on their kitchen counter so it can dry out.

  I can hear Mrs. Cole screaming while Myers tries to explain to her that sticking a cell phone in rice is one way to save it from dying if you’ve gotten it wet.