What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  “I love you,” she says to him.

  Silence.

  I hold my breath. She’s actually said the words, and not in a ‘you’re my best friend’ way but in a real, heart-wrenching way that would be touching if she said them any other day but today.

  Like I’ve said before, we’ve always known that Marcy’s had a thing for Anders, but that was quiet knowledge that we shared without talking or dwelling on it. Saying the words aloud is different. Not only do they sound funny coming out of her mouth, they herald a change in how we are all going to act towards each other.

  In saying those words, she’s cast a spell that can’t ever be taken back.

  “I can’t . . . I . . . ,” stutters Anders.

  “I love you,” she says again, like the first time was only a warning shot. This one, however, strikes home.

  “Why can’t things be the way they were?” he cries. His voice is weirdly hoarse. I can’t see his face, but I can imagine that it’s flushed and red.

  “We change, Anders. That’s what people do. We change every day, and at some point we look at our best friend, our very best friend in the whole world, and realize that just being friends isn’t enough anymore. I don’t know what will be enough, but being me without you isn’t what I want.”

  “Why?” says Anders. “Why me? Why can’t you let me go, Marcy? Just let me walk away.”

  I stare through the crack in the door. Marcy’s head droops even more. “If that’s what you want then I can’t stop you.”

  “Marcy. . . .”

  “What?” she says. “You’re a boy. I’m a girl. Why does it have to be anything more complicated than that?”

  “You know that it’s more complicated,” he snaps. “What would your parents say? What would my mom say? What about West or Myers?”

  “What about them?” she says. “What about the rest of the world?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Marcy takes in a ragged breath, long and deep. Quietly I get to my feet, hurting inside roughly the same way that Anders or Marcy must both be hurting. I wish I could rush into her parents’ room and tell the two of them that everything is okay—more than okay—but I don’t know if that’s true or not.

  Since last night, I don’t know anything.

  “You care too much about what other people think,” Marcy says to him, like she’s accusing him of some sort of awful crime.

  Anders licks his lips. “Don’t you?”

  She looks up. Every raw emotion is painted on her face. “I stopped caring about what other people thought about me a long time ago,” she says. “I thought you did, too.”

  Anders makes a strange noise. I can’t see his face, nor do I really want to, but he sounds exasperated, like maybe he’s finally out of excuses.

  “I can’t,” he murmurs once again and stands up. Before I even have a chance to run and hide, or shrink against the wall so he doesn’t see me, he’s out the door. Our eyes lock but he doesn’t stop walking.

  “I—I—” I stutter but that’s all. I don’t have the right to say anything. I don’t even have the right to be there.

  “Enjoy the show?” he snaps at me. ‘We’ll be on again at 5.” Then he’s in the living room and down the spiral staircase again. I wait for the inevitable slam of the garage door, but I hear nothing.

  The only sound is the deafening silence of Marcy’s house, with Anders skulking around the basement, Myers flying through another dimension in Marcy’s bed, and Marcy, sitting on her parents’ mattress, quietly sobbing.

  Sobbing, until she has no more tears left to give.

  42

  IN THE BATHROOM, the air still damp from Anders’ long shower, I rummage through the medicine cabinet searching for more salve to put on my burn.

  There isn’t any Neosporin, but there’s some petroleum jelly which might work equally as well.

  Gently, I pull the Band-Aid off my arm and look down at the vivid reminder of the fact that I don’t remember a good goddamned thing about last night. The little triangle, puffy and red, chatters in stinging prose as it stares back at me even though it has no eyes.

  The pain will leave as pain always does, but there will be a nagging reminder left behind.

  Why me? Why was I marked?

  All Marcy had to do was put on pants.

  Anders only needed to wash.

  Myers covered his deformity up with a patch, but he’s always owned the glass eye thing anyway.

  Me? I’ve been branded for life.

  Too many crazy thoughts run through my head but none of them link together to form a picture. As I dip my finger into the jelly and gather together a small, gooey mound, I start humming a nonsense tune. My hope it that it will cover over the internal noise, but the first one that comes to mind is ‘Ring Around the Rosie.’ That only makes me feel worse. The popular theory about that song is that it has nothing to do with children and everything to do with a disease that covered its victims in stinking sores, and the ignorant belief that the bubonic plague was transmitted through smell. That’s why everyone back then carried sweet smelling flowers in their pockets in hopes of dodging death.

  I wonder if carrying flowers might have worked for all the people being pulled out of Viktor Pavlovich’s house.

  My guess is no. They’d be dead anyway.

  I shake my head to loosen all the lovely bitter thoughts my brain manages to dredge up from a well so deep it might be bottomless, but shaking my head does something else instead.

  Suddenly my mind is invaded by memories.

  There’s laughter and chaos and then a pressure on my chest and an awful burning on my arm. The pain is so intense that I feel like whatever happened to me is happening all over again. I’m stuck in an endless time loop that will never let me be free.

  A wave of dizziness hits me hard, as surely as if I am standing two feet deep at the edge of a swirling ocean, then suddenly dragged beneath the surface by a dizzying undertow.

  The next thing I know, the floor rushes up to meet my back. I hit my head against its hard surface and stars explode.

  “Ow,” I scream out, half hoping that one of my friends will come see what’s wrong. Unfortunately they’re all so broken that they’re probably unable to hear me. “Ouch,” I cry again, but my words are suddenly chopped off as another memory comes flooding in, so vivid, raw, and real that I know, way down deep, that it’s true.

  The girl from Val Buenavista’s video is standing in front of me, her face inches from mine, and she’s poking at me, one glittered polished nail pushing into my cheek and my forehead and everywhere.

  “Hello?” she giggles uncontrollably, as though she’s not even talking to me, but someone else that I can’t see. “Hello?” she says again. “Anybody home?”

  Her finger presses into me with each dull, lifeless jab.

  “Wicked,” says a deep voice coming from someone who is definitely from my part of the world, where people say ‘wicked’ for everything, instead of ‘cool,’ or ‘sweet.’

  The girl’s face is so close that she’s almost blurry, so I look somewhere else, anywhere else. My eyes fall on white painted cabinets. They’re unfamiliar at first. Then I realize that they are the cabinets in Marcy’s kitchen. They are gooey and moving, blending with the ceiling and the floor and everything until they swirl into a deep tunnel without end.

  My eyes go dim. When clarity comes creeping back, the girl from Val Buenavista’s video isn’t there anymore. The cabinets aren’t there anymore. I’m sitting in the back seat of Marcy’s car without any recollection of how I got there. The world is spinning and I’m trying to make it stop by staring hard at the seat in front of me. There’s a head peeking over the top of the head rest, and two others—three in all, sitting in the front seat.

  Like I’m bobbing
on the surface of that dizzy ocean, my head is struck by a rolling wave, and my neck involuntarily lolls to the right. Myers is next to me, his eyes closed and his mouth open. Anders is there, too. Marcy is half on his lap and half on Myers. Her curls are in my crotch and she isn’t moving either.

  We all look like rag dolls, tossed in the back seat without any regard for how people are supposed to sit.

  From somewhere, I hear the sheep cry like I’ve heard before, and I get an uneasy feeling that has nothing to do with farm animals, or farms, or even the tobacco barns over the border in Connecticut. It’s the feeling of being in the presence of something that doesn’t make sense.

  Something crazy.

  I don’t do crazy. I’ve never done crazy.

  That’s why I keep my distance from Beryl. My mother is bonkers with her psychic visions and her desperate, lonely clients who want to know when they’re going to find a boyfriend or lose the one they already have.

  That’s why I always stayed far away from Tate.

  Tate.

  Tate Cole.

  Suddenly the seed of a thought germinates and blooms into a poisonous flower.

  Tate is at Bellingham State.

  Pizza Depot is in Bellingham, too.

  Calista Diamond is a resident of Bellingham.

  The memory of Val Buenavista’s video that Anders and I watched back at The Stumps with a bloody Barry Kupperman kneeling on the ground, dripping all over the place, flashes before my eyes. In that moment I learn a simple truth that I should have realized the moment I first saw the unreal images of the four of us in the woods behind the wall of debris at the end of Miller Road.

  With my head throbbing from hitting the floor and a golf ball-sized lump already starting to form, I squeeze my eyes shut and will my brain to rid itself from everything but the here and now. Then I do something that I’ve never done before—not once in all my seventeen years.

  I call for help.

  With all my might, I let free with a plea so loud that I almost scare myself silly.

  “Anders,” I scream. “Anders. Marcy. Anyone. HELP!!!”

  43

  “JESUS CHRIST, WEST. You’re a fucking mess.” Anders growls as he pulls me to my feet.

  “What happened?” Marcy says. She’s in the door of the bathroom. Her eyes are red and puffy. For that matter, Anders’s are, too.

  That’s what we’ve all been reduced to—either red blood or red eyes.

  “Anders,” I whimper, the bump on my head throbbing in time with the burn on my arm. “That girl. That girl from last night.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “That girl,” I say again, using the same words but louder this time. People always think that talking louder will add clarity to what they are saying.

  “What girl?”

  “The girl from Val Buenavista’s video. The one she showed us back at The Stumps.”

  Marcy’s face turns white. An image of the greasy guy on the video, licking her cheek and groping her body with dozens of hands like one of those Indian gods momentarily flits through my head.

  “What about her?” Anders says with such bile in his voice his words might as well be made out of poison.

  “It’s her,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?” he snaps at me. Snapping is the new normal for Anders.

  “Weston,” Marcy says. “Are you okay? You hit your head hard. You’re not making any sense.”

  Anders still has his hand around my arm, squeezing my bicep. I wrench free from him with such force that he’s momentarily shocked.

  “She’s the girl from the television,” I manage to get out, but now it isn’t my arm that’s burning, it’s whatever is in the pit of my stomach, bubbling and brewing like a pot on the stove that’s about to explode.

  “What girl on the television?” Anders growls. His unwillingness to understand forces me to shut my eyes and quiet everything around me so that I can get the words out of my mouth that need to be said.

  Finally I take a deep breath. “When you were taking a shower,” I begin slowly. “When you were in the shower, Marcy and I were watching the news about Running Man.”

  “Yeah?” says Anders, still annoyed. I can’t tell if he is annoyed that I interrupted his brood-fest, annoyed that I overheard his conversation with Marcy, or just plain mad at everything and everyone.

  “They showed that girl in the ambulance,” I continue. “The girl with the shaved head and the dotted lines who screamed at us when she saw us.”

  Anders looks uncomfortable, as though I pulled a scab off of something that he is trying to ignore.

  “She’s from Bellingham,” Marcy says. It’s not a question. It’s a fact.

  “So?” says Anders.

  I lick my lips, not sure if any of what I am about to say makes sense at all, but I have to get it out. If I don’t, I think I’ll burst.

  “That’s Calista Diamond,” I tell him, staring hard into his blue eyes and hoping that he will be equally as horrified as me. “We were with her,” I tell him. “Last night. At the Stumps. She’s the girl who came with us.”

  Anders says nothing. He stares at me blankly as though the words that are coming out of my mouth aren’t part of his vocabulary.

  “But . . .” Marcy says.

  “Don’t you see,” I stammer at him. Then out of exasperation, I grab his bicep and lock onto it like he had locked onto mine. “That’s her. She was with us at The Stumps last night. Then this morning we were in the woods, and she was in Running Man’s house.”

  Anders still stares at me, no words coming out of his mouth.

  Finally, I burst out crying. I don’t have anything left to say that will make any sense. The little pieces of last night start falling into a picture, but they aren’t a puzzle. Instead, they are an abstract piece of art made from sorrow and pain, with dabs of blood and tears. Then the picture is painted over in broad strokes of murderous red from a good looking doctor, who up until yesterday, was probably having the time of his life slicing and dicing up people in his house on Covington Circle.

  Maybe he went out to places like FunTowne to pick up his victims, or maybe, like last night, he hung at the edge of the partiers down at The Stumps, pretending he wanted a joint or maybe even a blowjob so that he could relive his youth.

  The painting in my head, the one that will always hang somewhere in its dark and windy corridors, hopefully out of the way so that I rarely have to look at it, is ugly and bitter and is somehow connected to the four of us and how we ended up in Prince Richard’s Maze.

  It’s somehow connected to the triangle on my arm and big black eyes and sheep.

  I have to find out how. If I don’t, I think I really might go insane. After all, insanity is a popular option these days.

  Just ask Marcy’s brother.

  44

  BERYL WRITES TO-DO lists. She writes them all the time and leaves them around the house. Sometimes she even writes to-do lists for me. On them are things like ‘do the laundry’ or ‘order Chinese.’ Other times she writes simple things that she has to accomplish throughout the day—adult things, like ‘call the bank,’ ‘pay the credit card bill,’ stuff like that.

  We’re all back in Marcy’s bedroom. Anders has plopped himself down on the floor. Marcy is sitting on the edge of her bed. Myers is flat out, and I’m frantically scribbling on a piece of paper I found on Marcy’s desk. On the other side of the paper is a drawing of a unicorn with flowers and fairies all around its head. The drawing isn’t bad. Marcy’s always been talented like that. I don’t care about her drawing, though.

  Right now, I care about getting my own to-do list out of my head and out onto the paper before it fades away like all my memories of last night.

  I look at what I’v
e scribbled down, and I get scared. As a matter of fact, I get so scared that I drop the piece of paper back onto Marcy’s desk and take a step backwards. I’m only seventeen years old. What am I thinking? Any rational person would say that we have to tell the police everything we know. We have to tell them that we were wasted at The Stumps last night and don’t remember anything, even though we now know we were with Calista Diamond.

  I think that little tidbit of information is crazy important. Too important to even exist, and I know what we have to do.

  Almost in a panic, I stand over Anders who is starting to act like he’s a little afraid of me. I make him pick up the Cole’s house phone and call Grafton Applewhite.

  “This is bad,” Marcy whispers as she sits in the middle of her sea of clothing, slowly sinking into it. “This is really, really bad.”

  “Maybe,” I say, feeling cold and calculating icicles form in my veins. The thing is, I’m neither cold nor calculating. I don’t have the disposition for it. I am, however, a survivor. If growing up under the same roof as Beryl Kahn has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes you have to be cold to survive.

  We all know there’s truth in that. That’s why we lie. We lie to survive.

  Anders won’t look at me. He puts his mouth to the phone and waits precious seconds for another phone in another part of town to ring. After a moment he hangs up and says, “He’s not answering.”

  “Try again,” I growl, even scaring myself a little bit, but I know in that growl is a little sense of urgency pushing and prodding at me and telling me that what Anders has to do is a vital part of my to-do list.

  Anders blows air out of his nose and punches digits into the phone again. This time, it’s picked up on the other end.

  “It’s Anders,” he says when Grafton picks up. He waits a moment, closes his eyes, and says, “Because I’m calling from the Coles’ house, that’s why.” Now I know why Grafton didn’t answer the phone the first time. He screens his calls and there is no way in hell that Marcy Cole would ever call him or even cast a sideways glance in his direction.