What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  “We brand them,” he hissed, as he pinned both of my arms above my head and drove the hot surface of his ring into the pink flesh of my forearm. “We brand them for life.”

  I screamed and suddenly the weight on my chest was gone. There were sounds everywhere but I barely even heard them because my arm was on fire, the likes of which I had never felt before.

  As tears poured out of my eyes and lucid thoughts finally decided to take a holiday or at least a well-deserved siesta, I heard grunting and growling and I didn’t know what it could be.

  My eyes opened one last time.

  That’s when I saw Anders standing over the greasy guy with a rock in his hand. He was hitting him again and again, his arms turning black and slick as he kept driving it down, down, down.

  “Leave my friends alone,” Anders screamed, drugged and deranged, as each rock fall broke something new in the greasy guy’s head and dark liquid sprayed out of him in the moonlight. “Leave them the fuck alone.”

  65

  BACK AT MARCY’S house there is a to-do list lying on the kitchen counter. It’s missing the next chore we need to get done because the next item is something that I never even considered.

  The missing item is ‘bury a body.’

  The greasy guy is lying face down in the leaves, not far from where we all woke up this morning. Only, he didn’t wake up with the rest of us. He’s never going to wake up again.

  The woods are bright enough from the moon that I can see where his head isn’t exactly round anymore. It’s concave, and covered with black goop that I know isn’t really black.

  As I stare at his corpse I realize that it’s almost a miracle that we didn’t notice it this morning. Only some mounded up piles of leaves and branches separated him from where we found ourselves with our memories gone and our world turned on its side.

  I’m sure that when the sun rises tomorrow morning the leaves all around the corpse will be covered in red sap.

  That can’t happen. Either the sun can’t rise or the red leaves and the mangled body of the greasy guy who caused all of us so much pain can’t be there.

  We have to get rid of the blood.

  We have to get rid of the body.

  My mind makes a mental leap way too far and I decide that we have to bury the greasy guy, in the woods, in the ground.

  There simply isn’t any other alternative.

  I don’t know what makes me come to that conclusion, but I can’t think of any other way to distance the four of us from last night other than to make that distance a vertical six feet.

  The simple truth is that Anders killed a boy who is from The Bellingham School. It doesn’t matter that Anders doesn’t really remember doing it or that he acted in self-defense, because he didn’t.

  He brought down a rock on the greasy guy’s head, caving in his greasy skull, because he was defending me.

  He was defending all of us.

  He shouldn’t have to own that.

  Myers is standing next to me. Tears are streaming down his face, and once again, I allow them to happen without wanting to lash out at him for being such a baby. Once you see a dead body, you can never unsee it, no matter if you have one eye or two. Myers’ one eye is now indelibly printed with the greasy guy’s dead image.

  He’ll never forget it and neither will I.

  Thankfully, Anders and Marcy haven’t followed us into the woods. I’m sure they are still back on the path, content to be wrapped in each other’s arms where there is tenderness and love—where their world makes sense inside a world that makes no sense at all.

  The world outside of the two of them has people like Tate in it. The world has psychotic murderers like Viktor Pavlovich and psychopaths like the greasy guy who thought a fun night on the town involved drugging and raping someone as sweet and kind as Marcy, and maybe doing something worse to her—or me.

  I don’t blame them for not coming into the woods. I don’t blame them for not wanting to look at the greasy guy ever again. He’s gone. That’s all that matters.

  As for Anders, I can’t ever let him think of himself as a murderer. He doesn’t deserve to carry around the weight of that burden for the rest of his life. I know what it feels like to carry weight. It’s a nightmare.

  It’s better that the greasy guy be erased. At least that’s what I decide.

  A half-hour later the four of us are back in my truck. Myers is riding shotgun again. Anders and Marcy are in the backseat, but something has changed. Anders’ arm is draped protectively around Marcy and her curly head is leaning up against his shoulder. A barrier has given way inside Anders, and I think if anything positive can come out of what happened to us last night, the two of them together might be it.

  As nice as that thought may be, there is something very not-nice that has to happen first. We all know it, but I’m the one who says the four fated words that will change our lives forever.

  “We need a shovel,” I tell them. That’s all. We need a shovel to dig a hole in Prince Richard’s Maze, away from Big Loop and Little Loop and away from Turner Pond. The hole has to be excavated from the ground in a remote part of The Maze where no one goes. Next Spring, poison oak and poison ivy will hopefully grow out of the ground over the unmarked grave, and no one will ever know that the poisonous plants are covering an equally poisonous person who deserved every bit of what he got.

  Only digging that hole and putting the greasy guy in it, along with all the bloody leaves, will make him go away forever so that we can forget about him and what happened to us last night.

  Hopefully, Marcy, Anders, and Myers will be able to completely erase his memory. As for me, maybe I will talk Beryl into signing a waver so I can get a tattoo this year instead of next, so that I don’t have to look at the triangle on my forearm every day and be reminded of why it’s there. Otherwise, I won’t have the luxury of being able to forget the sheep’s cries and the big black eyes. I won’t have the ability to ever forget that a psychotic rapist, barely a year older than me but firmly on the adult side of the fence, was the first person to ever make me believe that the fat part of my life was gone and what was left behind wasn’t so repulsive.

  I want a better memory than that.

  I deserve it.

  66

  I PARK MY TRUCK across the street and down three houses from the Coles’ house. Primrose Lane is thankfully quiet. There are no cars in any of our driveways and the lights in Marcy’s kitchen are on. If any of our parents bothered to care, they would think we are all in her kitchen, watching television and wondering if we know anybody who was pulled out of Running Man’s house.

  The truth is, we sort of do, if our brief and messed up interaction with Calista Diamond after we were thoroughly drugged last night constitutes knowing someone.

  There are no reporters or cops in sight. No one has realized yet that we are connected to the psychotic girl who blew her brains out up at Wang Memorial in Apple.

  I’m grateful for that.

  “I’ll be right back,” Marcy whispers as she slides out of the back seat and quietly clicks the door closed behind her. She’s going to get a shovel in the Coles’ garage. It’s probably one that her father purchased a dozen years ago from the local hardware store but has never used. We all have lawn men to do work like that in Meadowfield. Owning a shovel is only for show.

  That, and burying bodies.

  “Are we really doing this?” whimpers Myers. He’s rubbing my coconut’s pirate patch like it’s his real eye. It’s not. Underneath the black cloth is nothing, and his fake eye is back in The Maze with only a dead body as company.

  “We have to,” I tell him. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “We could go to the police,” he says.

  Anders snorts in the backseat. “And tell them what? That I murdered someone? May
be we should tell him that it’s my fault Calista Diamond is dead, too. Maybe if I screwed her like she wanted she wouldn’t have ended up with Running Man.”

  “Anders,” he begins, but Anders cuts him off.

  “Or better yet, maybe I should have let him get his rocks off with West and then he’d be alive right now and I wouldn’t be a murderer.”

  I shake my head. “You know that’s not true.”

  “Do I? Seriously. Do I?”

  I don’t answer him and neither does Myers. I stare out the window at Marcy’s house. Myers stares at that secret spot between his feet. Anders stares into empty space. We know what we have to do. We don’t have any other choice.

  “What about after?” Myers asks.

  Anders and I are both quiet. I don’t know what’s going to happen after. I’m barely holding on to what’s happening now. We’ll deal with after when after comes, and hopefully, the only thing we will tell anyone if we’re ever asked is that we don’t remember anything about last night.

  Let Tate Cole answer the hard questions, although I doubt he’ll say anything either. He’ll just continue eating his pudding and ‘killing it at ping pong’ with Eddie Bick until he turns eighteen and gets transferred to some big-boy facility where electric shock therapy might be just the thing he needs.

  Jesus. Do they even do that anymore? What about lobotomies? It’s a pleasant thought to think of Tate Cole being strapped to a chair, with electrodes attached to his head and someone wearing a white lab coat dialing the voltage up to its highest level. It’s an even more pleasant thought imagining someone as equally skilled as Running Man shoving a sharp instrument into the orbit of his eye and poking around inside until the part of him that makes him so psychotically evil is turned to mush.

  As I bask in my thoughts, each one viler than the last, Anders says, “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” says Myers.

  The back door opens. “I’m going to get her.” He unfolds himself from the back seat and gets out of my truck.

  Seconds tick by before Myers says, “No offense, but I’d rather be with someone who can actually protect me,” and he gets out, too.

  I sit alone in my truck without any real motivation to move. My mind wanders back to what the greasy guy said to me as he sat on my chest. I play the scene over and over again in my head. I want it to stop, but each time I hope it will end, the memory rewinds and starts over again, getting more vivid and more real.

  What seems almost laughably unreal is what Dr. Viktor Pavlovich did in his house on Covington Circle. For a moment, an old image of Sandra Berman pops into my head. I hope she’s not one of the bodies in that house. I hope she really did run away and is living another person’s life far away from Meadowfield where she can be happy and free.

  Happy, because kids don’t run away from home unless life there is unbearable. They don’t run away from home unless they can’t take one more second of their fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck parents or indifferent mothers.

  Five more minutes pass as I let myself marinate in my thoughts, all of them gross, all of them thoughts that I would never have even entertained twenty four hours ago, before I decide to go after Marcy, Anders, and Myers.

  If Mr. Cole even owns a shovel, it’s as likely to be in his underwear drawer or the kitchen closet as in the garage. Chaos is the norm in Marcy’s house. I can’t even imagine what it would be like if Tate had never gone away. Frankly, I don’t have to imagine. I know. The Coles’ house would be a burnt stain in the earth. Marcy’s crazy twin would have torched the place years ago, maybe while using a cigarette on the couch in the basement, all the time watching Tyrone float in his bowl.

  Foul, bitter thoughts like that one keep running through my head as I cross the street, jog down a few houses, then slink alongside Marcy’s garage to the back door that’s always open—never locked.

  Marcy is standing on the garage steps leading into the house. Anders and Myers are leaning up against the wall with their arms folded across their chests.

  The guy with the afro, the third of three that left The Bellingham School yesterday, bought a pizza at Pizza Depot, and doused it with Flunitrazepam, is standing next to Marcy with his arm around her shoulder and a knife pressing into her throat.

  “It’s about goddamned time,” he hisses at me in a voice that’s both bitter and evil. “I was about to call the cops.”

  67

  THE GUY WITH THE afro applies pressure to the knife and the tip of it pushes into Marcy’s throat. A little trickle of blood slips down her neck.

  “Let her go,” I say so calmly and evenly that I might as well be one of the teachers at school quietly reprimanding Pavel Vagin for flicking snot at Myers.

  “Shut the hell up, pretty boy,” he snarls at me, and I flinch. There are those words again, the one that the greasy guy breathed into my face last night in Prince Richard’s Maze—the words that I never thought would be associated with someone like me. In that moment, I realize that he’s probably been referring to me as ‘pretty boy’ since he and his friends drugged us last night. We haven’t had names. We’ve been the hot girl, the pretty boy, the jock, and the master baiter.

  I cast my eyes sideways. Anders is pale. Myers is standing next to him. Mr. Cole’s oversized shirt is now hanging down almost below his wrists, but not far enough that I can’t see that his fists are clenching and unclenching, clenching and unclenching.

  “She didn’t do anything,” Myers says, and I feel like I’m in an alternate universe where people like me and Myers are the ones who protect our friends, and jocks like Anders shrink in their own grief.

  “What’s with the patch, dude?” he snaps at Myers. Then he pushes his lips together and says, “Your mommy going to dress you as a pirate for Halloween?”

  I don’t even give Myers a chance to respond. “What do you want?” I say in that calm tone.

  “I want this to be fucking yesterday,” sneers the guy. Obviously, he doesn’t realize that what he wants is pretty close to what the rest of us want. The thing is, there’s no going back to yesterday where Meadowfield was decent and we never woke up in Prince Richard’s Maze.

  Calista Diamond is dead.

  The greasy guy with the sunglasses is dead.

  Running Man is dead, and everyone inside his house is dead, too.

  There’s no going back to yesterday. There’s barely even room to go forward.

  “I have money,” I say. I probably sound really stupid, like some desperate victim on a crime show who is trying to weasel out of a tight spot.

  “Yeah, we’ll get to that soon enough,” the guy with the afro snarls, then gets a slight pained look in his eyes. “Right now, I just want to know where Frankie is.”

  Anders closes his eyes.

  Marcy bites her lip.

  I take a deep breath.

  “Who the hell is Frankie?” Myers hisses, fire coming out of his mouth right alongside his words. The guy only stares at him as though he’s monumentally stupid and that everyone in the world should know who ‘Frankie’ is.

  “Don’t be a douchebag,” he says, “Or I’ll slit her pretty throat.”

  He adds a little more pressure to the handle of the knife and more blood slides down Marcy’s neck.

  I want to murder him.

  Bad.

  “Don’t,” cries Anders. He takes a step forward, but it’s a baby step. It’s the step of someone who is walking on a tightrope but has never stood on a tightrope before, and there’s no safety net below. “Please.”

  “Why? She your girlfriend or something?”

  Anders swallows, and his Adam’s apple bobs up and down. “Yes,” he says. A tiny smile flashes across Marcy’s face. A zillion pound weight sheds from Anders’ shoulders.

  “Too bad,” the guy with the afro sneers then bends
down so his lips are right up against Marcy’s ear. “You know what?” he says. “You’re hot and all, but if I hated my sister as much as Tate hates you, I’d want her all fucked up, too.”

  “Tate’s a psychopath,” Marcy says as though the nightmare we’re living has done nothing but render her bored.

  “Maybe,” says the guy with the afro. “We weren’t in Bellingham for being normies. Still, a deal’s a deal. He put a lot of time and effort this past year into making sure that when we had a chance to get out of that hell hole, his whole family would end up in pieces.”

  “So?” says Marcy again in that same unaffected voice. I hope she’s not broken in the head like Anders was for most of the day. She needs to be sharp. She needs to be as brutal as the knife he’s pushing into her neck, or maybe she’ll end up like Tate wanted her to end up.

  “So?” says the guy. “So Frankie was going to have some major fun with you while Calista and I robbed that old dude for some cash, but I guess we all know how FUBAR that plan went.”

  That old guy.

  Running Man.

  “Pavlovich?” I whisper.

  “Yeah,” he snaps. “Pavlovich. And I thought Bellingham was a shit show. You should have seen what I found in his basement. Walk-in freezers full of people, all cut to shit.”

  Myers whimpers, his hands still balled into fists.

  The guy with the afro pulls his knife from Marcy’s neck and waves it around in the air, presumably to illustrate his point, but he doesn’t let her go. He holds onto her as tightly as ever. “He drew all over them and sliced them up,” he says. “Like I really wanted to find that crap when I snuck in though his basement window?”

  “Too bad for you,” says Marcy and I get nervous. She’s going to get herself killed.

  “Too bad for me?” he roars. “Too bad for him.” He puts the knife to her throat again and I die a little inside. “He had Calista upstairs in the kitchen. I thought she was screwing him, because, you know, she screws everybody. Then she screamed. So I went up the basement stairs, cracked the door and there he was. He had Calista in a chair, with her hair all gone, and he was drawing on her face with a sharpie.”