by Nick Lake
THE VOICE DID NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.
But I did clean my room.
Next day was a school day. Sunlight woke me, slanting through the venetian blinds in my bedroom. I lay there, thinking I must have imagined what happened the previous day. Not the foot—that was undeniable. But the voice.
I got up, pulled on Levi’s and leather motorcycle boots. I don’t have a motorcycle, but I liked the boots when I saw them in a magazine someone had left at the library, so I saved up and got them on eBay. Vintage. In the photos in the magazine they went well with jeans and a loose, plain white T-shirt, which is what I put on next, yanking it over my head.
Of course, when I looked in the mirror it didn’t quite work on me. The T-shirt wasn’t fitting right, and it was creased. The boots and jeans, which had looked so good on the model, somehow didn’t click, somehow made me seem less like a fashionista slumming it and more like white trash on a break from busing tables in a late-night dive.
This is what always happens: I try to put clothes together and something is invariably missing, I get some detail wrong, I don’t know how. Even when I buy the exact same things that I see on TV or in a mag or whatever. Even when I put on the same eyeliner, the same bracelets. Something about me, some combination of my face and body, ruins it.
“You get a job as a day laborer?” said the voice as I regarded myself in the mirror.
I felt a tight, cold sensation in my chest. So the voice was still there. Fear twisted inside me, coiling around anger.
“Shut up,” I replied. I left the room, with a backward glance in the mirror at my terrible ensemble, and went downstairs.
Dad grunted at me when I reached the kitchen. He was holding a mug of coffee and eating a bagel. I waved to him. “See you after school,” I said.
He looked up. “You okay?”
“Sure.”
He nodded. “Take the bus. Safer.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
That was it. The extent of our conversation.
Of course I had no intention of taking the bus, even if there was a murderer in town. I mean, I didn’t fit the victim profile. So far, the killer had targeted what the media called “sex workers.” Prostitutes, a girl from a massage parlor, a stripper. And it was morning—not really a time of day conducive to serial killings.
I grabbed a bagel and went out the front door. It was still early—in the east, out over the ocean, bundles of pink clouds were gathered, achingly beautiful against the blue sky. I barely noticed.
Jagging right and then left onto Fourth, I headed toward school. I started eating the bagel and imagined I was on an interstellar transport and it was a space-age snack, designed to fuel my body and provide all my nutrients, the old-fashioned mess of a meal crammed into something convenient and tasteless.
I walked through layer three, the long strip of suburban houses between the boardwalk and the empty lots, the faceless wide streets of malls. I passed a couple of people getting little kids into cars, someone pulling a suitcase on wheels, just back from a business trip maybe. I wasn’t really concentrating, but then something made every detail snap into focus, and I was standing by an orange Chevy Camaro, on the back a Calvin-pissing-on-a-Ford logo.
The something was the voice, and it said:
“I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. It’s all your fault.”
It goes without saying by this point that there was no one around me. Just another fake-clapboard house, that orange Chevy, a bike lying on its side in a brown yard. I wish I could describe what the voice sounded like. A real person, but not someone I knew. About forty, maybe? It’s also impossible to convey the tone. When you write words down there are gaps between them, spaces, but spoken they run like liquid, merge together. It was a middle-aged woman with a New Jersey accent, that’s pretty much all I can tell you.
One thing though: the voice was angry. Very, very angry.
I didn’t think; I was tired. I just talked back. I don’t know why.
“It’s my fault you’re dead?” I said. “Who the hell are you?” I was kind of aggressive. This will become relevant.
The voice didn’t say anything. I held tight to my bag and kept on going to school. I was shaking, my heart racing. I don’t think it crossed my mind then that something was wrong with me. I just thought: It’s a dead person. Or an angel, or something.
A strange angel, yes. But I don’t know. I just assumed it was supernatural, a phantasm of some kind. Which frankly scared me a hell of a lot. I was shaking as I continued the walk to school, past the long-dead FRANKIE’S GO KARTS with its vast cracked parking lot, furred with weeds, its broken neon sign pointing to the ticket office and its fading painted race courses.
At school I was distracted. That didn’t make a big difference from usual. I was pretty much coasting through my junior year. It drove my dad mad. He kept saying, “You’re a smart girl, Cass. You spend half your life in the library. Why are you wasting your abilities?” I told him once that using my abilities at school would be the biggest waste of them, and he dragged me to a kitchen chair and made me sit there till my assignments were done, so I never said that again.
Anyway, when I arrived at school, a few people turned and spoke low to each other when they saw me. I saw others glance at me and kind of raise their eyebrows. I figured the news was circulating about the foot on the beach, and me being the one who found it.
And underneath the buzz of curiosity, something else. Fear. I sensed it as I walked up the stairs, especially from the girls. That anxiety that had been there in the town, silent but present, like a tumor, since the killings began. That anxiety that said, So far it has been sex workers, but what if he starts on other girls?
Even as I walked, I saw people pulling away from me. Like I was a bad-luck charm. Like getting too close to me might get you killed.
Great. Another reason to be ostracized. It had to be me who found it. Just had to be.
Weirdly, though, I could swear a couple of kids looked at me enviously, hesitating, almost like they wanted the scoop, wanted to know if I knew anything. I mean, it was national at this point. How fourteen young women had disappeared in the last couple of years, never to be seen again. How the cops supposedly didn’t care enough to solve it because the victims were in the sex industry, and if it were ordinary girls then the murderer would have been apprehended long ago.
I don’t know how “Houdini Killer” got started. But by then it was already being used by news anchors, commentators in the New York Times, everyone. Because of the way that the bodies never turned up, like the killer was a magician.
Except that now, part of one had. And it had been me who found it, me who hit the jackpot with a severed foot. Even so, I was surprised by the speed with which it had gotten around, my discovery. Dad had told me it was hush-hush. I guess the officers, at least one of whom was FBI or something, didn’t know how small New Jersey towns operate. Someone at the station would have told his wife, who told their neighbor, who told Marjorie the school secretary, and that was it. Someone has probably written an equation for the speed of gossip.
I walked up to the main doors, and that was when someone tripped me. I felt the foot hook my leg, and I went sprawling. I put my hands out and landed on them, hard, the jolt fizzing electric up my arms and into my shoulders. I cried out, involuntarily.
And heard a laugh, somewhere behind me.
I eased myself into a sitting position, started picking up the books that had spilled from my bag. My hands were grazed, and now there were blood smudges on my calculus.
Mr. Nakomoto held out his hand and lifted me up. “Did you see who did it?” he asked kindly. He had a round face and round glasses; circles suited him. He was like someone with no edges, you know? No sharpness about him.
“No,” I said.
“Shame,” he said. “These bullies.” He shook his head. “I don’t like to see them getting away with it.”
“They always get away with it,” I sa
id.
“Not always.” But even he didn’t look convinced.
I shrugged. I could have said, People who hurt other people always get away with it, because it was the truth or at least the truth as I saw it then, but hey. What would have been the point?
I picked up one more book, and he picked up one and handed it to me, and then he coughed and walked away.
Later, I was in English class with Ms. Gilbert. I always felt kind of sorry for Ms. Gilbert. I mean, she knew I’d read most of the novels in the library, let alone the ones we were studying, so she was forever firing questions at me, trying to draw me into the discussion.
“Why do you think Fitzgerald tells us that Gatsby hasn’t cut open the pages in his books, Cassie?”
That kind of thing. And I would shrug and not answer, which I could see really disappointed her. I hated disappointing her. I mean, I wasn’t being a brat, I just couldn’t do it. I hated to speak in front of other people. Even if I was on a bus, and someone called me on my cell, I wouldn’t answer. I didn’t want anyone nearby to hear my voice.
When I say “someone called me on my cell”: don’t get the wrong idea of my social life; I mean Mom, before she died, or Dad. Most of the class was there when the piñata incident happened, or they’d heard about it, and the few friends I’d made since then dropped away after the whole thing with Mom. I think I made it pretty hard for them to be friends with me; I don’t blame them.
I should explain about the piñata:
It was my seventh birthday. Mom and Dad went big on the theme, which for some reason was Mexican. I don’t think I asked for it, I don’t know. And Dad is like tenth-generation Italian American, and Mom’s family came from Holland, originally, so I really don’t get it. But that’s what it was.
The whole front yard was decorated with hay bales, flags, plastic cactuses. Cacti?
Google says cacti.
Okay, yes, and they had little ponchos for all the kids who came, and there was a table with tacos and cheese and guacamole. The thing I loved most: they had a donkey they’d hired from somewhere, and there was an old wizened guy who was giving kids rides on it. I think I asked for the donkey—in fact, maybe that’s why the whole Mexican theme. They got the donkey, and then they figured they could turn it into a thing.
I rode that donkey maybe five times; I loved animals back then. I was so happy.
It’s not like I remember every detail. All I know is that at a certain point, Dad produced the piñata and tied it to the apple tree. The piñata was a donkey too, every color patchworked onto it in a coat of ribbons. A big fat one. Dad bent down and grabbed a branch that had fallen from the tree, snapped a stick from it.
And here’s the thing: It wasn’t even me. It wasn’t me who did it.
This is what happened:
They blindfolded me, and I tried and tried to smash open that donkey. I really did. But I wasn’t a real coordinated kid, and I only gave it a couple of glancing blows.
Dad was going, “Come on, Cassie! You can do it! You can do it, Cassie!”
He was more excited than I was, I think. I just wanted to ride the real donkey, not smash up this fake one.
And I couldn’t do it.
Dad shouted louder and louder. In my memory, his words are colored red. “Cassie, IT’S EASY. JUST SWING.”
I sat down, and I started to cry.
According to Mom, Dane Armstrong kind of volunteered. He wasn’t pushy about it. Dane was my best friend—he loved animals too and his family had tons of them, rabbits in the yard, dogs, cats, even a goat. I used to hang out with him all the time, when my parents let me. After what happened next, his parents left town though.
Anyway, Dane apparently stepped forward and said, “Hey, I’ll do it for her.” Dad wasn’t happy about it, but Mom calmed him down. She was always good at that, which is one of the thousand terrible things about her dying, and pretty soon Dane had the stick and the cloth over his eyes.
I don’t remember how long he swung at the piñata for—I know he broke it open a little and candy started spilling out, because in my mind is an image of the little packs on the grass like jewels, shining, all colors and foils, golden and silver, and that of course was what made the kids run to try to grab them, which was when Dane, who was still swinging wildly with the stick, brought it around in a wide arc and smashed the somehow-now-sharp end of it into Molly Van Buren’s face, spearing her eye.
If you ever want to know what it’s like to be a pariah, to be so far outside the social circle you’re not even bullied, just ignored, it’s easy: arrange for everyone you know to come to a party, then make them watch as a kid gets her eye gouged out. They couldn’t rescue Molly’s—she wore a glass eye after that. She still does. She wants to go into the Peace Corps. I don’t know that from her; I overheard it somewhere. She doesn’t speak to me anymore.
Memory plays tricks, but I think I actually kept a couple of friends, even after that. So if you really want to be alone, what you must also contrive to happen is this:
One day, in the school dining hall, get some meat loaf with peanuts in it. At this point you don’t know you’re allergic—your parents are not into PB&J sandwiches, so you’ve never had any, or maybe you did once and your parents dismissed the redness around your mouth, thinking you’d scratched yourself. I don’t know.
The important thing is: you should eat the meat loaf, then very quickly suffer a massive anaphylaxis that swells your throat and bronchioles, fills you with a sense of black dread bearing down upon you like the grill of a massive truck, stops the air to your lungs, meaning that everyone in the dining hall panics as you lie twitching on the floor, until the school nurse finally gets there and takes the EpiPen from her bag and stabs it into your thigh, flooding your system with adrenaline and probably saving your life since the paramedics don’t get there for another twenty minutes.
After this, you will truly have no friends.
BUT BE WARNED!
Some new kids might turn up once you’re in high school, and they don’t know about the piñata, or the time Nurse Kelly did a Pulp Fiction on you. They don’t care about the stories either and they’re into books too, just like you, so you start to hang out. They may or may not be called Scott and Trish.
In this scenario, as I have already intimated, there is only one thing to do: make sure that your mother dies horribly, so that you are forever cursed, forever doomed like Cassandra of myth—the girl who leaves a trail of violence in her wake. That should be enough to see off fair-weather friends like, oh, Scott, or—for the sake of argument—Trish.
Got that?
The recipe for being totally and utterly alone:
Accidental eye surgery
+
Major medical incident on school grounds
+
Unpleasant tragedy
=
No friends for Cassandra.
Which is a very long explanation for why I didn’t like to speak in class, but thanks for bearing with me. The point is: I probably should have been more consciously shocked by the foot on the beach. It maybe seems odd that I wasn’t more shaken by it, but I think in the waking part of my mind I just saw it as the latest installment in the curse of Cassie.
Unconsciously was a different story, of course. I think you can probably guess that already.
For instance:
How it was thanks to the voice that things started to go wrong at school. See, later on that very first day, I was in math class. The teacher, Mr. Fortey, was doing matrices. Afternoon sunlight was hazy through the windows, a distant view of the ocean and the piers visible beyond oceans of prefabricated buildings. We get seagulls in the schoolyard—they take your fries, if you’re not careful, and they’re not gentle about it.
Mr. Fortey had written five problems on the whiteboard, and we were supposed to be solving them. They weren’t so hard. I was working on the third one when the voice said,
“Don’t finish them.”
“What?”
I said, under my breath. By this point I knew something truly screwed up was happening to me. It wasn’t a prank—it couldn’t be. I mean, the voice had been in my room, on the street, in the classroom. In the bathroom at the police station. It was like my mind was a house and the voice was an intruder, stalking the corridors.
“Don’t finish the problems,” repeated the voice. “You do them, and I’ll hurt you.”
I looked around as if someone was going to explain to me what was going on.
“Shut up,” I whispered. “Go away.”
Silence. Daisy Merkel glanced over at me from the neighboring desk like I was a freak, though that was normal.
“Do what I say or I will make you suffer,” said the voice, its tone as cold as dark night air.
I ignored it. I pressed my pen very deliberately down on the paper and filled in the missing numbers in the third matrix problem.
Now.
What happened next, I know it now, was a coincidence. There’s no way it was anything more. But you cannot imagine how much it freaked me out.
First, the tip of the pen snapped from the pressure I’d exerted on it. Blue ink splattered the page and I cursed, putting the pen aside and reaching into my bag for another one.
My movement was abrupt, quick. My index finger, therefore, impaled itself quite deep on the pair of compasses that I had left open inside—we’d been doing a lot of work on geometry. Maybe half an inch of the sharp steel point was embedded in the soft pad of the finger.
I yanked my hand out of the case, yelping, like a spider had bitten me, which for a stupid moment was even what I thought had happened. Red blood pattered onto the paper, mixing with the ink, sounding really loud somehow. I thought: Do what I say or I will make you suffer.
Mr. Fortey rushed over. “Cassie, you all right?” he asked.
I was staring at my finger.
“You feel that, *****?” said the voice. “That’s what happens when you disobey me.”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
Mr. Fortey stared at me. “Now, Cassie, you’ve been hurt. Let’s get you to—”
