Bury the Lead

by Mischa Thrace

  Natalie answers before Mr. Monroe can. “But not the details. Not that it was suicide.”

  “Suicide is one of the most contested areas of reporting,” Mr. Monroe says. “As you’ve just demonstrated. On the one hand, there’s the issue of the deceased’s privacy and that of the family, but on the other hand, there is the desire to sell papers, to get clicks, to pull the most viewers. Oftentimes, relatives don’t want to publicly admit that a loved one has taken their own life. Then again, there can be cases when the act is committed in a public manner, which puts it in the public domain.”

  “Or if they’re celebrities, right?” Jeremiah says. “Like that dude who ate the crazy food. Anthony something.”

  “Bourdain.” Mr. Monroe nods. “Yes, when it’s a celebrity, the public often feels they have a right to know.”

  “Doesn’t that make more people kill themselves?” Claribel asks. “Like they make it cool?”

  “There is often a spike in suicides following reports of celebrity suicides, that’s true. But does that mean they shouldn’t be reported?”

  “Of course not,” Jeremiah says. “If people are gonna kill themselves, they’re gonna kill themselves. You can’t force someone to do it.”

  “Not true though,” Ravi says. “What about that girl from Wrentham we talked about in Social Topics? She was convicted of murder for convincing her boyfriend to kill himself. And they were our age.”

  Jeremiah leans back in his seat. “Shit, you’re right. Still doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be reported though. News is news. Even more so in that case.”

  “So, do we agree there are some cases that should be reported and some that shouldn’t?” Mr. Monroe asks.

  I say, “I think the issue is less about whether or not we report suicides, but how we report them.”

  “Go on.”

  “I think the problem is when the reports are unnecessarily graphic or sensational,” I say, still planning the words as I speak. “I mean, the original one back in the nineties was Kurt Cobain. He cultivated a whole emo image while he was alive, had legions of fans who wanted to be like him, and when he killed himself, they did too. Would all those people have done it anyway? Maybe, maybe not. The nonstop media coverage of his death wouldn’t have helped though. Same thing with Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain and all the others. I think it’s possible to report suicides without giving every single article an over-the-top, click-baity headline, and the coverage doesn’t need to be so excessive. People die, even famous people, and it’s a tragedy, but the world doesn’t need to put it under a microscope.”

  Ravi kicks my foot. I ignore him. Journalist mode has taken over. I researched this very topic last year, and the stories practically begged to be told. “On the flip side, there was a rash of youth suicides a few years ago that were the direct result of extensive bullying, and I absolutely think those need to be reported to the fullest extent possible, because those are the cases where, yes, the victim took their own life, but the world around them handed them the gun. One of those kids was only ten years old. Ten. Of course the world needed to know what he went through, because the people who did know failed him, and the world needed to see what the consequences of bullying and abuse can be. Those stories led to the anti-bullying laws, which aren’t perfect, but they’re something. So yeah, sometimes sharing the details is important, even if it feels salacious.”

  “Comments?” Mr. Monroe asks.

  “I agree,” Ravi says. “You scream the stories that have the potential to stop a tragedy from happening again, but you don’t linger on the ones that might cause more tragedy. You try to break the cycle, not perpetuate it.”

  “Well said.” Mr. Monroe nods approvingly. “Anyone else?”

  “I just don’t think it’s the world’s business to know how you died,” Natalie says, refusing to budge.

  “Not even if it’s murder? Or a shark attack? A new strain of Ebola?” I ask.

  “That’s different.”

  “So, it’s only suicide that’s the problem? It’s so shameful that we should pretend it doesn’t happen?”

  “Suicide is a sin, okay?” Tears well in Natalie’s green eyes. “We shouldn’t act like it’s not. It’s selfish and stupid, and everyone left behind isn’t only missing you, they’re having to worry about you burning in hell because of a stupid decision you made without thinking about it or asking anyone for help.” Natalie pushes her chair back from the circle and flees, slamming the door, but not in time to block the sound of her weeping.

  For a moment, no one moves, shocked into silence. Then Claribel gets up, chair screeching against the tile, and says, “I’ll check on her.”

  Mr. Monroe nods. When the door closes again, he surveys the class. “Emotions are difficult, messy things. Your stories will evoke emotion, and it may not always be the ones you intend. You can never know what baggage someone brings to your work. It’s important to be sensitive to the emotional needs of others, but not crippled by them. We live in difficult times, and it’s important to shine a light in the darker corners of the world while remembering that goodness exists too. Seek a balance not only for your audience’s sake, but for your own.”

  The story about the brief search for and discovery of Emma’s body becomes the most-viewed and most-commented article in the Monitor’s history in a matter of days.

  The outpouring of grief is real, with the vast majority of the comments expressing some variation of We love you, we’ll miss you, fly high! Then there are the people working through the seven stages of grief, with most of the posters stuck hard on denial, the ones who claim Emma wasn’t suicidal at all, but that’s understandable. No one saw Emma’s death coming any more than the previous classes had seen Liam’s. I don’t think anyone ever really sees suicide coming. It’s like the more obvious candidates for such a death would rather talk about it than act on it, while those who follow through come out of nowhere. Maybe the difference really is in the talking. Maybe, sometimes, having someone know that you’re hurting enough to want to die can be enough to stop you from doing it.

  The comments that are a problem are the ones attached to pseudonyms. The Monitor allows anonymous comments, but many people opted for their real names because it’s such a Maplefield-centric site. The app isn’t available for public download but shared through the school’s email list. I thought the ability to submit tips anonymously was important enough to outweigh the drama that occasionally erupted in the comment sections, but I’m starting to rethink that policy.

  Buried in the comments below the article about Emma are a handful of users taking advantage of their anonymity to take their final shots at a girl who had probably made their lives hell at one point or another.

  I’m glad she’s dead.

  She deserved to die.

  Why won’t anyone talk about what a bitch she was? Part of the reason we’re all getting along right now is because she’s gone.

  The only nice thing she ever did was die.

  Out of the hundreds of comments, the vitriol makes up only a fraction, but it’s enough to make me consider closing the comment section completely. I could delete the offensive remarks and leave the rest, but the thought of targeted censorship rankles me. The first amendment is sacred to journalists, and I can’t bring myself to violate it.

  Besides, the comments aren’t completely wrong.

  Perhaps it’s the constant monitoring of the comments that did it, but that night, I dream of walking through the woods in a purple dress, rocks and twigs stabbing the soles of my feet as I try to stay one step ahead of something I can’t see. Birds caw from high in the trees, a chorus of avian accusations that follows me all the way to the big evergreen.

  I wake not with a pounding heart, but rather the uneasy realization that I overlooked something. I check my phone. There’s still an hour before the alarm is set to go off, but I know I won’t get back to sleep. It’s too early to call Ravi, so I stare at the slowly brightening ceiling and try to piece togethe
r the images from the dream, to put my finger on what I’m missing. The feeling of grasping for something just out of reach is real, like when a word gets trapped on the tip of your tongue. It’s not the leftover confusion of my dream—I’m sure of it.

  The alarm sounds before the answer comes. I roll out of bed annoyed and tired. The feeling clings on the drive into school, and I’m irrationally irritated by the ceaseless perkiness of Cassidy’s friends.

  “Punch me,” I order Ravi on the walk in.

  “Or not,” he says. “You okay?”

  I’m going to have to be, tired or not. I have interviews to do, and no one wants to open up to a cranky journalist.

  Emma’s funeral was two days ago, and while I have no intention of reporting on the actual event, I thought a profile piece, with quotes from friends and teachers, would be a thoughtful way to close the coverage on her death.

  “Just tired.” I shake my head, swallow a gulp of coffee, and try to set aside the crabbiness. “Let’s do the long way.”

  Instead of heading straight inside, we veer off onto the grass to walk around to the teachers’ entrance in back.

  “Well, I have good news,” he says. “I was going through the I Am Maplefield pictures last night, and we have almost three-quarters of the school done already.”

  “Nice.” We’re still spending Directed Study in the studio, but since Emma’s death, we’ve only seen four students: three freshmen and Jacob Harris, who had been high and sporting an impressive black eye. We gave him a whiteboard anyway, since being high at school was pretty much Jacob’s entire brand, and he wrote I Am A Disaster in huge bubble letters. We couldn’t disagree.

  Ravi offered to reshoot him when the shiner cleared up, but Jacob just smirked and said, “This is who I am, man.”

  The photo didn’t turn out as awful as I’d expected, given the state of his face. Ravi, being the master that he is, managed to make it look ironic and funny instead of sad and pathetic. Everyone knows Jacob is practically raising himself since his father is a long-haul trucker who leaves for weeks at a time. It’s an open secret that he deals, and rumor has it that his dad not only knows but encourages it. The only reason he’s still in school is because that’s where his clientele is.

  “What are you thinking about your end of things?” Ravi asks. “With the curse. Do we keep pursuing that or should we talk to Mr. Monroe about switching topics?”

  I’ve barely thought of the curse since everything that had happened with Emma. “I think we keep going,” I say. “We obviously leave Emma out of it, and probably Liam too now, but the other disappearances are still relevant. I can shift the emphasis to the origin of the urban legend rather than an investigation into each person. Or not. People die, even students, and the world goes on. By the end of the year, if the curse strikes again, we’re going to regret not being ready.”

  “I should’ve brought you donuts today.”

  The warning bell rings from inside.

  “You really should’ve.” I exhale a hard breath through my nose and kick at a patch of mulch. I gotta get over myself. “Okay. Acknowledge and set aside. Acknowledge and set aside.” I plaster on a smile in an attempt to trick my brain into believing I’m cheerful.

  “That working?” Ravi asks, a skeptical look on his face.

  “Enough.” And it is, right up until something punctures my foot and deflates my zen. I bite back a yelp, but not the curse that follows it. “Dammit!”

  “What? What’s wrong?” Ravi snatches the coffee cup from my flailing hand before I spill it on either of us.

  “Something stabbed me in the friggin foot.” I grab his shoulder for balance and yank my shoe off. A shard of bark protrudes from my sock. I pluck the offending splinter out and freeze.

  This is it.

  This is the thing from the dream that I missed. It wasn’t the birds that triggered the feeling, or the incongruous dress.

  It was the walk.

  I drop my socked foot to the ground, barely feeling the cold asphalt through the thin cotton, and clutch Ravi’s arm. “Her feet,” I say, waving the piece of mulch at him. “Ravi, her feet. Holy shit.”

  He looks more than a little concerned about my sanity, but I know I’m right. I shove my foot back into my shoe, exhaustion a distant memory now. “Do you still have the photo? The one of Emma? From the woods?”

  He nods warily. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Is it on you?” I’m already reaching for his bag. “I need to see it.”

  He shakes his head. “No, it’s at home. I switched to a new memory card. It was too weird to be walking around with that on my camera all the time.”

  I grab his sleeve and pull him back the way we came. “We need to get it. Now.”

  “What’s going on? We can’t just leave school.”

  “Says who?”

  “You drove Cassidy, remember? You need to take her to the barn later.”

  “Yeah, that’s later. It’s fine. We can be back by then.” I’m practically jogging now that his car is in sight. “I need to see the picture.”

  “Larson’s gonna catch us,” Ravi protests. “I’m all for skipping, but this is a little blatant.”

  “No, she won’t. Bell already rang. Let’s go.”

  He unlocks the car doors. “If they call my parents, I’m blaming you.”

  I don’t fill him in on what’s going on yet, not until I can back it up with proof, but I keep turning it over and over in my head, all the worst details from the scene, and I know in my bones that I’m right about this.

  I don’t even bother raiding the kitchen at Ravi’s like I normally would. I march straight upstairs before he even has the door shut.

  “You know, I have no idea what you’re on about right now, but you’re kinda pissing me off.” Despite the words, his tone makes it clear that he is more intrigued than angry.

  “Show me the picture and I’ll explain. I need the picture first.” I sit on his unmade bed and wait while he boots up his laptop. He rolls his desk chair over to the bed and sets the computer beside me. I don’t remember it being so unbearably slow before.

  Ravi straddles the chair backward, slots the memory card in the reader, and hesitates. “You sure you want to see this?” The look on his face says he definitely does not.

  “Yes. Open it up.”

  The scene is less shocking on the computer screen than it had been in real life. I’ve had enough time with the image in my head to know what to expect, but the shimmering purple fabric looks like liquid in Ravi’s photo, light glinting off the folds, and I’m again gripped by the surreal thought that I’m looking at a fashion shoot.

  “Zoom in on her feet,” I say. My heart is pounding, but my finger is absolutely steady as I point to the spot I need to see. Journalist brain is in full control.

  Ravi does as I ask, magnifying Emma’s bare feet until I can make out a slight chip in the polish of the pinky toe on one foot and the faint lines on the sole of the other—the one that twists at such an unnatural angle.

  “Holy. Shit,” I whisper. This is huge.

  “What? What’s so important about her feet?”

  “Look at them.” My mind is positively racing. “What do you see?”

  “Feet,” he says, starting to sound annoyed. “Girl feet. Nail polish, smooth skin, no scaly bits like I have.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?” He’s clearly sick of being one step behind.

  I laugh—a short bark of a sound that could almost be mistaken for distress. Almost. “You see, but you do not observe. Her feet are smooth. They’re clean. The polish is intact.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “And where are her shoes? She’s got this fancy dress on—totally impractical, by the way—but where are her shoes?”

  “I don’t know,” Ravi says slowly. “She was barefoot. I don’t remember seeing shoes. Maybe she didn’t wear any?”

  “Then how are her feet so clean? There’s not a speck of dirt on them.
If you walked through the woods barefoot for even a few steps, the soles of your feet would be caked with dirt. But hers look like she just had a pedicure.”

  Ravi stares at me, and I see the moment it comes together for him. He goes to lean back in the chair, realizes he’s sitting backward, and flails for a moment before regaining his balance. “You mean—”

  “I mean.” I can’t help the grin that starts. “Emma didn’t kill herself at that tree. She was left there. This isn’t a suicide. It’s a murder.”

  Once separated, the boy grew terribly jealous of his sister, who was more like a chameleon than a girl at all. While they were in the womb, she had stolen all the charm and sucked in all the confidence and left the boy with nothing. He knew she loved him—when they were little anyway—but he also knew she was tired of him. She never said it out loud, but she didn’t have too. They were twins. They didn’t have to say things to know they were true. Not like other people.

  She thrived in their separate classrooms, even though she liked the same things as the boy: Star Trek and rockets and entomology. It was just that she knew how to hide it. She could be whatever anyone wanted. The boy could never figure out how to do that. It felt like a betrayal of his very self, and besides, passion wasn’t meant to be contained. There was nothing better in the world than being so excited about something that your face hurt from smiling. He couldn’t understand why that joy made people uncomfortable, but he knew it did, and he came to hate the things that made him happy.

  That hate grew to be his constant companion, filling the spot his sister belonged in. He hated his face, with its too many freckles and too-close eyes. He hated the hard lumps that sprouted on his injection sites—lumps he never saw on his sister despite using the same brand of needles and the same insulin. He hated his parents for cursing him and hated the teachers for ignoring the kids who picked on him. But most of all, he hated the pair of effortlessly graceful and athletic boys, with their loud shouts and dirty jokes, who fouled him so hard during gym that he had to hide the bruises beneath long sleeves and jeans, even in the heat, just so his parents wouldn’t ask questions.