Chapter 10
We made camp in a Walmart parking lot that evening.
The location was less…idyllic than the campgrounds we’d passed along the way.
And arguably a lot sketchier. But as soon as we parked, the girls got out and began to unpack, the way they did every time they camped, much to the amusement of our nearby neighbors, a group of men smoking around their muscle cars, showing them off to each other.
But none of the girls seemed to care…or even notice them.
Nor were they particularly concerned about being chased out of the parking lot by Walmart staff, claiming that no one ever disturbed them.
Another perk of working on behalf of Death.
As usual, the girls channeled their energy into making a home of the parking lot, which, as far as I knew, we were only supposed to stay in for one night.
I couldn’t help but feel like their efforts to nest and decorate were wasted on a place as seedy as this one.
It was one thing to set up in an RV park, where others were doing the same, or empty expanses of BLM land, where everyone was, more or less, left to their own devices.
But I wondered how they could be so relaxed in the parking lot of a rundown town with a leering group of men just a few yards away.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who noticed them staring, but I saw that Chloe was watching them, too, her gaze hard and unblinking.
Next to Shiloh—who kept her cards close to her chest, never talking about the circumstances of her near-death experience—Chloe was the most withholding girl in the group.
But I didn’t realize this at first, mostly because she liked to spin stories, strange scenarios and wild tales that became increasingly ridiculous until you realized they were lies.
“I don’t tell this to just anyone, but…my near-death experience was a bouncy house caught in a windstorm,” she’d said to me the day that I joined the group.
“I had a good grip on the netting, but my mom fell out. It’s the nails that did her in, acrylics.
They were so long she couldn’t close her hand into a proper fist. That’s why I get gel sets. They remind me of her.”
Gullible as I was, I’d offered her my most sincere condolences, only for her to change the story the next day, citing a bank robbery gone wrong, a gun pressed to her temple.
I quickly learned to save my sympathies. Chloe didn’t want my pity, anyway.
Still, the mystery of her near-death was a source of perpetual curiosity, especially as I learned the other girls’ first brushes with mortality.
There was Riley, diagnosed with a rare and aggressive bone cancer at just three years old that she’d fought for her entire childhood.
During her sophomore year of high school, after three years of remission, it metastasized.
Her oncologists tried and failed to kill it, first with bouts of radiation and then with bone saws, removing the cancer from the femur, replacing it with steel.
The doctors told her there was nothing more they could do, and that same night, Shiloh appeared at the foot of her bed with an offer from Death.
Naomi’s story was similarly tragic. She’d found herself homeless in the dead of winter after fleeing the last of a series of horrible foster homes. She was sleeping in a playground, half-dead with cold, when Shiloh appeared and offered her a way out, a warm car to sleep in.
Iona’s was a car accident, two days after she passed her driver’s exam. “I wasn’t the one at fault,” she’d assured me the first time I rode in the station wagon with her.
Skye didn’t even know, or seem to care, about the circumstances of her near-death.
The girls had just turned up at her home in Palm Springs, laid out their terms, and made her an offer that sounded not only better than death, but better than spending the long months of summer at home with her mother and the bevy of her pretentious D-list socialite friends who flocked from LA every summer.
“I think I was just really, really bored,” she’d said to me just yesterday, at a gas station in the middle of the prairie. “Maybe that was how I was supposed to go. Death by ennui.”
The girls seemed to bond through these near-death experiences, trading stories and showing off their battle scars around the fire.
But I sensed that Chloe’s story was decidedly different and darker than that of the other girls.
I could tell by the way the girls exempted her from all their grim discussions and posturing.
If they referred to Chloe’s near-death at all, they did it in vague whispers when she wasn’t around.
But I didn’t need the details to understand.
It was a story I’d heard before, one I feared.
A girl walks home alone at night, and a car slows to a stop beside her.
A door opens, and a man emerges, stepping onto the sidewalk.
There’s a snatching and a scream. Flailing limbs and nails dragged through thick flesh.
None of it enough in the end.
Chloe’s story would have ended the way the stories of so many before her had, but Death intervened with an offer that she took.
I’m not sure when the offer came, if it was before the worst or after.
No one knew how long she’d had to wait to be rescued, if she ever was.
Maybe she’d freed herself, fighting off her attacker and fleeing into the night.
It was hard to believe what she’d been through, looking at her then as she stared down those leering men across the parking lot.
Most girls have a way of shrinking themselves under the gazes of the men that want them, the fear compacting them into these tiny, hunched versions of themselves.
At least, that’s what I used to do, having read all the statistics and digested copious amounts of true crime.
I knew all the grisly ways that men like to hurt girls like me, and I’d spent the bulk of my teenage life trying to avoid a series of tragic and gruesome ends.
I walked home with a small canister of pepper spray in the front pocket of my backpack.
I wedged my keys between my knuckles and gripped them tight.
I used to keep a tracking app on my phone so that my parents (and ex-boyfriend) always knew where I was, so that even if the worst happened, they had a better chance of finding whatever was left of me.
But Chloe wasn’t like that.
She was unafraid. Defiant, even.
The men took notice of the way she seemed to grow taller under the weight of their gazes…
instead of shrinking like she was supposed to.
At first, they were perplexed, laughing awkwardly, milling about in circles, dragging on their cigarettes with a kind of agitated franticness.
One of them even pointed at her with a quick jab of his thumb as if to say Get a load of this.
But their awkwardness and good humor quickly became something else the longer that Chloe held them in her unflagging gaze.
The men could stomach, with some unease, the disregard of the other girls. But they resented Chloe, as if she’d taken something from them.
When one of them spit a bloody dip of chewing tobacco in Chloe’s general direction, Shiloh stood up. And I realized that she’d been watching them all along, tracking their every move from her periphery.
In fact, all the girls had.
They stopped what they were doing—conversations dying into silence, peals of laughter cut abruptly short—and stood with Chloe, unflinching.
I saw the moment the men realized they were in danger, some quiet instinct within them cuing them into the truth.
It was as if they saw us for what we were.
Small deaths incarnate. The power to kill in the palms of our hands.
As they retreated to their respective muscle cars, a kind of smugness came over me, a small and sweet taste of what it must’ve felt like to be fearless.
To be like them.
To be Death himself.