14 #2
I screamed, but not loud, and not for long. Hands crushing. Nails clawing. Throat collapsing. I don’t think the neighbors heard. They were always fighting and I . . . I wasn’t loud enough.
“That’s OK,” she said, even though I knew it wasn’t. “There must be something. We’ll find it and—”
And what? I snapped. He goes to prison, becomes the next “morally gray bad boy,” gets fan mail, maybe a Netflix documentary, parole in a few years, a book deal a few years after that.
I bet the title will be something like Surviving.
But I don’t get to survive, I don’t get to write a memoir, so why the hell should he?
“Maybe there’re others,” she said. “Other victims. Maybe you’re not the last person he killed. We could make a list of missing persons, see if any of them have a connection to him.”
And if they do? Knowing a missing person isn’t evidence.
“There must be something we can do.”
There is something. We kill him. That’s what we can do.
“How?” she asked again, frustration eking into her voice. “Please, Lu, enlighten me.”
Drop a piano on him. Drive a steamroller over him. Fire a bazooka straight into his dick.
“Who are you? Lucy McQuinn or Wile E. Coyote?”
Fine! We get a gun and shoot him! How’s that for a plan?
“Guns are traceable.”
So?
“Hmm. Right. It sounds to me like your plan is for me to spend the rest of my life in prison while you peace out into the afterlife. Your plan is shit.”
Your plan is to do nothing.
“Let me tell you something funny about dead people,” Nicola said, finally, finally starting to sound angry.
“Something maybe you missed on your little jaunt down to hell. No one speaks ill of the dead. If Kyle dies, he’ll become perfect, just like you did.
All that edgier-than-thou bullshit you and Krissy used to pull in high school?
Forgotten. No one will want to hear anything bad about Kyle once there’s a tombstone over his head. ”
I don’t care. I don’t care what people say. I don’t care what people think.
“Well I do. If we find something we can give to the police, then everyone will know what he is. They’ll hate h—”
You think I’m stupid. You think I’ve missed some big, obvious clue because I didn’t understand, because I wasn’t smart enough to get good grades or get into a good school like the rest of you.
“Wha—”
But I do understand. You’re the one who doesn’t understand. He took everything from me. Everything. My life. My future. My family.
Nicola dropped the whiteboard onto the coffee table with a loud clatter.
“I’m trying to help you, Lu. Last I checked, I’m the only one who is, so maybe clean the ectoplasm out of your ears and listen to me.
I can’t kill Kyle. I can’t. I . . .” She takes a slow, deep breath and rubs her face.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m not . . . I promised myself I wouldn’t get upset.
I just want this to work out OK. And if he just dies, he’ll get flowers on his grave. He’ll get flowers.”
Did I get flowers?
“No,” she said after a pause. “You don’t have a grave. You’re a missing person.”
So why does it matter who gets flowers?
“It matters because . . . because it does. I need people to know what he is. I need them to see him, really see him. They need to know that Kyle’s a monster, that you didn’t run away, that your grandma isn’t the one who killed y—”
What?!
Nicola winced and fiddled with her hearing aid.
“I think we need to rewind,” she said. “There’s a lot you missed, OK? There’s a lot you need to know. Like . . . a ton.”
They blamed my grandma?!
“Look. No. No one blamed your grandma. Not officially. I think there was just . . . talk, you know? She didn’t help out with the search stuff. She seemed strange in the TV appearances. At first, when everyone thought you’d just run away, she referred to you in past tense.”
Because she knew I wouldn’t just run away for no reason!
“The police never said anything. It was never official. But, you know, she had a criminal record—”
That was nothing.
“—this big, mean-looking dog—”
Cookie never hurt anyone.
“—and rumor was she was a hoarder.”
Why does that matter? She took me in. She made a space for me.
“I know, Lu. I know. But, you know, once people heard that she had some mental illness—”
I froze time and screamed.
I screamed and screamed and screamed. The sound bombarded me, inhuman and ugly, trapped within my own head, making the gluey cracks throb and my porcelain smile ache, as if it were about to shatter and break.
My anger was a thick, palpable thing. It wrenched at my limbs, clenched tight in my bloated, plastic-stuffed torso.
I didn’t even realize I was moving until I hit the floor, my body collapsing forward with a jarring thud.
Everything felt wrong, the deep rumble that was Nicola’s voice slowed to an inhuman drawl, the pixels on the TV bleeding and blurring, the overhead light flickering.
A world that had felt almost safe a moment before made alien, made ugly.
I crawled, not knowing where I was going until I got there, clambering into the nook behind the TV, a mess of wires, spiderwebs, and dust. I couldn’t curl up, so I folded myself in half, hugging my stiff, gluey legs to my chest, shaking so hard my porcelain rattled against the floor.
“—nd you . . . Lucy?” I heard the floorboard squeak as Nicola moved. “Where’d you go?”
My grandma was trashy, I spat. That’s what you’re saying. We were poor, and bogan, so it was easy to blame her when I disappeared.
I listened to Nicola’s bare feet pad across the room toward me. “What are you doing back there?”
That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what happened? Everyone blamed Grandma.
She didn’t deny it.
This town, I rasped. This fucked-up town. You rich bitches always treat the rest of us like—
“Hey. Hold up. You think I’m a rich bitch?”
You weren’t like me. You spent fifty dollars on a dress.
“What are you talking about?”
At the tea party!
“Yeah. OK. You got me. Years ago I spent fifty dollars on a dress that I only wore once, and I regretted it. How much did that cosplay cost you, per chance?”
Fuck you.
“I’m going to let that one slide because you’re upset,” she said.
“And I get it. You have a right to be upset. This is a lot to process all at once. And yeah, you’re not wrong.
This town is fucked, and what they said about your grandma was also fucked.
But that’s just another reason to go to the police.
If we can find evidence of what Kyle did, we can clear your grandma’s name. ”
That wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t have to spare Kyle to save Grandma. My grandma never hurt me. She was the only person in the world I knew never would. She’d raised me. Loved me. Carved out a space for me after my mum died and my dad decided he couldn’t cope.
Kyle did this. He did all of it. And now Nicola didn’t even want to help me kill him. She thought he could walk away from this with a heart that beat, with lungs that breathed. She thought the police arresting him would be justice.
He killed me. He killed me. He did it with his own hands. Why should he be allowed to do that and live? Why should he get anything less than what I got? Why should my family be the one to take the blame? Why should I have to be the one to settle?
“I’m sorry,” she said after a while, voice soft and calm and careful again. “I shouldn’t have dropped that info about your grandma being a suspect on you like that. I forget sometimes what you missed.”
I didn’t respond.
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” she added. “I never did.”
I stayed quiet.
“And I’m sorry I . . . I know this is hard for you, going through that day again. I’m sorry I lost my cool.”
I didn’t know what she was trying to do. Be nice? I didn’t want her to be nice. I wanted to go back to fighting. Fighting was easy. Fighting made sense. Fighting made the anger frothing beneath my duct tape feel strong, justified.
“And I’m sorry you didn’t think you could tell us about your certificate at Ginger’s party,” she continued, relentless.
Stop apologizing, I muttered. It was just a certificate.
“Hey. It’s more than I ever got.”
I thought you went to university.
“Sure did. For a bit. Got the debt to prove it, but not the degree.”
You dropped out?
“That’s another way to put it.”
But you were one of the smart kids in high school.
“Huh. I’m glad you noticed. I would’ve gotten dux if Chelsea Peters hadn’t swooped in last term with a perfect English score. I never forgave her for that.”
Chelsea Peters was at the party, I remembered. She’d worn a pink dress with tiny bells on the hem of her skirt. Beautiful. Of course. They’d all been beautiful. Shimmery, sparkly, and special.
“You were pretty hot yourself,” Nicola said, which was the exact moment I realized I’d been thinking those thoughts a little too clear, a little too loud.
Don’t pretend you liked my cosplay, I said, low and angry. You all treated me like an outsider, a freak. I know you all made fun of me after I’d left.
“OK. Wow. There’s a lot to unpack there.
” There was a shuffling sound followed by a creak of floorboards as she got comfortable on the other side of the TV.
“Let’s start with the obvious. (A) I don’t need to pretend to like your cosplay.
I do like your cosplay. I thought you looked the coolest out of everyone at the party. ”
No, you didn’t.
“Yes, actually, I did. We all went safe. You went in drag. Like, holy shit. How was anyone supposed to compete? We looked nice, sure, but you? That cinched little waistcoat, those knee-highs, and that crooked top hat? Seriously, Lu, you took no prisoners. I thought so, even after you made me seem awkward as hell in front of Ginger—which, arsehole move by the way.”
I didn’t make you look awkward.
“You one thousand percent did. I kinda hated you for that. And then you and she had this cute touchy-feely-whispery moment, and I hated you even more.”
I hugged my legs tighter and scrolled through my memories, recontextualizing, reanalyzing.