34
I sat on the grassy embankment beside the creek and watched as a storm crept down the distant hills, a solid lump of dark cloud and flickering light.
Ginger stood beside me, wrapped in Nicola’s yellow rain jacket, blonde hair whipping around her head as the wind plucked and pulled at her, fickle and mean.
Half in the creek, half on the jagged dirt edge stood an old, dead willow tree, branches spindly and black, bark cracking and peeling away.
When I was a kid, it’d been green, alive, the names of lovers carved into the trunk new enough that they were still tacky with sap.
Now it looked like something from a Tim Burton movie.
What if we can’t find it? I asked. I didn’t want to say “me.” I didn’t want to think about this place being my grave . . . even though it was.
“Then we come back tomorrow,” Nicola called up at me.
She was in the creek, knee-deep in water, hacking at the muddy roots of the willow tree with a shovel.
“I’m not leaving your body out here, Lu.
Your family deserves to know what happened.
We’ll find you. I don’t care if I have to dig up the whole goddamned tree. ”
Ginger glanced uncertainly across at me and then down to Nicola. “We can’t stay much longer. You’ll get struck by lightning.”
She’s right, I added. Either that or you’ll get washed away when the rain raises the water level.
“Also,” Ginger said, “I think the water is rising.” I didn’t have my phone, and she couldn’t hear me.
Perhaps that was a little fucked up. Perhaps I should’ve tried harder to include Ginger.
But I was tired, it was early, and a small unexamined part of me wasn’t quite as ready as I’d thought I’d been to give up the special connection I had with Nicola.
Which, if I was being honest, wasn’t just a little fucked up; it was properly fucked up, far up enough in the fucked-up subscription tiers to come with a free armchair diagnosis. But, in that moment, I didn’t care.
“Just a few more minutes,” Nicola said, and kept digging.
I curled my spider legs around myself and watched her work.
Kyle had said we’d played here as kids. I didn’t remember that. What I remembered was climbing to the top of the trunk with Krissy while he and his friends ran around the creek bed below, splashing in the shallow water and whipping each other with leafy branches.
Krissy and I would’ve been six, maybe seven.
Old enough not to call the dragonflies zigzagging through the air baby helicopters anymore, but not so old not to think it.
The adults had been gathered around the nearby barbecue, the smell of burning meat and the sound of their curses carried by the wind.
It used to be a happy memory, a simple one. Now I couldn’t conjure it in my head without also hearing Kyle’s panicked voice, echoing out of the hole in the ground, hands clutching at his bloody thigh, pale face peering up at me through the tangle of steel rebar.
“. . . I left you beneath the willow . . .”
Below, Nicola snarled, almost as if she could hear him too, and drove the head of the shovel furiously at the willow’s spidery roots.
“. . . I didn’t want you to be somewhere ugly . . .”
Mud, rock, and clay sloshed down into the water at Nicola’s feet, gross and lumpy.
“. . . it was a wombat hole . . .”
Just the idea of being shoved in somewhere so small, so dark, so dirty, made my claws shake, my glue feel cold and choking. I wanted to go home, sit on the sofa, or, better yet, in the sink. I was waterproof now, right? I could do that. I could shower again.
I let myself imagine it. The bright white light, the blast of warm water, the weighty, steamy taste of the air. I missed showering so much. There was so much I missed. So many little things, things I never even thought about when I was alive.
The too-spicy taste of Grandma’s chicken noodle soup, my lips numb, my cheeks hot. The feel of laughter, the sort of laughter that made my eyes wet and my lungs feel high and tight. The feel of running a comb through my hair a few extra times, pulling it back behind my ears.
“Ginger,” Nicola called. “Do you have your phone?” She’d stopped digging.
“It’s in my pocket,” Ginger replied.
“I need a light.”
I watched as Ginger uncertainly slid down the muddy bank, stumbling over roots and loose rock.
She was in skinny jeans, which didn’t help, and sandals, which only hindered.
By the time she made it to the bottom, she was as muddy as Nicola.
She hesitated a moment before stepping into the knee-deep water and wading out to where Nicola stood.
I watched the two of them standing in the slow brown stream, half obscured by the grass and scrub.
Nicola whispered something to Ginger. Ginger whispered something back and pulled her phone from her pocket, turning the light on and shining it at something in the roots of the tree. I couldn’t see what they were looking at. I didn’t want to see it.
“It’s her,” Nicola’s lips said, too soft for me to hear, but it was easy to read. They were the words I’d been waiting for, the words I’d been dreading.
“It just looks like fabric,” Ginger replied.
“It’s Hello Kitty.”
“What’s Hello Kitty got to do with anything?”
Nicola tossed the shovel up onto the embankment and clawed at the earth with her hands. I couldn’t see what she was uncovering, but I could see Ginger’s face. The color drained out of her cheeks, not slowly but instantly, pink vanishing, replaced with a grayish white. “Oh . . .”
“It’s her,” Nicola said again, louder, surer. “Call the police.”
Ginger turned aside and began fumbling with her phone. “What should I say?”
“Tell them we were walking and saw something.”
That’s such an obvious lie, I said as Ginger dialed triple zero, the words spilling out of me so fast they tangled.
You can’t see anything from up here, and who goes walking just before a thunderstorm?
Also, you’re pretty famously the person who was accusing Kyle of my murder.
They’ll accuse you of planting the body.
They’ll say you did it. They’ll say . . .
Nicola looked up at me. The rain was already flattening her hair against her forehead; her hands were covered in mud, her jeans soaked to the thigh.
Despite it, somehow, there was a quietness to her.
An aura of control. “It’s OK, Lu,” she said, low but loud enough to carry.
“Leave the lying to me, OK. I can handle it.”
That’s very noble. Stupid, but noble. You know, they’re probably going to blame you, arrest you. I thought that’s what you didn’t want to happen. A life behind bars.
“It’ll be fine, Lu. It’ll be fine.”
You say that. But maybe we should just leave. Maybe we should just forget about this. Maybe—
“We’re not leaving you here.”
“Yes,” Ginger said into her phone. “Hello? My friend and I are at the creek, and we think . . . we think we’ve found a body . . .”
Lose the shovel, I suggested, soft as a whisper, so none of it would leak into Ginger’s call. The police might have questions about that.
Nicola picked it up off the bank and threw it into the water. I watched it drift slowly away downstream.