Twenty-One
Beck and I settle into our seats around the fire ring again. The sun beats down, bleary and strong. The shadows of the trees create pockets that feel twenty, thirty degrees colder. My face stings from sun exposure and my legs are numb under the shade. I doubt there’s any real way to be comfortable.
I keep thinking about Ivy, about the way Beck spoke to her.
So that’s what Beck looks like angry.
I’d only ever heard about Beck’s fights over the last eight months.
But now, I can see it clear as day. I know what her face looks like contorted in rage, I know how her voice lowers, I know how her muscles tense before delivering a blow to someone.
I was so close to seeing what her bare skin looks like with blood on it.
What would Beck do to me if she knew I came here that night and didn’t tell her? Sure, someone else attacked them, but I’m the one who kept them from being able to escape.
“So what’s on the phone?” Beck asks.
I sigh. “Let’s find out.”
I pull my portable charger out of my backpack and wait the agonizing handful of seconds until the phone comes back to life after its eight-month sleep.
My stomach twists, knotting harder and harder as I make the slow walk through Harlow’s passcode (I figured it out years ago; it’s her dog’s birthday) into her photo app.
She’s got all kinds of pictures from that night, the three of them making faces in the car driving up, images captured of their lopsided blue-and-yellow tent and their tiny fire and partying with the college kids.
Harlow takes a bunch of pictures of some guy, including one where they’re kissing.
A bunch of Opal grinning wide as she dances around the fire.
But around one a.m., the photos stop.
I try one more place.
Harlow’s group chats.
To the group chat titled FOREST THINGS.
The one with only Paisley, Harlow, and Opal.
A lump sticks in my throat.
It’s a long thread, so long I can’t even get all the way to the first messages.
Messages from long before this trip. I can see when they changed it from some other inside joke to FOREST THINGS.
I see them discussing supplies and how excited they were.
Harlow asking when Opal’s getting out of the gas station bathroom.
Paisley asking for a candy bar as Opal goes in.
I see my name, but it gets my heart racing, so I scroll past.
I swallow against the current of tears threatening to overflow, but it’s too much.
I can’t do this.
I practically throw the phone over to Beck. “I can’t deal with them,” I say. “What they did—what am I supposed to feel? Why do I feel so shitty when they’re—?”
Beck’s gaze bores through me, but she doesn’t speak. My thoughts roam to our conversation last night. Has she ever had to discover a group chat like this with her volleyball friends? With her friends from middle school? Maybe she’s not speaking because there’s nothing we didn’t say last night.
Still, I wish she would.
Instead, she takes the phone and starts poking through. “Let me take it for a bit. We’ve done a lot today and,” a laugh escapes her lips, “we haven’t even made breakfast. Maybe we can do that?”
I take a shaky breath and nod. Maybe we do need to take a second.
Ivy gave us a pretty huge revelation about Vanessa, the missing girl, and we still need to figure out how this all fits into the town’s witch narrative and dead girls.
We still don’t know who the killer is, but it’s daytime.
We deserve a break, no matter how short it has to be.
I pull out the ingredients for breakfast. Which, in this case, is my dad’s old trick of a Bisquick Shake ’n Pour.
I add water, shake a little harder than I need to, and start forming them on the little griddle my dad used to make breakfast for us.
I wrap the pancakes around hot dogs we bought and call it a day.
It calms me down more than I expect it to. I blink and almost think we’re just having a fun trip. I can even convince myself for a second that the phone in Beck’s hands is hers and not a dead girl’s.
We eat in silence, but it feels more like we’re saving our energy than that there’s any lack of things to say.
It’s nice to have that rapport with anyone who isn’t my family.
In a way, I guess Opal and I kind of had that.
We were the only ones of our group in AP Statistics and would study together during our shared free period.
I always liked her best in those moments, when she wasn’t looking sideways at Harlow or Paisley.
She was really smart, and we complemented each other, explaining concepts the other didn’t understand.
She was so good at celebrating every grade we got, even when it was shitty.
She loved discussing the niche psychology videos she’d watched the night before.
She talked about not really knowing what to do with her life like that was an okay thing.
She made me feel comfortable with the uncertainty.
There was one time she even surprised me by laughing about Paisley begging her to ask her dad for an audition for his latest film, a dramedy set during Obon with an all-Asian main cast. Paisley could be an extra, Opal had joked, but we’d both agreed she’d say she was too “good” for that.
Yet even Opal went along with that cruel group chat, this whole trip.
What kind of relationship do you have with a person when they fear someone else’s social rejection more than they care about your well-being? Does that negate the connection you have? Does it become fake, or just…make them a bad friend?
What does it mean that Opal is dead now?
I’m washing our dishes when Beck gasps.
“Holy shit, Em, I found another video,” she says.
Another one?
I rush over so fast I nearly fall in front of Beck. She shoves the phone in my face, showing me Harlow’s hidden videos. “But it’s not downloaded.”
The video that might contain their deaths. Their horrible, violent deaths that left the Hornes unable to bury a body.
I swallow. “How long is it?”
“Longer than the other one.”
“We need to go find a patch of service.”
As we move back toward town, more people have started shuttling in, filling the parking lot with minivans and other SUVs.
We even pass a few groups, friends, and families with small children and barking dogs.
My chest tightens as I watch them, blissfully unaware of the tragedy and resulting carnage that took place here.
I find myself watching the group of friends in particular.
Suddenly, Beck and I aren’t the main characters in our own horror story anymore.
We’re the traumatized ones on the periphery who pop in to warn new victims before disappearing from the plot.
I squeeze my eyes as the tears burn again. I can’t deal with the finality of it all. I know everything’s already happened, that there’s no way to save their lives. But mysteries start when someone’s already dead, and they’re their own genre. The truth is worth fighting for.
We end up finding a single bar outside a coffee shop near the mechanic. Jazz music bleeds out from the inside as we sink into metal chairs and agonize over the snail-slow download speed.
Once it’s done, we can’t press play fast enough.