Through the door, in the crowded hallway, I caught a quick glimpse of Max walking past – still short, still chubby, still wearing his glasses, but different somehow. His head was down, and he was scowling. And then he was gone.
‘You think Rob?’ Marci asked, following my gaze to where he stood in the doorway. She pondered him a moment, then shook her head. ‘I don’t see it. Punching you at the Bonfire last year was the craziest thing he’s ever done in his life, and I heard he spent the whole summer working it off for his slave-driver mom. He’ll be on his best behaviour today, just to prove he’s changed. We need somebody else.’
‘Hey, guys.’ Brad Nielsen flopped down into the desk in front of me, right next to Rachel. ‘What’s up?’ He was a guy I’d known better as a kid, though we hadn’t really hung out in years. He was nice enough, but I found myself suddenly hating him – hating him passionately, almost violently. Who did he think he was, invading my group and talking to my girls?
This was exactly why I’d stopped hanging around people - I didn’t want to think like this. How quickly had I gone from nervousness to jealousy? He’d done something so little - he had sat down in a chair – and I’d felt myself burning with rage. Why couldn’t I just have a normal relationship, without seeing everyone I met as a possession or a competitor? I breathed deep, counting slowly to ten while he talked, willing myself to calm down.
‘Did you guys hear about Allison?’ His face was grave, and the girls leaned in, frowning.
‘Allison Hill?’ asked Marci.
‘Yeah,’ said Brad. He looked at me. ‘You didn’t hear?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘Killed herself,’ said Brad. He swallowed. ‘They found her this morning – wrists slit, just like Jenny Zeller.’
Rachel covered her mouth, her eyes wide, and Marci’s jaw dropped.
‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘What the hell?’
‘It came on the radio right as I got to school,’ said Brad.
‘She just called me last night,’ said Rachel, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘She called me five times – I thought she was just being annoying. I had no idea!’
Another suicide. I looked around the room and saw for the first time the worried looks of the other students: the furrowed brows, the pursed lips, the teary eyes. Everyone was talking about it.
Allison Hill had been a pretty normal girl, as far as I could tell: she didn’t have a ton of friends, but she had more than Jenny Zeller. She was in the choir and the dance team; she had two good parents; she had a job at the bookstore. I’d bought a book on Herb Mullin from her just a few weeks ago.
Why did normal people kill themselves?
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said Brad. ‘It’s nuts.’
‘Suicides always go up during periods of trauma,’ I said, ‘and we’ve had plenty of trauma over the past year, but why teenage girls? They’re not in the target demographic of any of the three killers, so it’s not personal fear, and I don’t think either of them have had connections to the other victims. Did the two girls know each other?’
No one answered, and I mentally kicked myself. There I went again, spouting off about the technical details of a crime and making everyone think I was a freak. I looked up quickly and sighed with relief, seeing that Rachel was ignoring me altogether, too lost in her tears to listen, and Brad was only half-listening, probably out of politeness, while he tried to comfort Rachel. When I stopped talking he turned away altogether to focus on her.
But there was Marci again, looking at me with that same look as before; not judging, and not really studying, just . . . looking. Thinking.
Brad and Rachel were whispering now, locked in some tearful private conversation. All around us the class was involved in a dozen similar hushed conversations, as the other kids struggled to come to terms with their emotions. I watched them blankly, unsure how to react. I wasn’t sad about Allison, I was . . . confused. Angry.
Why was I even bothering with these idiots if this was how they valued their lives?
I told myself I shouldn’t think like that, but it was hard to think of anything else.
Marci pulled out a notebook, turned to a clean sheet and started writing. When she finished she sat up straight and smiled at me – a fake smile, trying to be playful but leaving her eyes dull and sad.
‘I’ve made my prediction,’ she said, tearing out the page and folding it carefully in fourths. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I haven’t thought much about it.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said, handing me the note. ‘We can work together on this one.’
I took the note and unfolded it.
John Cleaver
I looked back at Marci and raised my eyebrows.
‘You think?’ I asked.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘And as for your guess, I have it on very good authority that a girl named Marci Jensen absolutely cannot handle any more school today.’ Her eyes misted up, just the tiniest fraction of a tear, and she blinked it away. ‘Pick her, and who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky, and we’ll both win.’ She smiled again, more real this time, but still a mask of sadness. ‘It could happen.’
I looked at the classroom – a mess of crying, confused students, and still no teacher. It was already five minutes after class was supposed to start. School wasn’t likely to be much of anything today anyway, after the news about Allison. I looked back at her.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Out,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘Out and away.’
The windows in the classroom were dark and blurry, made of some ancient plastic that had yellowed over the years. The sky beyond looked old and sour, like a jaundiced eye.
We didn’t need demons. It almost didn’t matter how many they killed, because we just rolled over and killed ourselves. Would it ever stop? Would there be anyone left when it did?
And I was the one who’d called them here.
I grabbed my backpack and stood up. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Chapter 7
Marci had a much newer car than I did, though, that’s not saying much, and she drove me to her house to pick something up on our way to Friendly Burger. The front door was open, as before, and the twin four year olds were still there – and still, as nearly as I could tell, wearing the same clothes as before. Marci smiled at them as we walked inside, and ruffled the boy’s hair.
‘Hey dude,’ she said. ‘Mom in the garden?’
‘Is school over already?’ the little girl asked.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Marci, holding out her hands. ‘Isn’t that awesome?’
‘Momma’s in the garden,’ said the boy.
‘Why is school so short?’ asked the girl.
‘Because we already know everything,’ Marci answered, leading us into the kitchen. It was old, like the rest of the house, and the kitchen table was sticky with jam that I assumed had come from the twins’ breakfast.
‘Momma’s in the garden,’ the boy repeated.
‘Thanks, Jaden, I heard you the first time.’
‘Do you really know everything?’ the girl asked. ‘Do you know how many stars there are?’
Marci turned to face the twins, squatting down to meet their eyes. ‘Four billion, five zillion, six hundred and twenty-three. Do you guys want to watch cartoons?’
‘Yes!’ they shouted. Marci herded them back down the hall, and I heard a TV come on. A moment later she returned to the kitchen, smiling, and walked to the sink.
‘I remember being that happy.’ She picked up a wet rag, went over to the table and started scrubbing away the jam.
I turned to look at the fridge. It was covered with calendars, flyers, crayon drawings, magnetic letters and more. One of the magnets was a splash of rubber water, with a rubber fish dangling in front of it on a stiff spring. I turned back to Marci and saw her leaning forwards, her hands braced against the table, watching me. I looked away again, at the window this time, and felt suddenly stupid.
Why did I keep looking away?
She probably thought I was a jerk. But just as suddenly, an answer popped into my head: it was my rules again, cutting in to stop me from looking at Marci’s chest. It was a force of habit so embedded that I hadn’t even noticed I was doing it. I needed to pay attention to her, not my rules. I forced myself to look back and saw her standing upright, leaning lightly against the counter with her arms folded.
‘You’re different,’ she said. ‘You know that?’
‘I’m sorry.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t be sorry, whatever you do.’ She grabbed a purse off the counter and held it up. ‘You hungry?’
‘Not really.’
‘Me neither.’ She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down, then shook her head. ‘Can you believe this?’
‘You mean the Handyman, or the suicides?’
‘Any of it,’ she said. ‘All of it. What’s happening to us?’ She caught me with her gaze, staring intently. ‘Did you know the Clarks left town?’
The Clarks lived next door to Max, in the neighbourhood called The Gardens. Max’s dad had been killed in front of their house just nine months ago, when Mr Crowley had ripped him in half. I’d been there, hiding, and I’d hesitated just a second too long to save him. I pushed the thought away and looked back innocently.
‘They moved?’
‘They haven’t sold their house yet,’ said Marci, ‘but they left. Three days ago. Said they wanted to get out before school started, so their kids could start the new year somewhere safe.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Fifteen people dead in a year, seventeen if you count the suicides.’ She opened her eyes and looked up at me. ‘Is that totally freaky, that I know that? Of all the sick things to keep track of.’
It was actually nineteen dead, because Mr Crowley had killed two drifters nobody knew about, and hidden the bodies so well no one had ever found them. One, I knew, was in the lake, and the other was probably there as well. There might be even more; it had taken me almost two months to trace the killings to Crowley, and who knew what he’d done before I found him.
Marci was staring at the wall now, her elbow planted on the table and her fist in front of her mouth. She was blowing into it, her face slack and her eyes moist.
I pulled out a chair and sat across from her. ‘Knowing how many people have died isn’t freaky at all,’ I said. ‘I know them all too. I could probably name them.’
Marci laughed – short and humourless. ‘Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to grow up where people have other things to talk about. Weather, or football games, or movies. You know?’
‘We have all that stuff,’ I said. ‘It’s just too boring to bother with.’
‘I guess that’s true enough. But we used to live like that, you know, boring or not.’
It was time for me to do something – to say something, to involve myself in this conversation. On our first date I’d barely said a word, and even when I was dating Brooke I hadn’t been especially active. She’d planned everything, she’d done everything, she’d said almost everything. I was just along for the ride back then, and now I was doing it again. I needed to act; I needed to
be
. I needed to step up and be a real person.
But . . .
What could I possibly say? Her little brother had said she had lots of boys over all the time – what kinds of things did they say? Did they talk about sports? Did they tell her she was pretty? I couldn’t hold her hand or gaze into her eyes or anything like that. If I wanted to act, I needed to stop acting like I thought other people were supposed to act, and start acting like myself. I was the one she’d invited into her kitchen: John Cleaver. But how much did she really know about John Cleaver?
And how interested could she possibly be in the things that interested John Cleaver?
I spread my hands on the table, flat against the wood. I had no one else to talk to: Mom wouldn’t talk about the killings, and Brooke wouldn’t talk at all. I was desperate to talk to somebody, and if I told everything to Marci I’d either gain a confidante or destroy a budding friendship. But what good was a friend I couldn’t talk to? I wanted to be the real me. I decided to test the waters.