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In physics, Mrs. Montague explains how light exhibits properties of both a particle and a wave, thin fingers flickering above the projector as she points to a complicated series of arrows, blocks, and circles. We are slumped at our desks, throbbing foreheads grinding against our palms, our mouths like sandpaper with the smell of cigarettes and natty light still drifting from our hoodies.
They bring us out, one by one, into the hallway. We have our college acceptance letters tucked into our back pockets, eager to share, and no one wants to be the weak link that brings the entire delicate structure crashing down.
There are two of them, Assistant Principal Burgess and a uniformed officer who smells like old spice and strong coffee.
They are just trying to get some information about a ‘gathering’, last Saturday, a word that conjures covens, bonfires, dark bodies gliding through leafless trees. Sickle moons and sacrifices.
We say:
Wasn’t there.
We don’t know her.
Party?
We’ve seen her around...she’s missing?
Family attorneys are summoned before long, and a wall of silence is erected that makes further interrogations pointless.
In the next period Jerry rallies to give a speech to freshman on the dangers of drinking and driving; Sam heads the food drive, collecting bags of canned goods by the bus lane; Kevin has a pass to leave early to fulfil his community service hours at the local homeless shelter.
If light can be two things at once, so can other things.
At the candlelight vigil, we file into the pews in a line of crisp, dark suits, the same ones purchased for our summer internships. Our parents remark on how handsome we are, eyes lingering on our faces a little too long, searching.
During the pastor's sermon we weep, or wink, our properties dependent on who is watching.
Derek begins a fundraiser to pay for the Cross' search expenses, and Bennet organizes a committee to do lawn maintenance at their home. Glen speaks to Our Lady of Light to deliver prepared meals of meatloaf and rice Krispy treats.
There's a rally at school for Jenny Cross, rows of students watching somberly as Principal Jessup and a line of police officers’ detail the curfew, the tip hotline, the new prohibited spaces festooned with ragged police tape. In the center of the gym floor is an oversized portrait of her, auburn hair cascading in a sheer wave down one side of her face, leaving one half tilted toward the light, the other wreathed in shadow.
She is grinning.
It started small. The coincidences, the irregularities. The shoes that would never come away clean, no matter how hard we scrubbed them, that left a track of cakey, red clay across the floor. Or the strands of hair we found snagged in car doors, or twisted around a car antenna like thin, red ribbon.
Or how that giant portrait of Jenny wound up propped in Derek's closet, but different, her smile wider, the eyes, not how we remember them; they couldn’t have been that hard, that cold, her teeth like ivory shingles.
Then the other things:
Jerry, stumbling off the stage in front of all those freshmen. When the janitors collected his spilled coffee an hour later, they sniffed at its strange smell.
Sam placed cartons of eggs and Cheerios and cheese into brown bags and handed them across a counter at the food pantry. The confused customers returned a few minutes later, pulling from their bags handfuls of damp, charred leaves.
At the homeless shelter, Keven swore he saw something lurching between the cots on the second floor, something that wore a blue and yellow cheerleading outfit, and trailed ropes of rotting nylon cord.
Our parents touch our foreheads, tell us to get more sleep, they want us to be ready for our internship interviews, but we keep staring out the window, or glancing at the dark spaces under doors.
Bennet hands the smiling college adviser his resume and recoils at the charcoal drawing of the girl scrawled there. She is curled in the bottom of a hole, thick, dark lines across her ankles and wrists where ropes have been tied.
At the fundraiser, Derek begins his speech but when his mouth opens, he chokes, claws at his throat, rolls across the stage as audience members rise in their seats. With each crack of his lips black, oily smoke flows out.
The next day the police find the semi, the inside greased with charcoal burns. The stench of something cooked into the seats. In the field they find the remnants of beer cans, a ring of fire, and Bennet's class ring.
Nothing has touched us before. We've always shined, despite our darkness. Not when we cheated, or stole, or spread rumors. Not when we killed. But if a girl can be pretty and strong and kind, and have her future lined up in front of her like a gravel path lined with tulips, then what we did could bring out something else. Rip darkness out of all that light.
And one by one, we crack.
The same officer, the same pungent aftershave, but this time our smug grins have loosened to mounds of ash, our eyes are rimmed in guillotine crescents.
Bennet goes first, called in to account for his ring, but he is ready. The night before he watched, frozen in bed, as chipped fingernails appeared above the frame of his open window, the wind rustled curtains suddenly dying, stilling, to frame the fingers like pale spiders, then the arms, and suddenly her face, all eyes and teeth and crimson hair spilling to the floor.
The party was his idea, he admits. He also supplied the fireworks. The ones you could only buy from the plywood shack off the highway. The ones with the big exclamation warnings fenced across the package.
Jerry got the beers. Paid the gas station attendant an extra twenty for something sweet to add to it. Derek picked up the girls, tossed them in the back of his truck like squealing bales of hay. When he glanced in the rearview Jenny's hair cascaded in the wind like a red flag.
Kevin poured the kerosene, got the fire going, then tossed the can in the abandoned semi cab someone had dumped in the field years before.
Derek handed out the drinks, careful to save the one with that extra something special for Jenny. By midnight the girls were all gone, rides hitched with some of the other guys, or hiked out to the road to catch Ubers. All except Jenny, whose head lolled towards the fire, her face a flicker of confusion because each time she tried to stand she sank back onto that overturned cooler.
We pushed Sam forward, but there was iron in Jenny we had never noticed before, and despite the drugs she realized that the boys watching her around the fire weren’t boys at all, weren’t her friends.
She ran to the semi. Maybe she mistook it for one of our cars. Maybe she thought someone had left their keys conveniently dangling from the ignition like some horror movie cliche. But she clambered in, and her fingers searched the dashboard in vain, just as Sam, giggling, tossed a firecracker in through the open passenger window, into the gas can.
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Parents and lawyers pile into the sheriff’s office, overwhelming the secretary with their demands. But we are eighteen, and the police don't have to consult with them; not when we've sworn off our rights, would gladly stay safe behind concrete walls rather than face the alternative stalking us outside.
Now, we sit in our separate cells. We shake. We ask for forgiveness we don't deserve. We know that she is coming for each of us, that sooner or later she'll appear beyond the bars, glinting eyes and teeth, grin bisected by shadow, brought back by a force greater than physics, something ancient and lethal and just.