TODAY, AFTER SCHOOL, CARRIE IS leaning against my locker. She’s holding her knapsack, which is black leather and scuffed in a fashionable way, in her hand. Holding it the way she holds all her expensive things, like she gets it but she doesn’t care. Her pearl gray scarf, which matches her, I imagine, very expensive pearl gray wool coat, is double looped around her neck.
When I tie a scarf around my neck, I look like I’m being strangled. I don’t know why.
As she’s walking up to my locker, I check my face for any stray weird stuff because that sort of thing happens to ME.
“Hey,” Carrie says, “It’s Friday. School’s out. Got any big plans?”
“Um,” I say. “No?”
“How about coffee?”
I shove the many bags of popcorn, my school eating vice, into my locker so they don’t spill out onto the floor and grab my giant puffy purple coat, which smells like popcorn, and click my locker door shut. “Sure.”
So we get coffees, then go to the park where Todd Mayer’s body was found.
Which is my contribution to the afternoon’s activities.
I have been thinking about Todd since I found out he died. I also watched three hours of CSI last night, and I want to see the park.
I also overheard three girls in bio talking about how they can’t go to the park now because of Todd.
At the time I was all, “The girls at my school are really really not smart.”
Now that I’m here, it feels both weirdly important to be here and kind of like some high school girl thing where you do something because you want to do something significant and then you realize WHY something is significant.
Because someone DIED here.
The sun is going down. Or it’s down already. It’s hard to tell because the sky is so gray and the gray is everywhere, like an eraser, like a pervasive non-thing.
The lightest thing is the ground, which is one smooth, even dome of crisp white snow, with the trees down at the bottom of the hill poking out like thick black hairs.
“I heard the lady who this park is named after used to bring her dogs here to poop because she didn’t want them to poop in her fancy backyard,” I say, the snow crunching under my boots. I can’t remember where I heard that. Did Mark tell me that?
“Really? I heard she was an activist,” Carrie says, looking at her coffee cup.
“Maybe she’s both.”
The dog walkers are gone. Or missing. You can just see some little footprints, like the little holes left in cupcakes after you pull off all the sprinkles. I wonder if maybe the dog walkers are also too creeped out to come here at night now that someone died here. Maybe they’re keeping the dogs away so they won’t mess with evidence.
Carrie takes long sips of her coffee and stares out into the dark.
I am actually not a big fan of coffee, and mostly I drink it because it’s something Carrie likes to do, so I let the thick black liquid graze my lip before I let it slide back through its little hole and back into my cup. It tastes like tar.
There’s a sound. Flapping. Like a thousand flags. I step forward to see the bit of yellow police tape shifting in the trees.
“I feel like a cop,” I say, in my exaggerated serious cop voice, breaking the silence with a sort of joke because I’m cool.
“Yeah? Because of the coffee or because we’re next to a crime scene?” Carrie asks, not yes-and-ing.
“Both,” I say, now equally serious. “Would you know what to look for, in a crime scene?”
“I think they teach you that in cop school,” Carrie says.
“I think it’s instinct,” I say, with the authority of someone who watches a lot of TV. “It’s like a Where’s Waldo type of thing, where you have to be able to see the little out-of-place details. Have a soft eye.”
“Like what,” Carrie asks.
“You have to ask yourself, ‘What doesn’t belong?’” I say, turning my coffee cup around in my hand. “The out-of-place thing.”
“Don’t killers think about that stuff?” Carrie asks. “If I were a killer, I’d think of that stuff.”
“It could be a skin cell,” I add. “Hard to know you’ve left behind a skin cell.”
“You could wear gloves,” Carrie says. “That would stop skin-cell leakage.”
“Criminals always leave a thread,” I assure her. “Or a little piece of plastic or a footprint or a hair. You could leave a piece of the glove; that’s a clue, too. Or a piece of twine or—”
“Something small,” Carrie says, running her finger over the lid of her coffee. “I get it.”
It feels like we’re standing in a painting. It feels surreal, if I think about it, which I am. I’m actually not really feeling sad. Because I didn’t know Todd. I did see a photo of him on the news. He looked like a goof with big zits and a big ridiculous smile on his face.
No judgment obviously. Since he’s dead. School photos suck obviously.
“Let’s go,” Carrie says, swiveling. “It’s freezing.”
I am walking behind Carrie, watching the edge of her shoes crack the thin sheet of snow on top of the grass, thinking a few things, as I often do.
My mom once wrote a book about a girl who doesn’t have any friends. It’s called Come Play with Molly!
Come Play with Molly! is about a little girl, Molly, who wishes and wishes for friends, and then one day she wakes up and her backyard is full of little boys and girls, ready to play with her.
I shit you not, that is the story.
Needless to say, Come Play with Molly! sucks.
First of all because I know my own friendless childhood was the inspiration and second because the ending is total bullshit.
My mom doesn’t remember actual shit about what it means to be a kid.
If she did, the book would just be called Molly Has No Friends but She’s Dealing with It.
Or:
Molly Had No Friends So She Is WARY of Friends Who Just Show Up All of the Sudden and Act Like They Are Her Friends.
I look at Carrie, who looks pretty fucking cold. I search for my mittens in my pockets.
Carrie’s bare hands are both curled around her coffee cup. Her fingers are thin like icicles.
“Do you have an alibi for that night?” I ask, in my TV cop voice.
Carrie snorts. “Uh. I was home watching TV.”
“Yeah sure, me too.” I nod.
“Oh yeah?” Carrie raises an eyebrow. “What were you watching?”
“The Food Network.”
Carrie scoffs. “The FOOD NETWORK. Right.”
“It was a special about birthday cakes, where these three teams had to make a birthday cake with a car theme,” I say. “Also I watched a BBC thing about a town where everyone hates one another but won’t talk about it.”
I toss my coffee, still full, into the garbage can. It hits the bottom with a tell-tale THUD. “You think Todd Mayer knew his killer?”
Carrie stares up at the snow swirling in the streetlights. “How would I know?”
Sometimes, when Carrie talks, I hear Shirley’s voice. That tinny, quick disdain that haunted my life from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. from grade five until relatively recently.
Shirley Thinks You’re a Waste of Space. A nonexistent and possibly too real title for a children’s book.
At the edge of the park, Carrie looks at me with what feels like some sort of piercing, mind-reading stare.
“We should have said something,” she says. “We should have said something nice, for Todd.”
“Yeah,” I say, “like RIP or something.”
Carrie steps forward and grabs my arm, digging her fingers into the puff of my coat. “Rest in peace, Todd.”
She holds my arm for another second, then let’s go.
“Cool,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.
We walk the rest of the way to Carrie’s bus stop in silence.
At the stop, Carrie turns her head to the side, exhales a long stream of warm air, like a person smoking a cigarette, turning their head to blow out a stream of smoke. I can see it curling into the cold night, like milk in coffee. A little bit of Carrie mixing into the night.
There’s a sharp squeal of brakes as the bus slides into the mush of snow by the sidewalk.
“Anyway,” I say, “I’ll see you Monday, obviously.”
Carrie shoves her hands into her pockets and turns toward the bus. “Sure,” she says, and jumps up onto the step, not looking back.
When I get home, there’s a car in the driveway. A big gray SUV with the motor running. Mark’s best friend, Trevor Bathurst, destroying the environment. I can see him in the driver’s seat, looking at his phone.
I’ve only said like three sentences to him, but I strongly suspect that Trevor is the sort of person who is a dick.
“HELLO!” I yell as I throw open the front door.
Mark and my mom are standing by the counter in the kitchen. My mom has the big pot out, and I can hear a loud sizzling noise. The kitchen smells like watery beans and tomato. Normally it’s my dad who makes chili, the typical dad dinner where a dad makes a dinner that seems like it’s this big effort but really it’s no bigs because it’s all he does other than light the barbeque in the summer.
Because he’s a lawyer and not a cook, he says.
My mom calls out my dad on this stuff all the time.
“Well, I’m an artist and not a maid,” she says.
Right. We get it. You both have jobs. We all have things to do. Why are you telling me this?
Mark and my mom both stop talking when I walk in the kitchen and drop my bag. Like I’ve clearly interrupted something. Mark is pulling on his coat.
“Hello to you, too,” I say.
“Hey, G,” Mark says.
“Hey. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Mark grabs a banana from the basket on the counter. “I’ll be back for dinner,” he says, backing toward the door.
I am suddenly starving, though not for any of Mark’s ridiculously healthy snacks. Like. Fruit? No, thank you.
Mark hikes his bag up higher on his shoulder. “Uh. You good?”
“Yeah. Just hungry.”
“Cool.”
I look in the pot. It’s still a big chili iceberg with chili water sizzling up steam. My mom stabs it with a spoon as Mark walks down the hall.
When Mark opens the door, I can hear the bass from Trevor’s car.
Who needs that much bass, like, ever?
I slip past my mom and to the cupboard, where I grab a box of saltines and tuck them under my arm.
“Dinner is at six thirty,” she says, “Georgia, you know you don’t need a snack.”
I shove a saltine in my mouth. “I skipped lunch.”
Don’t buy saltines if you don’t want me to eat them. Just sayin’.
My mom stabs at the chili iceberg some more. She’s wearing her yoga pants and her old yoga shirt that has the yoga elephant logo she designed for the studio down the street on the front. This outfit means she’s been drawing all day. I don’t ask what she’s working on because, honestly, I have no interest in hearing what part of my life is being pillaged for the learning experience of children.
“Hey,” I say, “did you know some kid at Mark’s school was murdered?”
My mom spins around. She puts down the spoon and grabs my shoulders. “I did know,” she says, in kind of a moany voice. Then she hugs me. She smells like pencil shavings and beans. “God, it’s a horrible world. Stay safe, okay?”
“Okay.”
When she’s finished, my mom releases me and goes back to mashing dinner.
I go to the basement and click on the TV. Mark’s laundry is in a pile on one of the cushions. It’s mostly socks. I cover it with a blanket because it’s weird looking at a pile of socks that still look dirty frankly. Ew.
On TV there’s yet another show about murder. An investigator is squatting in a forest next to a tarped gray and blue body, nestled among a thicket of greenery.
The investigator’s face twists in anger. “Fucking monsters.”
It is hard not to think about a boy being killed when almost every show on TV is about murder, and I watch a lot of TV.
Someone at school said Todd was found in the snow wearing nothing but a pink mitten, which feels like something you’d see in a movie. The only other thing I heard about Todd is that he didn’t have any friends. Which I heard from Taylor Savory, who, like everyone else at St. Mildred’s, dates boys from Albright so I guess she would know. Taylor wasn’t talking to me, just loudly.
“It’s so sad,” she said, twisting her long red hair around her index finger. “Apparently, like, NO ONE liked him?”
I’m well aware that this is probably also how someone would describe me if I was found in the woods with nothing but a mitten.
I wonder if the kids at Albright had another name for Todd.
I wonder if a person with no friends can still know their killer?
Sure, right?
Curled up on the couch, suddenly my fingers are chili iceberg cold.