“Was I not clear?” Dave yells. “I told you to hide the body. So what’s this, Signal?”
Something dense glances off my shoulder: a silicone hand flops in the grass in front of me. I wince away before the next body part catches the back of my head.
“What’s this, huh? And this?” he screams, pelting me with parts of the plastic corpse.
In two strides his hand is on my collar, he hauls me up and stares me down. I’m so close I can see the tiny black spaces between his too-white teeth and smell the chemical sting of his harsh soap.
“You FAILED the same test TWICE. You FELL OFF the obstacle course, you FAILED Color War. You’re a FAILURE, Signal. SAY YOU’RE SORRY FOR BEING A FAILURE!”
“Sorry, Dave,” I wheeze. But I guess it’s not sincere enough for him because he shoves me backward, hard. I wind up on my knees again, the others watching in stunned silence.
“You are sorry, a sorry excuse for a Class A! You’re a disgrace to the work we do here. Let’s see if you’ve figured it out yet: what did you come here to learn, Signal?”
He’s angry I’m not afraid of him. But how could I be? What could he do to me that’s worse than what I’ve been through? I woke up wearing the lifeblood of my best friend. I am the Girl From Hell.
“WHAT DID YOU COME HERE TO LEARN?!”
“Not to end up like you,” I spit back.
“What did you say?”
I pick up the head, pressing its cheek to my chest, and look Dave in the eyes.
“You take broken kids and make them worse. That’s not work. That’s a waste. Of all of us.”
“Oh, you’re a waste all right, Signal. No need to convince me,” Dave says, and his key fob rattles in his hand as he points it at me. Finally, he gets the fear he wants. I hold very still. “One of the bodies in front of me is going to disappear tonight. You understand?”
I manage a nod.
“Go,” he says. “Everybody else, with me.”
“She gets a buddy,” Nobody creaks. “Dog Mask—”
“Jada!” Dave orders. “Make sure Signal does her own work this time.”
The rest of them move off, leaving just Jada and me.
I gather up the burnt mannequin parts, aware of her moving around behind me. I turn to see her pulling off her large yellow sweatshirt and laying it on the ground. I figure she’s going to sit and watch me scrounge, but then instead she drops to her knees and helps me pick up the pieces.
“If we put them on the sweatshirt,” Jada says, “we can bundle it up after. Maybe we could do two bundles? That’d be easier to carry.”
“… Okay.” I take my fleece off and lay it by hers.
“Good work back there,” Jada says, not looking at me. “Telling Dave off. The face he made was really beautiful. Like his brain was constipated.”
My own laugh surprises me. She smiles almost shyly.
“Any ideas where you want to hide it this time?”
“No clue,” I sigh. “It won’t burn, it won’t sink …”
“So we bury it,” Jada says. “I know just the spot.”
We take a detour to get shovels from the shed behind the obstacle course. When she slings a sharp spade over her shoulder, I feel a twinge of misgiving.
“You don’t have to help dig,” I say uncertainly.
She tilts her head back. “What, are you like, scared of me or something?”
I grip my shovel uneasily, fighting to keep my voice calm. “Why do you think Dave had you stay? He’s hoping you’ll attack me again. He knows you hate me.”
“I never hated you, wow.” Jada rolls her eyes. “I hated how boy crazy you were when you first got here.”
“I was boy crazy?!”
“Yes. You were boy crazy,” Jada snaps. “Remember running down the field after Javier? Laughing with Erik all the time, all that ‘I’m a virgin he he he’ stuff? But then when I asked your girlfriend why she was cool with it, she said you had a hard time making friends with girls.”
Ouch. “That’s true,” I admit. “I mean, I have a hard time making friends with anyone.”
Jada nods, her eyes wary. “Yeah, well … me too.”
We walk along the forest path through the forgotten playground.
“I had a best friend,” I truly have no idea why I’m telling her this, “and then when we got to high school she sort of stopped talking to me in public.” My face burns, but Jada doesn’t laugh.
“Lucky you. I never even got a best friend,” Jada tells me. “Every time I invited a friend over, my stepbrother would mess it up. I just stopped asking people.” She smiles an angry smile. “I always thought, when I get to high school, I’ll get an amazing boyfriend! He’ll come home and kick my stepbrother’s ass! So stupid …” She laughs, shakes her head. “Like I thought everyone got some perfect boyfriend in high school. Like in a TV show.”
“Yeah!” I nod. “In middle school, I thought, like, there would be some group just waiting for me in high school.”
“Yeah.” Jada grins. “Barbie gets a Skipper! That’s how it works.”
I laugh. “Oh, I was the Skipper. A Skipper without a Barbie.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a Barbie. One of the special edition ones with the big box and sparkly dress and little brush and everything.” Jada lifts her chin, then laughs. “… No Ken though.”
“Yeah? It’s all, um, over? With you and Erik?” Why am I bringing this back up?
But Jada just shrugs, if a little too carelessly. “Eh, we were never official. He’s hot but he knows it, you know? Like he’ll never be some perfect boyfriend, he’ll never be all about one girl like that. And after what I’ve been through?” Jada sighs. “I need to be straight up adored.”
“I mean, that does sound nice.”
“Doesn’t Nobody adore you?” Jada asks.
“You know, we, um,” I hurry to cover. “We mostly sent letters in prison so we’re sort of adjusting to an in-person relationship. Now where are we looking to dig?” Smooth.
“We’re looking for a patch of skinny white trees.” Jada says.
“Like, birches?”
“Maybe? I don’t know all the names of the trees. Right there. Those.”
She points to a grove of slim white trunks ahead, their small yellow leaves turning the air around them gold, and I smile.
“Yeah, those are birches.”
“Right. The ground there’s super soft. And we need to dig the hole seriously deep because we cannot have your girl turning up again.”
When Jada finally declares the hole deep enough, it’s almost sunset. Winded, we open up our bundles and shake the limbs into the dark earth, then take a moment to rest before we have to shovel the massive pile of wet dirt back on top of the mannequin.
“What about Troy?” I ask her as we lie, collapsed, on the cold ground.
“What about Troy?”
“He likes you.” I pause. “He might even adore you.”
A smile flickers across her face. And then a distant whistle carries through the trees:
“JADA! LIGHTS OUT! LET’S GO!!!” Dave calls.
She looks confused. “I’m supposed to leave you here alone …?”
“I guess Dave figures if it takes me much longer to hide this body then Dog Mask can have me.” I try to sound cavalier, rising to my feet and giving her a hand up. The birches have dimmed from white to lavender, their long shadows blurring into the darkening air.
Dave’s voice calls again, angrier.
“Well, you do have a shovel if Dog Mask turns up. And it is a full moon …” She looks doubtfully up at the sky, then back at me. “Just go fast, okay?”
“Okay.” I smile, Dave’s voice calling louder in the distance. “And thank you.”
“I’m glad we got to hang out,” Jada says, and then, her eyes sparkling: “I forgive you for being such a skank before, okay?”
“Wow, thanks. I forgive you for slashing my face.”
“So dramatic! It was a SCRAPE, Skipper.” She laughs, pushing my shoulder as she gets up, and disappears into the trees.
And then the only thing in the woods is me, and the wind, and somewhere, a man in a mask who apparently intends on killing me. But it’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine.
And then I hear a twig snap.
I hold completely still, and whatever is behind me does too. Slowly, I slide my hand down my shovel handle, gripping the wood like a baseball bat.
I swing around, raising the shovel to confront: nothing. I plant the shovel in the earth, my hands shaking.
“You’re fine, you’re fine,” I say out loud.
“No you’re not.” A mocking voice answers, and I instantly flood with relief. “You’re not even halfway done. What have you been doing out here since Jada came back? Making dirt angels?”
“Erik!” I turn and immediately wince from the glare of his flashlight. “You scared me for a second!”
“What else is new?” he says. “Kate asked me to track you down and make sure you hadn’t run into Dog Mask. How’s it going?”
“Well, hmm. I’ll probably just be another, like …” I squint at the hole speculatively, “Fourteen hours?”
He takes my shovel and indicates a pack of water bottles he’s dropped to the ground.
“Take a break, weakling.”
He gets no protest from me. I settle on a tree stump and empty two bottles, barely pausing for breath, as Erik sets the flashlight in the crook of a tree to illuminate the ground and begins digging. The flashlight’s beam cuts a stripe of color across his face: a flash of green eye, his flushed red cheek, the purple shadows cast by the constricted muscles of his clenched jaw.
“Everything okay?”
“What?” he starts, surprised, like someone pulled from a deep sleep. “Sorry if I’m not chatty, I just think I have a pretty good idea how to put Dave’s eye out without him figuring out I did it—“
“Don’t!” I laugh. “Dave is such a loser, he doesn’t deserve anything as cool as an eye patch.”
“It’s not a coincidence your mannequin turned up after your stand-off with Kate at Arts and Crafts. They had to make an example out of you.” Erik leans into shoveling. “But it’s my fault they got the opportunity. We should’ve buried it where they couldn’t find it and use it against you like that.”
“That’s not your fault. I’m just really bad at camp,” I sigh. “Anyway. Who won the screen time?”
“None of us. No dinner either. You really put Dave in a mood.”
“Wow … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. If we’d done that Scavenger Hunt, camp would’ve been a dismal place to live. And we probably would’ve done it, if you hadn’t refused.” When I look up at this, Erik’s eyes flash away from me. “So. You remembered something?”
“Yes!” I cry, “Erik, I remembered inside the shed!”
The only light came from Rose’s phone; its dim blue glow slipped across a mattress on the floor as she crossed to the corner and kicked loose a floorboard: “He always keeps some potion in here,” she said, pulling out the Transformers thermos. She set her phone on a card table against the far wall, its surface mottled with candle wax, and I watched her silhouette pour something into the Thermos lid.
“You up for a little pre-party?” she said, holding it out to me.
I almost choked it all up, it was so bitter. She didn’t see—she was busy pulling things out of her backpack: the ends of two candles, two bowls, a hacksaw, and a package of Hostess cupcakes.
“Ugh. This is gross. How about we break into those Hostess cupcakes instead?”
“You can’t eat the cakes, but I might have a granola bar or something …” She fished around in her bag, pulling out a white plastic disposable camera left over from her parents’ long-ago wedding reception.
Two cupcakes. Two people. I could do the math.
“Does Mr. Moody know he’s meeting me tonight?”
“It’s a surprise. And it’ll be a good surprise if you’re fun, happy Signal instead of nervous, weirdo Signal! That’s what our little pre-party is for. Chug it, ho!”
I finished the cap, my mouth going weirdly numb. Rose put her phone in a bowl on the card table and pulled up a playlist, the music quickly filling the small shed. Then she stood two plastic figurines beside the bowl. They weren’t large, maybe the size of wedding cake toppers, yet the flickering candlelight sent their long shadows dancing around the room. One was a stiff plastic Elvis with a blank pink face, the other a plastic Marilyn Monroe, her feet splayed, her white skirt floating around her hips and her head thrown back. Her face wasn’t blank, but the paint was messed up; her red mouth was one scarlet blob that dripped down her throat.
I knew they were just junk souvenirs, but as I watched I realized they were pulling the light out of the candles, pulling the music from the phone. I tried to tell Rose, my words like cotton balls in my numb mouth, and she tilted her head back and laughed. And then all the light was coming from her. She was the light, and she was the music, and she wanted to dance.
“So, Mr. Moody didn’t drug you,” Erik says, leaning on his shovel and staring at me. “Rose did.”
“She didn’t know it was drugged.” I shake my head quickly. “We drank from the same thermos.”
“You’re sure she drank as much as you did?”
I picture Rose’s lips pulling away from the lid, their gloss undisturbed.
“Even if she wasn’t aware the thermos was drugged,” Erik goes on, “she was trying to get you drunk. Why? If she needed something from you, why not ask while you were sober? Especially considering you did everything she told you to—”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah, it is.” Erik shovels faster, as though to burn away some building energy. “You’re bending over backwards every week so she can get high with a ghost. Why did you put up with all of it? Were you in love with her or something?”
“What?! No! Rose was like my sister. It was just …” I screw my eyes closed and say it. “Sometimes, in high school, a terrible friend is better than no friends, okay?” The sadness of the confession flattens me. “The article got that right at least. I was a loner. A sad virgin loner ‘seemingly obsessed with the macabre.’”
“Signal.” Erik frowns sternly. “Please stop hitting on me.”
And I laugh. In the dark, beside a mock grave, he makes me laugh.
“So the hacksaw Rose brought … Was that the same one that was used on her?”
I nod. “It was a really common type, brand new. The police thought it was shoplifted.”
“And it was under your hand when you woke up.”
“Where Mr. Moody planted it.”
He steps out of the beam cut by the flashlight, his face disappearing for a long moment.
“Have you been thinking about the newspaper stuff?” I ask.
“Yes. A lot,” Erik answers, sending another shovelful of earth into the grave, “Especially about the Windward trust. Rose was a Windward as in, like, Senator Windward?”
“Sort of. Rose’s mom was from a branch of that family. But when she got pregnant at sixteen they pretty much disowned her and cut her off. That’s how she and Rose ended up next door to us in the trailer park.”
“And her real dad?”
“He parted ways when Janeane found out she was pregnant. Rose always wanted to find him but …” All the things Rose will never do bump up at the back of my throat.
“So Janeane was cut off, but Rose had a trust, right? The newspaper said something about trustees and a scholarship.”
“Yes. The Windwards set up a trust for her, but she couldn’t touch it until she turned eighteen.”
“Interesting,” he says, then: “I wonder if it’s set up to exclude spouses …”
“What, like what if Rose secretly married Mr. Moody? I mean, it’d be very out of character. But it would explain the secrecy.”
“The secrecy was because Rose was banging Mr. Moody,” Erik says flatly. “Considering what you’ve remembered about the shed, let’s review her possible admirers: there’s her churchy boyfriend, his violent best friend, and the local drug dealer. You see any obvious overlap?”
There’s something about him putting it so cleanly that makes me see it in a flash. The tension. The love triangle.
“Vaughn,” I say breathlessly. “Vaughn was Mr. Moody!”
Erik walks toward me, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and grabs a water bottle. “Nope. The guy most likely to stash an old thermos full of liquor in a shed is Jabberwocky Whatshisface. He’s our guy.”
“Jaw Itznicki?!” And then, feeling prim, “No way. He wasn’t Rose’s type.”
“Bad boys are every girl’s type.” Erik grins.
“Where do you get your girl information, a T-shirt from 2002?”
“Come on, Signal. How hot was Jaw?” Erik’s grin gets wider. “Rate him on a scale of one to me.”
I roll my eyes, but guiltily remember seeing Jaw at work on Rose’s lawn, looking much the way Erik does now: shirt plastered to his chest, clipping hedges or taking smoke breaks by the planter. I once pointed out the bruises on his neck and Rose cackled: “Um, you mean hickies?”
“Look, I get that the shed is more of a match for Jaw,” I concede. “But what if Rose went to the shed to get drugs from Jaw’s stash … for her and Vaughn? Vaughn said he was getting high with Mike that night, right? I still can’t see Mike doing drugs, but Vaughn? Absolutely.”
I get up and start pacing.
“So what if, after I passed out, Rose went to meet Vaughn at the party, and when they’re high, Mike finds them. And it all comes out.”
“And Mike kills her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. But I could see there being a fight. I could see Rose denying everything and Vaughn losing his temper. And lashing out.” My hands are shaking, my voice trembling as it all slides together. “Erik, that would explain Vaughn covering for Mike! Because Vaughn would need an alibi too. But Mike has a conscience. He couldn’t live the lie. He had to leave town …”
Erik watches me silently, leaning on his shovel.
“Don’t you see? One of them hurt her, and they both covered it up. Maybe initially Vaughn thought he could throw off police by leaving her in Jaw’s shed. Make it look like an overdose. But when he gets there … there I am!” It’s so obvious. How had I not seen it before? “The only person who knew about Mr. Moody!”
Erik tilts his head. “So why let you live?”
Cold shoots through me, though it doesn’t come from the air or ground.
“So he could frame me instead.” Obviously.
But Erik frowns. “Framing someone is hard, Signal. A spur-of-the-moment framing? Before I met you, I would’ve said impossible. Put yourself in the killer’s position: you’ve just killed Rose.”
My chest tightens.
“Your reflexes are on a hair trigger, the woods are full of your classmates, and then you stumble across the only person alive who can tie you to the victim.”
I hold very still.
“He’d kill you. I’m sorry, nothing personal.” Erik puts a hand on his chest in a gesture of feigned apology. “But you’d be gone. But you’re saying instead, Mr. Moody decides to use his precious getaway time … posing Rose in your lap? Planting false evidence? Who even does that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I snap. “A homicidal maniac, maybe?”
“A homicidal maniac might have the urge to frame you, but they couldn’t pull it off. Only a psychopathic mastermind would be capable of that. So if Mr. Moody framed you—”
“If?” My voice breaks. “What do you mean, ‘if’?! There’s no if. He either framed me, or I killed her.” And there they are, the words I never thought I could speak out loud. “I killed her and then blocked it out. Is that what you’re trying to say?”