“That’s what the prosecution thought. And the jury too.” Erik takes the flashlight from the tree. And then the world disappears as he turns its beam directly on my face.
“No evidence anyone else had been in the shed. You were found soaked in her blood, the weapon in your hand.” Erik’s voice for once is painfully slow. “No thermos was found. No drugs in your bloodstream. The only evidence we have Mr. Moody even existed is that Rose told you he did. And she lied to everyone.”
The world is a haze of blinding white, my eyelashes refracting into dark rainbows at the edge of my vision as my eyes fight to close. But I stare at him through the light, hands balled into fists.
“But I don’t buy it,” he says, and the flashlight cuts away.
“Why not?” I ask the dark.
“Call it instinct,” Erik says. “I see the angel and I want to set her free.”
So he still doesn’t believe I did it. I could sob with relief. But why does it matter what Erik thinks? When did he get so much power over me? Erik’s pop idol dimples flash as he keeps talking, but I’m not listening anymore. I’m remembering one of the first things he said:
“You find a person’s weakness, right … Then you get friendly and slowly make them believe that weakness is gone. Once they believe that, boom. You break right through it, right into their heads.”
Erik said he wanted to talk over my case because he was bored. But maybe what he saw in me wasn’t a new puzzle, but a new victim. He never believed I was innocent. He thinks I killed Rose and she’s his way into my head. Why else would the deadliest guy in camp spend so much time with me?
“So, Watson, here’s the questions we need to ask to solve this crime,” Erik goes on. “Why did Rose keep Jaw such a huge secret? Why did she need to get you drunk? And who drugged the thermos?” He looks over his shoulder toward me. “Any thoughts?”
“No,” I say, gripping the other shovel. “Look, I can take it from here. You can go back to camp.”
“Uh, what?” He frowns. “Why?”
“Maybe because you just stuck a flashlight in my face and interrogated me?” I snap.
“Yeah? And? I wanted to see your face.” Now he’s acting baffled. “I told you. Everything comes through in your expressions.”
“How stupid do you think I am? This whole time you’ve just been trying to get in my head!”
Erik’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh. Okay. I see.” He stabs his fingers into his chest in a flash of anger. “I’m out here burying your mannequin, trying to help with your wrongful conviction, and you still think I’m just some creeper out to get you, right?” He lets out a sharp, exasperated laugh. “I’m sorry, Signal, but if you’ll let me just make myself a little vulnerable here, you’re starting to hurt my feelings.”
“Come on, Erik.” I roll my eyes. “We both know you don’t have feelings.”
His mouth contracts and some unnameable expression flares up and is gone before I’m sure it’s there, the air going stiff as he turns away and tamps the earth down on the grave. He doesn’t say anything, won’t look at me as he finishes. Like he’s actually offended. Like he was really being sincere, as if he’s even capable of sincerity. Everything he does is a manipulation.
“You know those scars on Javier’s knuckles?” Erik says at last, kicking leaves across the packed-down dirt. “He tore them open on his victim’s skull. Javier banged his victim’s head on an asphalt drive so many times they had to identify the dude with dental records after they picked his teeth out of the pavement. You should ask him to tell you about it the next time you’re mooning over each other in a dandelion patch.” I open my mouth, then close it. He snatches the flashlight from the tree, catches up the two shovels, and starts sauntering back through the birch grove toward the woods. I fall in beside him, the silence between us extended and uncomfortable.
Then he starts in again once we’ve returned the shovels to the obstacle course shed, blurting: “Your silence speaks volumes, by the way.”
“There’s a reason I didn’t want to do the Scavenger Hunt today, Erik.” I stare icily straight ahead as we cross the obstacle course field. “I’m trying not to judge everyone by their past. Only by how they act here and now.”
“Except for me,” Erik says viciously. “Everyone gets a fresh start except mean old Erik.”
“You’ve been calling me a weakling and telling me I don’t belong since I got here!”
“Yeah, and I’m right!” he says with cold fury. “Maybe that’s what really bothers you about me. I don’t pretend either of us is something we’re not. I don’t ask you to make me daisy chains in a meadow or tell you you’re a flower. I’m just myself with you, terrifying though I may be, because I trust you can handle it. But you can’t. You’re determined to think the worst of me!”
“Erik, you killed ten people!”
“And you haven’t even asked my side of the story!”
“Erik!!” I almost laugh at the audacity of the statement, yet his stung expression is completely serious.
“I asked you, at least,” he says, and now the cabin and Kate’s glowing cigarette are in sight, he strides head of me without a backward glance.
“You finish with the body?” Kate extends her arm, blocking me before I can follow him into the cabin.
“Of course.”
“Then get right in bed. No talking, straight to sleep.”
I guess she’s still mad about me ruining their stupid Scavenger Hunt. My head is buzzing with everything I still want to say, but Erik’s vanished up to his bunk, and I know everyone is lying there awake and starving and at least a little angry at me. So I shut up and go to bed.
Night bird sounds, the rustle of dry leaves overhead. I’m in the shed.
Dark lines of Rose’s hair trail over my knee in one slow, steady pull, tickling the back of my hand. Because Rose’s head is rising. It floats up from my lap and her body like a balloon. Her face is turned away, I stare at the bluish white of her scalp through her thick hair. And then once her head is level with mine it slowly, slowly starts to turn.
I can’t move.
For a moment Rose’s profile is cut out against the dark in perfect detail, and then those blank eyes lock with mine. Her lips part, her bloodstained teeth clatter, her thick tongue worms in the dryness of her mouth, but no voice comes out. She will never speak again.
In my lap, her body twitches. Her pale hands walk themselves like spiders up to her neck and clutch there, fingertips digging into the red meat. The body rolls into a kneel across from me.
I watch, paralyzed, as Rose’s hands rake the air, catch her head and awkwardly pull it onto her neck. Rose, back together, kneels across from me, a line of red across her throat.
There’s a figure behind her, and at the sight of it a burning scent fills the shed. The figure is too tall, too thin, saggy gray skin hanging from its bony frame. It doesn’t have a face, just a flat flap of pale skin. It ducks behind Rose and then starts crawling around the room, hands moving back and forth, the burning smell so harsh I squeeze my streaming eyes closed.
Rose screams, a howl that cuts through me with almost physical force, it is so deeply animal, so full of fear.
White fills the air, obliterating Rose like an overexposed photograph. Then the white narrows down to two bleached rainbows arching through the window, and Rose is gone.
In front of me are the Marilyn and Elvis figurines, grown life-size. But Elvis has white-blond hair, and Marilyn’s curls are dark brown. They’re embracing, faces smashed together, their hands moving over each other’s bodies.
A male voice, strange and slow: “Come here and I’ll give you a real kiss.”
Marilyn turns to me, her dark hair spiraling down over her shoulders, and the room goes white again, but slowly this time. As though fading into gathering mist.
Click!
The mist clears at once, and Elvis’s blank face is right next to mine, his hand splayed across my cheek. He has no eyes, no mouth, his features are just blunt shapes. His formless mouth covers mine and I taste sweet smoke.
“This is messed up,” he laughs into my ear.
“She’s completely out. Just one picture.” Marilyn’s mouth is a red streak all the way down her throat.
“How much did she drink?” Elvis says, on all fours, backing away, then he rolls himself up to standing. “What if she wakes up? Sorry I’m so late.” Elvis walks backward out the door and down the path, as Marilyn rushes over and kneels in front of me, her hand on my cheek. But she’s not Marilyn anymore. She’s Rose: whole, unbroken, alive, and I start to cry.
“Why isn’t he here? He’ll know what to do,” Rose says, her fingertips brushing at my hair. “I’ll have to tell you all about it when you wake up.”
“ROSE!” I wail. “ROSE!!!” I reach for her, but she slips away, the shed dissolving as a strong hand reaches through the wall and grabs my shoulder.
“Signal, wake up!” Nobody cries, shaking me.
The lantern next to my bed blinks on. It was just a dream. It was just a dream.
Javier stands just behind Nobody, a red Sharpie slash across his throat.
“Troy?” Kurt calls, high and panicked. “Where are you?!”
“Right here,” Troy answers. “Chill out man, you’re okay.”
“You kept calling for someone named Rose?” Nobody says in her gruff voice.
Confusion melts into the sick awareness that everyone is looking at me, all curled up, crying. “It was just a nightmare.” I sit up, scraping my hair back from my clammy face. “Sorry guys, false alarm. Everything’s fine.”
“Um, I’m not fine!” Troy announces. “I thought Dog Mask was dragging one of the girls out of the bathroom or something.”
“You okay?” Javier asks quietly, settling onto the bunk beside me.
“I’m fine, I … It just felt so real.” Javier rests a hand on my shoulder and I sag with relief at the contact, my hand flying up to cover his, and that’s when I feel them.
Javier’s knuckles are crisscrossed with raised, wormy lines of scar tissue, like beads of badly welded steel.
That’s when I see Erik, sitting on his top bunk, hair mussed but his eyes clear, staring at me through the haze of the lantern.
I hold Javier’s hand tighter.
“Wait a second, is it … is it raining?” Dennis says sleepily, and a momentary hush follows as we listen. There’s a sporadic drumming on the tin roof, and in the silence it grows steady.
The boys all groan, and Erik turns and spiders down from his bunk, then yanks down his sleeping bag. Dennis’s pillow lands on the floor beside me, thrown from above.
“What’re you guys doing?” Jada yawns.
“Last time it rained the water leaked down the inside of the walls. Everybody’s bedding got wet. We’ll be drier in the middle of the cabin.”
“On the floor?” Jada gasps. Erik throws his bedding down just a few feet from my bunk. He stretches along it, hands under his head, and peers up at me, his expression impossible to read. There’s a small rumble in the distance, and the drumming on the tin roof grows harder.
“The girls’ cabin never leaked. Why didn’t they just move us all in there?!” Jada grumbles, pulling her sheets away from the wall.
“Too close to the woods,” Nobody says darkly. “Where Dog Mask is.”
“Hey, Signal, c’mere …,” Javier says softly, and leads me over to the bathroom. He looks around furtively, making sure no one has followed us in, then leans in and says, “I managed to get these from the pantry before lights out. When Jada came back and said you’d been digging, I figured you’d need them.”
He pulls back a towel from a stack on a metal chair to reveal a family-size bag of Ruffles and a giant bag of trail mix. With M&Ms.
I turn back to him, touched. “Is it cool if we share them with everybody?”
“… They’ll go pretty quick.”
“I know, I know, it’s just everyone’s hungry and it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault. Not at all.” Javier’s face softens. “But if you want, sure. Let’s make it a party.”
“Hey guys?” I announce as we walk back into the cabin. Everyone is sourly staking out space on the cramped floor and looking vaguely miserable. “Who wants some snacks?”
The drumming of the rain is all I hear for a moment as six stunned faces stare up at me.
“Are you serious?” Dennis says at last.
“PUT IT IN MY MOUTH!” Troy bellows, springing to his stocking feet.
The bags are torn from our hands. Jada runs and gets brown paper towel squares from the bathroom to serve as plates. A couple of lanterns are brought to the center of the floor, and everyone pulls their bedding into a ring to better oversee the even distribution of the trail mix elements. By the time I get my sleeping bag and join the circle, the only open spot is right between Nobody and Javier and across from Erik, who’re establishing each person’s preferences for dried pineapple over M&Ms, or banana chips over yogurt raisins; it all feels so strangely normal for a moment. This is real. The nightmare was just that, a nightmare. I push it out of my head.
“It’s so weird, being up late eating snacks in our pajamas like this. It feels like a slumber party!” Jada chews on a banana chip.
“That’s what a slumber party is?” Nobody asks. “Eating in bed?”
“What, you’ve never been to one?”
Nobody shakes her head.
“Then welcome, this is now your first.” I look around the group. “Nobody’s first slumber party, who’s in?”
“I smell a MAAAKEOVER MONTAAGE!” Troy yells, with jazz fingers.
“Boys do slumber parties, right?” Jada screws up her tiny nose.
“We call them sleepovers.”
“Uh, yeah, and they’re the best. Video games all night and then everybody draws dicks on Kurt’s face when he falls asleep first, and then we dunk his thumb in warm water and he pisses himself and it’s just a great time.”
Kurt jokingly narrows his eyes at me when I laugh at this. “Oh, so it’s cool if we all draw dicks on your face, then?”
“Only if I fall asleep first. Which I won’t.” After that nightmare, I may never sleep again.
“My sisters would always play light as a feather, stiff as a board,” Dennis offers.
“We could tell scary stories!” Jada’s eyes go wide in the lamplight.
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea for Signal right now,” Javier says to her quietly.
“And that’s your business how?” Erik sits upright, his expression hidden from my view by the fall of his loose hair.
“Bro, she just woke up screaming. I don’t think it’s a great idea to scare the hell out of her.”
“I grasp your logic, Jav, but as you’re well aware, Signal has a mouth.” He lets the word hang. “She can speak for herself.”
“What’s your problem?” Javier says just a little too loud. Erik starts to answer, but before he can Nobody cuts in.
“Are fistfights part of slumber parties too?”
“Nope, no, not at all,” I interrupt quickly. “Javier’s right, I can’t handle ghost stories. But maybe we could tell, uh, non-scary stories? Like um, I don’t know, maybe—”
Erik pulls his pillow over his head. “Boring. If you’re all going to stay up telling each other fairy tales I’d honestly rather just sleep.”
“Who said anything about fairy tales? I’m just saying we could tell stories where people don’t, you know, die gruesomely-”
“Everyone dies,” Erik says sharply. “Any story that doesn’t deal with that is a fairy tale. Where do you think ‘and then they all lived happily ever after’ came from? The best case scenario ending is ‘and then they each died alone after the humiliating torture of old age.’”
“That’s awfully nihilistic, Erik.”
“Whoo, slow down, Kurt and I didn’t get to that part of SAT prep.” Troy munches on honey-roasted peanuts. “Nia-listic?”
“Nihilism is the rejection of moral and religious teachings in the belief that life has no meaning,” Dennis says, as though he’s reading from a flashcard.
“It’s a more official term for common sense.” Erik’s eyes flash but his tone is elaborately casual. “Now maybe Signal thinks the meaning of life is to share and care with us like Heidi of the Swiss Alps even when she’s trapped in a damn murder machine—”
“I am no kind of Heidi of the Swiss Alps.” I widen my eyes at him. “I wish you could have met me two years ago. ‘Life is meaningless’ was like, my personal motto back then!”
“And now?” Javier turns on his side and looks up at me. And I was about to try and pull my tough girl routine, but I can’t with Javier watching. Because being a flower for sure means something to him, and it means something to me. So I go with the truth instead:
“Now … I feel the opposite way about it.”
“What, that life has too much meaning?” Erik snaps.
“No,” I say. “Or … well, kind of. I mean … it’s not as simple as one meaning for everybody. Life isn’t just some math problem with one solution, right? It’s … a force. A force that gives and gives … We get a body, and a mind and time, and this huge urge to do something with all of it …”
“That’s the hardest part of prison,” Nobody says, staring down at a line of pretzels on her napkin. “Feeling like you can’t do anything with your time. Like it’s just going to waste.”
“Yeah,” Jada agrees.
“So maybe the meaning of life is what we give back when we answer that urge,” I ramble on. “We create the meaning of our lives, by finding our individual purpose. By pursuing what we love.”
I glance up at Erik, waiting for his sarcastic laugh, but it doesn’t come.
“Whoa, man. Deep, that’s deep!” Troy laughs, pulling on the rust-colored beanie he always wears to bed, then shrugs. “So the meaning of my life is to bang girls and eat candy. How about you, Kurt?”
“I don’t know. I always thought it was like what Dad always says, the most important thing in life is family. Being loyal, having their back.”
“I’m with Kurt,” Javier’s low voice rumbles close to my side. “Life is about protecting the ones you love.”
“What does it mean if some of us think the meaning of our life is to end other people’s lives, though?” Dennis asks. My smile drops.
“Yeah, how does that fit into your vision of life as a force that gives and gives?” Erik demands. “It’s almost like you’re conveniently forgetting the part where life brutally takes everything back, whether you serve your ‘purpose’ or not.”
Javier laughs. “You and Dennis are part of Team Take, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, don’t be so modest, Jav. Sure, you lost our Sharpie fight. But you’re still just as much of a murderer as I am.” Erik smiles at him coldly, and I notice he alone has an unmarked throat. “Everyone in this room is! We’re all Class As. Sounds like we’re all on Team Take to me.”
Jada’s face falls, and Nobody’s shoulders seem to slouch. Troy and Kurt avoid each other’s gaze and Dennis pulls his blanket closer.
“I know I’m a Class A. No one lets me forget it,” I grimace. “I’m sure that’s true for all of you too. The world keeps telling us we’re evil. But what if we proved the world wrong? I am what I choose to do. I am the choices I make.”
“You chose to come here to learn how to kill people,” Erik says. “That’s what this program is. We all made that choice.”
I stare at his stern face. What must it be like to be Erik, to have that insistent voice inside your head all the time, picking you apart? Something else is going on too—there’s more anger in his words than I could inspire, about what I don’t know. Because, as he pointed out, I have never asked his side. I don’t know his life or his past. Maybe he hurts as much as I do.
Maybe everyone does, all the time.
With that in mind, I try and talk to him the way I wish someone would talk to me.
“Well then, this program is not working,” I say gently. “Because if ‘Class As’ are supposed to be so terrible, no one here acts like a ‘Class A.’ You really helped me today, Erik. So did Jada. I wouldn’t be here right now without you two. And we all protected each other from that Scavenger Hunt.”
There’s a murmur of agreement around the circle.
“So what if we keep doing that? Keep protecting each other? What if we turned this camp into a place we actually want to be?”
“In that spirit …,” Kurt asks seriously, “can I have the rest of your Ruffles?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I have three pieces of pineapple.”
“Okay. For three pineapples I would trade three Ruffles.”
“Now that the speeches are over,” Jada says in a dramatically bored voice, a low growl of thunder approaching overhead. “Can we do something fun please?”
Nobody lurches upright and stares straight out the dark window. “Look.”
A bolt of lightning throws the figure outside into sharp relief: Tall, hunched shoulders, the features of his dog mask slick with rain, staring in through the window at us.
And before the next bolt of lightning flashes, he’s gone.