10
She arrives like a bullet from a gun. ‘Hey!’ she shouts, so loud it almost tips me off.
She raises her arms like she’s going to catch me, like she’s trying to play hero. She looks so much like her dad. I could snap her thin arms that she’s stretching towards me. I could step out of the way. Keep coming, I’m thinking, keep coming and I’ll watch you fall. I look over the edge again, and she skids still.
‘It’s not me who should jump,’ I say.
Her eyes dart down, stare at where my feet are: how close to the edge. I could tightrope walk the whole way around this summit, dare her to do it too. Follow the leader. It’s a kind of detention.
‘Reckon you could jump because of what your dad did?’ I ask.
Her eyes widen. Now I’m playing with her – being a bastard – but I don’t want her to come any closer. Don’t want her to feel sorry for me neither. There are dark rings under her eyes. I’m glad if this means she’s not sleeping: she should be suffering. She doesn’t look away from me. She’s got nerve, this girl.
‘Why don’t you believe it?’ I just go ahead and ask her this too. ‘If it wasn’t your dad that killed Ashlee, who did?’
‘Plenty of people use these woods. All the time they do! Anyone could have been there that night.’ She’s looking at me hard like she knows something.
‘Police don’t think so,’ I snap. ‘Your dad don’t even think so.’
Still, she keeps eye contact. ‘My dad doesn’t know what he thinks.’
I make this weird laugh-noise in my throat. ‘He knows he’s guilty. Even if he says he can’t remember, he admitted it yesterday. Manslaughter?’ I try to stare her out, try to get this into her thick skull.
She shrugs. ‘He’s not well.’
The casual way she says this makes me want to shake her: it’s because her dad’s not well that all this happened. Can’t she see that?
‘What kind of psycho would kill a girl like Ashlee?’ I say. ‘She was perfect, did no one no harm. The longer they lock him up the better.’
She keeps quiet.
‘So which is it?’ I hiss, frustrated at her now. ‘Murder or manslaughter?’
Her face goes blank, switches to a mask that looks like she’s practised a million times. I keep going.
‘Did he meet Ashlee before that night? Because that’s what the papers are saying. Did he chase her there like a bastard? Or do you believe those lies about your dad being in a flashback when he did it?’
Emily Shepherd won’t tell me anything. Although, there, behind her mask, just for a second, I glimpse it: pain. Total screw-with-your-head pain. She doesn’t know what to believe neither. She’s hurting with it too.
‘You’re not tough,’ I say. ‘So stop pretending it.’
She sticks her chin out. ‘Neither are you.’
I glare at her. ‘I should give you your detention. If you’re not giving me any answers.’
I consider the options. My signature sports detentions involve a heap of running and a heap more sit-ups straight after. But I need something more for this girl. She should feel scared, like Ashlee must’ve felt that night. She should suffer.
‘My dad . . .’ she says, so quietly it’s like I haven’t heard her at all, ‘he couldn’t have, he wouldn’t . . . after the army stopped, he couldn’t do anything . . .’
She reaches out and tries to put her fingers on my shirt. I leap back.
‘You mean after he got discharged,’ I say. ‘After he got discharged for killing a civilian?’
Her mask’s dropping now.
‘Is that why he killed Ashlee?’ I continue. ‘He got a taste for it?’
She won’t look at me. ‘Dad was scared,’ she whispers. ‘If he’d heard someone in the woods while he was there, he would have been scared of them too. He couldn’t have stalked anyone.’
‘Maybe you didn’t know your dad! Did you ever think of that?’
‘It was someone else,’ she says, folding her arms. ‘Other people use these woods; other people were there that night.’
She stares harder now. She knows something. She knows I’m one of those other people.
‘He must’ve talked to Ashlee before,’ I say fast.
‘No! He’d never seen her until—’
‘’Til he walked out of these woods with her dead?’
She shuts up at that. I watch the wind pull dark hair from her eyes, from his eyes. The guilt – again – heavy in my guts. It’s my fault Ashlee was in these woods that night. My fault that Shepherd found her.
‘He murdered her,’ I say, feeling my mouth twist nasty. ‘He watched her and he stalked her. That’s what happened.’
I want Emily Shepherd to accept this. I want her to tell me that Shepherd used to roam around these woods at night – that he used to hang round near Ashlee’s shortcut track and that he was a weirdo. I want her to admit that her dad’s murder charge is right.
She waits. She’s not scared of me, not one bit. Maybe she should be.
‘If this is all detention is,’ she says, ‘. . . then I think I should go.’
I hold up my hand. ‘Wait.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Because I’m telling you to. Because I haven’t said it’s over.’
She frowns. ‘Why should I stay here when you think my dad is a . . .?’
I wait for her to say it: murderer, killer, stalker, psycho; anything like that. When she doesn’t, I tell her. ‘Everyone thinks he’s guilty, that he’s a monster. It’s obvious!’
She keeps her frown. My heart is hammering. Just thinking about her dad being innocent of murder gets me kind of panicky.
‘Refer me for a suspension, then, if you’re not going to do anything,’ she says, and again there’s that challenge in her words, in her blue-grey eyes . . . in those eyes that look too vivid, too startling, to belong to a murderer’s daughter.
I’m not giving her what she wants, though, no way. I bend ’til I’m looking her square in those killer’s eyes. ‘Why’d you hit that girl today? Are you violent too? Are you like him?’
I want her to be, because, if she is, there’s no doubt her father murdered Ashlee, no doubt that he’s a liar. That they both are.
Her eyes flare. ‘I didn’t hit her! I pushed her and she fell.’
Now I’ve struck a nerve. Now she wants to push me too.
‘Why don’t you try it?’ I say.
I want her to snap; maybe I want her to hit me so I can hit her back. I go closer, ’til I feel her breath land hot and fast on my skin. She should be dead instead of Ashlee. She should be the one hurting instead of me.
‘Do it,’ I say. ‘Push me! Show me you got killer’s blood like your dad.’
But she turns away. ‘You don’t have to be like this.’
She’s disappointed. I see it in her eyes. Maybe because I’m not who she recognises from school, because I’m not that prefect with the perfect girlfriend and the perfect life. Not any more.
‘Sports detention,’ I repeat, and my voice sounds kind of empty. ‘Or can’t you handle it now? Aren’t you tough enough?’
‘I can handle whatever you want to give me. I don’t care.’
There’s something about her expression that gets me. Why can’t she believe what everyone else does? Why does she have to believe nothing – not murder, not man -slaughter! Maybe it shouldn’t bother me, but it does.
‘A running game, then,’ I say. ‘I run. You chase. Then we swap over.’
She snorts something like a laugh. ‘Fine.’
I take a step back and look at her skinny body, her pale skin, grey-blue eyes. I could run her ’til she’s in the middle of this wood; I could get her lost; make her feel completely alone. Then she might get scared, might believe what her dad did. Then I can drop this whole thing and never have to speak to her again; stop asking these questions that she don’t have answers for anyway.
Before I realise what I’m doing I feel my fingers curling into the shape of a gun, then my hand comes up towards her. It’s so natural, to do this here in these woods, that I don’t even realise I’m doing it ’til I’m aiming my finger-gun at her.
‘You’re chasing me first,’ I say.
Her mouth opens a little as I aim my hand at the middle of where her ribs are. She’s looking at it almost like it’s a real gun I’m pointing and if she moves or tries to run, I’ll shoot. I look down the barrel of my arm towards her and she’s trapped in my firing line. One twitch of my finger, then bang. I imagine what that would be like, to see her body smash apart. I try to imagine wanting it.
‘I’m It,’ I explain. ‘I run.’
My heart is beating like bullets, feels like I could kill her with just them. I move my ‘finger-gun’ back, rest my fingers against my temple this time. That’s when I jerk my fingers upward in one quick movement and shoot, right through my skull. I point my fingers back at her fast and shoot again. Shoot her. Bang. Straight through the ribs. Through her heart. Still holding her gaze, I drop my arm.
‘You’re chasing first,’ I say again.
And I turn and step off from the Leap. Right off the edge.