“Are you all right, miss?”
I sit up abruptly. “Yes! Yes, I’m fine.” I look down at the notes I’ve taken. “Hey, do you remember who else was here that night? Like maybe a quite attractive guy in green?”
“Ooh, well, I couldn’t say for sure. There were lots of the boys in, though.”
“Gee.” I roll my eyes and quote a TV show I watched the other day: “Could you vague that up for me?”
He shakes his head and looks concerned. “Now, why are you worrying yourself about things like this? A pretty girl like you, you should be off having fun—”
“Wait,” I stop him talking by holding up my hand. “Why did you say that?”
“That you should be off having fun?”
“No. You said I was pretty.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“You think I’m pretty?”
“Certainly! Very pretty! Very striking!”
He keeps talking, but I don’t wait to hear him say more. I rip my notes off the waitress pad and stride back out into the main room of the pub. The musicians keep playing, but they all look at me. The men at the bar look at me. The men sat at the little tables in the corners, eating crisps and drinking big pints of beer, all look at me.
I realize finally why the men are looking at me: it’s not just Nathan who thinks I’m pretty.
When I get back home, I run straight up to my room and shut the door.
“Thera, is that you?” Dad calls.
“I’m just doing something in my room!” I yell.
“Will you come down here?”
“Just give me two minutes!” In front of the full-length mirror in my room I take my dress off. Then I take my undewear off, and kick my shoes and socks off, and study myself naked. I sorely need boobs, and my tummy pokes out a little, but the rest of me is okay. I have bruises on my legs. I don’t know where any of them come from, but I always have bruises on my legs. My legs look quite thin and muscular—from running around over the fields, probably. I turn to my side. I am pretty slim, but my bum pokes out. I bet if I brushed my hair, that would look better too. The more the dead girls appear to me, the more I think about being a girl, and the more uncertain I am about it. There are some things I really like about being a girl. I like long hair, and I like that my clothes are more colorful. But I don’t like: periods, boobs, or the fact that someone might kill you just because you’re a girl. The only way a girl is different from a boy is how they look naked, and apparently that makes all the difference to perverts. I expect some perverts like little boys, but most prefer girls like the dead girls.
There are other things I don’t like about being a girl. I don’t like that I’m supposed to be pretty and polite and to behave, and that when I think about all these things they just seem like things that would make killing you a lot easier. I don’t like that I have a vagina. I poke at it. I found it the other day. That’s where the boy’s thingy goes in with sex. I saw it on a video, but I had no idea what they were talking about. I realized when I found it. Boys don’t have a vagina and girls don’t have a willy, so when they threaten you with rape, you have nothing to threaten them back with. I don’t like that even though my body is pretty strong now, it’s going to get comparably weaker to all the boys my age when they grow taller than me. I’m scared I won’t be able to fight back. I think about Billie, and imagine that if she were only a foot taller or a bit stronger or if we’d done a boys’ sport like football or martial arts, then she would know how to kick the man so hard he would cry and fall to his knees. I imagine her running out of there and calling to me across the field. Suddenly she is here, in front of me, with the other dead girls.
So far, I have received automatic writing messages from three of them. The littlest dead girl has not spoken yet, and Billie only said, “Find me,” and that was ages ago.
“Don’t worry,” I tell them. “I’m going to make it right. I’ve been preparing, and I know how to do it now.”
And I do know how, finally. I realized in the pub, with all the men looking at me. I am pretty—it isn’t just Nathan that thinks so—and that’s going to be my weapon. The thing I use to catch the killer and avenge Billie’s death.
Just then, a load roar comes from behind me. “Theeeeeraaaaa!”
“I’m coming!” I turn around and shout, but my dad is in the room behind me. I recoil immediately into the corner of the room.
“Thera, put some bloody clothes on and get downstairs for supper right now!” Dad yells.
Mum comes up the stairs. “What is it?”
Dad is on the landing now. “She’s naked and muttering weird stuff.”
Mum comes in, and I grab my big Disney T-shirt nightie and pull it over my head. “Thera, what are you doing?”
“Nothing! I was just seeing if…” I trail off. The dead girls are standing around Mum. Sometimes it’s really hard to make people understand you when they can’t see ghosts.
“What are you looking at?” Mum casts her eyes about, but she looks over their heads. “Thera, I understand if you’re exploring feelings…”
I frown, confused. “What?”
“But the sort of, um, nakedness on the television program Dad says you were watching the other night is not normal, and—”
“I’m not ‘exploring feelings’! I’m figuring out how Billie was murdered!”
“Enough!” Dad roars from outside. “You’ve got to get off this topic, Thera. Stop thinking about it, it just makes you and everyone else upset. You’re going to Nan and Granddad’s for the whole weekend. I’ll take you tomorrow.”
“You can’t banish me, you pig!” I yell back. I can’t believe I spent all evening finding an alibi for this piece of poo.
He bats my bedroom door open with one hand. “I can send you away to Nan and Granddad’s for the whole summer if I feel like it, so watch your mouth.”
“I have things to do here!”
“You’re upsetting Sam, talking about death all the time. It’s gruesome.”
Sam is crying in his room, but I think that’s got more to do with Dad yelling than anything else.
“Andy, calm down!” Mum shouts, and walks him out, shutting my door. “Of course she’s talking about death,” Mum mutters, as if I can’t hear her right outside.
“You’re the one who doesn’t want her here,” Dad hisses. That hurts. Mum doesn’t want me here? I think Dad means that she wishes we lived somewhere else. “Her friend was killed. What do you expect? With everything going on, it would be better for her to be at my parents’. You know she’s hard to watch, she’s got a mind of her own. She’s too curious about this. Her teacher said she was asking weird questions.”
Urgh, bums. I should have known Mrs. A would turn me in.
“Well, if you hadn’t encouraged them to play anywhere they liked, in the fields, in the—”
“Oh, so it’s my fault now, is it? I suppose we should just coddle them like babies forever.”
“Oh, stop it, Andy.”
“We have to make some sort of decision about what we do with the kids. They’re on holiday now, we can’t just give them no rules because we disagree.”
“Exactly, so what’s the point in arguing and name-calling?”
“I didn’t name-call.”
“You sound like a schoolyard bully, getting at me all the—”
I put my hands over my ears and sink down to the floor. I hate it when they fight. Maybe it would be better for me to go to Nanny and Granddad’s.
On Friday morning my alarm goes off at six thirty, and I run out the door at seven. I don’t tell Sam where I’m going. I know Nathan is already off school for the holidays, though. I run all the way to the trailer park, and then creep around his trailer and look inside the grubby windows. I can’t see any movement. I put my hands around my eyes and squint. It looks like he is asleep. Either tha
t or there’s another pile of junk now on the top bunk to match the one on the bottom. I go ’round to his side of the trailer, reach up and knock near where his head is. I wait for a minute and then I do it again: dum-dum-dee-dum-dum.
There is a little pause, and then I hear a quiet tap-tap. I race back ’round to the front. He has rolled over in the bunk and is squinting at the window. It must be pretty impossible for him to see through too. I wave and make a lot of movement so he can tell I’m outside. He looks like he’s getting out of the bunk.
I put my hands to the window again. Yep. He’s getting out of the bunk. He’s only wearing boxer shorts. His chest is very flat. He is pulling jeans on. They are blue and normal-looking. Now he is taking a T-shirt out of the laundry basket, which is on the table. He pulls it on and his hair shakes around. He doesn’t have those flat curtains boys get when their hair is really thin. Nathan has nice hair, thick and soft. There is a click, and he opens the door. “Hey, you all right? What are you doing here?” he says sleepily.
“My parents are sending me away to my grandparents’ for the weekend, so I wanted to tell you I can’t come and hang out.”
“Oh, okay. What time is it?”
I show him my watch. “Seven twenty-five.”
“Urgh, I only went to sleep at two thirty.”
“Why? What were you doing up that late?”
“Just watching TV.” He stretches and groans. “Mum’ll be up soon. She has work at eight thirty.”
“Where does she work?”
“In a factory.”
“What do they make?”
“Some sort of food?” Nathan says, like I would know the answer.
I nod, as if maybe I do. “Were you okay last time?” I ask.
“What d’you mean?”
“When your mum got home.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You were acting a bit weird.”
Nathan chews on his lip and looks across the fields. “I felt funny. I don’t like this thing about ghosts, Thera. I’ve been having nightmares all week. Mum’s annoyed with me.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I keep getting spooked an’ stuff. It wakes her up. She needs her sleep ’cause she works earlies.”
“Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay,” I say. “Do you want to try again?”
“At what?”
“Duh. At what we were doing when we were interrupted.”
“Um,” says Nathan, and looks down my body and then back up into my eyes.
“See, I have this plan.” I clear my throat. I’m nervous about telling Nathan the exact plan because I don’t want him to laugh at me, but I have to have someone on my team, and Sam’s too little, and he’s scared of everything. “The plan can only go ahead if I can pull some things off while I’m at Nan and Granddad’s. But I need to practice with you now, so I can work out how to be raped and not die. So you have to start, and then I’ll attack you while you’re doing it and fight you off, okay?”
“I don’t know…” Nathan says hesitantly. “I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“Don’t worry, I’m tough,” I say. “A few bruises are nothing. We could try it naked.”
“Um…” Nathan says again. “Naked?”
“I mean with our clothes off. ’Cause Billie’s clothes looked like they’d been taken off and put back on,” I add quickly, embarrassed. I don’t add that Nathan wearing only boxer shorts was interesting to see, and that I wouldn’t mind seeing him without them. Two birds, one stone.
“Yeah, I got that.” Nathan gulps. He looks over to the closed bedroom door. “Mum’s in.”
“We can just lie down in the wheat field,” I say, nodding up the hill. “It’ll be easy.” Nathan looks where I’m pointing. “What do you think?” I ask.
He screws up his face. “Okay. Sure.” He goes inside and sits on the pile of junk on the bottom bunk and pulls his sneakers on, without socks. When he comes out, we walk up to the wheat field. I skip ahead and jump onto the crop, flattening it out all around me.
“Wheat angel!” I call out, like Billie and I used to do.
“You’re not supposed to do that!” Nathan exclaims. He looks around. “We could get in trouble with the farmer.”
“’Fraidy-cat,” I say, and he looks annoyed.
“Okay,” he says. He glances around and jumps in next to me. He lies on his side, gazing at me, and suddenly things get quiet. He swallows again. “Take your clothes off then,” he says.
I sit up and lift my T-shirt over my head.
Nathan gapes at me. “Wow,” he says, like he’s breathing the word. “Nice boobs.”
“I don’t really have them,” I say.
“Almost,” he says, nicely.
“Now you.”
He takes off his T-shirt too. His chest is gorgeous, tanned and muscly with perfect red-wine-colored nipples. I put my hand on it.
“Your heart’s beating fast.”
“No it’s not,” he says awkwardly. “I’ve done stuff like this before.”
“Have you? Naked?
“Um, no, just top half. Now take those off,” he says, and points to my jeans.
“Let’s both do it at the same time,” I say.
“’Kay,” Nathan says. He seems almost shy, which is crazy, because he’s older.
“One, two, three.”
We both unbutton and unzip our jeans, and pull them down at the same time, with our underwear and boxer shorts. Nathan’s face suddenly goes dark red when he looks at me and his mouth opens. He looks up at my face, then quickly away, as if he’s just realized I’m watching him, and bites his lip. He regards himself, between his legs, and then puts his hands over it.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m just…” he says. “I’m not, like…” He shakes his head and stands up, almost falling over because his jeans are down around his knees. I see his thingy. It’s pointing upward. It’s bigger than Sam’s. I’m staring at it, when Nathan pulls his jeans up, grabs his T-shirt and runs away.
“Nathan?” I yank my jeans up and run after him, tugging my T-shirt over myself. He’s waiting for me back at the horsey field. “Are you okay?” He nods, but he’s half-crying and looks like he’s going to throw up. He brushes away some tears angrily. “Was it me?” I ask. “Am I ugly naked?”
“No!” he shouts. “Of course not! Don’t be a fuckin’ idiot!”
“Don’t swear! And I’m not an idiot!”
“Well, for a smarty-pants you certainly don’t get some stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing!” he says, annoyed. “I don’t want to pretend to…you-know-what you again, okay? I mean I do, but I…don’t,” he says lamely. “I’m not like those men.”
“What men?
He kicks the fence. “Pervs.”
“Um, okay.”
“Aren’t you weirded out doing this? If Billie is a ghost, then what if she’s watching?”
“She knows why—”
“I don’t want to think about Billie anymore! I live right next to the woods. You don’t have to see them and think about her every day.”
“You don’t think I think about Billie every day?”
“Can we just stop talking about it for one fucking second, I don’t wanna think about it!” Nathan shouts. He leans against the fence and looks away. I try to think of something to talk about.
“Hattie said your dad was in prison.”
“Did she?”
“That’s sad.”
“Do you really think I want to talk about that?”
I feel my cheeks blush. This is what Mum and Dad warned me about. Maybe I am an idiot. “Sorry.”
After a while of silence, Nathan says, “He’s not an
ymore. They let him out.”
My eyes widen. “When?”
“A few months ago.”
I frown, looking over to the trailer park, right next to the copse where Billie was killed. “Does he live with you?”
“No. He’s come by, but…Mum won’t have him in. For now,” Nathan adds darkly. His arms are folded, his legs crossed, his head down, and his face is still red.
“Don’t you want him to come home?” I ask. He shakes his head.
“Why not?”
“He’s a bad person.”
“What did he do?”
“Beat someone up really badly.”
“A girl?”
“No. Not this time. It was in a bar.”
“So…he’s beaten up girls before?”
Nathan sticks out his bottom lip and shrugs. His eyes are all blank and staring, but at the ground, not me.
“Do you think he might have killed Billie?”
He lowers his head even more and looks away from me, so I can’t see him properly.
“Nathan?”
“Nah.” He turns back to me, and looks all right again. “Nah, I don’t think he killed Billie.”
“You don’t even suspect a little bit?”
“Nah.”
“But if he’s back, maybe—”
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” he says suddenly, as if he’s been holding it in and really wants to say it.
“No. Why would I think that?”
Nathan’s face screws up. “When we were…when I was on top of you in the trailer, and out in the field… I got an erection.”
My eyes widen. “Oh.”
He sees me and looks away. His cheeks are back to red again, like before. “And then, today, when I looked at you naked…Whoever…killed Billie is a really bad person, Thera. Men like that, they’re really bad people. And I wanted to…I wanted to do…what they do.” He wipes at his eyes, even though they seem dry. “There was this other time,” he whispers, “this other thing. That I did.”
Dead Girls Page 17