We Can Be Heroes

by Kyrie McCauley

  “Work. Get down now or I’m calling the cops.”

  “That’s bullshit, even for you. And you know it.”

  Vivian unlocked her phone, waving the bright screen in the air. “Five! Four!”

  “Jesus! Fine! I’m coming.”

  Beck muttered something under her breath, but Vivian didn’t catch it. Probably some foul name. Beck always loved calling her names.

  It took several minutes for her to climb down, but then there Beck was, right in front of her. It was the first time they’d been face-to-face since the funeral.

  It felt like yesterday.

  It felt like a thousand years ago.

  “Hey, Vivian,” Beck said, her wild red curls breaking out of a messy bun to frame her face. She was covered in sweat and paint, her mask still hanging loose around her neck. Her clothes were stained, but not just from tonight. There was more paint than denim on her overalls.

  “Beck,” Vivian said. Typical Beck, she thought. Doing some stupid, dangerous, unnecessary thing.

  But then Vivian looked back at the mural. At Cassie. Vivian knew what it took for Beck to climb up there with her fear of heights. Knew she did that for Cassie.

  Maybe it wasn’t so unnecessary.

  “Listen, I’m not going to call the cops. Just stop and go home now, okay?”

  “Okay, boss,” Beck said, laughing softly.

  “Is this funny?” Vivian snapped. It was a long shift. EMT work beat the hell out of her, emotionally and physically. That’s why she chose it. So she’d be too tired to think.

  But tonight she just wanted to shower and sleep.

  “Never thought I’d see the day you knowingly don’t report my bad behavior.”

  “Well, congratulations. You get a free pass on account of my sheer exhaustion,” Vivian said, turning away. “Go home, Beck.”

  Vivian climbed into her car and reached for the key. But the car was already on.

  “No. No, no, no, no.”

  She prayed to every god she could think of for fifteen seconds, then tried the ignition again. Stalled. Totally, devastatingly, out of gas.

  Vivian glared at her phone lying on the passenger seat. Like she had any kind of choice. She reached for it and opened her text messages. She scrolled for a while before realizing that what she was looking for didn’t even exist.

  There was no text exchange between her and Beck. Not on its own. It would have been a group chat with Cassie. She scrolled back up. The messages were still there. Dated the morning Cassie died.

  Vivian called Beck instead.

  “Change your mind? Calling the cops?” Beck asked instead of saying hello.

  “My car died. Can I get a ride?”

  “Shit, yeah. I’ll pull around.”

  Vivian ended the call, and the screen lit up with the group text. The conversation she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of, but couldn’t bring herself to read again, either.

  The last thing Cassie had sent was a SpongeBob meme.

  Cassie

  It was always

  the best part of my day—

  riding to school with

  Beck and Vivian.

  Beck’s angry music and

  Vivian’s angry eyes.

  The two people

  I loved most in this life,

  barely tolerating each other,

  but doing it anyway

  for me.

  Sometimes,

  I could make them both

  laugh at the same time.

  I don’t know why but

  it felt like magic

  and I felt most loved then.

  So this is where I came

  when I died:

  to Beck’s van.

  Beck

  BECK PULLED HER VAN ACROSS THE highway and let it idle behind Vivian’s car.

  When Vivian stepped out in front of the van’s headlights, Beck saw her clearly for the first time tonight. For the first time in months. Vivian’s brown hair was pulled into the same tight braids she had always worn to run track. Her eyes were tired and serious. She looked the same as ever, her thick brown eyebrows furrowed in deep thought, like she was overanalyzing every single thing she saw and heard.

  Beck’s hand slipped over the wide steering wheel, and she applied just enough pressure to chirp the horn. Vivian jumped, startled, then lifted her middle finger as she glared past the headlights.

  Beck never could resist. Vivian had always been way too easy to rile.

  Besides, this is how it used to be between them. How it would be still, if the universe made any damn sense at all.

  Vivian climbed into the van, muttering a soft “Thanks for that.”

  “You’re welcome,” Beck said.

  “Can we just get some gas so I can go home? We don’t even have to talk,” Vivian said.

  Beck didn’t answer, but she pulled off the side of the road and began to drive.

  There was no connection for a phone to plug into. No Bluetooth in the old beast of a van, a classic VW bus that Beck’s grandpa found in a decrepit—but cheap—state, and restored slowly over the years. When Beck was fourteen, he let her pick the color for its new paint job. She chose golden yellow. The color of the sunflowers. When he let her name it, she chose Betty.

  Then on her sixteenth birthday, he surprised Beck by handing her the keys.

  If anyone had told Tribeca Jones, age six and watching the stars for her salvation, that one day someone would lovingly restore a car just for the sake of her having something to drive . . . well, she’d have said keep the car and maybe put some food in the fridge or help her parents get sober, thanks.

  Six-year-old Beck was possibly even angrier than teenage Beck. Practically feral.

  But Beck loved the old VW bus more than she liked most humans and didn’t care at all that the only music it played was the radio, and only when it felt like it.

  Tonight when she twisted the dial, Betty offered them a sucker punch by playing one of Cassie’s favorite songs.

  “Shit,” Beck said, reaching for the dial again, but Vivian blocked her hand.

  “It’s fine,” she said, her voice low. “Let it go.”

  A minute passed . . . the music too upbeat for the way it was making them feel.

  It was like Cassie was right there, a moment away instead of five months. For a second, Beck swore she could hear familiar humming. More than anything, Cassie had loved to sing. She was always singing in the back seat, humming along to the radio.

  “The mural is beautiful,” Vivian said out of nowhere, pulling Beck from the past.

  Beck looked over, but Viv’s eyes were down, watching her own hands twist in her lap. Whenever she got anxious, Vivian would rip all her nails off, like she was doing now. Beck reached over, her hand falling on Vivian’s, stopping her.

  “They shouldn’t have left it up,” Vivian said. “That was . . . I don’t know. Cruel.”

  “No one cares if it’s cruel, Vivian. They care that Bell has jobs.”

  “I think it’s more complicated than that,” Vivian said.

  “I don’t,” Beck said, her voice too sharp. It wasn’t Vivian she was mad at. For once. Beck tried to soften her voice before she spoke again. “It’s weird to listen without her.”

  “It’s like I can hear her.”

  But Beck heard it, too.

  Humming.

  More distinct this time.

  “Stop that, Beck.” Vivian’s voice broke on Beck’s name, her anger biting through the word.

  “I’m not. That would be fucked,” Beck said. There were a million things she loved to torment Vivian about, but she would never about Cassie.

  Beck slowed down on the highway, rolled to a stop on the shoulder to listen. If she was alone, she’d have blamed exhaustion. Isn’t that what she’d done those other nights? When she thought she heard . . . something. Dismissed it as longing and grief.

  The chorus hit.

  A voice belted it—and the sound was coming from the b
ack of the van.

  They whirled in unison. At first Beck thought that she must have fallen off that billboard and hit her head so hard that she was either dead or unconscious. But Vivian was real and warm beside her after so many months. And this wasn’t a dream.

  In the back seat of the van, there was a faint outline in the darkness.

  A shadow, in the shape of a girl.

  Then it moved, climbing into the middle seat of the van. The curve of her jaw was faintly there, but mostly not. The fall of her hair nothing but a wave of darkness.

  But her eyes were the same bright blue.

  The singing had stopped, and those eyes were fixed on them. They looked unnaturally wide with no face there to frame them. Only the soft, translucent shape of a familiar smile.

  Cassie.

  Vivian

  VIVIAN HAD NEVER BEEN SCARED OF the monster under the bed.

  She’d never believed in fairies. Not even the one sent to collect teeth. She’d chosen science over fiction, and truth over fable, from the time she was young enough to know the difference. Vivian didn’t once scan the night sky for unidentified flying objects or lose sleep over a ghost story. Because ghost stories weren’t real.

  Except now she was in one.

  Vivian reached across the van, her hand finding Beck’s arm without taking her eyes off the back seat.

  “Beck, do you . . . ?”

  “Yeah, I see her.”

  “You do?” Cassie asked, climbing—floating?—into the middle seat of the van. Vivian could make out more details of her, but they were unfocused, there for a moment, then gone. Like her eyelashes on her cheek, and the dark indigo of the denim jacket she was wearing when she died.

  “What the hell is this?” Beck asked. She reached out, and Vivian drew in her breath, sharp, when Beck’s hand passed through Cassie’s barely there arm. “Why?”

  “How?” Vivian asked.

  “I don’t know why,” Cassie said. Her voice was the only thing unwavering about her. They heard her as though she was really right next to them. Which wasn’t possible. “I don’t know how. I’ve been here for a while and you couldn’t see me, or hear me. Not until you two were . . .”

  “Together,” Vivian finished. Her hand was still on Beck’s arm, like she needed to hold on to something—someone—to convince herself this was real, and not another one of the nightmares that had plagued her since March.

  She squeezed her fingers together, pinching.

  “Ow!” Beck yelled, pulling her arm away.

  “Making sure it’s not a dream,” Vivian said, her eyes never leaving Cassie.

  “That’s not how that works,” Beck said, rubbing her arm.

  Cassie laughed.

  And then Vivian didn’t care how or why. She didn’t want to question this at all. She just wanted to hear that laugh again. The one she’d missed every moment since March fifteenth, when it was stolen from her.

  “I’m only here at night,” Cassie said. “During the days, I’m too . . . wobbly. I’m nowhere. It’s just me thinking then.”

  “I don’t understand,” Vivian said.

  “Me neither,” Cassie agreed. “Sorry if I scared you. You’ve never heard me before.”

  “I heard you humming,” Beck said. “I just didn’t think it was real. God, Cassie, we missed you.”

  Ghost Cassie turned to the window. There was nothing outside but acres of sunflowers.

  “How’s my family?” Cassie asked.

  Broken to pieces, Vivian thought.

  “They’re . . . doing their best, Cassie,” she said instead. “They moved away, back to your grandparents’ town.” It was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.

  “Good,” Cass said. “That’s probably for the best.”

  Light pierced the still darkness of the van. The sun was rising.

  “I’m gonna go away again,” Cassie said. “See?”

  She leaned forward, letting the shadow of her arm cross through the beam of light, where it disappeared. Before Vivian or Beck could protest, Cassie lifted her hand. “But I’ll try to come back. Tonight. I think . . . I think maybe you both have to be here. I think maybe you are supposed to help me.”

  “Help with what?” Vivian was leaning toward the back of the van, hands clutched together, like she had to stop herself from reaching out and grabbing for Cassie to try to keep her there with them.

  “What any ghost needs,” Cassie said. “Closure.”

  “Closure?” Beck asked. The sun was warming the van, illuminating it too fast.

  “Unfinished business,” Cassie explained. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. I can’t imagine why else I would be here. I just don’t know what that is.”

  Vivian didn’t know, either.

  “It’s vengeance,” Beck said quietly.

  Vivian whipped her head around.

  “Just because your entire belief system is based on angry revenge fantasies doesn’t mean the rest of the world is, Beck.”

  “Well, she has a point,” Cassie said.

  “Vengeance? Against who?” Vivian asked. “Nico is gone, Cass.”

  “Against Bell, I guess,” she said, her shoulders lifting in a ghostly shrug. The gesture was so nonchalant, so Cassie. It was like she was a caricature of a ghost, not taking her haunting duties seriously enough. Yet here she was, dead—sort of—asking them to help her solve the impossible mystery of why she was here, so that she could move on for real.

  A mystery to solve, a ghost, a van. And Beck probably had a stash of weed tucked under a seat. All they were missing was the dog.

  “Which Bell? The town? The company? Mr. Bell?” Vivian asked.

  “Yes,” Beck answered.

  “All of them,” Cassie said as the sun rose over the tree line.

  And as quickly as Cassie had returned to them, she was gone again.

  We Can Be Heroes

  Season 2: Episode 13

  “The Sheriff”

  MERIT LOGAN: Some background information. In March, seventeen-year-old Cassie Queen’s ex-boyfriend, Nico Bell, brought his father’s guns to school, shooting Cassie, one other classmate, and himself. The classmate survived. Nico and Cassie died at the scene. It could be argued that the small town of Bell is one of the most pro-gun places in the country, since it has been home to Bell Firearms since 1824, and the town was quite literally built around the company. A solid forty percent of jobs in town are held by Bell to this day. And Nico Bell was set to inherit the whole of it from his father, Steven Bell.

  MERIT: I have a few more questions, Sheriff, about the events that led up to Cassie’s murder.

  SHERIFF THOMAS: Well, I’ll try my best. But I can’t say I know much. It was young love, gone terribly wrong. One of my officers handled the case. Wasn’t high priority. Can’t say why the kid did it. Why he thought that was the only way.

  MERIT: The only way?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: The only way to keep her. I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t even planning to kill her. Maybe he just wanted to . . . to scare her.

  MERIT: You think a seventeen-year-old took his father’s guns to school to scare a girl he had previously acted violently toward?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: I’m saying we don’t know what was going on in his head. We couldn’t have guessed his intentions.

  MERIT: Sir, have you responded to domestic violence cases in the past?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: Sadly, yes. We come across those cases rather frequently.

  MERIT: How often? Just an estimate is fine.

  SHERIFF THOMAS: About three a month in Bell.

  MERIT: And how did Cassie’s circumstances compare to those other calls?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: This wasn’t the same at all. They weren’t adults. They weren’t married or living together.

  MERIT: So you didn’t treat Cassie’s case like you do other abuse cases?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: There was no case, Ms. Logan. Nico Bell wasn’t on our radar. They were kids. What kind of person expects kids to
start killing each other?

  MERIT: Maybe the kind of person whose job it is to be familiar with the dynamics of violence expects it. And they didn’t kill each other, did they? Nico killed. Only Nico. You are talking about it like both of them are responsible. But let’s move on, Sheriff. To the day it happened. Can you tell me what you remember of that morning?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: It was a normal, quiet morning in March. We pride ourselves on that in Bell, you know. The low crime rates. No one robs a house in Bell. Or holds up the gas station. Because just about every single person is armed. Keeps the peace.

  [Long pause]

  MERIT: . . . Does it?

  SHERIFF THOMAS: You know what I mean, Ms. Logan. It did. What are we going to do, take everyone’s guns away just because one girl died?

  Cassie

  At first death feels

  like that time I almost drowned

  in the lake

  the summer we were twelve.

  There wasn’t pain, really.

  Just an awareness that I

  had gone under, an awareness

  that soon I’d run out of oxygen.

  Our rowboat sank

  right in the middle

  of the lake.

  With me still in it.

  I was trying to swim

  back to the dock

  but I overestimated

  the distance, my strength.

  And then there were

  arms around me,

  pulling me back to the surface,

  getting me back to the dock.

  The sun was high

  and bright, right

  behind his head,

  forming a halo.

  And when the paper wrote

  about the incident,

  a little block of text on page four,

  they called him a local hero.

  Nico.

  Beck

  BECK DIDN’T BOTHER TRYING TO SLEEP when she got home.

  Instead she started the coffee and reached for Grandpa’s pill bottles.

  She counted them out, sorting them into a days-of-the-week container she’d picked up for him at the dollar store. It was mostly just pain meds, but the dosage was precise, so Beck counted and then counted again to make sure she had it right before tipping them into the plastic container.