We Can Be Heroes

by Kyrie McCauley

  Beck propped her phone up against a cup of orange juice, scanning the local paper online for some mention of—

  There it was.

  Vandalism on Route 90.

  She didn’t read the article, but locked her phone and tucked it in her pocket when she heard the familiar creak of the third stair from the bottom, just a moment before Grandpa stepped into the room.

  He set his oxygen tank on the kitchen island across from Beck.

  “Early morning?” he asked. “Or late night?”

  Beck had stopped keeping secrets months ago.

  “Late night,” Beck told him.

  Grandpa grunted, but the sound wasn’t a chastisement. After Beck’s mom, teenage rebellion in the form of staying out late to paint was an easy ride.

  “Wear a mask?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  Grandpa left his coffee cooling on the counter and went to grab the paper from the porch. He kept it folded as he read, and Beck glanced up to see an inverted but familiar image.

  Her mural.

  On the front page of the paper.

  “Shit,” Beck said, earning a look of disapproval over the top of the paper.

  “What?” Grandpa unfolded the paper, was quiet a moment as he read.

  “Late night, indeed,” he said, laying the newspaper down on the counter. “Anyone catch you up there?”

  “No,” Beck said automatically, then remembered the no lying promise they made to each other when Beck moved in. “Vivian.”

  “Ah,” Grandpa said. “Maybe stick to some less-conspicuous locations in the future.”

  “But the sign had—”

  “I know what the sign had on it. Which is why I’m not scolding you, Becks. Just imploring you to use some better judgment in the future. Don’t get caught.” Grandpa glanced down at the picture of the mural on the billboard. “It’s beautiful, honey. God, I miss that girl.”

  Beck stared down into her cup at the sound of Grandpa’s voice catching.

  If Cass was like a sister to Beck, she had been like another granddaughter to him.

  “Can you help in the garage today? Got a whole lineup coming in for oil, inspection, tires.”

  “No problem, Gramps,” Beck said, downing the last sip of orange juice. “Okay if I take a quick nap?”

  “First appointment is at ten; go sleep.”

  Upstairs, Beck crawled out of her stained overalls and into bed. She looked up at her ceiling, painted swirling navy blue and covered in stars. She’d wanted her room to look like the night sky.

  She was just falling asleep when her cell began to ring. She glanced at the screen.

  “Vivian, I’m trying to sleep,” she answered.

  “We should meet tonight,” Vivian said. “In your van. Maybe if we’re both there again, she’ll come back.”

  “Okay, yeah. Sunset?”

  “It’s at eight thirty-two. Already looked it up, and . . .”

  “And?” Beck asked, her eyes drifting shut as they talked.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About vengeance. I’m in.”

  Beck sat up in bed.

  “You are?” She hadn’t expected that from Vivian so quickly. Vivian usually made pro-and-con lists, debated endlessly. Considered a problem from every angle. And avoided getting in trouble at all costs.

  Maybe Beck liked this new Vivian.

  “Okay, well, shit. What are we gonna do? Burn the factory down?”

  “God, Beck. No. We aren’t burning anything down. You really aren’t one for subtlety.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Beck’s phone started buzzing. It was Vivian wanting to video chat. When Beck answered she could see Vivian’s bedroom, which looked mostly unchanged. The wall behind her was covered in shelves containing every annoying track trophy and spelling award and perfect attendance certificate that Vivian had ever gotten.

  It was Vivian herself who had changed these last few months. She looked exhausted, and not just from their one late night with Cassie. The dark half-moons under her eyes looked like they had been made by months of sleeplessness. And Beck should know. Those same shadows greeted her in the mirror each morning, too. It was like Cass had been haunting them all this time, they just didn’t know it until last night.

  Vivian’s hair was finally out of her tight braids, and she had a mane of long, wavy brown hair framing her head.

  Beck thought maybe she should say something nice to her.

  “You look like a vampire,” she blurted out. “But, like, the hot kind.”

  “Wow, gee, thanks, Beck.”

  Beck got out of bed and went to her window. The farmhouse had those old, deep well windows, and Beck curled up in one, folding her bare legs in front of her.

  “We need to be strategic,” Vivian said. Beck saw a notebook and pen on Vivian’s bed, filled to the brim with her notes. She was nonstop. Even about this. “We need to go after Bell in the way that’ll hurt them most.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Their image,” Vivian said. “Mr. Bell knew Nico was threatening Cass. The police knew it. No one did anything. They chose that company over her life. All we have to do is tell them what happened.”

  “Tell who?”

  “Everyone. We have to tell everyone who will listen.”

  Vivian

  THE VENGEANCE PLAN LOOKED LIKE THIS: six Xs on a map of Bell.

  The locations were chosen carefully. Places they could work at night without being caught, but visible enough to warrant people’s attention during the day. They wanted all of Bell to see them.

  Vivian met Beck under the billboard just before sunset. Someone had to climb up to take a picture of the first mural, and Beck refused to go back up on that shaky platform a second time.

  “Be careful!” Beck shouted from below while Vivian took the photos.

  “I’m already done,” Vivian called back as she climbed down the rusted ladder. When she reached the bottom, Beck was facing the other way, and Vivian tapped her shoulder.

  “Couldn’t watch you climbing around up there,” Beck said.

  Vivian didn’t know all of Beck’s secrets. They’d had Cassie in common, but little else. Vivian was a good athlete, a great student, running as fast as she could toward her dreams. Beck preferred the quiet spaces. Being alone with her thoughts. She liked to paint and smoke and had always been more interested in fixing car engines with her grandpa than school. So Vivian didn’t know why Beck was so scared of heights. But she knew Beck must have had a good reason.

  She seemed to fear nothing else.

  “Now what?” Beck asked.

  “Now, a public service announcement.” Vivian pulled up a new account log-in. She’d been thinking about this all day. Which platforms to use, and how to use them. They needed visuals. Somewhere they could post the mural and then photos of Cassie. They had to make everyone feel like they knew her, too. Like the loss was everyone’s loss.

  Vivian showed Beck her favorite photo of the billboard, adding it to a photo editor app to brighten the image and change the tones and colors. Vivian knew she wouldn’t be the artist of this insane plan of theirs, but she could plan a social media campaign. She’d had enough practice on her own accounts, trying to project her own image of perfection.

  She could be the architect behind their vengeance plan, right down to a perfect aesthetic.

  “Tell me about the portrait,” Vivian said, turning to Beck.

  “It’s Cassandra, from Greek mythology. Cassandra was a prophetess, but she was cursed. She could see the future, but no one believed her.”

  Vivian wrote the description under the photo, about the Greek myth. Added a title for the mural, simply Cassandra, and their location in Bell. Then she tagged a handful of gun-control advocacy organizations, and anything else she could think of to draw attention to Bell.

  #dontforget

  #bellgunskill

  #justiceforcassie

  “Okay, I’m posting it. Ready?�
�� Vivian looked up to Beck for approval.

  “Post it. Do it. Burn it all down, V.”

  Vivian rolled her eyes, looked back to the phone.

  “Okay, our first Cassie mural is . . . up.”

  They sat staring at the photo on the phone, the little blurb of words underneath. Vivian had been confident about her plan, but now that it was up, it felt too small. It didn’t seem like enough in the face of a mammoth like Bell.

  The silence stretched between her and Beck. They weren’t used to being alone together.

  After the funeral, Vivian couldn’t be around Beck at all. She was like a constant, sharp reminder that Cassie wasn’t there. Only a Cassie-shaped space where she should have been, and it had felt like a black hole pulling everything toward it. Vivian couldn’t avoid that feeling. So she avoided Beck instead.

  She’d have gladly kept avoiding Beck forever if Cassie hadn’t come back to haunt them. “Did you know Cass was named for her?” Beck asked, interrupting the uneasy quiet between them. “Cassandra. That’s why she always loved those Greek plays and stories so much.”

  “Remember the Halloween she made all of us dress up as goddesses, and you got to be Athena and have that fake sword and all the kids ran away from you?” Vivian asked.

  “It was harmless, one of Cassie’s theater props,” Beck said, then smiled. “But it sure looked real.”

  “You got us all sent home.”

  “We went to Cassie’s house, and we ate candy all afternoon. And then we were too sick to trick-or-treat. That was an awesome day.”

  “We got in so much trouble,” Vivian said. It didn’t matter if it was Halloween when they were twelve or parties when they were sixteen. Beck always got them in trouble.

  “We had fun. Well, Cassie and I did. Maybe someday you’ll figure out how to do it.”

  Their faces were suddenly cast in a shadow, distracting Vivian from whatever she was going to throw at Beck next.

  “Beck. Sunset.”

  They both looked toward the van.

  “Let’s see if this works,” Beck said.

  While Beck drove, Vivian searched on her phone, finding the same song that was playing on the radio when Cass appeared the night before. They were like overzealous sports fans, convinced that some meaningless talisman worn on their body was the reason their favorite team won a big game. It’s superstition, Vivian told herself. You don’t believe in these things.

  But tonight it didn’t matter. She wasn’t taking chances. Not if it meant they got to see Cassie again.

  Beck parked the van on the same stretch of highway where she’d appeared last night. But none of it seemed necessary, because the moment the sky shifted from yellow to green-gray, they heard her.

  “I’m here,” she said softly, but she still sounded far away.

  Vivian turned at the voice, her eyes finding the outlines of Cassie, still so faint but growing less translucent even as she watched. Cassie’s denim jacket appeared, and tonight it was solid enough to see the button holes, and all of the little sunflowers that Beck had embroidered onto the back and edges of it for her as a birthday gift last year.

  “Cassie,” Vivian whispered, lost in awe all over again for a moment before collecting herself. They had work to do. “We have a plan. Beck, can you drive to the lake so we aren’t just sitting on the side of the highway?”

  Beck turned the van back on, shifting into gear and turning on the highway. Heading for Bell Lake. They’d spent every summer on the dock of the lake, stretched out in the ruthless sun until they couldn’t take it anymore, then diving into the waters to cool off.

  They’d gone to the lake when it was cold, too, in late fall and early spring.

  It had started as retribution. Cassie forced Vivian and Beck to do a play with her their freshman year. Vivian hated it, and for once Beck seemed to agree with her. They were cast in the ensemble, and neither could sing. Beck couldn’t follow a choreographed dance to save her life. But Cassie had insisted they stay in it so that they could spend more time together. High school had pulled them in different directions.

  For Beck and Vivian, it was three months of extended humiliation that culminated when Beck knocked Vivian right off the stage at the curtain call of closing night.

  After the show, they’d asked Grandpa to make a stop at the lake before going home, and Vivian and Beck had dragged Cassie down and thrown her off the dock before jumping in after her.

  It had been late October, and the water was frigid.

  But a tradition was born.

  From then on, after every final performance Cassie was in, they all went and jumped in the lake, even if it was freezing.

  “So this is what we are thinking,” Beck said when she put the van in park. The lake looked dark and still, but the windows were rolled down, and Vivian could hear how alive the lake was in the summer—the frogs were peeping, and something was sloshing through the water. Beck reached for her sketchbook between the seats and opened it to show Cassie their map. “We have a vengeance bucket list. Six murals that I’ll design and paint. Six locations around Bell. And a social media campaign to tell everyone the whole story of what happened to you. From the beginning.”

  Vivian opened her phone. The comments were already starting below her first post. Many of them were loving. Memories of Cassie from school friends. Condolences from strangers.

  And then she found one from some guy that said: “That mural is vandalism. More crime is never the answer.”

  Vivian clicked through to his profile, and saw the man was from Bell, too. His photos were mostly of him posing awkwardly with his vast collection of guns.

  Beck looked over her shoulder and scoffed. “You think maybe he’s compensating for something?”

  Vivian turned the screen toward Cass, who was hovering just over her shoulder in the middle seat of the van again.

  “I know the type,” Cassie said, and any other time, they might have laughed. But Nico wasn’t someone they could laugh about anymore. “What makes you think people will actually care? They didn’t before.”

  “I don’t know,” Vivian said. “Maybe they won’t. But we have to show them we care. We haven’t forgotten what happened. Something has to change so it doesn’t happen again.”

  “You guys could get in a lot of trouble,” Cassie warned. She said it to both of them, but she was looking at Vivian.

  Vivian, the rule-follower.

  Vivian, the straight-A student.

  Vivian, who was bound for the best premed program in the country on a track scholarship.

  But Cassie didn’t know that the version of Vivian she had loved was gone—disappeared the day a bullet shattered a bone in her leg, stealing her ability to run track. The day a second bullet stole her best friend in a moment. And what could Vivian say? She had tried to get back to that place—to that better Vivian, but it was like trying to break into a stranger’s mind and understand how they worked. I don’t know her anymore, thought Vivian. And I don’t want to know her.

  “It’s worth the risk,” she told Cassie. “So you have to tell us everything. The parts we didn’t know, too. And then we will tell the world your story. We’ll make them listen.”

  “From the beginning?” Cassie asked.

  “From the beginning,” Vivian said.

  Cassie

  It feels odd to call it

  the night I met him

  since we’d been together always,

  in the same classes

  since kindergarten.

  But I remember the night

  I met him.

  Ethan Pine had been

  stage director

  for the fall production

  of Beauty and the Beast.

  His parents left town

  so he threw a party.

  We arrived soaking wet,

  the three of us.

  Lola Talbot pulled me aside

  the moment we walked in.

  Jesus Christ, Cass.

  Wh
en are you guys gonna

  stop jumping in the lake?

  It’s November. You’ll

  get sick and die and

  then who

  will play the spring lead?

  I laughed at her then.

  Because it was funny,

  and because death felt so far away.

  Neither of us could know

  that in just sixteen months,

  plus a few days,

  Lola Talbot would watch me die

  in our high school classroom.

  But that night she said,

  Nico is looking for you.

  and I said, Bell?

  which was such a stupid question

  (which other Nico existed, or mattered?)

  that Lola didn’t answer me.

  Lola did her very best

  with what I gave her.

  We’d changed into

  dry clothes in the van,

  but my hair was soaked.

  You are pale and freezing,

  like a corpse, she scolded.

  She dragged me along the hallway

  aiming for the bathroom,

  where she was probably going to wring

  the water from my mess of tangled curls

  and put some lip gloss on me

  but we didn’t make it.

  Nico Bell stepped in front of us,

  blocking the hallway.

  He said my name easily,

  like we were already close.

  Like he knew we would be.

  Don’t tell me

  someone had to pull you

  out of the lake

  again?

  His eyes were only on me,

  and Lola squeezed my arm,

  Good luck,

  then disappeared.

  I don’t remember everything

  Nico Bell said to me

  that first night.

  But I remember the way

  his blond hair

  fell into his face

  while he talked.

  He talked so much.

  I thought he didn’t mind

  that I was quiet, shy.

  But now I think

  maybe he just

  never cared