Scott, the bald supervisor. He has to be near forty. “Isn’t he married?” Randall says. Poor, prematurely balding Randall. Perhaps in Scott he sees his future, chained forever to his first place of work, making out with teenage girls in sweaty concrete storage rooms.
Cady barks. I realize it’s supposed to be a laugh. “Monica was the opposite of a saint,” she says. “Sometimes she brought vodka and orange juice to work in her water bottle and drank it in the morning. Like, before noon.” She shakes her head. “And she really liked Scott. She really thought he was going to leave his wife and his kid for her. She thought they were going to run away together to Tahiti or Jamaica or freaking wherever. Sometimes she would laugh at the thought of the wife and kid crying and left behind.” She lets out a strangled-sounding sniff. “She was the exact opposite of a saint, and that’s why I loved her so much.”
“We all loved Monica,” Rob says. He sounds subdued, and I let myself relax a little bit. Subdued people don’t suddenly rear up and head-butt girls nearby.
Even if they kind of deserve it.
“Hey,” Katharina says. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are dancing with something a little bit insane. “Crazy idea. Monica was a rule breaker, right? So, second memorial service for Monica, for the real Monica. Tonight, Adventure World, after hours. Who’s with me? Am I crazy?”
“Yes, you’re crazy,” Cynthia says. “But I’m in.”
Cady snuffles, wiping at her nose. “I’m in too.”
Rob spreads his arms like he’s about to take flight. “Let’s do it.”
They’re echoed by Randall, by Tina from the bonfire.
Connor.
Even Melody volunteers to go. Even though she wasn’t invited.
If everybody else is in, how can I be out?
It was a miracle Pixie found the knife at all. It was a miracle I wasn’t the one to find it. I usually stripped down the girls’ beds and beat the sheets, while Pixie would wipe down the floor. In our four years together, we’d created almost a dance out of our routine, where I’d swirl by with the sheets as she swept her way across the room. But on this day, this one day, I’d slammed my wrist in the door and had asked her to take over beating the sheets.
So this wasn’t a choice either. It just kind of happened that way.
If it had been me stripping Violetta’s bed, and I’d been the one to see the knife’s handle poking from underneath the mattress, I would probably have pretended I didn’t see it. I didn’t even want to think about what Stepmother would do if she found me in possession of a weapon. She’d probably use it on me, or she’d use it on Pixie and make me watch. I would have pushed it farther beneath the mattress and prayed that Violetta, who had always been nice to me, who smelled so good, didn’t get caught.
But again, I didn’t get the chance.
Instead, it was Pixie who pulled it reverently from its hiding spot and dangled it between two of her fingers by its wooden handle. “Check it out,” she said. She snuck a peek behind her to make sure the door was closed, then held it out to me. “Look.”
It was a big knife, but not too big. Bigger than a steak knife, not quite a cleaver. But sharp, very sharp. I leapt back as if she were holding a poisonous snake, its fangs bared and ready to strike. “Put it back!”
“No way.” I could see it reflected over and over in her eyes. “I’m keeping it. It’s not like Violetta can say anything.”
I felt cold all over, then hot, then cold again. Sweat froze on my forehead. “Stepmother will know. She always knows.”
Pixie looked at me levelly, then stuck the knife into her pants, securing it through the band of her underwear so that it fit snug against the inside of her leg. Or so I figured—the pants Stepmother gave us were the girls’ old ones, so they were always pretty loose. “She won’t know. Not if you don’t tell her.”
The cold traveled to my belly. My tongue was suddenly thick in my mouth. Absurdly, my lips broke into a tiny, hysterical smile.
“You won’t, will you?”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say anything.
—
By the time we all get to the park and scatter our cars inconspicuously throughout the employee parking lot, the park is already almost closed. “You know we close in a half hour, right?” the woman at the front gate warns us, each and every one of us.
“We’re just running in,” we tell her, one after the other, each and every one of us. We are running in, of course. That’s the truth. We just won’t be running out. Not tonight. Tonight is for mourning the saint who wasn’t.
We’re with Cynthia, a supervisor with keys, so we have a better place to wait out closing time than the storage facility. That’s good; I worry that seeing the place where I saw—or thought I saw?—Katharina living might break my mind. My mind is close enough to breaking, thanks to my close proximity to Connor and his close proximity to Cady. Her legs don’t seem to be working; she clings to him with every step, and with every step I hate myself for hating her.
“We’ll go to Iceworks,” Cynthia says. Iceworks closed at eight, and it’s beneath the Blade’s Revenge, Monica’s favorite coaster (she dressed as the Blade for five successive Halloweens, apparently, spandex and plastic sword and all), so it’s a fitting place to wait.
We crowd in, all nine of us: me, Katharina, Melody, Cynthia, Connor, Cady, Rob, Randall, and Tina. Cynthia clacks the lock shut behind us, and my heart jumps in panic before settling down. It’s so hot the air is thick, and it’s dark enough that I can’t see anyone’s face; we’re all just shapes in the gloom.
“What should we do for the next hour?” someone whispers. Melody, it’s Melody. I know my own sister’s voice. “Play Never Have I Ever?”
I wince. How inappropriate of her, my sister, to suggest a stupid party game at a memorial for a dead girl.
But somehow, maybe because it’s Melody and the world just opens up before her wherever she goes, thornbushes jumping out of the way and handsome boys lying down on puddles so she can cross over their backs, Tina bites. “Let’s play Monica-themed Never Have I Ever,” she says breathlessly. I can relate; I feel like the darkness is trying to suck the air right out of my lungs. “Things that Monica did.”
“But we don’t have anything to drink,” Randall says.
Rob answers, “So?”
“I’ll start,” Cady says. Her voice is as thick as the air. “Never have I ever stolen from Five Banners.”
Katharina laughs, then abruptly stops, like she’s realized how inappropriate laughter sounds in this room. “Wait, what?” she says. “I can’t picture Monica stealing.”
“She totally did!” Cady says. Her voice has lightened, and I can picture the look on her face: wistful, dreamy. I wonder if eating Sweet Treats fudge counts as stealing. If so, the taste was a fitting punishment. “Not like money from the cash register or anything. When our first year was up, she stole a Blade figurine from headquarters, one of the nice ones with the rhinestone eyes, to have as a memento of our first year, she said. I asked her why she didn’t just buy it with her employee discount, and she said it wasn’t the same. It wouldn’t be as exciting.”
Everybody laughs, as if on cue. “Me next,” Cynthia jumps in. “Never have I ever hooked up with a fellow employee.”
I wish I could see Connor’s face.
“I should be drinking right now,” Cady says.
So should I, and I want to say it, but I don’t.
“Okay, me,” Rob says. He’s the only one I can really make out, thanks to the piercings that glitter in the thin shafts of light filtering in through the covered windows. My heart skips a beat as I think of another room, another darkness pierced only by weak beams of light filtering through bars. But I take a deep breath and I don’t pass out. “Never have I ever dared to eat the cotton candy.”
It goes on like this for an hour and a half. It’s a stretch of time that feels like forever, and yet I’m not angry at it, because by the end I feel like I know Monica, feel
like I share a kinship with her besides the fact that we’re both members of the club. She wasn’t the girl they made her out to be, the sweet, innocent angel who never did anyone or anything wrong. She was a girl who did some good things and some bad things and sometimes did things that were wrong because they seemed exciting and sometimes did things that were right even when they were hard. She was a girl I’m glad I knew, even if it was only for a little while.
Someone’s phone finally lights up the room, and Katharina speaks. “It’s time,” she says. “We can go. We should be safe now.”
Her words meet silence. We can go. Go where? We haven’t talked about it. We haven’t thought about it, or at least I haven’t. “There’s a bunch of us,” Randall says. The light from Katharina’s phone gleams off his bare, shiny forehead. “We won’t be able to evade capture for too long.” Evade capture. Who says things like that?
“The Blade’s Revenge,” Cady says. Someone’s added cornstarch to her voice and stirred. “It’s right above us. We can make it to the top.”
Cady’s words meet silence too, but this silence is electric, racing with currents of thought and possibility. “We could climb the safety staircase,” Cynthia says slowly. “I have the keys for the gates.”
“Even if somebody comes after us, they’ll have to climb all the way to the top,” Tina says. “They can’t fire all of us.”
Yes, they can, I want to say, but again I don’t say anything. I’ve been swept away in the energy, caught up in the rush, and I want nothing more than to say goodbye to this girl I wish so much I had known. We could have been friends. She could have shown me the Five Banners ropes, pointed the way around with her long red nails, introduced me to Cady. Cady and I would have become friends and I would never have noticed Connor that way then, because I’m a good person, and I would never have hooked up with a friend’s ex when she was still in love with him. I’m not a bad person. I’m not. I’ve done bad things, but I am not a bad person.
After the stuffy room, the air outside feels crisp and cool against my skin; I revel in the way it brushes sweat from my forehead and pulls the hairs sticking to the back of my neck free. The nine of us walk in a solemn procession out of the store and through the gates toward the Blade’s Revenge, silent and focused on our task. Cynthia leads the way, unlocking the gates and letting us through. I’m in the middle, sandwiched between Katharina in front of me, where I can keep an eye on her, and Cady behind me, who threw herself there, insisting I’d proven myself the best shoulder to cry on, literally. I hope she doesn’t touch me again. I can still feel her tears, or ghosts of them, anyway, soaking the air between us.
The safety staircase winds its way from the ground to the top of the tallest hill of the coaster, ensuring there’s a way down besides the air for anyone trapped at the top, and providing a way for engineers and technicians to assess its safety (hence the name) and fix anything that needs fixing. So it’s steep and narrow—meant for emergencies, not for the casual climber. I’m somewhere beneath a casual climber. I am not a climber at all.
So my calves are burning and I’m breathing hard less than halfway up, but I can’t slow down because then Cady might bump into my back. Katharina doesn’t seem to be feeling the stress at all: she’s silent as she moves, her steps graceful and steady, and her hair, tied into one long braid, swings rhythmically across her back as if it’s trying to hypnotize me. I won’t let it. I look away and over the railing; the empty park stretches before us, strange in its stillness. I wonder if anyone’s spotted us yet. Maybe not. The park is still lit up by streetlights and backlights, but none exist this high up—there’s a blinking red light at the coaster’s summit, perhaps to warn any particularly low-flying airplanes, but it doesn’t do much to illuminate the group of vagrants scaling the coaster’s side.
The staircase ends in a small platform, maybe the size of the average bathroom; the nine of us, crowded together, just barely fit. My face is in Randall’s armpit, and my arm is rubbing up against Tina in a way that could probably get me sued, but the wind is whipping my hair and the park below looks like a fairyland now, like a theme park built for dolls. I want to experience this fairyland. I wonder if this is what I was thinking that other night, that night I was or was not drugged.
Somebody behind me shifts—the last person in line fitting in, most likely—and I’m pushed farther to the front, so that my stomach butts against the railing. The metal chills me through my shirt, sending waves of cold down my legs and into my toes. My eyes are drawn forward, down, and I’m seized by the sudden and wild urge to jump. I know I won’t fall and go splat. I have faith that the park will save me, that the magic of the night will lift me up with its currents and bear me somewhere high, somewhere bright, somewhere basements don’t exist.
A hush hovers over the group. “We should say something,” Cynthia says. “Before they find us.”
The hush uncrosses its legs, pulls out a newspaper, settles in. A breeze sweeps through, sends Katharina’s braid bouncing onto my arm.
“I’ll start,” Cady says, shooing the hush away. If she’d actually made the motions, she would have hit me; somehow we ended up right next to each other, both of us pressed against the safety railing. For a safety railing, it could be a lot safer; it comes up only to our waists. A good shove could send one of us right over.
And just as I’m thinking that, there’s a grunt, and someone jostles me, and then Cady screams, the scream that someone about to dive headfirst from the top of a roller coaster would scream.
The world turns into a blur. Someone elbows me hard in the side, and I shriek in response. What feels like a rope hits me on the cheek—Katharina’s braid? I’m stumbling back, but there is no back, there is only a warm mass of bodies, and someone else is sobbing, but I can’t see who it is because my eyes are closed. I don’t want to see who it is. I don’t want to see the thing that used to be Cady splattered over the cobblestones below.
“Oh my God, oh my God, are you okay?” someone is saying, and I nod before I realize they’re not speaking to me. Someone is shaking me hard by the shoulders, and my head is shaking like it might fly off.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” someone is saying, and her voice is shaking, and my knees start to shake as I realize that it’s Cady, that she hasn’t fallen after all.
“Scarlett, what the hell?” A fine spray of spittle coats my face, but at least my shoulders stop shaking. I don’t know who spoke.
I’m so confused. I don’t know what’s happening to me right now, but I don’t like it. Not at all.
“Did Scarlett just…?” Rob is speaking now, in that slow, measured tone of voice he used when he told me not to come to the memorial in the first place.
Maybe I should have listened to him.
“Ask her,” someone urges.
Rob clears his throat. “Scarlett, did you just try and push Cady off the platform?”
I recoil, sending my back into the safety rail and nearly sending myself over the edge. When did I turn around? “No!”
Cady is in a heap in Connor’s arms, her shoulders shaking, but her words are distinct and clear. “I felt hands on my shoulders, somebody tried to push me, somebody tried…” She trails off, like she’s unable to comprehend the depravity of that somebody’s soul.
Somebody. Because that somebody wasn’t me. “I didn’t do it,” I say hotly, and beads of sweat spring up in a string of pearls around my throat. “I swear to God. I would never.”
Rob is giving me that stare again, the stare that might mean he’s about to press a button and fry me. “Did anyone see anything?”
“This is crazy,” I say before I realize I’m talking over Cady, and that she’s saying much the same thing.
“This is crazy,” she echoes. “Scarlett would have no reason to hurt me. Scarlett’s my friend.”
Connor, Rob, and I share the same flinch, passed from one of us to the other like a particularly noxious brand of flu. Or mono, as the case may be. “Yeah,” I s
ay anyway. “I would never—”
“I saw it.” Katharina’s words stop us all in our places. She’s commanding, regal; her hair, unraveling from its braid, flaps in a cape behind her. “Scarlett…how could you?”
I’m going to throw up my beating heart, and it’s going to burst and spill my blood all over everybody’s feet. They’ll never be able to get their shoes clean. “I swear I didn’t—”
“I saw it,” Katharina thunders. I wait for anybody, for Melody, to defend me, but everybody else is silent. “They were both looking over the side, and all of a sudden Scarlett turned and shoved.” Katharina clearly sees me blanch, and she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Scarlett, but I saw it.”
“I didn’t.” My forehead is getting very hot and there are spots dancing in the corners of my vision. “I didn’t do it.”
Cady—of all people—leaps to my defense again, but she sounds considerably less sure this time. “Guys, let’s be real. Scarlett would never—”
“Scarlett hooked up with Connor,” Katharina announces. Cady stops talking midsentence, and Connor’s face goes so white his freckles stand out like stars. A hush clamps down on all of us. All of us except Katharina. How does she even know? “At the bonfire, in the barn.”
I don’t hear whatever she says next; the rushing in my ears is too loud. “I didn’t do it,” I say again, as loudly as I can, trying to speak over the noise.
Now Katharina’s got her phone out. Her screen flashes as she turns it on. “Guys, should I call the police? Or Cady’s parents? Anyone?” And then she glances up at me and gives me this little smile, the same smile I saw the time we found the knife.
It’s her. She’s back somehow. I don’t know how, but she’s back, and she’s trying to ruin my life.
The dots cluster and swarm and then everything is black.
I didn’t do it.
That’s the refrain that runs through my mind the rest of the night. During the stiff, steep march down the safety stairs into the arms of two park security guards, one of whom is, conveniently, Tina’s boyfriend and who therefore lets us stroll out the employee exit. During the walk back to the parking lot I am an island off to the side, plodding along, numb, whispering my refrain under my breath to drive it into my brain as the others whisper among themselves. During the scatter in the parking lot: Cynthia, Tina, and Randall race off, tossing excuses into the wind; and Rob and Connor walk off, Cady held up between them, staring at the ground, mute, like she can’t believe everything that’s happened, like her legs have just decided not to work anymore.
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