The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

by Rhett McLaughlin

“There was a fire,” his dad said, shaking his head, as he sat next to Rex and put an arm around him.

  “Oh God,” Leif said, covering his mouth with his hand, realizing he was incapable of doing anything other than using the Lord’s name in vain over and over again. He figured God would give him a pass under these circumstances. It was as if he’d entered some alternate dimension, like he was in someone else’s dream. Alicia couldn’t have died. She was the most full-of-life person he’d ever known. “Oh God.”

  As Rex stared blankly around the room, deep in shock, the word SACRIFICE screamed out from the Post-it in his own handwriting.

  It practically knocked the wind out of him.

  Ben was right.

  They’d sacrificed Alicia. And here was their pathetic cover-up.

  Rex wanted to weep, but instead he got angry. “What do you mean, a fire?”

  “Son,” Rex’s dad said. “There was a fire in a small building on the school property that they use to…you know, to discipline kids. Seems Alicia was in there and somehow…a fire started. They think she may have started it herself and wasn’t able to get out. Apparently she was having a lot of trouble at the school. But we don’t really know much.”

  Leif pictured flames rapidly spreading, surrounding Alicia.

  Rex scoffed at their barely plausible story. This didn’t sound like the Alicia he knew. Sure, maybe she was capable of burning down a small building in some act of defiance, but she’d never make the mistake of getting caught in the fire herself. “We should find out,” he said. “That’s all you were told?”

  Rex’s parents looked at each other, then gave him a sad shrug.

  “But that can’t be what happened!” Rex shouted, jumping to his feet. “Something is really wrong with that school!” He made eye contact with Leif, who seemed to have been buying the fire story until this very second.

  “I agree,” Rex’s dad said. “They obviously need to update their safety standards. Probably hasn’t changed since it was that old resort.”

  “No, not…” Rex wanted to tell his parents about everything listed right in front of them on the bulletin board—Ben, Alicia’s violent abduction, what he and Rex had seen at the spring—but he also knew they wouldn’t be pleased that he and Leif had repeatedly been sneaking out past midnight. Now was no time to invite tighter surveillance on his nighttime activities; he needed to tread with caution. “I mean, they’re doing bad things to those kids. They did something bad to Alicia.”

  “Sit down, honey,” Rex’s mom said, gently pulling at his hand. “You’re in shock. We all are.”

  Leif’s hand was over his mouth again. Ben’s sacrifice theory. Could that really have happened to Alicia? Up until last Friday, he would have said No way, of course not, it’s a SCHOOL.

  But now he thought: Yes. Yes, it definitely could have happened.

  Rex sat back down. He knew that nothing he said to his parents right now would make any difference.

  “Look,” Rex’s dad said, rubbing his son’s back, “when something terrible like this happens, it’s impossible to comprehend, and so we try to come up with all kinds of explanations. But the truth is, when God says it’s your time, it’s your time. All we can do is pray. For Jean and Bill. For Melissa.”

  That’s not all we can do, Rex thought, allowing his rage to simmer, mainly because he knew the alternative involved losing control. “Has anyone seen her body?”

  Rex’s mom and dad looked at each other.

  “Well, I’m sure someone has,” Rex’s dad said.

  “But, like, her parents? Have her parents seen the body?”

  “Sweetie,” Rex’s mom said after blowing her nose, “you don’t need to concern yourself with morbid details like that right now. I think you’re just gonna get yourself more worked up.”

  “So that’s a no?” Rex asked.

  “It’s okay, Rex,” Leif said, not thinking this line of questioning would lead anywhere productive.

  “Oh, is it, Leif?” Rex looked at him. “Alicia is dead. She’s dead.”

  “I know,” Leif said, taking off his glasses to wipe away tears. “I know.”

  “Are we doing her funeral?” Rex asked his parents, milliseconds after the thought occurred to him.

  Rex’s dad sighed and grimaced. “I’m afraid not. Shackelford already offered the Boykinses a funeral on the house. Free service, free coffin, free everything.”

  “Well, you should offer that too! Alicia was my best friend, Dad. The Boykinses aren’t even that close with Shackelford!”

  “Rex, come on, you think I don’t know that? Of course I offered. I was going to either way, but Shackelford beat me to the punch.”

  “That’s true, honey,” Rex’s mom said.

  Rex’s dad shook his head. “Jean and Bill had already signed the paperwork with Shackelford. I wasn’t gonna press ’em on it. They’re out of their heads right now, don’t know up from down, and I don’t blame ’em, either. Sorry, son.”

  Rex clenched his jaw, then picked up the Nerf basketball and hurled it against the wall.

  * * *

  —

  “IT DOESN’T FEEL real,” Leif said.

  It was the first thing either of them had said in at least ten minutes. They were on their island, sitting on their rocks, not bothering to decide who would sit on which boulder, not adhering to the rules of statements and questions, maybe because they were too in shock to remember to. Or maybe because in a world where their best friend could be around one second and gone the next, those rules now seemed pathetic and meaningless.

  “I know,” Rex said, staring out toward the woods where Ben lived.

  “Remember when Alicia wore a cape for three weeks in fifth grade?” Leif asked. “And when people asked which superhero she was, she would say, ‘None of them, I’m just a girl in a cape.’ ”

  “Don’t do that,” Rex said.

  “Do what?”

  “Start talking about her in the past tense. Like, reminiscing. I’m not ready for that.”

  “Okay. Sorry.” Leif wasn’t necessarily ready either, but he couldn’t help himself. He felt an obsessive need to remember every little detail he could about Alicia, that if he didn’t do that right now, the memories would all fade, like a vivid dream that evaporates as soon as you lift your head from the pillow.

  He’d thought about that time, only a few weeks after she’d moved to Bleak Creek, when Alicia invited herself to a sleepover he and Rex had already planned. Rex told her it would be weird to have a girl spend the night, and Alicia told him, “You’re weird for saying that.” He’d also remembered when, in sixth grade, Jeremy Hawkins found a toad on the playground and proceeded to organize an impromptu game of “frog baseball.” Before the first pitch was thrown, Alicia took the wiffle ball bat from Jeremy and said, “How ’bout we play some Jeremy baseball?” She then proceeded to clock him repeatedly in the head with the plastic bat until the PE teacher intervened. She was sent to the principal’s office, but Jeremy never touched a toad again.

  And now Alicia was gone.

  She was never coming back.

  She and Leif would never sit together near a cozy fireplace, or work on crossword puzzles, or make beautiful offspring that were perfect combinations of all of their best respective features. He wouldn’t even get to tell her how he felt. He would spend his whole lifetime never having told her.

  That seemed impossible.

  “I really don’t think there was a fire,” Rex said, still not looking at Leif. “Don’t you feel that too?”

  “Honestly,” Leif said, “I don’t know what to think.”

  “I bet Ben will have an opinion on this.” Rex scanned the woods. Ben didn’t seem to be home. Probably out squirrel hunting.

  “Well, sure, we all know what that will be,” Leif said, sounding more sar
castic than he’d intended.

  “What do you mean by that?” Rex asked.

  “I mean…” Leif felt like the tension between them could reach a breaking point at any moment, like his animosity toward Rex might combine with their grief and quickly combust. But he didn’t care. “He already said that he thinks kids are being sacrificed. So he’s obviously gonna confirm your theory about…you know, about that happening to Alicia.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I already told you, I don’t know what to think.”

  “So you’d prefer to believe their dumb-ass story about Alicia accidentally burning herself up over—”

  “I’d prefer that she wasn’t dead at all!” Leif shouted, surprising himself but feeling empowered by his anger. “That’s what I’d prefer! Whether we know how she died or not, dead is dead!”

  Rex looked stunned, as if he’d just been slapped. “All right.” He nodded a few times. “That’s fine. If you don’t care enough about Alicia to want to figure it out—”

  “What’d you just say?”

  “I said if you don’t—”

  “You seriously think you care more than me?” Leif had been carefully protecting his affection for Alicia for so long, not wanting it to come between him and Rex and, if he was being honest, afraid of how vulnerable it might feel to reveal it. But now his rage was overriding his fear. “You have no idea how much I—”

  “Rex! Leif!” Travis Bethune was wading in the river toward them, utility belt and all. “Thought I might find you boys here.”

  “Oh, hey,” Rex said, his tone gentler.

  “Yeah, I just…Gosh, man, I’m so sorry about Alicia,” he said, stepping up onto the island in his enormous work boots.

  “Thanks, Travis,” Leif said, coming down from his fury.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Rex added.

  “She was a really great person.” Travis didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, and ended up planting them on his hips. “You know, the reason I…Well, I should say…” He looked at the ground and shook his head. “The day it happened, I was paintin’ a house over on Brewster. I got the call on my radio, and by the time I got over there in my gear, it was all…it had already burnt down.”

  The color drained from Rex’s face. “You saw it?”

  “Well, yeah…what was left of it. Wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure. I keep thinkin’ if I had been there cuttin’ the grass that day, I woulda…I don’t know. Maybe I coulda done somethin’ to help her.”

  Rex hadn’t imagined Whitewood would go so far as to actually burn down a building to legitimize his cover story, but of course he would. Otherwise, it would be obvious that it had been a lie. “I don’t know that you could have done anything, Travis,” he said, “but thanks, man.” There was so much the poor guy didn’t know.

  “Oh, right, so, yeah…When I got there, I found this.” Travis dug around on his belt, pushing aside keys and reaching behind his measuring tape, coming up with something small and black pinched between his thumb and index finger. “The rest of her stuff went to her parents, of course, but…I thought you might want it.”

  Rex and Leif stared at Travis’s hand, unsure of what they were looking at.

  “It’s a button,” Travis said. “From her jumpsuit. Burnt, but…you know. Hers.”

  “Oh,” Leif said.

  “Do you…?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Leif put out his palm and received the sacred piece of blackened metal.

  “Huh,” Rex said, standing up from his rock and leaning over to see.

  Something about the button made the situation that much more real for Leif—having an object on his skin that had so recently been so close to Alicia—and he began to cry. “Thanks for this, Travis,” he said. “This means…this means a lot.”

  “Least I can do,” Travis said, his hands back on his hips. “Really. You boys shouldn’t have to go through somethin’ like this, at so young an age. I just…yeah. But remember, you’ll see her again one day.”

  “Right,” Rex said. This was something he’d heard the pastor say at every funeral he’d ever attended. He wanted to believe it was true—that he’d get to hang out with Alicia on a cloud, telling her all the things she’d missed on earth—but he had his doubts.

  “Anyway, I’m gonna get goin’,” Travis said. “But if you boys need anything, anything at all, you know who to call.”

  Rex and Leif nodded, genuinely appreciative as Travis walked back into the river.

  “Though,” he said, turning back, “my answering machine broke, so. If it keeps ringin’, that means I’m out. In which case, call my beeper. My second beeper. First beeper’s for business only. Y’all got that number, right?”

  “Yep,” Leif said. “Thanks, Travis.”

  Travis gave them a thumbs-up and waded away.

  Rex held out a hand toward Leif. “Can I…?”

  “Oh, sure.” Leif didn’t actually want to part with the button, but he was touched by Rex’s sincerity. He passed it over, continuing to stare at it even after it was in Rex’s hand.

  Rex didn’t know what to make of it. It felt good to hold, though. His gut still told him that even if this had been a fire, it certainly hadn’t been Alicia’s fault. None of it was. In fact, she wouldn’t have even been at that school if it weren’t for him and Leif and PolterDog.

  So it was their fault.

  Their best friend was gone, and it was all their fault.

  16

  JANINE LOOKED INTO the side-view mirror for the seventh time in the past minute.

  She was sitting in the passenger seat of GamGam’s Grand Marquis as her grandmother steered them toward the airport, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being followed. Or that GamGam’s brakes were going to suddenly give out. Or that something else horrible would happen.

  The paranoia had been with her for days, ever since her visit to Aunt Roberta’s. Learning that her uncle’s fatal car accident had likely been a murder—that there were people in town (including the sheriff, for God’s sake) so desperate to hide whatever was happening inside that school that they would kill another human being—had been jarring, to say the least. It was a level of cruelty she hadn’t anticipated, and she was ready to heed the message so gracelessly scrawled on the side of the vehicle she was currently in.

  So that’s what Janine was doing.

  She was leaving Bleak Creek.

  It hadn’t been a snap decision. As rattled as she’d been after talking with her aunt, she’d been incredibly angry, too. At first she’d let that fuel her, imagining her documentary could uncover the truth, not only about what had happened to Donna but also about her uncle’s death. It quickly became clear, though, that word had spread about Janine. Most people she approached, from parents to teachers to other students, wouldn’t even entertain the idea of speaking with her.

  The only interviews she’d successfully conducted were with a couple of Donna’s other coworkers from Li’l Dino’s, twenty-one-year-old server Gabriel Rodriguez and sixteen-year-old hostess Sandy Dillon. Both of them had provided variations on the responses she’d gotten from Tommy Dowd: that the Whitewood School had really helped them out, that they’d deserved to be sent there and were glad it happened, that it had put them on a path to living a successful life. As soon as Janine’s questions got even slightly probing, they’d shut down. (Once their interview was done, Gabriel had revealed his true motivation for being there, awkwardly asking Janine out for coffee. Sandy, meanwhile, had asked Janine to sign a form indicating that the interview would count as an hour of community service for Key Club.)

  After unsuccessfully attempting to talk to both Donna and Aunt Roberta once more about the school and what had happened to Uncle Jim, Janine had reacquainted herself with an old friend: self-doubt. She was putting her life—and possibly her aunt’s
and cousin’s and grandmother’s, too—in serious jeopardy, and for what? She couldn’t even get any good interviews. If she was killed, people would find her footage and think, Why was she even down here? To film boring conversations with her grandmother and some teenagers and a fat man bragging about his kidney stones? Janine had no business making a documentary, and she wasn’t quite sure why she’d ever thought she could.

  But all that didn’t explain why she’d finally decided to leave, not entirely.

  No, there was one more thing.

  Dennis.

  The night before, after Janine had come home from her scintillating interview with Sandy, she and GamGam had been sitting on the couch eating cold fried chicken and watching Wheel of Fortune when the phone rang. GamGam had toddled off to get it while Janine tried to decide if Vanna White had the best job in the world or the worst. Moments later, with a You’re never gonna believe this tone in her voice, GamGam called out, “It’s for you, Neenie.”

  Janine had trudged toward the phone, fully expecting it to be Gabriel Rodriguez asking her out again, and she was actually considering saying yes, thinking maybe his persistence was the universe’s way of helping her officially hit rock bottom. But all thoughts of Gabriel had disappeared once she heard the voice on the other line.

  “Hey,” Dennis said.

  Janine froze, thinking Bleak Creek had officially caused her to lose a grip on reality.

  “Janine? You still there?”

  It was really him. His voice conjured up a million feelings at once, as if she wanted to shriek and swoon at the same time. “Yeah. I’m here.”

  “Good.”

  “How did you find me?” Out of all her questions, this was arguably the least important, but it was the easiest to ask.

  “It wasn’t that hard,” Dennis said, obviously grinning. He hadn’t actually answered her question. “I miss us.”

  Though it was wonderful to hear him say those words, it was also infuriating. “Oh, really?” Janine said. “Does Lola know that?”

  “She and I are done. She’s not a very…creative person. Compared to you, anyway.”