Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  “I don’t know. I sort of flung it at him and ran away.” I climb to my feet to dig some blankets out of the chest at the foot of my bed. I hand three of them to Amanda. She seems to still feel cold, anyway. One of them is the Disney princess comforter I used when I was a little girl.

  “I get that.” She smiles. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” I climb into my bed, but turn on my side, facing her. I’m not sure if I can sleep with my back to her. If she weren’t undead, if she were Renee, I’d have no problem with her crawling into bed with me and braiding my hair. But she’s not Renee, I remind myself, and she is undead.

  I drop the extra pillow down to the floor for her and blow out all but one of the candles, the pink one in a glass jar on my nightstand that I’m pretty sure isn’t a fire hazard.

  She mashes the pillow up under her head, and I try not to think about her gnawed shoulder oozing onto it. “No, I mean it. You’re a good friend.”

  I stare at the ceiling in the dark, blinking back tears brought on by memory or regret or stress—I’m not sure which. “No, I’m not.”

  “Pfft,” Amanda says. I hear her rolling over in her cocoon of blankets. A soft snore soon emanates from the floor.

  And then I’m alone, sleeping in the dark with the undead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I WISH THAT I COULD run away from this. I understand Amanda’s impulse to do it. Really, I do. But I can’t.

  Blood pounds through my temples as I run. My feet jar against the cross-country path, vibrating painfully in my knees. My lungs flutter open, and I suck burning air through my mouth. My sweat-soaked ponytail slaps against my cheek, curling in the humidity. It’s way too hot for fall today, and the heat presses against me.

  Coach says the team is too slow, that we need to get as many hours of practice in as we can. I feel that sluggishness in me, as I fall behind the rest of the team on the winding track through the woods behind the school. State finals seems like such a distant, unimportant thing. But the running is not. The running makes me feel awake and alive, and that’s something I need right now.

  When I left for school this morning, I sent Amanda to the crawlspace. I felt weird doing it, like some kind of a jailer. But she took her pillow and the blankets and willingly crawled in there with a flashlight and a book. I know that she wants to run. So do I. And we both know that keeping her in the attic isn’t going to last long. Somebody is going to find her. I hope to God that it’s not my mother when she goes up there to drop off laundry or something. She’s used to being sane and having well-defined parameters in her world. This would blow her mind.

  My feet hammer the dirt path, in time with my breath. I wish I could stop thinking. There are snatches of time when I’m running when I stop thinking, when I can hear my breath churning and my heart thumping and nothing else. The rest of the world is silent, just the scrape, pound, and burn of my body. These seconds are pure bliss, and those moments of zen are why I love running. I try to fall into it now, but it’s elusive, as if it’s just ahead of me, slipping away with the rest of the pack.

  Sun flashes through the leaves overhead, momentarily blinding me. It’s a pleasant, but disorienting instant, as if I’m falling into some bit of sky where I have to trust my legs to carry me through this opaque brightness.

  “Charlie!”

  My head snaps around at the sound of my name being called. My wet ponytail slaps my face. I stumble and churn to a clumsy stop, sweat dripping off my nose. I have a momentary fear of Devourers, but then I see who it is peering at me from behind a tree.

  “Rafe,” I gasp.

  He steps completely out from his hiding spot. I haven’t ever seen him in full sunshine before, and it seems weird to see a Goth kid in sunshine. He looks pretty bad, though. His eye makeup is smeared, and it seems like he’s slept in his clothes.

  “What are you doing here?” My voice is a high whistle.

  “I needed to talk to you. About that note.”

  I’ve been dreading this. “Look, I…”

  He advances toward me, hand out. There’s such a pleading, a wanting in his eyes. “I have to know…”

  I instinctively step back. I haven’t thought about what I’d say when confronted about the note. I haven’t read it—that would be a huge betrayal—but I think he must know now that Amanda is alive.

  He reaches toward me and grasps my shoulder, a bit harder than I think he intended to. Startled, I squeak and turn out of his grasp, stumbling, and land on my ass in the dirt.

  The woods burst forth with cops, like quail flushed from the undergrowth by a dog, and I don’t have a chance to say anything else. Two deputies grab Rafe and haul him away from me. He growls and fights, but he’s no match for two grown men. They have him down on the ground and in cuffs as I sit, gaping like a fish.

  Doing nothing.

  *

  “Are you all right, Charlotte?” Sheriff Billings asks me.

  I sit in the school guidance counselor’s glass fishbowl of an office, staring at the wrinkled label on a bottle of water, trying to smooth it with my thumb.

  “I’m fine. Really. He wasn’t trying to hurt me.”

  “That’s not what it looked like from where I was standing.” The Sheriff leans against the guidance counselor’s desk. She’s gone, probably to make some phone calls or soothe Rafe’s friends, I’m betting. I’m conscious of the curious gazes of students roaming by in the hall. I scrunch down in my chair.

  “He just wanted to talk,” I say.

  “We heard that. About a note.”

  I take a deep breath. This is where everything could all unravel, and I must be very careful. I know I can ask them to call my mom, that cops can’t really question a minor without a parent present. But we’re all supposed to be friends, and that would be suspicious as hell. Besides, I want Sheriff Billings on my side. “What is he talking about?”

  “You don’t know anything about a note?”

  My heart flip-flops. “No.” Now that I’ve committed to the lie, I have to go through with it, to protect Amanda. No matter where it takes me.

  “He said he got a note from you…from Amanda.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “Have you seen this before?” He hands me a plastic baggie. There’s a note inside on yellow legal paper. I read through the plastic:

  “The boundaries that divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” —Edgar Allen Poe

  There’s one hole in my neck and one in my side. I can feel the air on them, like extra mouths, searching for something. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on like this, on the cusp of the living and the dead.

  Despite all the terrible things that have happened to me, I want you to know that I’m still a human being. I still love you, forever and in all directions of time and space.

  —Amanda

  “I don’t understand,” I say, handing the note back to the Sheriff. And I really don’t. In those short lines, there seems to be an unseen river of feeling moving beneath the words. It’s an experience I have never had, and it makes me feel like a voyeur.

  “The boy doesn’t have an alibi for the night Amanda disappeared,” the Sheriff says. “We’ve been watching him for a while. We think he abducted Amanda and killed her. And that this note was written during her imprisonment. We matched her handwriting to her homework…and we never released details of her wounds to the public.”

  I wrap my hands around the water bottle to steady them, tapping the edges of my pink fingernails together. “Oh my god. I can’t believe that.”

  “The evidence we had up to this point was circumstantial. The lack of an alibi. The fixation with death. Have you seen the guy’s artwork?”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s grim stuff.” The Sheriff holds up another plastic baggie with a picture of a dark-haired girl covered in blood and a man in black standing ov
er her. It looks sort of like Amanda, but it’s done in an anime style. It could be anyone, or even just a scene from a comic.

  “His friends say that he’s working on a Web comic called ‘Living Dead Dame.’” He fans out more pictures. Some of them are pretty graphic—sexual—nudes of women and the like. One shows a fully-clothed blond girl holding a paper crane. She looks a little bit like me, but again, the anime style makes it hard to tell. “Have you seen this before?”

  “Oh.” I don’t know what to say. This art is so intimate, and so inadvertently damning. “No. No, I haven’t.”

  “But that note is really incriminating. And with him going after you like that…”

  “But he wasn’t going after me.” My voice sinks in my throat, down to my stomach. And then I pull it back up. I can’t do to him what I did to Renee. I can’t just throw him under the bus. I have to protect Amanda, but I can’t let Rafe go to jail for something he didn’t do. “He wasn’t. And he didn’t kill Amanda. That note…I found it in Amanda’s art notebooks. I…I…” I shake my head. “I’m sorry I lied before. He didn’t do it. I’m telling you the truth.”

  The Sheriff sits back in his chair. “You really screwed up this time, kid. That note could be evidence in a crime.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did. I shouldn’t have taken the note. But he wasn’t attacking me. He’s innocent.”

  The Sheriff pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’ve gotta get this straightened out.”

  “Don’t put him in jail,” I plead.

  “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. The county juvenile detention center is full up, and I’m not about to park a juvenile in with a bunch of adults—even if I suspect he’s a murderer. I’ll put him on house arrest until I get this figured out.”

  I suck in a breath. House arrest wasn’t so bad, was it?

  The sheriff pats my hand again. “Don’t worry. Go home. Everything is fine. We’ll find where he hid the body and everything will go back to normal.”

  *

  Everything. Is. Not. Normal.

  My mom comes to get me, and she’s in full freak-out mode. I think she wants me to do a rape kit. I tell her to back off and that I’m fine. Fiiiiiine. She’s not buying it and wants to take me out of school for good. Never mind how furious she is about the note. I burst into tears in the car, not because of what happened, but because of how guilty I feel for getting Rafe in trouble. But she takes this as evidence that I need more pills, a good home school curriculum, and more attention from her.

  Which is the last thing on earth I want.

  “This is too far over the line. Too far.” She turns her SUV down our driveway, gripping the steering wheel so tight that her knuckles are probably going to bleed all over her hot pink scrubs.

  “Mom, I’m sorry. I should have told you about the note.” I’m scrunched down in the seat, rubbing my eyebrows. Part of me is afraid that she somehow senses that I’ve done even more things wrong, and she’s coming down on me like a ton of bricks because she has some nebulous mom-knowing about what I’ve been up to, but can’t nail it down to specifics.

  “It’s not just about what you did or didn’t do. You aren’t safe there.”

  “Wait. Rafe didn’t do anything.”

  “The kid probably killed his girlfriend. I’m not going to have you passing notes to a suspected murderer. You’re already lying and ruining my perfectly screwed-up investigation and—”

  I leap out of the SUV and slam the door as hard as I can. The window glass rattles, and I jump at the effect of it. But it feels powerful. It feels good to be angry and to finally express it. I stomp up the steps and through the front door.

  My dad comes out from the back. He has on the barbecue apron that he wears in the Body Shop, and it’s covered in stains. The generator hums loudly behind him. Goggles cover his face, and he strips the latex gloves from his hands. “Charlotte, I heard what happened and—”

  I brush past him, making for the stairs. “Yeah, well, Mom is determined to ruin my life for it.”

  “Charlotte, you get back here!” My mom’s voice calls behind me.

  I turn to glare at her. “Why? So you can make me take some pills to quiet me down?”

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I’m not taking this crap from you.”

  I throw up my hands. “Mom, there is nothing wrong with school. There’s nothing wrong with me. You can’t shove pills down my throat and lock me in my room and think that you’re protecting me.”

  “I’m your mother, and I’ll decide what’s best for you, young lady.”

  “News flash, Mom. Life happens. I’m part of it.” I turn on my heel and stomp up the steps.

  I hear my mother squawk in protest and my father’s soothing voice. Maybe he’ll talk her down. Maybe he won’t. It feels like things have crossed an irrevocable line, and I don’t know that he’s going to stick up for me like he usually does.

  I clomp morosely up to the second floor. Gramma stops me. Wordlessly, she wraps me in one of her firm but bony hugs. I fight back a sob against her shoulder. I fight it for a minute and then give in. Gramma smooths the hair on the back of my head. She always understands everything, without me having to say anything. Until now. Now things are too far gone down the rabbit hole. I snot against her shoulder.

  “It’ll be all right. You’ll see.” Her voice is as comforting as it was when I was little and afraid of the dark.

  At least Gramma is still on my side. I pull back and wipe my nose on my sleeve. She pats my cheeks.

  I glance past her. The radio in the kitchen is droning on: “A local man has gone missing on a hunting trip in Truett Valley,” a reporter says. “Bill Webster’s tree stand, gun, car, and lunch pail were found, but he has not been seen since 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday. He was last seen wearing camouflage clothing and an orange hat. Any persons with any information about his whereabouts should call the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office…”

  I ball my hands into fists, pressing my fingernails into my palms. I can’t think of that. Not now. I can’t think of the Hunter as a real person with concerned people looking for him, a man who probably had pictures of his family in a wallet burning to a crisp in the crematorium... Bile rises in my throat.

  What made him so bloodthirsty? Was it just…time? He’d been undead longer than Amanda? Was she going to eventually…

  I rub my eyes with my hands. It’s too much to process. Too much.

  “I’ll bring you up a sandwich later,” Gramma chirps.

  “Thanks.”

  I climb the steps up to my room. I hope that Gramma can talk some sense into Mom, make Mom realize that she’s being a totally irrational control freak.

  But if any of them really knew what was happening, they’d be entirely justified. I burned a guy in the crematorium last night, lifted some expensive shit from the museum, and am harboring the living dead in my closet. If they knew that? Holy shit, they’d have a GPS chip implanted into my head and ship me off to reform school.

  But they don’t. So far, my family is in the dark. And I intend to keep them that way. I’m giving serious thought to running off with Amanda somewhere. That may just be the ticket.

  I open my door, and utter an immediate: “Oh, shit.”

  Amanda is sitting on my bed, holding one of my teddy bears. She’s smoothing its ears like it’s a favorite pet.

  And Garth is sitting beside her.

  I close the door quickly behind me and lean against it.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Amanda says.

  “How did…” I begin.

  Garth shrugs, his sharp shoulder tugging at his black T-shirt. “I knew you were up to something. I figured you’d tell me when you were ready. But I came up here looking for my old acoustic guitar in the crawlspace.”

  “You haven’t played that guitar in years.”

  “Okay, I was being nosy. Lothar wanted up here like nobody’s business, and was pawing at the crawlspace door. But imagine the look on my face when I see Amanda he
re, reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales by flashlight.”

  Amanda lifts her hands helplessly. “I didn’t try to eat him or anything. I figured that would be rude.”

  “Yes. Yes, it would. How much have you told him?” I ask.

  “Uh…everything.” She glances sidelong at Garth. “He’s your brother.”

  Garth seems mostly unruffled by the talking dead. “It took a while for the whole life-after death-stuff to sink in. And I’m not buying that it’s supernatural—maybe a pathogen. She wasn’t very forthcoming. But I turned on the Sulliven charm.”

  “He actually threatened to tell your folks.” Amanda casts him a dim look.

  “Are you gonna?” I challenge him.

  “Not as long as you tell me the truth from here on out.”

  “Really?” I perk up.

  “No. You can’t keep this a secret forever. We really should tell someone.” Garth rubs the back of his neck. He’s vacillating.

  I shake my head. “Think about what will happen to her if we turn her over. She could become a lab rat, or, or—”

  “Charlie,” he interrupts. “This is bigger than all of us.”

  “Look,” Amanda says. “I’ll leave. That will solve it.”

  “No.” I say it vehemently. “We can fix this.”

  Garth runs his hands through his hair. He is not a decisive guy. Even at the best of times, his internal debate about getting pepperoni or mushrooms on his pizza can paralyze him for a good fifteen minutes. “Jesus, this is too big. This is…” He stares at Amanda.

  I crouch before him. I take a deep breath, preparing to give him the only inspiring speech I’ve ever given in my life: “This is the biggest, weirdest thing that’s ever gonna happen in your life. This is the closest you’re ever going to be to answering the questions of life and death, at least until you’re ready for a permanent dirt nap. This is the ultimate gothic Choose Your Own Adventure. It’s the call at the beginning of the Hero’s Journey that you’re always waxing on about every time you see a movie. This is your decisive moment.”