The Color of Bee Larkham's Murder

by Sarah J. Harris

  I don’t need to study his face or ask him to raise his voice so I can see the genuine shade. Lucas Drury.

  This is the boy at the center of everything, whose voice is blue teal when he’s not whispering.

  It was Bee Larkham’s favorite color; she liked it far more than my cool blue.

  Another uncomfortable truth that revealed itself to me when I least expected it.

  “I know you were at the police station yesterday, Jasper,” he says quietly. “There’s no point denying it. My dad called a copper for an update. He said you came in for a chat with your dad.”

  Light Copper makes me laugh, but it could have been Rusty Chrome Orange.

  “This isn’t funny, you idiot. My dad’s gone ballistic.”

  “You told me that last week. You said you were pulling the duvet over his eyes.”

  “The wool, you idiot, and he worked it out. He found my Facebook password and guessed BL is Bee Larkham. He got straight on to the police on Saturday morning and claimed Bee’s a pedophile: a serial offender who preys on young boys. My two sons. Probably more victims. Those were his exact words.”

  I breathe out cool blue with white circles. “Was he right? Was Bee Larkham a pedophile who preyed on young boys including Lee?”

  “Of course not,” he says louder. “She was in love with me. No one else, but . . . Never mind about that now. We don’t have time. We’re both in trouble. We have to—”

  The bluish green is cut off by shiny conker brown.

  “Lucas! What are you doing? Hurry up!”

  Lucas glances over his shoulder as two boys approach. They look like identical twins and must be his friends. They’re not smiling. I’m not sure about Lucas. I haven’t looked at him since he grabbed me. His hand drops from my shoulder as if it’s been burnt.

  “I have to go, Jasper. I’ll meet you in the usual place at lunchtime, OK? We need to get our stories straight before either of us speaks to the police again. Deal?”

  I move my head up and down because I agree with him about straight lines and straight stories.

  Those are the stories we both need to tell, but I’m not a total fool. Lucas Drury has to go first. He owes me that after everything I had to do for him and Bee Larkham.

  9

  MUM’S STORY

  This is Mum’s straight story, not mine. I was only three or four. I sat with her in the back garden of our house in Plymouth on a late summer evening. Dad wasn’t there. He was with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m not sure which country. No matter. We didn’t need him in the picture when we had each other.

  The grass felt warm beneath our bare feet. I don’t remember wriggling my toes in the sunburnt yellow grass, but that’s what Mum said we both did while we played with my red pickup truck. It had come to rescue the battered yellow car that crashed into Mum’s foot and overturned.

  She told me this story over and over again because I was too young to remember it actually happening. She remembered it for me and it became our favorite bedtime story.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Do you mean the starlings? Look, they’re the noisy birds in the tree over there.”

  “No. I don’t mean those birds. They’re reddish pink. I mean the other sound. Short blue lines.”

  A robin hopped out of the hedge, chirping. “That one,” I exclaimed. “That’s the color. A short blue line with moving lemon bits.”

  “You see colors?” Mum asked. “When you hear sounds?”

  I said yes, of course I did. Didn’t everyone?

  Mum kissed the top of my head over and over again.

  “Not everyone,” she said, when we finally stopped laughing. “Not everyone understands the wonderful way we both see the color of sounds, Jasper. Which is a shame. A shame for them, not for us, because we share an amazing gift.”

  We ran through a list of things, starting with noises we could hear in the back garden, like a lawn mower, a car revving, an aeroplane passing overhead, and radio music blasting out of a neighbor’s window. I told Mum the colors I saw for every sound.

  Lawn mower: shiny silver

  Car revving: orange

  Aeroplane: light, almost see-through green

  Radio: pink

  We moved on to other things. The sound of the fan Mum had put in my bedroom to help keep me cool at night (gray and white with flashes of dark ink blue).

  Dogs barking: yellow or red

  Cats meowing: soft violet blue

  Dad laughing: a muddy, yellowish brown

  Kettle boiling: silver and yellow bubbles

  We talked and talked about my colors and I’d never looked happier, Mum said. My smile stretched from ear to ear.

  We could have chatted and played forever, but Mum said it was late and time to have a bath and get changed into my dinosaur pajamas.

  “Roar!” I shouted. “What color are dinosaurs’ roars?”

  We both decided they were probably shades of purple because that’s the colored sound my T-Rex made whenever you squeezed his tummy.

  Mum swung me up and I settled into my favorite position on her hip.

  “Thank you for letting me into your secret, Jasper,” she said. “Now can I tell you something?”

  “Yes!” I shouted. “T-Rex wants to hear too!”

  “For me, the starlings are bluish green, the robin is bright yellow, and the kettle boiling is dark gray with orange bubbles.” She kissed me quickly on my cheek. “Daddy doesn’t like me talking about the colors, so when he gets home you don’t need to tell him about yours either. He’ll be sad he can’t see the world like us, Jasper. Not everyone’s built the same. We’re the lucky ones.”

  She was right, but my luck eventually ran out. When Mum died, I lost the one person in my life who could see the world like me.

  She loved hearing about my different hues and discovering how they compared to hers.

  My colors miss her. They long to be shared with someone who appreciates them as much as I do. But I still have to talk about the shades I see—even to Dad—because a part of Mum lives on through them.

  That’s my straight story.

  I hate the ending but I can’t change it.

  10

  WEDNESDAY (TOOTHPASTE WHITE)

  Afternoon

  “It’s this way to the science lab, thicko.” A hand grabs my collar and hauls me back as I dash out of the dining hall. “Lucas said you might make a run for it after lunch. He needs a word.”

  I’ll call this boy X.

  His evil twin, Y, hovers in the background in case I’m a secret ninja who can kick-box his way out of any situation.

  I’m not and I can’t.

  They don’t touch me—that would be assault. I’m silently escorted down the corridor. X walks in front and Y behind. No one notices I’m being taken against my will because I’m not screaming. That would be pointless. I doubt anyone would help. Not even the girls who walk past. Especially them. They’d probably laugh buttercup yellow.

  When we reach the science lab, Y opens the door and pushes me inside. A boy’s perched on the bench. His lip is cut and there’s a pale green bruise on his cheek and a long, red mark on his hand.

  It could be Lucas Drury. Lucas Drury after a fight with a tornado, which has messed up his hair, split his lip, and scratched his hand. I didn’t look at his face when we spoke in the corridor earlier, so I can’t know for sure this is the same boy. I don’t say anything. It’s safer that way.

  “Did anyone follow you here?” His voice is quiet and low. A dark greenish blue color. Lucas Drury’s color.

  “Dunno,” Y says. “Don’t think so.”

  “Then what the hell are you looking at? Get out!” Blue teal.

  It’s definitely him.

  X’s and Y’s shoulders go up and down. They slam the door behind them.

  I shudder, not only at the unpleasant squashed beetle color of hell but also at the worrying development. I had no idea spies were here at school and o
n our street—people like David Gilbert who could search for damaging evidence about Bee Larkham and me.

  Now I’m certain of one thing: there are spies everywhere.

  I gaze at Lucas Drury. He’s trembling with rage at what I’ve done, all the mistakes I’ve made. I rub Mum’s button in my pocket harder as he strides towards me. He’s going to pin me against the wall, like last time. Instinctively, I move backwards. My head is slap bang in the middle of the periodic table poster again. Thulium is on my left, rubidium on my right.

  He stops in front of me. “Tell me everything.”

  I can’t. I don’t want to think about that. I turn my head to look at the poster.

  Mendelevium, Nobelium, Ytterbium, Thulium.

  “Hurry up, Jasper. Before someone finds us in here. We need to agree what we tell the police before they question us both again.”

  “Rusty Chrome Orange,” I say, before I can stop myself.

  “What?”

  “He’s a detective like the famous actor, Richard Chamberlain,” I blurt out.

  “Wait. You’re confusing me. Who have you spoken to?”

  “Richard Chamberlain wanted a First Account about Bee Larkham, whatever that means. He didn’t explain.”

  “What did he ask you? Did he mention me?”

  I reel off the weird questions about Year Eleven boys and Bee Larkham and condoms.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him about the death of my parakeets and my neighbor David Gilbert, who’s a bird killer, but he wasn’t interested.”

  “Fuck the parakeets, Jasper.”

  My scalp prickles at the sharp, ugly-colored word.

  “Jasper! Open your eyes! You can’t pretend this isn’t happening. This is real. For both of us.”

  I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want this to be real. I want to shut out the unpleasant colors.

  “I’m not interested in the parakeets and neither are the police. Lee got scared last week and coughed up to Dad about other letters he found in our bedroom. He told him you pass me stuff at school and spy on Bee with binoculars. That makes you a witness in all this.”

  He’s lying. I wasn’t spying on Bee Larkham. I was watching her oak tree and making notes of who visited her house and the neighbors’ houses. I thought that would help me build a case against David Gilbert.

  “Please, Jasper. Concentrate. What did you tell the detective about Bee and me? Did you say you’d seen me visiting? Through your binoculars? That you’d seen us together, you know that time . . .”

  Uncomfortable colors nudge around the corners of my brain. I daren’t let them in. Finally, I open my eyes and avoid looking at Lucas. He sounds like Dad. I hate him for that.

  Concentrate. Act normal. Don’t flap your arms like a parakeet.

  I can’t ever tell him that while he broke a grown-up woman’s heart into millions of tiny, sharp silver pieces, I did something far, far worse to her on Friday night.

  Something unforgivable.

  “I didn’t tell Richard Chamberlain, like the actor, anything about you and Bee Larkham.” That’s the truth. “I warned him about the death threats to my parakeets, but my notebooks were out of order. He told me to stop making 999 calls. They waste police time. I screamed and threw up all over his sofa.”

  “Great. Well done. Whatever you’re talking about. Weirdo.”

  He punches my arm, not hard. It doesn’t make me cry. Not like when the bigger boys do it after school.

  “Listen, Jasper. I’m denying absolutely everything. The police have nothing, just what Lee thinks he knows and Dad’s suspicions after he found some messages and pics from Bee on Facebook. That’s all. I’m sticking to my story that the note you delivered last week was a prank. It was a dumb girl at school having a laugh.”

  “A prank,” I repeat.

  “Yes, a prank. Bee didn’t sign the letter with her name. She used initials as usual. They’ve got no proof unless you tell them she gave it to you. You haven’t done that, have you, Jasper?”

  “I didn’t tell the detective anything.”

  “You see. No proof. Dad says the police haven’t been able to get hold of Bee yet and they won’t be able to analyze her handwriting because I ate the letter.”

  “You. Ate. The Letter.”

  “Yup. I tried to make a joke of it when Dad waved it in my face. I grabbed it off him, chewed it up, and washed it down with a glass of water before he could pull it out of my mouth. Dad didn’t laugh.” He touches his split lip. “He didn’t find it funny when I refused to tell the police anything about Bee at the weekend.”

  “What did it taste like? The letter, I mean?”

  “You’re missing the point, Jasper. I ate it because I needed to get rid of the evidence. I had to protect Bee. Without that note, Dad has nothing concrete. Nothing that proves we were ever together.”

  “I’m glad you ate it.” I’m still curious what it tasted like, but Lucas isn’t interested in sharing the details.

  “You have to deny everything too, if they speak to you again,” he continues. “Say the note was from some random girl at school. You don’t know her name. You found it stuffed in your bag or dropped on the pavement outside your house. Or talk gobbledygook about parakeets again to throw them off the scent. Just don’t tell the police the truth about the letters or the time you . . .” He stops.

  I can’t look at him.

  I don’t want to think about that.

  I want to be absorbed into the periodic table and create a chemical explosion that annihilates me, Lucas Drury and Bee Larkham, and all the putrid colors we created together.

  Bang!

  Bright flashing lights, splintering acrid yellows and oranges.

  I rub Mum’s button harder in my pocket.

  “Look at me, Jasper,” Lucas says. “You have to do this for me. You have to fix this mess because it’s your fault. My dad’s threatening Bee with all kinds of things. She could lose her job and go to prison, all because you cocked up. It’s over between us, but she needs cash from her music lessons more than ever right now.”

  He curls up his fist. I close my eyes and wait for him to punch me. I deserve to be hit because I’ve hurt Bee Larkham far worse than his dad ever could. I deserve to go to prison. Maybe this is a trick and Lucas has already guessed what I’ve done.

  Maybe her death is written all over my face.

  Nothing happens.

  I look up. Lucas has walked over to the window.

  “Life sucks,” he says, wiping a tear from his face. “I wish I could go back in time. I’d change everything.”

  I agree about time traveling. My life totally and utterly sucks too. I want him to stop crying. Then I’ll pretend I never saw anything; he’ll pretend he never did anything. We’ll both pretend we haven’t seen anything or done anything or know anything about each other.

  Most important, we’ll both pretend we don’t know anything about Bee Larkham or what went horribly wrong last week.

  “What am I going to do?” Lucas asks, running his hands over his face. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I have absolutely no idea. If we were both in a swimming pool, I couldn’t throw Lucas a life buoy because I’m drowning too. I can’t help myself, let alone him.

  Lucas doesn’t wait for my nonexistent advice.

  “I’m only fifteen. I can’t do it. We were careful—we used protection.” He looks back at me. “Do you think the baby’s even mine?”

  11

  WEDNESDAY (TOOTHPASTE WHITE)

  Still That Afternoon

  We split up like an apple sliced down the middle, spitting out its shiny black pips. I suggested Lucas leave the science lab first to prevent any spies reporting our clandestine meeting to the head teacher or police. I waited four minutes, fourteen seconds before heading straight to medical, the only possible destination.

  I vomited as soon as I walked in, before the nurse had time to stand up from behind her desk let alone pass a pa
per bowl. That made me feel even worse, because lately I’ve caused a lot of sick-clearing-up work for people.

  I make trouble everywhere I go.

  The nurse and me have been arguing for the last five minutes, her dark marigold versus my cool blue.

  I can’t let you go home alone. I have to get hold of your dad first.

  Dad has an important meeting and can’t be disturbed.

  I’ll try again.

  He’ll have his phone turned off. I have a key. I can let myself in. I do it all the time. I have neighbors who look out for me.

  That’s a lie, but it’s highly unlikely she knows anyone who lives on my street.

  I want to hide in my den, away from the accusing windows of Bee Larkham’s house until the bright colors stabbing my brain no longer flash.

  I need to get rid of the picture in my head of the baby inside Bee Larkham’s tummy, the baby I killed when I killed Bee Larkham. I’d murdered two people that day, not one like I thought.

  I can’t tell the nurse, of course. She’s trying Dad’s number again. My voice is a higher pitch, a whiter, flakier blue.

  My tummy hurts. I’ll tell Dad to take me to the doctor’s this evening. We’ll get a sick note. Medicine. I promise.

  Bad, horrible thoughts chase each other around my head and make me want to claw at the hole in my tummy while she leaves another message on Dad’s mobile. I can’t get a doctor’s note to fix those feelings.

  The truth is, I can’t confess to the nurse. Words jam in my mouth; random thoughts are lodged in my brain. Some can’t get out and others won’t own up to what they’ve done and reveal their true colors.

  She won’t understand, how could she?

  Her phone rings bubble-gum pink and she starts talking again.

  I have to get to my den and burrow beneath the blankets. I’ll close my eyes and wrap Mum’s cardigan around me and pretend she’s lying next to me, talking about the colors and shapes she sees when she listens to classical music alone at night while Dad’s away.

  The nurse puts the phone down. “Wait here, Jasper. A pupil with asthma needs me right away. I’ll find a teaching assistant to stay with you until your dad gets here.”