Soon an angry mob of townspeople formed—think pitchforks, straw hats, and chants about killing mutant cows. Led by Earl Beddington, the town’s most prominent farmer, the mob marched on the vacant field as soon as the sun went down. But the grass was so high and the farm so big, they eventually got lost in all the foliage. As midnight approached, they set up camp in a small clearing inside the jungle of grass. While the others slept, Beddington stood guard, his pitchfork grasped tightly in his hands.
A little before dawn, Beddington heard a rustling in the grass. He was about to go back to camp to warn the others when he came face-to-face with, you guessed it, a green cow.
But this wasn’t just any ordinary cow with a green tint. According to Beddington, it had long fangs, pointed ears, and bright red eyes. The cow sniffed him the same way dogs do when you first meet them. Beddington said it made him feel like a piece of meat.
Beddington began to slowly back away. The beast licked its chops and then charged, all the while viciously mooing. Panicked, Beddington let out a high-pitched squeal and ran full sprint back toward the camp.
“Cows!” he yelled. “Cows!”
The rest of the posse woke up, grabbed their pitchforks, and ran as fast as they could. By the time the sun came up, three people had been impaled, one eye had been poked out, and Beddington was forever changed. A search party found the injured and frightened farmers soon after, their screams having carried throughout the town.
Beddington harbored revenge against cows for the rest of his life. He became an outspoken critic of vegetarianism, and much to the embarrassment of his family, an advocate of a theory he called spontaneous evolution.
Green Cow Acres was bulldozed a few years later. By then, the town had a new mayor, a new name—Williamsburg—and was trying to change its image from a backwater town to a real center for business and vacation homes. And that meant declaring the green cows weren’t real and that Beddington was basically a crackpot.
But here’s the conspiracy part: When they cleared the land, the rumor is they found the skull of a cow with incisors as big as steak knives. The mayor had the skull destroyed, but one of the construction workers sold the story to the press, and so the legend of the green cows lives on. Eventually, the town dedicated a statue to Beddington, honoring him for his role in developing Burgerville, but most people still know him as the guy who came face-to-face with a green cow and lived to tell the tale.
* * *
• • •
I arrived at Beddington’s statue promptly at 5:45. Located in front of Town Hall, it’s probably Burgerville’s most famous landmark. I waited expectantly, an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach, shivering on the unusually cold fall day. Beddington stared at the horizon in the direction of Green Cow Acres, a panicked expression on his marble face. His arms were opened, palms to the sky, still warning his fellow townsfolk about the green cows.
As the minutes passed, my hope began to wane. After about half an hour of nervously pacing, I went to face Beddington and find solace in his stone eyes. I nodded to him, thinking how foolish I was to think Jane actually liked me. Beddington seemed to be looking over my shoulder, keeping an eye out for his green cows.
After a while, I got the feeling he was looking at someone. I turned around, and there was Jane, her head tilted up at the statue. I almost jumped in surprise. Jane had her hands tucked in the pockets of a black hoodie, zipped all the way to her neck; her eyes reflected the last few rays of sunlight, two orbs glowing in the dusk. She peeled back her hood, revealing her long black hair, and once again my heart began to race as she walked closer.
“What’s he looking for?” Jane asked, glancing over her shoulder in the direction of Green Cow Acres.
“You came,” I said.
Jane surveyed the scene, turning around to take in the full scope of Burgerville’s main drag. The dilapidated exterior of Town Hall, an oblong structure that resembled a prison, loomed over Beddington. A single traffic light blinked yellow, a recent addition that was part of the town council’s push to modernize Burgerville.
“So this is it?” she asked.
The way she said it, I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the statue or the town.
“Pretty much,” I said, my words garbled. I had once again lost the ability to speak.
Jane hesitantly walked over to Beddington, leaned over, and read the inscription on the base of the statue.
“Earl Beddington. Visionaries don’t see with their eyes, they see with their hearts.” Jane paused to ponder Beddington’s words. “So, is this like your grandpa or something?”
I shook my head. “I wish. His relatives are loaded.” I then proceeded to tell her about the green cows, Beddington’s ill-fated search party, and the eventual cover-up. When I finished, Jane shook her head in disbelief.
“So you’re saying that this guy believed the cows over there”—Jane turned and pointed toward Green Cow Acres—“had mutated and become carnivores?”
“That’s right.”
“And you guys built him a statue?”
“Not for the cows. For his other achievements.”
“And no one talks about the green cows?”
“That’s all people talk about.”
“One delusional episode and no one can give the poor guy a break.”
“Who knows,” I said. “Maybe we’re the delusional ones.”
Jane climbed onto the base of the statue and cozied up to Beddington. His imposing figure dwarfed her slight frame.
“Take a picture,” she said, reaching down to hand me her cellphone.
I snapped a photo, Jane giving a thumbs-up to the camera like she was posing with a minor celebrity.
“My friends will get a kick out of this,” she said.
Jane teetered on the edge of the base, her arms spread out for balance.
“So why’d your family move to Burgerville?” I asked.
She jumped down from the statue, took her phone, and sat on the ground with her back to Beddington. “I’m still trying to figure that out myself,” she said. She let her head fall back against the pedestal, a few inches in front of Beddington’s boot. “Did you grow up here?”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if I’d just told her I had some horrible terminal illness.
Jane patted the ground next to her, inviting me to sit. I carefully lowered myself beside her and sat down cross-legged.
“My parents can’t stop talking about all the fresh air,” she said. “How quiet it is. All the wide-open spaces. When the nicest thing you can say about a place is that there isn’t much there, I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
“There’s a lot of stuff here,” I said, “you just can’t see it all.”
“Like green cows?”
“I don’t know. I guess I mean the history.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people who reenacts Civil War battles.”
“No,” I said, leaving out the time my grandfather took me to Burgerville’s Civil War Remembrance Festival and we reenacted the Day of the Substitutes, a proud moment where the landowners of Burgerville paid people to fight for the Union. “I’m talking about the stories.”
“You know they have those today too, right?”
“Yeah, but they’re all so . . .” I struggled for the right words. “True.”
We sat in silence, our shoulders lightly touching.
“So this guy Beddington,” Jane said as the sun continued to dip below the horizon, “did he ever change his mind about the green cows?”
“Never. His family tried to quiet him down, but even on his deathbed, he told anyone who would listen about what he saw that day.”
“Poor guy,” Jane said. “It’s kind of sad.”
“Until the day someone spots another green cow. Then the s
tory changes and the past is rewritten. That’s why I like history so much.”
“But it doesn’t really change the past.”
“No, but it changes how we see the past. Which is just as important.”
“Unless you’re Beddington,” Jane said.
I felt Jane lean into my shoulder, her weight shifting almost imperceptibly. I let myself fall into her, careful not to breathe, worried the moment was too fragile.
“There’s always room for revisions in history,” I said.
“How about in life?”
Before I could respond, Jane stood up, brushed off her pants, and turned to face Beddington. She seemed to be looking for clues in his stoic expression. Grabbing Beddington’s boot for leverage, I lifted myself off the ground and stood in front of Jane.
Just when I had worked up the courage to look into her eyes, I heard her phone beep. She pulled it out of her pocket, typed something, then said, “My ride’s here. Thanks for the history lesson, Ray.” She saluted Beddington and walked away.
“Where are you going?” I called after her.
“One of my friends from the city is picking me up,” she said. As she scanned the street, glancing down at her phone every few seconds, a car approached, the headlights so bright, I had to look away.
“But don’t you want to see Green Cow Acres?”
“I think I’ll take a pass,” she said, facing the street. “That place screams dead bodies.”
I realized I had just been used. Clearly her main objective was meeting her friends from the city, but why go through all the trouble of meeting me at Beddington’s statue? I could only guess that her parents were trying to keep her from her old life and I had been an alibi, a red herring meant to throw them off her trail.
An expensive-looking car with tinted windows pulled up. When Jane opened the back door, smoke billowed out.
The sun had all but gone down, so I couldn’t really make out the person in the driver’s seat. I heard laughter, a loud bass trembling in the trunk, and a voice asking if the statue of Beddington was Abraham Lincoln. I cringed. Jane, realizing the ridiculousness of her friend’s comment, rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders. Then, just as I was about to turn around and head home, she called out to me.
“Ray,” she said, her voice barely audible over the music.
“Yeah?”
“I hope you find your green cows.”
I nodded, standing in the middle of Beddington’s growing shadow. “You too.”
Jane dipped into the car and slammed the door. As I watched the taillights recede in the distance, I wondered whether or not I had just had my own encounter with something not really there. I normally would have brushed off the thought, but after that night, Jane seemed to disappear.
She wasn’t in school the next day, the day after that, and then the entire week. I was sure her parents had woken up, recognized they’d made a mistake, and moved somewhere else.
I settled into my routine of zoning out during class and lunch with Simon, where we’d discuss topics like the worst way to die and whether or not we’d cut off various body parts to date hot girls in our grade. Simon and I had no choice but to accept the Burgerville status quo. A place where girls ignored us, I was the weird kid who liked history, and Simon was the even weirder kid who wanted to be a vampire—or, according to one rumor started in middle school, was a vampire.
“You’ve got to forget about her,” Simon told me at lunch after a full week of speculating about Jane’s whereabouts, a long list that included North Dakota, North Korea, and the North Pole.
“I can’t,” I said.
“There are plenty of fish in the sea.”
But we both knew that wasn’t true. At least not in the dry, desolate lake of Burgerville.
“She’s different,” I said.
“What makes her so special? Besides the fact that she talked to you.”
I had an image of her in my mind. Perpetually walking into Mr. Parker’s classroom. That look of confusion, like she was trying to figure out where she was, who she was.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s the thing. I really want to find out.”
“Maybe you scared her away,” Simon said.
“Good talk,” I said, throwing a french fry at Simon’s face.
Once again, the best things about Burgerville remained in the past.
At least that’s what I thought.
112 DAYS AFTER
LIGHT THERAPY
Rich has been giving me all these assignments lately to help me better understand myself and my depression. “Depression is like this black light on everything in your life so you can only see the bad stuff,” he explains. “We’re trying to give you a flashlight to help you see all the good stuff too.”
“But don’t black lights reveal the truth? I saw this special on hotels—”
“You’re missing the point, Ray.” He pauses, looks around the room. “Let me ask you this. Do historians only study the endings of events?”
“No,” I say.
“And why’s that?”
“Because history isn’t a straight line from the beginning to the end. You’ve got to study everything in between. That’s where the real answers are.”
“And do they leave out all of the good parts? Is the story of Burgerville just a bunch of Beddingtons looking for green cows?”
“No. You have to have balance. Both the good and the bad. You have to tell the truth.”
“Good. So maybe you have to become a better historian of yourself.” He leans forward, a smug look on his face, as if he expects applause.
I roll my eyes. He sounds like . . . Well, he sounds kind of like me when I used to give Jane those same speeches.
“Is that clock wrong?” I ask. It feels like we’ve been talking for hours, but only about ten minutes have passed.
Rich glances at the clock. Instead of numbers, there are bright yellow faces representing moods—happiness, sadness, anger, one that looks like a homicidal maniac, which, according to its placement, is Rich’s three o’clock.
“Look, Ray, getting better isn’t about waking up with a big smile on your face and suddenly feeling like everything makes sense. It’s about taking a lot of little steps.”
I point to one of the posters on the wall. “We’re back at the motivational posters?”
“They’re clichés for a reason. So this week I want you to look at a few situations through the lens of a black light and a flashlight. I’m calling it ‘Light Therapy.’”
“Catchy,” I say.
So here it goes:
SITUATION ONE
Black Light: Simon spent all lunch talking about his new shoes, complaining that the lights had already grown dimmer from when he first opened the box. It was like our year with Jane never happened. When I didn’t respond, he initiated a heart-to-heart, telling me to cheer up and try to get excited about senior year. “Life happens,” he said, “whether you’re awake for it or not. And given your sleeping condition, you should really try to live life to the fullest.” I wanted to yell at him and ask, “What about Jane?”
Flashlight: Maybe Simon’s just trying to be a good friend. I know he misses Jane too. A few times this school year he’s begun telling a story about her and then stopped mid-sentence, his voice breaking, eyes on the verge of tears. At that point, he’ll put away his Lunchable—yes, Simon still eats Lunchables—and say he has diarrhea or needs to go to the bathroom to apply his acne medication, something way more embarrassing than just admitting he’s crying.
SITUATION TWO
Black Light: I drew the short straw and got Mr. Hillman, the worst teacher in the entire school, for U.S. Foreign Relations. Mr. Hillman resembles Napoleon in his later years, barely five five, with a receding hairline and sagging jowls that carve his face into a permanent frown
. He also has all of the insecurities associated with the Napoleon Complex. Most of his lessons somehow circle back to one of his accomplishments. Already, U.S. Foreign Relations is feeling a lot like an extended introduction to Mr. Hillman’s time as a track star in college.
Flashlight: Some history is better than no history.
SITUATION THREE
Black Light: My mom spent last Saturday cleaning out the garage, untouched since my dad left, filled with boxes of yellowed papers, clothes from when I was a kid, and the elephant in the room, all of my dad’s old stuff. As weird as it is to say, something about being surrounded by all that stuff, all that history, was kind of comforting. So if I wanted to look at my clothes from childhood—priceless items like my old cowboy boots and neon-blue track suit—they were there. If I wanted to read my ambitious tome on the history of the french fry, written in fifth grade, I just had to find the right crate. And if I wanted to look at my dad’s old yearbooks, pictures of his fraternity brothers, or his old baseball glove, all those things were there too—well, at least they were, until my mom crammed everything of his in a box labeled Goodwill and packed it in her trunk. It feels like she’s erasing his memory, cutting out all the good parts of our history with the bad.
Flashlight: Just because I’m stuck in the past, doesn’t mean my mom has to be too.
237 DAYS BEFORE
NEVER HAVE I EVER
About two weeks after our encounter at Beddington’s statue, Jane showed up unexpectedly at my house, my own green cow come to life. Simon and I were in my room, watching a horror movie called The Butcher with the sound off and filling in the dialogue ourselves—a favorite pastime of ours, especially with movies that look like they’re made on someone’s cellphone.
The History of Jane Doe Page 3