by Lily Sparks
When Erik sees me from across the field, he throws his head back and laughs.
“It’s called fashion!” I cry at him.
“Wow.” Javier leaps up from the quilt where he’s helping Dave with dinner and hurries toward me, and everyone is watching. “How do you look gorgeous in everything?” Javier says, and he twirls me around like he actually wants to get a better look, scanning me up and down.
Kurt wolf-whistles and Troy yells “Smooth!” and my face heats. Is this how we’re letting the group know we’re together?
Apparently yes, because then Javier brings me into him and kisses me hard, his stubble scraping my face as wild catcalls echo across the field, until Dave’s whistle cuts through and Javier pulls away. I stagger a few steps when he lets me go, overwhelmed, but not with the giddiness from before. I feel blindsided and a little embarrassed as Jada gives me a playful shove: “You and Javi?! Whaaaat?!?! That’s so cuuute!!!”
Nobody widens her eyes at me before Kate calls her over, and the twins high-five Javier when he returns to Dave. I look across the field to Erik. But he’s deep in conversation with Dennis and doesn’t look back at me.
Dave calls everyone to dinner and we gather on the picnic blanket, and it seems like Nobody is giving me space; she sits at the other end of the quilt instead of next to me. Jada and Troy sit across from me and Javier, talking to us both at the same time, like we’re a unit. I can barely follow the conversation, I’m so conscious of Javier next to me. He keeps his long arm draped loosely behind me, his head occasionally dipping closer to say little sweet things: “You cold? You want my fleece?” And “Did you want me to get you another granola bar, gorgeous?” Or I’ll catch him just looking at me. Like he doesn’t want to take his eyes off me.
Erik sits with Nobody and Dennis, his back to us.
When the sky starts to blush with the sunset, Javier drapes his huge fleece over my shoulders, and I’m surrounded by his warmth. It’s surreal, being treated like someone’s girlfriend. I don’t know why it makes me so uneasy. Maybe I’m just not used to belonging.
After the sun sets, Kate suggests we make up for lost sleep by going to bed early, and Javier takes two sleeping bags over to a corner of the tarp away from everyone else. And this is easier: to be him and me, instead of us and everyone else.
“My tattoo needs a touch-up,” I tell him as the first stars start to tremble overhead. He takes my forearm, his finger tracing inside my wrist. It feels like sparkling wherever his finger touches.
“Or I could do a new one somewhere else?” His eyes glint in the dark.
“I cannot lose that dandelion.”
“You’re missing the lesson of the temporary tattoo,” he says, teasingly, his finger moving from the tattoo to trace from my elbow to my wrist. “The moment you start stressing about how to keep something, you lose it forever. Because you’re not enjoying it. You’re just owning it. Temporary tattoos are about living for the moment.”
“Whoa!” I laugh, tucking my arm back into my sleeping bag with a heady shiver. “I had no idea you were such a philosopher.”
“I’m full of surprises.” He smiles. “You’ll see.”
He falls asleep midsentence not long after, the field growing quiet, everyone’s exhausted. But I can’t sleep, I keep staring at the stars overhead. In Ledmonton, I thought the night sky was flat. But now I see trenches and waves and chasms that must be millions of miles deep.
I realize he’s beside me before he speaks.
“Signal,” Erik whispers. “Come with me.”
I don’t answer, afraid to wake Javier, I just rise and follow him.
I follow him to the last obstacle on the course, the fake apartment building. I follow him all the way up the fire escapes to the small platform of fake roof at the top. The wind is higher and colder three stories up, the treetops billowing below us like an ocean before a storm. I have never felt closer to the stars.
“Erik, if this is about—”
“Dennis told me something interesting,” Erik cuts me off. The moonlight turns him black and white, like a silver screen idol. “Kate is taking down the fence tonight, in case we have to make a run for it. Just until dawn.”
“So what, you’re going to run away?” I don’t know why that comes out. But Erik shakes his head.
“It doesn’t work like that. The way Dennis explained it, if we’re on the wrong side of the fence but still in range when it comes back on, our kill switch still goes off. And the range is over twenty miles.” He bites his thumbnail. “I can’t cover twenty miles before dawn. But I could get there and back.”
And he points to a small grouping of lights past the first ridge of trees, maybe a dozen city blocks away.
He pulls a flashlight out of his hoodie. “What if we could get that screen time after all?”
A night hike with Erik? I should be exhausted, but instead an almost manic energy steals through me.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
Erik puts a leg over the edge of the fake apartment building, turns, and drops out of sight. I lean over in time to see him jumping from the top of the doorsill to the ground and roll my eyes. I take the fire stairs, like a normal human being.
When I get to the ground he’s pacing impatiently, staring out at the forest like it’s a pool he wants to dive into.
“Could you have possibly taken longer to get down here, Grandma?” he says as we make our way down through the forgotten playground. Shielded from the field by the trees, he turns on the flashlight. A bleached-out circle floats across the ground ahead of us, the ghost of a sunbeam.
“Now, now,” I say. “Calling me names is not going to make me fall in love with you.”
“What?” Erik sounds genuinely puzzled. “In love with me? What are you talking about?”
Utter. Mortification. “Remember? Before the bomb went off?”
“Oh, right, when I made that joke.” Erik’s face clears. “Sorry if I got your hopes up there, Signal, but I wouldn’t dream of intruding between you and Javier. What you’ve got going is so healthy, so real: he gets to play at being high school sweethearts and you get to pretend you can change a cold-blooded murderer—”
“We’re not pretending anything. We’re both broken people. I know you see me as some sweet little weakling, but I’ve got my share of regrets to carry, believe me.”
“Yeah, I can only imagine how many flavors of lip gloss you used to shoplift,” Erik snaps. “Have you told him you’re innocent yet?”
I take a deep breath. “It hasn’t come up.”
Erik looks smug. “Well, the good news is I don’t actually care. I’m sure it’s all very exciting, but as an onlooker you two bore me to tears. I’d much rather ask more questions about Rose, if I’m allowed.”
“Actually … Would it be alright if we talked about you for a little while?” I say as nicely as I can. “You know things about me I’ve never told anyone else, and I don’t even know your last name.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He mutters in a low voice.
“You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to,” I continue. “But we only ever talk about me. I’d like to know more about you.”
He doesn’t say no.
“Like, who were you in high school? Did you play sports? Were you in all AP classes? Backpack or messenger bag?” I smile in the dark, trying to imagine Erik with either. I truly can’t.
“I never went to high school,” Erik says. “I was pulled out in sixth grade and home schooled.”
“Oh.” That would explain the precocious way he talks. “Was your mom, like, a stay-at-home mom or something?”
“She was a forensic psychologist.”
“… And your dad?”
“A computer programmer.”
“Why did they home school you?”
I can hear Erik smiling his heartthrob smile.
“They didn’t want me to hurt a classmate and end up in prison.”
“Oh.”
“Am I creeping you out again?” he asks, still smiling.
“A little, yeah,” I confess. “That’s quite a statement, Erik. You want to give it some context?”
“Context, context …” I’m sure he’s about to blow me off with some pithy remark. Instead, his words rush out with strange intensity: “When I was thirteen, I attacked an emotionally abusive narcissist who deserved it. He was over twenty at the time, so it’s not like it wasn’t an even match. And face stitches look cool! I still don’t see what the big deal was. But I was informed that I lack in empathy. So my mom pulled me out of school and tried to fix me.”
“Fix you how?”
“Oh, she tried everything. Medications. Music. Aromatherapy. ‘Incentivizing kindness,’ that was a big one.” His disembodied words in the dark feel so intimate, like a voice on the phone late at night. “Lots of reading. I am definitely the type who spent his weekends at the library.”
I really wish I could see his face.
“… Did it work?”
“Well, no, obviously,” Erik laughs, and my blood runs cold. “Or maybe it did sort of, but that’s a story much longer than this walk. Next question, please.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”
“Next question.”
“I’m really supposed to let that one go?”
“Another time. Next question.”
“Ooooh-kaaay. What’s your favorite color?”
“Gray.”
“Favorite food?”
“Pop rocks.”
“What do you mean by sort of?”
Erik’s hand grazes mine briefly as he swerves in the dark, so I know to follow him. The sensation reverberates up my arm like a struck bell.
He stops, and gestures to lights up ahead. We circle the small cabin, staying just inside the tree line.
“No signs of a dog. One station wagon. Motion lights by garage.” He frowns and suddenly is halfway up a chain link fence. I follow him, and we land in a small grassy yard. From there it’s strictly hand signals between us as we pause, check for motion lights, then dart up the steps, pressing ourselves to the side of the house, holding our breaths and straining to hear if anyone inside has seen us.
And then a tinny scream pierces the night, and a sting of synth swells.
“Someone’s up, watching TV,” I hiss at Erik as he steps to the nearest window and looks in. “We need to go!!!” But he turns to me with a dismissive half-smile and shakes his head.
“It’s just a little kid watching a scary movie. I’m guessing he snuck out of bed, so probably his parents are asleep. Come on.”
“Probably?!?”
Erik kneels by a tiny basement window, which looks about the size of a shoebox. He slides open the glass and fiddles with the screen so it pops and falls backward into the room below, noiselessly.
“Carpeted. Nice,” Erik exhales.
“Yeah, right, you’ll never fit through that win—”
Erik, who is over six feet tall and has almost disproportionately broad shoulders, is through before I’ve finished the sentence.
Erik smiles up at me from the basement window.
“You want to find Mr. Moody or not?” he says, and disappears from sight.
There’s only one answer. So with the deepest sense of dread I lower myself through the small window and into the unknown.
Chapter Sixteen
Creepy Crawl
The moment I breathe the still, warm air of the house I know we shouldn’t be here. The drone of the heater, the alien weight of the unseen people overhead, the lingering smell of their dinner, it’s too familiar and foreign at the same time, my skin crawls with alarm.
“Erik this is crazy!” I whisper as he gives me an assist down. “What if someone wakes up? What if they call the police? What if they have a gun?!”
“What if they just stay asleep?” Erik is completely untroubled. “I know what this is about: you don’t want anyone to catch you in that outfit. Can’t blame you there. But we can only stay about twenty minutes, so let’s just focus on getting what we need and getting out without exposing those pants to any innocent bystanders.” His flashlight sweeps one side of the room, then he coolly pulls a kids’ chunky plastic playhouse from the corner and positions it directly under the window, a makeshift ladder if we need to climb out quickly.
The bright flashlight beam moves deeper into the room, throwing the furniture into sharp relief, and lands on a couch with a laptop on its arm. I gasp, but the circle of light keeps moving until he finds a tablet in a kid’s chunky pink case.
“Here we go,” he says, snatching it up.
“Don’t you want to use the real one?”
“You can try it, but it’ll probably have a password, whereas the kid’s stuff …” He taps the tablet, and an unprotected home screen glows in answer. He hands it to me. “Have at it.”
“I should still be Facebook friends with Mike from like, back in elementary school. I still want to know where he went, Nice Guy or not,” I say, navigating to my scarcely used account. Tapping over to Mike’s profile, there’s a video posted in the last couple of weeks with at least five thousand likes.
“That’s like, the population of our entire town,” I mutter.
Erik leans in as I press play:
Mike’s face, glistening with a day’s worth of blond stubble, stares back at us somberly. His hair is swept to the side and it’s clear he’s in an urban apartment from the sounds bouncing up from the street.
“Hey guys.” Mike sounds nervous. “I know since me and Vaughn left Ledmonton there’s been a lot of talk. Then with that newspaper piece coming out, we’ve heard from a lot of friends and family and we decided it’s time to be open. So here it is. Vaughn and I have moved to New York City. And we’re boyfriends. We’ve been boyfriends for a long time.”
“Wait—what?!” I cry, and Erik shushes me.
“For years I had to hide this aspect of myself. I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with being gay …,” Mike continues, his eyes edging with tears. “But there was something very wrong with me being gay. That was impressed on me by my family, my parents, my church. The pressure only went away when Rose and I started ‘dating.’” He makes air quotes when he says it. “Rose helped shield me during the hardest time in my life. And it wasn’t until we lost her that I decided to stop lying and living in fear. And to start being who I am.”
Now I’m going to cry. “I had no idea. That must have been so hard for him—”
Mike goes on: “Signal Deere, a Class A, is now in jail for Rose’s murder. And I believe with everything in my heart that she will burn in hell for what she did.”
Erik nods along in mock agreement. “Finally, someone talking some sense.”
“It’s not his fault. He thinks I’m guilty.” I blot at my eyes. “And if I thought he did that to Rose, I’d probably say the same thing about him.”
“Is that what empathy is?” Erik says, one eyebrow up. “Thanks but no thanks.”
“At least,” I go on, “this explains Rose’s weird rivalry with Vaughn. Vaughn must’ve been so jealous, with Mike all over Rose at school … And why Mike lied about getting high: it was easier than telling his parents the truth, that he and Vaughn wanted to be alone together …”
“There’s a site I want you to see.” Erik snatches the tablet and navigates to a message board called Armchair.org, then taps “Girl From Hell” into the search bar.
“One of my mom’s tactics was to channel my more morbid impulses toward ‘being a helper,’” Erik says, his voice low. “She encouraged me to try and solve true crime cases. This board is pretty reputable, lots of freelance crime journalists and retired cops … Anything catch your eye?”
I scan the short list of thread subjects:
>GIRL FROM HELL: THE ROSE ROWAN MURDER:
>>MIKE & VAUGHN: Mike Comes Out in Facebook Video!!
>>Tom & Janeane RECENT PHOTOS// Award Ceremony for Rose Rowan Memorial Schol
arship
>>$$$The Windward Connection$$$: Rose’s Murder Not First Brush with Teen Tragedy in Famous Family’s Past
>>MUH ALIENS: UFO Spotted Over Park Woods the Night Of!
>>NECKLACE THEORY: Complete Breakdown of Why Signal Murdered Rose Over a Necklace.
“What’s all this about a necklace?” I tap on the last thread.
>>NECKLACE THEORY: Why Signal Murdered Rose Over a Necklace
According to local sleuth/armchair contributor CC_CUBA, Tom Rowan told members of his Bible Study group that Janeane had found a pentagram pendant in Rose’s room days before that fateful night. Tom confronted Rose with it the day of her murder. She had explained the necklace belonged to Signal Deere, and Tom prohibited Rose from inviting her to the house again. Tom put the necklace in a bedside table drawer.
Flash forward to that night. Signal somehow gets Rose to meet her in the shed, and Rose tells her their friendship is over. As Sherpop&lock89 pointed out in a previous thread several elements of a traditional pagan altar were found at the crime scene: burnt down candles, a bowl of salt scattered on the floor, part of a cupcake wrapper (food, especially sweet cakes, is a common pagan offering), and of course the 10-inch mini utility saw found under Signal’s hand (likely shoplifted from Ledmonton Hardware Supply) would have stood in for a pagan atheme, or ritualistic dagger.
Lets_Get_Em has theorized that when Rose ended their friendship, she triggered some kind of emotional meltdown in Signal, who was possibly high as well (as RETIREDPHD points out, the drug tests administered to Signal when she was first processed did not include specific assays needed to identify a variety of opiates).
Signal strangled Rose, then incorporated her friend’s body into an occult ritual.
The necklace was not listed in discovery, suggesting Rose returned it to Signal, who alone knows its location. Tom finding Signal’s necklace lines up perfectly with explaining the “table of junk” (the altar) the mutilation of Rose’s body (a magic ritual) and a compelling motive for why things came to a head that night.