by Taylor Hale
“You haven’t been in a pool or anything?”
“I tried to go to a pool party last semester at school and it did not go well . . . but nope, I haven’t even had a bath.”
He laughs. “Oh.”
“Which means I shower instead.”
“I know, I know. Maybe you’re just loaded, but you’ve gotten kind of defensive, Olive.”
Olive. West is the only one who’s ever called me that. To everyone else, it’s either Olivia, Liv, or Livvie. But to West, it was always Olive.
“I’m not drunk,” I squeak out.
“Could’ve fooled me.” He pauses. “Hey, I’m just teasing you. Anyway, you probably want to get back to your party. I’ll let you go.”
I do want to leave, but I feel like if I let him out of my sight, he’ll slip away forever, and I’ll be thrown back into that reality where I’ll never know what West Hendricks thinks of me.
“Okay,” I say.
“Bye, Olive.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around?” I say to his back. God, I hate the pathetic hopefulness in my voice.
He lightly waves. “Maybe.”
And then he’s gone. West gets into an old chromatic sports car that reminds me of a model on Dad’s bookshelf. It revs as it starts, and the lights momentarily blind me before the car rumbles away. The pungent scent of gasoline carries on the wind as his taillights disappear, and strange clouds of emotions rain over me. I feel weird, I guess—a little hollow, a little sad. But I feel alive too.
With a knot in my chest, I go back to the party.
“Oh my God, Liv!” Keely stumbles off the dock, and I catch her so she doesn’t fall face-first into the sand on the shoreline. Her bloodshot eyes find mine. “Holy shit, I was looking for you everywhere! Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I just needed some air. How wasted are you?”
Tangles of her hair stick to the sweat on her forehead as she laughs a little too loudly. “Okay, maybe a teensy bit, but we started doing shots and—” She shoves her bottle in my hand. “Come on, drink with me.”
“I can’t, it messes with my pills,” I mumble.
“Fine, more for me.” Keely knocks back a huge swig. I’ve never seen her drink so much. Two summers ago, before I started my medication, Keely and I stole four of my dad’s beers and two of my mom’s wine spritzers. It was more than enough to get us wasted. We hid in my bedroom all night and laughed our asses off at videos of cats running into walls. Though it was one of the only times I ever drank, I had a lot of fun—but that Keely was different than this Keely. This Keely can’t even stand up straight.
“You’re not going to be sick, are you?” I ask.
“Don’t give me that, Liv,” Keely slurs. “I can handle myself, trust me! You’ve missed out on a lot.”
Ouch. Obviously I missed out on a lot, but it still hurts to hear. Keely keeps drinking from the plastic bottle. Mine must still be on the boat—not that I care.
When the door to the houseboat flies open, voices shout and cackle as Miles falls onto the deck with a dopey grin on his face. He’s probably as wasted as Keely.
I’m happy to see my childhood friends again, but I expected our first night together to be a little more . . . personal. They’re both right in front of me, yet there’s more distance between us here than when I was 450 miles away.
“There you guys are.” Miles jogs down the dock, and his sandals squish against the sand when he hops off. The smell of stale beer and cologne radiates off him. Judging by the huge wet patch on his shirt, he got involved in one of the drinking games. Miles doesn’t need to know I ran into West; he might get upset if I bring him up again.
“Hey.” I rub the goosebumps off my arms at the cool breeze from the sea. “Can we go now? I’m not really feeling this.”
“Aww, okay.” Keely pouts but hooks her arm to mine, then Miles’s. “Come on, Miles, you’re stuck with us.”
Relief washes through me as we leave the beach. The last thing I wanted was to go back to that party, I’m not in the right headspace to meet everyone again.
A fenced path leads us to the suburbs. Coral Park connects us to Keely’s neighborhood, so we follow the curved pavement until we reach a field surrounded by the backs of houses. Stars slice through the sky, and ropes dangle off the wooden posts of the playground, bathed in the navy hue of night. Miles, Keely, and I used to climb to the very top of the jungle gym and feel like we were on top of the world. Looking at it now, it’s barely taller than me.
West slinks back into my mind. Right over there, behind the set of slowly creaking swings, is the last place we spoke before my fall. He was thirteen with his friends, I was eleven and by myself. He’d been ignoring me for a while, but I was a brave, persistent child. Nothing like who I am now. Under the afternoon sun, I’d jogged over to him and asked if I could play soccer with them until Miles showed up. The other guys laughed, and West just said, “Go away, Olive. You can’t hang out with us.”
His friends laughed. Anger, embarrassment, and confusion cluttered my mind. I called him a jerk and stormed away, vowing I would never talk to him again.
That was a lie, of course, because I attempted to follow him on Instagram a year later.
“Hey, Earth to Olivia, are you there?” Miles says, and I snap from my reverie. His eyes burn a hole through me.
“Sorry, what’s up?”
“It’s nothing,” Miles mutters. “I was just trying to ask you about New York. Isn’t living in the city crazy?”
“Define crazy?”
“That winter lantern festival looks amazing. Ever been?”
“No, I haven’t. But it is really pretty.”
Dana and her friends went last year. Their profiles were illuminated with pictures of the lantern animals while I was taking a homework break in my room. Maybe Miles was expecting me to become some city girl with a super exciting life, like Dana Long and her penthouse apartment with an indoor pool, but I’m not like that at all. I don’t even have friends, not real ones. Just girls who talk to me because we’re on the same volleyball team. Miles needs to know the truth, but Keely saves me by shouting a WOO at the top of her lungs, so loud birds flock from a tree nearby. She spins in a circle with her hands in the air.
“Look at all this space!”
“She’s really drunk,” I tell Miles.
He laughs and puts his hands in his pockets. “Yep, that’s Keely Myers for you.”
“She does this a lot?”
“Oh yeah. Officer Myers’s daughter is one of the biggest drinkers in town and he has no idea about it. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“No? Not really.”
“I don’t mean she’s a joke or anything!” Miles saves. “Not at all! Keely’s great.”
“Okay . . .”
We’re halfway through the park, on the path that snakes through the grass. Sidewalk chalk hopscotch has been drawn on the concrete, and it reminds me of when Miles, Keely, and I got in trouble for scribbling stick figures because you aren’t supposed to vandalize public parks, even if it’ll wash away with the rain.
A high-pitched scream erupts. Up ahead, Keely falls into the grass and scurries back on the heels of her hands.
“Keely!” I run at her, Miles beside me, but we stop in our tracks. A rotten, putrid smell permeates the air, so pungent it oozes into my nostrils like some kind of chemical. I know that smell. Rats get killed in the city a lot, and their tiny bodies create enough stink to fill an entire alleyway when they roast in the sun all day.
Torn-up, fluffy lumps of flesh are scattered at the leg of the bench beneath a flickering street lamp. Broken bones, shreds of skin, bloodied fur.
Squirrel carcasses.
Three of them have been mutilated, like they’d been dissected in Science class. Their chests were sliced open, rib cages pulled apart, tiny organs spla
yed onto the ground. It’s way too clinical to have been done by another animal—no, this has a human touch, exactly like the report my mom had worried about. Some pieces of skin are uneven, like the person who did it messed up partway through. Maybe got angry.
“They say that’s how serial killers start out,” Mom says in the back of my mind.
Miles helps Keely to her feet, and she balances herself on yellow Converse. It’s like the drunk has been slapped right out of her. “God, that scared the shit out of me,” she says. “What kind of freak would leave this here?”
“My parents and I saw something about this on Caldwell’s news site before we came,” I say.
“It’s happened a bunch of times now.” Keely shivers. “But like, closer to downtown—like in town hall and at church.”
“I don’t think it’s happened in the neighborhoods,” Miles adds.
“We should call your dad, Keel,” I say.
“Wait—no, we can’t. He’ll know I was drinking!”
“Liv’s right, Keely,” Miles says. “We should call your dad.”
Keely chews on her bottom lip. “No. He can’t find out I’m drunk. Let’s leave it for someone else to find, they’ll call it in.
“What, like a little kid?” Miles says. “Come on, that’s not right. Here, have a piece of gum to cover the smell.”
Miles and I stare at her expectantly. At least he’s on my side about this. After a beat, Keely groans and snatches the gum. “Fine, but you guys better cover for me if my dad knows something’s up.”
The swing set creaks against the silence as we wait for Roger to get here. The rusty chains are cold in my hands, and my feet swipe against the earth each time they touch the ground. We’re far enough away from the carcasses that the visuals are unclear, but the queasy feeling remains.
“Do you think they were in pain?” I ask absentmindedly. Miles and Keely look at me.
“Probably,” Keely says. “That looks pretty bad.”
“Nothing deserves to go like that.”
“They’re just squirrels, Liv,” Miles says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I know they’re just squirrels, Miles, but I can’t stop imagining what they went through.”
“Maybe the person killed them before they tore them apart.”
“Or maybe they tortured them.”
Silence. Darkness drenches us, but light from the waning moon perforates the clouds. When two police cruisers pull alongside the curb, I skid to a halt and hop off the swing, relieved. Roger hurries out of one car, another cop from the other, and they meet us at the edge of the playground. As one of three cops in Caldwell, Roger has sporadic hours despite being the police chief.
“You kids okay?” Roger asks, huffing as he jogs toward us.
“We’re fine, Dad,” Keely says. “It’s just like what happened before.”
“Where are the carcasses?”
Keely nods toward the park bench but avoids her dad’s gaze. Roger’s lips purse in a grim line, and he nods at the other cop, a red-headed woman in her twenties. I recognize her as Maggie Jones. She was a senior in high school when I was in the sixth grade. Popular too. The beautiful lifeguard type, but I doubt she ever knew I existed. When she turns on her flashlight and points it at the bench, the beam overpowers the weak light of the street lamp.
Roger gets down on one knee and observes the carcasses for a long moment. The squirrels’ lifeless, beady eyes gleam against the flashlight. Roger straightens up and hooks his hand to his belt. “We should call the state troopers on this one,” he mutters to Maggie before he faces us, his police chief’s badge reflecting. “Okay, you kids get out of here. We’ve got this.”
There are police officers all over New York City, but Caldwell is small and sleepy—a state trooper wasn’t ever called in the entire time I lived here. Not that I remember, anyway.
“But Dad, what’s going on?” Keely says. “This is so gross!”
“It’s nothing to worry about, Keely. We’ve got it all under control.”
If they had it under control, it wouldn’t keep happening. This is creeping me out way too much.
“I’m just glad we found it, and not some little kid,” Miles says.
“You did the right thing by calling me.” Roger turns to Keely, and the serious look on his face becomes the expression of a concerned father. I know both sides of him well. Keely looks scared when he steps closer to her, but he doesn’t seem to notice her smell. “You just head on home now, okay? You kids stick together and get home fast. Miles, have your parents pick you up from our house.”
With that, we hurry away. I take one last glance at the trees surrounding the park. If someone had wanted to watch this, it would be easy to hide behind the leaves of an oak, up in the branches where no one can see.
The porch light clicks on when we get to Keely’s house. It’s a single story, ranch-style home with beige brick and black shingles. In the garden of red and pink roses, a cement stepping stone of Keely’s handprint is displayed. We made some together in kindergarten, but my parents lost mine in the move. Facing us on the cobblestone path that leads to the front door, Keely sighs.
“Whew, I think I’m off the hook. My dad didn’t notice I was drunk at all.”
“You’re good now,” Miles says. “Honestly, I don’t even feel it anymore.”
“Tell me about it. I really wanted to keep partying, but that was the biggest buzzkill. Let’s just call it a night. Pick it back up tomorrow?”
Miles nudges Keely’s shoulder with his fist. “You got it.”
Awkwardness spikes, so I shift away when Miles looks at me. He outstretches his arms, and before I can process it, he’s hugging me. I hesitantly hug him back. The citrusy smell on his shirt is so foreign—Miles never smelled anything like this before. It was always spring laundry, and he was warm. Now his skin is cold on mine, and his frame is so much bigger. His shark tooth necklace digs into my cheek. Somehow, it’s like I’m not hugging Miles Hendricks at all. He’s a completely different person.
Disappointment weighs on me. Of course Miles is different—people change when they grow up. I’ve changed, too, but unlike everyone else around me, I’ve regressed; they all grew up and got into drinking and partying, but I stayed a little kid, attached to my stuffed animals and watching movies in my apartment with my parents. My friends all left the nest, but I never did.
“It was awesome seeing you again, Liv,” Miles whispers into my hair, and honestly, it makes me feel a little weird. I’m relieved when he breaks away and walks down the driveway.
“But Miles, wait!” I say. “Roger said you should call your parents for a ride!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’m not scared of some animal killer.” Miles grins over his shoulder before he disappears into the night.
4
Sunlight pours through the blinds of the Myerses’ guest room. My body is heavy and my head throbs, because the last thing I remember is falling asleep to orange streaks of dawn coming through the window. Now the clock reads half past ten. Dammit, I didn’t even sleep for four hours.
On the plus side, I didn’t dream. The events of the night spun around my mind like a violent whirlpool until I drifted into a state somewhere between sleep and consciousness. Honestly, I prefer it—better to feel like crap all day from a lack of sleep than to see horrors of my nightmares, to feel the anxiety brought on by visions that always feel so real.
My hands drop into the plush, brand-new bedspread. The guest room is tidy and impersonal, with slate-gray walls, seashells, and fake coral on the nightstand. A canvas print of a beach hangs above the dresser. I saw the same one in IKEA with my parents.
Someone pounds on the door, and I jolt upright. Keely bursts inside.
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead!”
“How are you not hungover?”
She laug
hs, hair in a tangled bun atop her head with powder-yellow pajamas on her thin frame. “Trust me, I feel like shit. But if I act like I don’t, sometimes I can trick my brain into really believing it. Don’t rain on my parade and come get some breakfast.”
Keely Myers has an admirable ability to adapt to anything. I’m sick at the thought of what we saw last night, but she’s already moved on.
“We should spend some time together today.” Keely elbows me as we head out of the spare room. “Real time, like the old days.”
I let out a relieved laugh. “Movie night?”
“You read my mind.”
We weave through the familiar, striped-wallpapered halls of Keely’s house. Roger has a turntable set up in the living room next to a bookshelf filled with records. Afghans are spread over the arms of the living room couches. We pass a watercolor painting Keely’s mom did of a hibiscus syriacus, the national flower of South Korea, and photos of their family. The smell of rosemary and tomatoes soaks the air as we enter the kitchen. At the stove, Sun wears a black blouse adorned with maroon roses and stirs a pot. She’s a kindergarten teacher, so she has the summer off.
“What’re you making, Ma?” Keely asks, and we sit at the table.
“Tomato soup,” Sun says.
“For breakfast?” Keely grumbles. “I want pancakes. Or waffles.”
“Twelve thirty is not breakfast time, Keely. Have a bowl of cereal.”
Keely drags herself to the pantry. “Lucky Charms okay, Liv?”
“Sure, anything’s fine.”
“Afternoon, everyone.” Roger walks in wearing his full uniform. I want to ask him what happened after we left last night, but he goes to the counter and greets Sun. Keely has told me the story of how they met—how Roger grew up in Caldwell Beach with his father, and Sun traveled here from Korea to take a trip across the US. She had never planned on staying—not until she met him.
A heaping bowl of Lucky Charms appears under my nose. Keely shovels a spoonful in her mouth and takes out her phone. The milk transforms the marshmallows into gooey blobs, one of them vaguely squirrel-shaped.