“Oh yeah.” George smiles, but it lacks her usual color. Telling this story puts things about her on display that she wished she could keep hidden. The fact that she’s doing it because it will help me… I can’t believe she’s working with Eli against me. I can’t believe she accepts the things he says about me. But actually, if Mackenzie was this big a bitch to her, maybe I can. “I started to get nervous that this was a terrible idea, but it was too late. Dad picked us up from Cleo’s house and drove us to the Beaumont Theatre – you know, the weird old cinema in Brawley? There’s no red carpet, and the only press there were fromFangoriamagazine. It was actually really cool – the whole cast was there in full monster makeup, and there was a big crowd of musicians and horror industry people and edgy actors and a cake that bled strawberrycouliswhen Dad cut into it. But you and Cleo in your sparkly outfits looked completely out of place, and everything that I loved about the party you said was dumb or lame or dorky. You kind of laughed it off, but Cleo waslivid. She screamed at me in front of my dad and his friends. You both dumped the cake over my head and took pictures on her phone. I started crying. The two of you left.”
Bitch.I dealt with Alec for George, but Cleo still doesn’t know not to mess with me and mine. This might’ve happened years ago, but I remember George’s face as she kicked Alec again and again and again. She might brush it off with a smile, but this stuff has eaten away at her. She’s the nicest person in that shitty school and she’s been eating her lunch alone in a bathroom for years because of Cleo and Mackenzie.
Now her old bully is sitting on her couch, forcing her to relive this story. She doesn’t know that the monsters are on her side now.
“By the time I got to school the next day, you and Cleo had spread the photo around to the entire class. That’s it, one cake on my head and I’m the freak forever.” She clenches her fists. “That part’s okay. I know I’m a freak. I’ve embraced it. I don’t know how to be anything else. But I really,trulythought you guys were my friends. I thought maybe this time things would be different. I admired the two of you so much, how strong you are. Especially you.”
“There’s nothing strong about bullying someone,” I say.
“I know your parents were…” George swallows. “I don’t know what you remember, but you showed me burn marks on your arm once. From your dad’s cigar.”
“He was a terrible human.” It felt like a betrayal of Daddy to say it, even though in all ways it’s true. “He taught me everything I know.”
“Do you remember anything now?” George asks.
“I think I’m starting to.” Only that I’m going to ruin Cleo for hurting George.
“And you really don’t know what happened to you?”
I know exactly what happened to me. I was buried alive and I’ve been squatting in a rich girl’s house for four years, completely alone in the world. And I have to figure out what you and Eli have done and make you not hate me so I can save your asses.
I shake my head. “Nope. It’s all a mystery.”
“Doesn’t it kill you not knowing what happened to your parents?” George bites into a candy bar. “If my mom disappeared, I wouldn’t stop until I had answers.”
“Yeah, well, unlike your mom, my parents aren’t exactly worth finding.” I gesture to the true-crime documentaries littering her hard-drive. “I can see you love to play detective.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” George grins. “I was the one who figured out what Eli’s dad was doing.”
“What?” I plump the pillow behind my head. “Okay, I need to hear this.”
“You know my dad died four years ago.”
“Fuck. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”Why does the world have to suck so bad for the best people?
“Yeah, me too.” George looks away. “Anyway, after Walter’s reality TV show, all the showbiz guys bought pre-paid funeral plans from Memories of the Hart. It was kind of a joke but also, it was like a cool thing to say in the industry, being able to ‘go out in style.’ Dad decided to get a plan for all of us. He got this horror package with a fake coffin that was rigged to spring open during the funeral ceremony and a skeleton pops out and starts dancing. It wassohim. So, anyway, we have his body delivered to the funeral home for cremation, and as we’re making funeral plans Walter tells us there’s a backlog in the crematorium, and we might not have his ashes ready in time for the funeral.
“‘It’s no problem,’ he says, with all his Southern charm. ‘This happens all the time. What we do is give you a decorative urn to use in the ceremony, and we’ll get those ashes to you as soon as possible.’ It’s shit, but you know, that’s the price you pay for booking the most popular funeral director in the city. Dad wanted Walter Hart and we didn’t have the money to go somewhere else.
“So we have the funeral and it’s sad and for a while, I’m busy helping Mom and trying to get through school and being sad, and then one day I realize it’s been months and we haven’t heard anything about Dad’s ashes. I call Memories of the Hart and got passed around call center operators in Kazakstan. So then I go down to the funeral home to talk to someone in person, and they tell me his ashes aren’t ready. At this point I’m annoyed,” she grins. I grin back; I can’t even imagine George annoyed. “I might have suggested that I’d come back there with a police officer and fire up the oven myself, since it was clearly such a hassle. I think I frightened the secretary. She had a whispered conversation with someone over the phone, then came back and said if I returned on Friday, they’ll move them up the priority list and I’d be able to take him home.
“So I go back on Friday, and they have no idea who I am. A different secretary goes into the back room. She’s gone a long time. When she comes back, she hands me a shopping bag with a small round container inside.” George makes a circle with her fingers. “It’s about the size of a pot of hand cream.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. It’s so small I could fit a whole murdered boy band into one decorative urn. But I figure, they’re the funeral directors, they must know. I mean, heaps of stuff is different in real life than it is on TV. Maybe that’s only how many ashes you get out of a person? So I bring it home to Mom and we pop his ashes in our urn and forget about it.
“Then, one day, I’m at my aunt’s house and she’s got my grandfather’s urn on the mantel, and I decide to take a peek because…” she shrugs. The grinning skulls on her hoodie bounce. “Because I’m me. I wait until my aunt is out of the room and I tug the lid off and peer inside. She’s gotmountainsof ashes. At least ten times as much as us. And my grandfather was a small guy, so you couldn’t say it was a size difference in the bodies or anything. I think back on all the weirdness at the funeral home, and I just…”
“Pull a Sherlock Holmes orgasm face?” I venture.
“What?”
“It’s something Gabriel says about Eli. He gets this look on his face when he’s trying to figure something out. Like he’s excited to swoop in and solve the mystery.”
George laughs. “Yes. That’s exactly it. I have this feeling something isn’t right – and the mystery of it made me not so sad about my dad anymore. I decide to test the ashes. I do a couple of experiments in the school lab. Mr. Ross even gave me extra credit when I explained what I was doing. The results I get were… not great. But I’m not an expert, so I send a sample off to an independent lab, and they come back and tell me that while there are definitely fragments of bone in my container, it’s not human remains. Possibly a rabbit, they said. Or a gerbil.”
I think about how that must feel to know you’ve been grieving over the ashes of a gerbil, and I want to gouge out Walter Hart’s eyes with a rusty spork. “Then what?”
