“Didn’t even get to go to college?—”
“Juniper!” I finally bark.
She whirls on me, her voice hysterical as she shrieks, “How is she going to get a job?! Higher education is important, Aiden!”
I think she’s spiraling.
And sure enough, a handful of seconds later, she slumps to the ground next to me and begins to cry.
It’s hard to make out all of her words, but I catch snippets.
“I’m so sorry,” she sobs, and I think she’s talking to the girl. “I’m so sorry. You’re too young. You should go to college and fall in love and do stupid stuff—” And then more crying, more words that I can’t quite interpret as a weight settles heavily on my chest.
We need to get out of here. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is not someplace we want to be found.
“I’ll remember you,” Juniper is saying now, her voice still thick and broken with tears. I think she’s still talking to the girl. “If everyone else in the world forgets you, I promise I’ll still remember you. I’ll come play the music for you to dance around the graveyard?—”
And even though we need to leave, even though there’s an ominous, creeping sensation slithering across my skin, I can’t make myself stop her. For whatever reason, it sounds like these are promises Juniper needs to make, and though I don’t understand half of what she’s talking about, I find myself filled with a grudging respect for my pink-haired roommate.
We keep our dead, and our dead keep us. We remember them, and they in turn find us at the moments we don’t expect—a flash of memory on a summer’s day, a snippet of an old favorite song, a long-lost photograph unearthed.
“Juniper,” I say quietly when she finally falls silent, her words fading into soft sobs. “We need to go.”
“We can’t leave her here,” Juniper says.
“We’ll call the sheriff,” I say, bending over. I give Juniper a little tug, urging her to stand, and end up hoisting half of her weight myself as she stumbles. “We’ll call him right now, okay? But we need to get out of here. This would look really bad if someone found us like this. Did you get any blood on you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” she says, sniffling. Still, she allows me to lead her away from the student, her steps wobbly as she crunches through the leaves and undergrowth next to me. I steady her with one hand on her elbow, my other hand diggingout my phone once again. Two minutes later, I’ve got the sheriff on the phone.
“Garrity? There’s a dead body out here in the woods behind the high school,” I say. My words are short, clipped, and they sound strangely detached. Like my mouth is disconnected from my brain.
Garrity swears. “What do you mean, a dead body?”
“Just what it sounds like,” I say, rubbing my temples. “There’s a girl back there with a ton of blood on her face. I’m pretty sure she’s a student.” I take a seat on the plinth of the Solomon statue, feeling the cold from the stone seeping through the fabric of my pants. Juniper is sitting next to me, shivering uncontrollably; I think she might have gone into shock.
I listen only partially as Garrity shouts out frantic orders on the other end; when Juniper’s teeth start to chatter, I shrug off my suit coat and pass it to her.
“Did you touch anything?” Garrity says when he returns on the line.
“Yes,” I say. “Sorry. I didn’t touch the body, but Juniper—my roommate—she might have; she fell over. She vomited, too. And we definitely walked around the area.”
Garrity grumbles but doesn’t gripe about it; he just tells me to stay where I am until he shows up. So Juniper and I sit there, shivering in the cold, our heads tilted back against Solomon the Spud’s potato body. And when Garrity shows up with a couple of squad cars fifteen minutes later, I recount to him everything that happened—the anonymous note, finding the body, Juniper throwing up and falling to her knees, and coming back here to wait.
By the time I’m done talking, Garrity’s pudgy face is set into a grim frown. He just gives me a nod, casts a sympathetic look at the still-shivering Juniper, and thencalls for his people to follow him. They disappear into the trees a few seconds later.
We wait for what feels like an eternity. There are still a few cars in the parking lot, from what I can see, but it will be mostly faculty left behind to clean up. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now. And I desperately wish that’s where I was—grumbling as I throw away yards of plastic tablecloths and yanking streamers down from doorways. Instead I’m here, sitting next to Solomon the Spud with my still-in-shock roommate, trying to process the dead body I just witnessed. Judging by the fact that Juniper is barely coherent right now, her brain is already working on the processing thing, but I don’t think mine is yet. It doesn’t quite feel real. I think hearing from Garrity will help.
When he appears from the tree line, I stand up, my hands shoved anxiously in my pocket as I wait for him.
His gaze finds mine, though, and a strange spike of anxiety embeds itself in my lungs. He’s giving me a funny look, one I don’t like. His footsteps fall heavy and slow on the carpet of leaves as he approaches.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says haltingly when he reaches Juniper and me. He looks back and forth between us before his eyes settle on me. “But there’s no body back there.”
I blink, and next to me Juniper shoots to her feet. “What?”
Garrity sighs, sending his mustache fluttering. “We found a bit of blood, but not much. We found the vomit too, in a separate area. But in the trees back there, where you pointed?”
I nod as the fingers of foreboding tiptoe down my spine, and Garrity continues.
