I imagine Paisley, Harlow, and Opal having a slumber party with centuries of other dead teens and kids. Maybe it’s the best party anyone could imagine, always going. Maybe it’s a version of heaven. Yet I try to imagine it now, trapped in these perfectly green hills. A view of Walt Disney Studios forever, only young people to hang out with. It sounds like it would be fun at first, but what does it mean to have an afterlife of only Peter Pans? Just standing here thinking about it, I’m suddenly itching to grow up.
Something my friends will never do.
We arrive at Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds’s combined grave. Unlike the grassy knoll where my friends are buried, her and her mother’s tombstone is more of a production. It’s situated against a wall, their caskets’ resting place set in marble and gold with a statue depicting the two of them sitting on top. There’s already a bouquet of pink flowers sitting on the stone, but Beck finds a flower to add to the display. She bends down to read the inscription, running her fingers along the words. Her nail polish is chipped, nubs bitten down. A twingeof nausea hits me as I think about what all that polish would taste like if you couldn’t stop yourself from chewing it and cracking it off your nail beds.
“You know what’s wild?” Beck says.
“What?”
“I don’t think Paisley ever saw anyStar Warsmovie. She dated so many nerdy guys, yet I have this distinct memory of her a few months ago, where she didn’t know who C-3PO was. She might have only ever known about him from the rides at Disneyland.”
I wonder if you can absorb every movie ever made after you die. It would almost make your life ending seem okay.
Beck bounces on the balls of her feet, hands clasped tightly together. Eyes on the statue. I take a step closer to her, but I’m not sure if moving any more would be welcome or not. I’ve been alive for almost eighteen years and still have no idea how to deal with people and their emotions. The frustration hits me harder than I expect. I don’t want to make Beck feel unsupported, but I don’t want it to feel as fake as it’s felt with everyone I’ve been around. I don’t—
“Everyone keeps talking about their deaths, but no onereallywants to talk about it, y’know?” Beck says, turning to me. The redness has started to fade from her eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, despite not actually knowing what she’s talking about.
“Like, they didn’t have cancer or get hit by cars or whatever usually happens to teenagers. They went into the woods and were found dead.” She turns away from the graves, life siphoned back into her. “Shit, Emma, they were found withmissing parts.” Her hands gesture wildly. “Paisley’s body was a huge chew toy for a bunch of wild dogs.”
Paisley is dead and there isn’t even a proper body to bury. The pieces of her that I always knew—her skin, her lips as she smiled andsneered, the curves of her body when we hugged or lay in each other’s laps—are not here. She’s not alive and she’s not whole. None of them are. This should be a nightmare.
This is all real.
With Paisley in the ground, their story is finally over.
Beck’s mouth only twists more. “Whatever’s in that casket—I can’t stop thinking about the teeth. Something’s wrong.”
I turn to Beck as dread knots into my stomach. The only thing I remember feeling last night was visceral disgust, but is there something I missed?
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Beck’s created more distance between us, but there’s something different about it. As Beck comes more alive, it’s like the space between us has suddenly gotten slippery. I would’ve skidded to a stop before reaching out to Beck before, but now I think she’d let me try to touch her in comfort.
I just can’t make the move as she puts her face in her hands, frustration with nowhere to go and no force to stop it.
“I used to be obsessed with wild dogs when I was a kid. Wolves, jackals, coyotes. I’ve forgotten a lot, but there’s one thing that came back to me as I was reading that ranger report,” Beck finally says. “Coyotes chew on bones, sure. But why on earth would they break a bunch ofteeth?”
I clench my fists as the unease only grows. “There must be marrow there too, right?”
“No, there’s not. They wouldn’t.” Her nostrils flare. “But I’ve sure heard of human beings doing that. Especially when they don’t want someone to identify a body.”
Fuck.
A chill runs through my whole body.
That woman in the parking lot and on the side of the road—I had a feeling something was off about her that night. I’ve spent eight months dismissing her as some sleep-deprived hallucination, but what if that visceral wrong feeling that overtook me was connected to what happened to Paisley, Harlow, and Opal? They were, well, prettyrandomlytorn apart. Whywouldanimals have only taken an ear or finger? Whywouldthey have broken teeth?
Ears, fingers, and teeth don’t have much tissue, but they do contain DNA.
Paisley said in her text that they were all going to die. Did she accidentally guess her own fate, or did she know somehow?
And if it wasn’t some random accident, if someone deliberately hurt them—the thought alone has my heart speeding up.
“You think she was murdered?” I ask.
“I do.” Beck massages her temples. “But I have fuck-all evidence. My mom would sooner die of a broken heart,” she glances up at Debbie Reynolds’s plaque, “than hear another grisly detail of what happened. Without a push from an actual adult with money, there’s no way those forest cops would want to dig into it.”
