Deadly waters, p.18
Deadly Waters, page 18
She’s learned to live with it, which didn’t seem possible last semester. Keeping busy helps somewhat. Time—and Gemma’s reminder that Kacey would want her friends to live their best lives—has carried her the rest of the way.
Anger has carried Ellie through. No, not anger—rage. Words have meaning, and Kacey—who read the dictionary for fun because she loved learning interesting new words; her favorite was effervescence—would find the distinction important.
“I can’t go see her,” Ellie says. “I try, and I get to the care center, and once I even got all the way to her door, but I can’t . . .”
“It hurts,” admits Rebecca. “Seeing her like that, seeing what it’s doing to her parents; it’s . . . well. Not being able to do it doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“You do it.”
“Penance.”
Sniffling, Ellie pushes herself up on one elbow and shoves her hair out of her face. A small pile of clips and pins sits on the floor next to the foot of the bed. Ellie, Rebecca, and Kacey—the Titian Trio, as their first-year RA called them, but each of them with such dramatically different kinds of red. “What do you mean?”
“Kacey invited me to that party,” she says quietly. “It was held by a bunch of her high school friends, remember? One of them was in journalism, and I couldn’t stand her. We were paired for a project sophomore year, and I spent the whole time fantasizing about shoving her in front of a bus.” Rebecca smiles at Ellie’s startled laugh. “It was entirely mutual. Linsey Travers, that absolute bitch. I didn’t want to ruin the party for Kacey by making her keep the peace all night, so I told her I had homework to do. She wished me good luck and said she’d see me in the morning; she was planning to just crash with the high school friends.”
“What happened to Kacey wasn’t your fault.”
“I know.” And she does. That’s the strange thing; she knows it’s not her fault, just like what happened to Daphne wasn’t her fault, but that leaden knot of guilt that lives in her chest doesn’t give a shit about logic. She toes off her shoes and pulls her legs up on the bed, tangling her fingers through the anklet. “It wasn’t your fault either.”
“I was at a different party,” Ellie mumbles. “I was dancing and drinking and laughing when . . .”
“You had absolutely no way to know that halfway across town, something terrible was about to happen. Carry the guilt if you have to, Ellie, but not the fault.”
Her friend crumples back onto the bed, suddenly sobbing, and Rebecca lurches across the gap between the beds. Her fingers snag in the anklet before she snatches them free. She climbs over Ellie so she can press along the girl’s back, arms around her and face pressed against her shoulder. “I’ve got you,” Rebecca murmurs. “I’ve got you.”
Ellie weeps, occasionally breaking off into wheezing, mostly incoherent rants about Kacey’s high school friends, about the boys who hurt her, about burning the world because there’s nothing worth saving. Then the words run dry, leaving behind a keening wail.
Hafsah comes running, one hand clutched to her chest as she appears in the doorway and takes in the scene. She pants and flicks her hand at Rebecca.
Obligingly, Rebecca scoots closer to the wall, bringing Ellie with her, and Hafsah eases onto the edge of a bed really not meant for three people. They secure Ellie between them, even as she shakes from the violence of her grief and rage.
This is why, Rebecca realizes. This is why, despite everything, despite every sensible reason, she and Hafsah haven’t gone to the police with their suspicions. Why they won’t for as long as possible. Because this is Ellie, and she’s theirs, all of her, even her recklessness and the broken edges sharp enough to bleed. She meets Hafsah’s eyes, sees the same thought reflected there, and gives a slow blink in place of a nod.
They’ll never be able to protect Ellie from herself, but they can damn well try.
21
Someday, when I’m safely and comfortably settled in a nonextradition country, I should write a book about all this. Thinking with Your Dick: How Men Walk Willingly to Their Deaths Because It Could Never Happen to Them. A brief bubble of fear that bursts so quickly, and then they’re back on their bullshit, ignoring those who’ve already died.
It isn’t just stupidity; it’s arrogance. As if they’re somehow superior specimens, and nothing can harm them.
Gee, college boys with a history of hurting women have been turning up dead after being torqued to bits by alligators. You’re damn right that I, a college boy with a history of hurting women, will absolutely take you to my grandparents’ secluded house on the river now that they’ve returned north for the summer.
Dillon McFarley—Dillweed Dillon, as his frat brothers call him—stands out for his imbecility even in a horde of other candidates.
The cold front has ended, bringing back thick swarms of mosquitoes and a sweltering heat. Even now, long after sundown, heat bakes up from the packed earth and stone leading down to the McFarleys’ private dock. Dillon stands at the very edge of the dock, toes curling over the corner of the final plank, legs spread wide, pissing into the river. Classy.
Of more interest are the red gleams in the mostly darkness. One of the neighbors has an old-fashioned lamppost on their back patio, wrought iron and frosted glass. The red gleams come in pairs, and there are a lot of them. Alligators really do look like demons when you catch them at night.
When Dillon wobbles his way around to face me, he hasn’t tucked himself back in. It’s a less than inspiring sight. “Never fucked a redhead before,” he slurs.
He’s not going to now either.
“Sure you have,” I tell him, teeth bared in a snarl. “What about Kacey?”
“Who?”
“Kacey Montrose. Short, pretty—long, long hair the color of a blood orange?”
He stares at me blankly. I can see the thoughts trying to spin together behind his eyes, striving to push through the haze of alcohol and party pills. Maybe I’m slipping. It’s not like I really took the time to tell the others why they were dying. I knew why they were condemned, and it wasn’t that long before other people realized why they’d died. The fuckheads didn’t need to know. They’d already shown they didn’t care.
Kacey demands more, though. Kacey is personal. Kacey is bright and vivacious, full of compassion and forgiveness. Now she’s a frail shell on a hospital bed, her brain so damaged by asphyxiation she’ll never wake up.
Because of Dillon.
She wouldn’t understand this, would never approve of it, especially not for her sake. She’d still forgive me. She would have forgiven the devil if he’d said sorry or no. She even would have forgiven Dillon.
I’m not Kacey. I’m not interested in forgiveness.
I smile at him, sliding off the rail of the deck to stand on the house-side end of the dock. The McFarleys have a shepherd’s hook mounted horizontally along the outside of their dock, in case they notice anyone drowning behind their house, I suppose.
Drowning is a kind of asphyxiation. But the McFarleys don’t really care about that. If someone drowns in their backyard, they’ll be held liable.
They managed to avoid any liability after Dillon drugged Kacey at a party. After he wrapped duct tape around her wrists and ankles, even around her neck so she struggled to breathe. After he shoved his dick down her throat and kept it there, even though she was choking, even though she passed out, even though he buried her face in his groin so her desperate body couldn’t even try to breathe through her nose instead. His friends were too busy filming and laughing to help her. He peeled away the tape after, but he didn’t clean up the residue on her skin. He just left her there in a room at a party, letting people think she’d passed out from drink, and it wasn’t until the hosts tried to wake her up hours later that they realized there was a problem.
But Kacey was underage, and the hosts were scared, so they took her to the hospital and propped her up on a smoking bench close to the entrance of the ER. They left her there for someone else to find, after who knows how many hours, when every single second mattered to try to save whatever brain function they could. She never even woke up.
They were her fucking friends, and they just left her there.
She’ll never wake up.
All that joy and light and kindness, snuffed out in an instant because he decided his dick was more important than her life. His friends deleted the recordings, but not before word of them got around. The county declined to press charges because, as they claimed, there was no way to know Kacey hadn’t consented; maybe she just hadn’t taken her asthma into account, and really, it was a tragedy, but there was no reason to ruin a young man’s life over a simple accident. The incredibly expensive lawyer his family retained may have had something to do with that. Her family is so strapped paying for her medical care, they’ll never be able to afford an attorney to go after him in civil court.
“I’m going to be kinder to you than you were to Kacey,” I tell him gently, pulling the shepherd’s hook off its posts. I loop the cord around one of his wrists—just one—and twist it to loop it again, the way it would look if you got caught in it while flailing. Not suspicious. Not murder. Just a drunk-ass fool stupid enough to poke at alligators with a long stick still attached to him. He stares at the cord around his wrist and tries to pull it away, but the alcohol has his brain so befuddled that he can’t seem to figure out how to get it past the widest part of his hand. We stopped twice on the way here so he could hurl, any benefit from throwing up immediately lost as he kept drinking; he’s got to be in the realm of alcohol poisoning by now. “You’re going to be in pain, yes, but it will be over quickly. That’s more than anyone can say about Kacey.”
“Who are you?” he asks, eyes wide and face pale. Spooked, but not scared. Not really.
Not yet.
“Someone who’s tired of letting boys be boys, when the girls never get to be anything.” I push the pole toward him, and his hands curl around it by reflex, letting me lean him out farther and farther over the water. He clutches the pole for balance, teetering at the edge of the dock. Those red gleams are getting closer, congregating. “I wish I could do to you what you did to her so you’d know it exactly. So you’d suffer it exactly. But I can’t. This will have to do.”
He gapes at me. He doesn’t understand, clearly. I don’t have time for him to sober up enough to make him understand.
I take several steps back, then pivot to one side and snap my right leg up in a midkick against the pole. He flails back with a startled curse, followed by a splash. Adjusting my thin leather gloves, I walk back up onto the deck, then turn to watch. It’s not precisely a safe distance. The alligators can easily get onto the deck. It might even be why his grandparents decided to return north a bit early this year.
Dillon flails briefly, mouth already full of water. Alcohol makes it hard to be coordinated, though, and the pole is heavier than it looks. It’s hard to maneuver it when you’re clawing at the surface of the water, too panicked or distracted or drunk to realize you could just lean back and float.
But drowning isn’t often as it is in the movies. The flailing doesn’t last for long, replaced by a dazed lassitude as the oxygen deprivation begins, and soon Dillon slips below the surface and doesn’t come back up. In the light of the neighbor’s lamp, the red gleams converge, and the water suddenly thrashes and boils with movement.
I put my bike to rights on the deck, where I can see the alligators if they decide to crawl up for a second course. I’m done before the water settles, the dull roars and bellows of the gators abruptly silencing the frogs and crickets along the river. I shrug into my bag, carry the bike around to the front of the house, and throw my leg over, kicking off smoothly.
I don’t look back.
It’s not enough.
Goddammit, it’s not nearly enough. Not enough time, not enough pain, not enough shame. It was supposed to be enough, but it’s not. It’s over so fast, and then he’s dead, and why should he have it so much easier than Kacey?
Why do we allow any of those assholes less pain than they inflict on others?
The fury and resentment don’t ease through the long ride back to town, not the way it has before. Because it was personal? They’re all personal.
It’s always personal.
22
Shoving her sweat-damp sheet down to the foot of the bed, Rebecca groans and sits up, hair clinging to her unpleasantly. The Sledd Hall air conditioner, never in the best shape to begin with, sputtered out and died yesterday afternoon. Now, despite being not quite five in the morning, heat and humidity curl heavily through the halls and suites. Even without the constant hum of questions and anxieties in her mind, she wouldn’t be able to sleep in this.
She doesn’t tiptoe or try to move quietly to avoid waking Hafsah. After nearly three years of sharing a room, she’s learned that almost nothing wakes Hafsah except Hafsah and her specifically chosen alarm. She’s heard the stories of how long it took Hafsah and her mother to train her body into responding to that alarm, and it apparently involved a lot of buckets of ice water.
She supposes that counts as a form of aversion therapy. If you wake up to the alarm, you don’t get drenched.
Not bothering with any lights, Rebecca changes into shorts and a sports bra, pulling on a tank top that belongs to Ellie but hasn’t been returned because she hasn’t washed it yet. She tucks her keys, phone, and wallet into her small cross-body purse and then, on a whim, ducks into the strap for her camera bag. She has to bite back a groan as she stretches to ease her bike bag down from the top shelf in the study space, her other hand shoved against the miscellany box to keep it from toppling onto her. Whoever invented folding bikes deserves a special space in heaven, she thinks; hers has certainly made her life easier, and Ellie, Luz, Keiko, and Susanna all have them as well. Delia is not allowed on a bike, given the number of bones she broke as a child trying and failing to learn, and Hafsah doesn’t particularly like them.
Most of the time they walk around campus because it’s easier than dealing with the bikes, but when they need to get farther off campus than the bars across University Avenue, the bikes are a godsend.
The dorm is quiet as she heads out into the hall and down the stairs. She can hear the buzzing of plug-in fans and a handful of snores and reminds herself that this, this is why she’ll never have a hookup in a dorm room. She doesn’t want to become one of the many greeted with reenactments of the sounds they make during sex.
Stepping outside is . . . not the relief she wanted it to be. It’s already muggy and close, with the faint unpleasant smell of car oil burning off the roads. It makes her think of last year, when the smoke from the Sawgrass fire down in the Everglades drifted north along the interstate. Every now and then her parents and their siblings like to tell stories of the wildfire summer of 1997, when it felt like three-quarters of the state was aflame. A number of her family members were already in law enforcement by that point, and they all remember the piled-on shifts of volunteer firefighting as well as of directing traffic around newly closed roads or areas.
Her knee pops when she drops to a crouch, more sound than pain, as startling as it is. She winces and stretches it out. She gets so achy when she tries and fails to sleep, always holding herself too tensely, as if she can will sleep to take her if she just thinks hard enough. Because that can work. Shaking her head, she unfolds the bike and checks to make sure everything locks properly into place, then mounts and sets off.
She doesn’t really have a destination in mind. She almost never does in this mood; she just has to get her body in motion to match her frantically spinning brain. She rides slowly in the gray morning, savoring what little breeze there is. She likes when the campus is busy and full of life, but there’s something to this, she thinks. The gray light of earliest sunrise softens the edges of the newer buildings, fills out the shadows between the crumble-cornered bricks in the older ones. The history is easier to see when everything else is still.
A family of raccoons looks up from busily pillaging a cluster of trash cans behind one building. From the narrow steps near the door, a stray cat watches them, fur fluffed but not hissing. When she reaches the edge of campus, she keeps going and eventually turns out along Thirty-Fourth Street, riding along the graffiti wall. One of the panels makes her stop and pull her bike over to the grass so she can look without being in anyone’s way.
The wall gets used for any number of things. Birthday greetings, PRIDE, graduation announcements, proposals, memorials, sports encouragements, even advertisements. Political messages tend to get painted over fairly quickly, as does anything offensive. So either these panels are new, or no one has felt the need to cover them up.
One of them has the famous pantie board shown, and each painted pair of panties has a girl’s name on it. She frowns, wondering if the girls consented to that or if this is a violation all over again—and far more public. The boys’ names are there, too, in a tall column framed by alligators. Another panel shows a cartoon gator sitting at a table, holding a fork and a knife, with a napkin tied around its throat. On the plate before it is another stack of names. BON APPETIT curves above the gator’s head. She recognizes a couple of the names, but not because they’ve been gator bait. Near the center of the wall, not immediately next to the permanent panel but close to it, there’s a section that looks to have been started as a memorial for Mountebanks. It’s still visible under the words spray-painted over it and decidedly at odds with the hot-pink THANK YOU over his poorly painted face. Running across the bottom are yet more names.
Rebecca realizes with some shock that her name is among them. Maybe it was too much to hope for that his attack on her wouldn’t make it into the general rumor mill, but somehow it’s still unexpected. She stares at it, the careful letters that shape her name—first name only, thank God—and the muscles in her chest throb with the memory of his fingers. Is there still catharsis if someone else names you?
