“Hey, Mila.”
I look up and immediately wish that I had a bushel of bay leaves. (They’re good for banishing—although Riley’s mom kept them in the spice cabinet to use in her spaghetti sauce.)
Caleb Treadwell, Ms. Chu’s stepson and my lab partner, is climbing onto the stool next to mine, wobbling a little as he tucks a silver chain into the collar of his T-shirt. I should have smelled him coming. He starts every morning by drowning himself in cologne that smells like leather and moss, but it can’t quite smother the tang of clinical-strength face wash. He stinks like a chemical fire.
On the surface, he’s almost painfully nondescript. His hair is too khaki-colored to be considered brown or blond, and it’s cut into the same short-on-the-sides, long-on-top style that every other guy in school has. His chapped, mauve lips are so puffy that he has a near constant pout.
“It is Mila, right?” he asks, even though there’s no chance he doesn’t know my name. We’ve been lab partners for almost two months. He just wants me to feel bad for not immediately saying hello. He smiles when he’s angry. The insincerity makes his eyes look dead. His teeth are as big as my thumbnails.
“Hi,” I say shortly. I plant the sole of my boot on the bottom rung of my stool for balance and lean a little farther from him.
“I saw you leave the funeral.”
“Oh yeah?” I say, digging through my backpack and retrieving my chem notebook and slapping it down on the counter. “Which one?”
He wheezes a laugh. The sound slides over my skin, making the hairs on my arm stand on end. There’s no one thing that makes Caleb creepy. It’s not that he licks his lips until the skin shreds or that he talks incessantly about being “one of the nice guys” or even his habitual sweatpants boners. Rather, it is all of these things as a whole that lends to his overall air of Total Fucking Creep. An aura of Men’s Rights Activist. Eau de Internet Troll. Musk of Mansplainer.
And his mouth looks a lot like a vagina. That doesn’t help.
Knowing Caleb means that my respect for Ms. Chu is lessened at all times, since I believe she is at least partially responsible for not buying him pants that would curb his public erections.
Huh. Maybe there’s a spell for that. Why didn’t Riley and I ever investigate this? Forced impotence would make the world a much safer place.
“I saw you at both funerals,” Caleb says, undeterred by my lack of interest or eye contact. “You’re hard to miss, ha ha.”
Caleb loves to slip mentions of my weight into conversation to see if I’ll snap. If I do, he’ll throw his hands up and say he’s just kidding loud enough for everyone around us to hear, so that it sounds like I have no sense of humor and he’s hilarious. Fatphobic asshole.
“It’s a shame about all this,” he continues. He flexes his hands against the edge of the table. His fingers are long and tapered and so solidly white it’s like they’re made of yeasty dough. I expect them to engorge to bursting. Or sprout powdery green mold. “June and Dayton. They were both in the honor society with me, you know. Dayton never seemed like she should be—God, she was a flake, just so, so stupid—but her grades were good. And they were neck and neck for the Rausch Scholarship, too. Whoops. Bad choice of words. Neck and neck.” He mimes a noose around his own neck, pulling the imaginary knot sharply to the right. “Hanging’s a rough way to go out. Big rope burns cut into their skin, their necks distended . . . They’d have to drop pretty far for the force to knock off one of Dayton’s shoes. Did you hear that they never found it? It could still be stuck in a bush in Aldridge Park.”
I shudder. June and Dayton’s caskets were both closed at their funeral. I didn’t give any thought to why. Now images of their mangled bodies swim in front of my eyes as Caleb continues to talk about postmortem bloating of the corpses.
“What do you think the last thing they saw was?” he asks abruptly. “I’ve heard that people shit themselves when they’re hanged, but that’s probably just a myth. I mean, anyone could shit themselves when they die. The muscles loosen and . . .” He trails off. The spit in his cheeks makes a burbling fart noise. What is it with dudes and sound effects?
“After June and Dayton, Riley Greenway probably would have been next in line for the Rausch Scholarship,” he says, reaching down to scratch his leg. I make a fist, ready to punch him in the temple if his hand starts to stray crotch-ward. “Even though she didn’t belong to any clubs. Xander said that she was going to write her essay on working in their funeral home. That’s how he won last year. The committee really eats up the humanitarian angle.”
I wish I could scrape Riley’s name out of his mouth with my fingernails. I hate that people like Caleb Treadwell feel like they can talk about her like they knew her. Riley wouldn’t have cared if she’d won the Rausch Scholarship. She would have entered just to take the prize away from people like Caleb and June Phelan-Park.
“But she’s gone, too,” he says with a shrug and a giggle. “So the road to the Rausch Scholarship is clear for me.”
“Excuse me?” Aniyah Dorsey stops next to our table, her books hugged to her chest and her eyes staring over the tops of her round glasses. Her hair shines like lacquered paint, the natural curl pressed flat and straight. “Are you implying that your life is better off after the suicides of three of your classmates? Can I quote you on that? I’m writing an article about the impact of grief on the school, and your lack thereof would make a great lede.”
“Move along, Rita Skeeter,” Caleb says, waving her off. His rage-smile stretches so wide that it wrinkles the corners of his eyes. “No one gives a shit about your newspaper.”
He’s not wrong. Fairmont Academy only has a newspaper because Aniyah won’t let it die. I don’t know anyone who reads it. But I don’t think she cares. It’ll look good on a college application regardless of how many people read it when it’s passed out on Fridays.
Or is it Mondays?
I picture Aniyah down at the creek, her hair pulled up high to avoid being splashed. In a boring town like Cross Creek, it must be hard to find newsworthy happenings. Would it be worth it to her to make her own story? She’s about my size, more than strong enough to hold Riley’s narrow shoulders underwater.
“You’re not next in line for the Rausch Scholarship anyway. It’s given to students who embody the Fairmont mission statement, and there’s nothing in there about being a fuckwit,” Aniyah says, glaring down at Caleb. “Besides, it’s an alumni-awarded scholarship. If they gave it to the principal’s son, it’d look shady as hell.”
“Stepson,” Caleb corrects loudly. People wandering to their seats pause and look over at our table. The attention feels predatory. More eyes, more suspects. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure that there’s a moment in my acceptance speech that commemorates the three girls who couldn’t keep up anymore. Or maybe I won’t. Everyone will have forgotten about them by the end of the school year anyway.”
He starts to laugh again, looking around at the other tables for people to join him.
I know he’s mostly talking about June and Dayton. They weren’t nice when they were alive. They used to make fun of Riley for living above a funeral home. And they made fun of me for being fat and Mexican. They found the things about other people that made them different and highlighted how that made them shitty. It was like they learned how to be popular from TV and didn’t understand that being known didn’t have to be synonymous with being a dick.
Last week, I probably would have sat back and made a note to try a new curse to see if I could make Caleb fail all his classes so that he’d never get the stupid Rausch Scholarship.