Chapter Five
“PERFECT.” ALICE LEAPED OUT OF THE VAN AND HEADED TOWARD the squirrel. “Just perfect.” Three minutes on the road and already they were leaving dead bodies in their wake.
“The poor little thing,” Summer gushed, leaning over the corpse as if it were a beloved family pet.
Of course, Alice felt terrible about killing an innocent creature. But it wasn’t as if it were premeditated. The truth was, if Summer hadn’t freaked out over it, she might not have even bothered to stop.
“Chief, we’ve got a 419 at the middle school soccer fields,” Tiernan said in her best policewoman imitation, focusing her lens on the victim like she was a detective on CSI: Pea Pod.
Alice approached the body cautiously. Despite the gut-wrenching sound it had made on impact, she was relieved to find the squirrel unbloodied and intact.
“I think we should call the police,” Summer said.
Do the cops even deal with road kill? Alice wondered. And supposing they actually did, they’d probably make her give a statement and fill out a police report. Like she didn’t have enough stress in her life without having to worry about a vehicular squirrelcide on her record. At least not until she’d heard back from Brown.
“We are not calling the po-pos for some smelly, disease-infested rodent,” Tiernan said, snapping another photo. “It probably had rabies anyway.”
“Stop taking pictures!” Summer barked. “Give the poor creature some dignity.”
“It’s only a squirrel.” Tiernan shrugged. “What do you want us to do? Go casket shopping?”
“Ladies,” Alice said sharply. This situation was already bad enough without having Tiernan and Summer at each other’s throats.
“We don’t need a casket to bury it,” Summer shot back.
“You actually want to bury it?” Tiernan asked, incredulous.
“I think this is public property.” Alice pointed to the fields beyond the patch of road where they stood—the same place they used to play soccer as kids. “I’m not sure it’s even legal to bury a squirrel here.”
“All I know is that it’s the right thing to do,” Summer said. Normally, Summer was a strict rule-follower, but she’d always had a soft spot for nature’s innocent creatures. Unless, of course, that creature happened to be Alice.
“Ooh, I have an idea!” Tiernan squealed. “Maybe we can hire Elton John to perform a personalized version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ at the funeral!”
Alice let out a long, heavy sigh. Five minutes ago she’d been thrilled to learn that Summer was coming along for the trip, that all three Peas would be back together for the Level3 show, just like she’d planned. Of course, back then, she’d naively assumed Summer and Tiernan had let go of the past and were capable of acting like mature, reasonable people.
“Listen,” Alice began. “I think we should all take a minute to say our good-byes to the squirrel, then get back on the road. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.”
“I wasn’t kidding.” Summer planted her hands on her hips. “It’s bad mojo not to honor the dead.”
And what about starting off our trip with a funeral? Alice wanted to ask. What kind of mojo is that? Instead, she just glanced at her watch. At this rate they’d be lucky to make it out of Walford.
Tiernan bent down and snapped a close-up of the squirrel “Just gathering some forensic evidence,” she mocked. “In case the CIA gets involved.”
“Hilarious,” Summer spat, turning her attention to Alice. “So, what does our fearless leader think?”
Fearless leader? Ha! Alice didn’t know what terrified her more—saying no to the funeral and have to deal with Summer’s sulking, or saying yes and being the butt of Tiernan’s jokes for the next two hundred miles.
She coiled a lock of hair around her finger, trying to buy herself some time while the squirrel’s black, glazed-over eyes appeared to stare at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to issue a verdict. Being the leader had always come naturally to Alice. It was being in the middle she’d always hated.
But what choice did she have? She could stand around all day waiting for Summer and Tiernan to come up with a compromise on their own (not likely), or she could save them all some time and step in and do it for them. “I say we have a short memorial service,” Alice finally declared. “But let’s be quick about it. I want to make it to West Virginia by sundown.”
The Pea Pod’s emergency road kit contained a new roll of duct tape, a flashlight with fresh batteries, two kinds of screwdrivers, but no shovel—a rodent funeral being the one crisis Alice hadn’t anticipated.
“Well, I’m not digging by hand,” Summer cried, showing off her perfectly manicured French nails.
“Uh-oh,” Tiernan chuckled. “Summer’s got her claws out.”
“We just need to keep looking,” Alice said, before Summer had the chance to fire back. Alice opened the supply cabinet below the sink, unpacking its contents just as carefully as she’d packed them only hours ago. “There has to be something in here we can use.”
Out came the Tupperware and plastic spoons, the boxes of of trash bags and rolls of toilet paper.
“What about this?” Summer asked. She held up Alice’s stainless steel travel mug, the words #1 DAUGHTER emblazoned on the side. “We can use it like a scoop to dig the squirrel’s grave!”
A grave-digging scoop, Alice thought to herself. Not exactly what she’d envisioned with the gift her parents had given her for making National Honor Society. And sentimental value aside, how was she supposed to drink her green tea every morning if her favorite mug was defiled by dirt?
Alice looked at the collection of kitchen accessories and cleaning supplies on the floor of the van—all of them useless as digging implements. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about sacrificing her “#1 Daughter” mug, but if it would get them back on the road faster, she’d take one for the team.
Summer used the mug (which proved to be a surprisingly effective shovel) while Alice, who wasn’t afraid of a little dirt, did her share of the digging by hand. For ten minutes they toiled on their knees in the grass, as Tiernan (who was boycotting the funeral) kicked back in the comfort of Pea Pod, munching on a Hostess Snowball. Normally, Alice would have complained about such slackerly behavior. But with Tiernan and Summer separated, there had been a ceasefire in their bickering, and she didn’t dare risk starting it up again.
Except for a few rare occasions, Alice avoided conflict at all cost. She and MJ never fought—unless you counted their heated debate over which font to use for the school’s literary magazine. In fact, ever since the debacle at the Winter Wonderland Dance (the most infamous of Alice’s infrequent outbursts), her teenage years had been almost abnormally peaceful and calm. She didn’t have backstabbing friends or screaming fights with her parents. She didn’t get grounded for staying out past curfew, or wind up crying over some boy in the bathroom at the big school dance. Though she’d have happily shed a few tears in the handicapped stall if it meant actually having a boyfriend.
“It’s done!” Summer stood up, wiping her hands on her shorts.
Alice peered into the hole. Personally, she would have dug another foot, but if Summer was happy, she was happy. And the sooner they were back on the road, the better.
“Okay,” Alice agreed. “So how do we get him in there?”
“Hmm.” Summer wrinkled her nose and looked around. The squirrel lay at least five feet from the open grave.
“We could just kick him in,” Tiernan called out from the passenger’s seat. “I’ve still got a pretty good chip shot.”
“Since when was your chip shot good?” Summer asked.
Can you two just let it go already? Alice wanted to scream. The past is over. What’s done is done. Alice wished she were the type of person who could just let it slide. After all, Tiernan and Summer were the ones with the issue, not her. But here she was, trying her best to make things pleasant and happy again and getting sucked into the drama in the process.
“Help me find something to pick him up with,” Alice said, searching the grass for the perfect corpse-moving tool. If she didn’t find something fast, that squirrel might not be the only thing dead around here.
“How about chopsticks?” Tiernan offered, wiping a flake of pink coconut from her lip.
Tiernan’s sharp sense of humor was one of the things Alice had always loved best about her. But sometimes a person’s best qualities have a funny way of being their worst qualities too.
“Can you just try to help us out here?” Alice asked, losing her patience.
“I am trying to help,” Tiernan continued. “What I meant was”—Tiernan pulled herself from the van and picked two sticks off the ground—“you could use a couple of sticks like chopsticks to pick it up.”
After the gruesome task was done (by none other than Tiernan herself, thankfully) they gathered around the grave and filled it with dirt.
Alice didn’t want to oversentimentalize it, but it did seem like a rather strange coincidence that the three of them had wound up at the edge of the very same soccer field where they’d first met and become friends back in fourth grade. Even stranger was the fact that they’d now spent more time giving closure to a dead squirrel than they had to the death of their five-year friendship.
When they were done, Summer patted the earth flat with her hands. “Would anyone like to say a few words?”
Tiernan stifled a laugh. “He was a good squirrel,” she said in her best spiritual-sounding voice. “He really loved his nuts.”
“Can you just be serious for one second of your life?” Summer asked.
“I’d like to say something,” Alice jumped in. She wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but it had to be easier to eulogize a dead squirrel than to play referee to these two. “I’d just like to, ah, tell the squirrel that . . . I’m sorry. For killing it. It was all my fault, really. And if I’d been looking where I was going, he—or she—would probably still be alive today.” Alice hung her head, making it look like she was extra reverent, though, in truth, she’d been so swept up by the sentiment of her own words she was afraid that if she made eye contact with Summer or Tiernan, she might actually start to cry. Her rational side told her it didn’t matter, that it was only a stupid squirrel. Yet, the fact remained that she’d killed an innocent creature, just like that, without meaning to.
Summer cleared her throat. “Let’s all pause for a moment of—” But the driving techno beat of her cell phone smothered the word “silence.”
“Sheesh,” Tiernan said under her breath. “If that ringtone was any louder, it’d wake the dead.”
“Sorry ’bout that.” Summer quickly slid the phone from her pocket, glanced at the caller ID, and silenced it. She may have been trying to hide it, but Alice still knew Summer well enough to tell when she was pissed.
“Let’s continue,” Summer said evenly, letting the call go to voice mail.
Alice took a long deep breath, then exhaled it slowly (just like her yoga teacher instructed) while reciting a calming mantra in her mind. The past is past. What’s done is done. It was an accident. It was only an accident.
But no matter how many mantras she said, nothing could erase the fact that some mistakes have consequences for which there are no second chances.
When she looked up at Tiernan and Summer, she could swear they felt it too. A shared grief. A silent moment of understanding. But as soon as they noticed her staring, Summer quickly hid her face while Tiernan reverted to her usual smirk.
Back in eighth grade, Alice had been both confused and in awe as she’d watched Summer and Tiernan develop this new air of cool detachment, like they’d suddenly become above it all, no matter what “it” happened to be. At first Alice assumed the same thing would happen to her eventually, that she’d grow into it, the way some girls developed later than others. But that moment never came. She may have been the first to wear a bra, but Alice was the last to grow into this studied indifference. Try as she might to be guarded and apathetic, she was (and probably always would be) the type of girl who walked around with her heart on her sleeve.
It was especially bad during those first few months after the Winter Wonderland Dance. Alice did her best to hide the hurt expression on her face whenever she bumped into Summer in the halls or drove past Tiernan’s street, but whomever she was with only needed to take one look at her face before they would inevitably ask what was wrong. Just another example of the many differences between the person Alice wanted to be and the one she actually was.
“Any final words?” Summer asked, opening her eyes.
But there would be no words for what happened next, as a paw, then two, then the squirrel’s entire gray furry head thrust its way through the earth. For what felt like a good ten seconds, nobody moved or spoke—the only sound came from the squirrel, whose twitchy black nose sniffed the air as its eyes darted from Alice to Summer to Tiernan, then back again, as if they were all stuck in some strange interspecies staring contest.
Even Tiernan was too stunned to utter a snarky remark.
For a creature that had just been buried alive, the squirrel looked surprisingly chipper, as if things like this happened to him every day. And before Alice’s brain could even begin to process what her eyes were seeing, the little rodent gave one final wriggle and freed himself from the hole—sending Alice, Summer, and Tiernan straight from their stupefied states into pee-in-their-pants hysteria.
By the time the squirrel had scampered off into the woods, all three of them were howling and crying and rolling around on the grass in a good old-fashioned laughing fit, just like they used to do, back in the day.
But as happy as Alice was to be sharing this hilarious moment with Summer and Tiernan, the shock of it all left her feeling strangely off-balance. When the squirrel was dead, the world was a place Alice was familiar with—a place of unwavering certainties, where what was buried stayed buried, and what was done (like she’d said in her mantra) was most definitely done. But if a squirrel could rise from the dead, maybe the past had more power than Alice had previously given it credit for. Maybe the past was only the past until it decided to claw its way back to the present.
“THE COUNTDOWN”
THE ROCKET I BUILT
OUT OF PAPER AND GLUE
JUST BROKE APART IN THE ATMOSPHERE
OVER YOU.
AND NOW ALL THE PIECES
ARE FALLING TO EARTH
AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT,
WHAT AN AMAZING SIGHT.
—from Level3’s third CD, Natural Causes