The Creeping

I push free from the crowd. These kids have gone completely crazy. Day of Bones my ass. This has nothing to do with Jeanie Talcott. This is an excuse for them to get hammered and live without inhibitions for a night. Well, who am I kidding? Isn’t that the reason for every high school party, and don’t I usually L.O.V.E. it?

I whirl away from the dancers and trudge as quickly as I can through the mud up the shore in the direction of the car. Twenty more minutes of this downpour and Zoey will wade through the parking lot like a drowned kitten, begging to be let into the car. All we have to do is wait her out. My legs are wobbly, reminding me of the alcohol in my bloodstream. How much was in that cup Taylor gave me? Three, maybe four shots? Thank God Michaela’s DD. My stomach lurches thinking about sitting shotgun as she careens down the narrow highway in the rain, but it’s better than driving drunk and Dad finding out. Not that he’d even notice if I stumbled into the house handcuffed and singing like a drunken sailor. From behind, a calloused hand grabs my shoulder; its index finger slides under the strap of my dress. I spin around, even though I don’t really need to look to know who it is.

“Daniel,” I say, wiggling out of his grasp. The thud of my heart hitches. He takes a step closer. I don’t move back, letting his face linger only six inches away from mine. The lightning splits the sky, revealing green eyes, grassy and speckled with brown like the swamps west of the cemetery. They’re eerily similar to mine. His eyebrows were bushy when he was a kid; now they give him a wild-man look like he cave-dives and kills all his meals. They match his auburn hair.

“Didn’t you turn out pretty?” He clenches his teeth too much for it to be a compliment. He’s so close I can smell the alcohol on his breath. His words aren’t slurred but lazy, buzzed. The only thing that frightens me more than grown Daniel is grown drunk Daniel. He grabs my arm, and I shudder at the heat of his skin and his words.

“Why were you watching us?” My voice is steady, to my surprise. He leans in even closer. To anyone around us we must look like boyfriend and girlfriend, or just two people about to make out in the rain. “Why did you come here?” I demand.

“What? You thought I wouldn’t come back to see you? To see how you ended up?” There’s mock flattery in his tone. “You think I wouldn’t check on the bitch who survived instead of my sister?” He tightens his grip, and his expression darkens. “I watched you and your perfect friends playing in the water today, and all I could think was that even if Jeanie were alive, she wouldn’t be there with you. She wouldn’t have been good enough for you. Or hot enough. Or skinny enough.” There’s only malice dripping from his words. Does he know I’ve thought that before, that Jeanie would have grown up to be average? “Do you deny it?” His hand pulses around my arm. “You telling me you would have kept her around?”

The rain hammers down on us, its sheets of water making me blind to everything more than five feet away, everything except Daniel. He came looking for me like he always does, and instead of me scared in the parking lot like the last time, I was with a group of girls the age Jeanie would have been. He probably watched Michaela catch air before she splashed into the water. He saw how alive we looked; how unlike Jeanie. I want to swear to him that it isn’t true; that Jeanie would have been there with us. But Daniel’s right. “You aren’t supposed to be talking to me.” I try to yank my arm free, but he holds me still. “You shouldn’t even be near me,” I say louder.

Daniel’s mouth is right at my eye level. “I kept saying, ‘See, Jeanie? See, Jeanie? See? Look what you were spared. Those girls can’t hurt you.’?”

I lock my sagging knees and resist the urge to cover my face. As we fled the cove, Daniel was whispering to his dead sister. I know that he doesn’t really mean that Jeanie’s better off dead; this is the endless grief talking, the sorrow that inspires conversations with ghosts.

“Daniel, why would you come home today?” I already know the answer. My eyes dart upward. We’re unwittingly standing under a dummy corpse. Its clothes are saturated with rain, and rivulets run from its boots. Staring at it, tears well in my eyes. I doubt he notices because my face is already slick with water. “You’re here for this.” I motion with my free hand. Vaguely, I register screaming coming from behind us. Not the celebratory yips about the storm or the manic laughing of the drunk dancers, but something shrill and full of alarm.

The fine lines on his lips stretch and vanish as he opens his mouth to speak. Of course he’s here to see how his sister is being remembered or forgotten, how I turned out, how his parents are doing across town. He’s here today for the same reason I had trouble sleeping last night; for the same reason I asked Shane for the case file. Who knows? Maybe Daniel has come back every anniversary with no one other than his parents the wiser. Before he can rumble all this at me, a sharp cry like a siren carried on the wind reaches us: “There’s a body! A body!”





Chapter Four