The Creeping

The blue-and-red lights of cop cars reflect on the surfaces around us like glittering disco balls. Zoey leaves my side, cradling my face in her hands and brushing her lips to my forehead. She mumbles a few words and then is gone. My classmates leave too, drawn toward the flashing lights or away from them, depending on how drunk they are. I crane my neck to watch the stream of police descend on the cemetery. Detective Shane shoves through the uniforms and angles to where I sit.

“Stella!” he shouts above the commotion. I rise on jittery knees. Zoey is hot on his tail. She went in search of someone who’d be familiar to me. Of course she did. My best friend who crawled through corpses for me. The concern scrunches up Shane’s face, and offhandedly I think he looks like a shar-pei. The comparison makes me guilty. He’s a youngish older guy, and it’s probably my unsolved case—unsolved because of my screwed-up memory—that’s made him look more ancient than he is. Either that or he’s a chain smoker. “Are you hurt?” he asks. I must look like I’ve been run into the mud by a bulldozer. Then Zoey comes to stand by my side, and we look like we climbed out of the bowels of the planet.

“No. There’s a body of a little girl. It’s Jeanie,” I blurt out before I can stop myself. Zoey shoots me a worried glance and throws her arm over my shoulders. Shane chews the inside of his cheek for a moment before turning and surveying the mudslide in front of us. Uniforms are setting up giant fluorescent lights to illuminate the ground.

“Why don’t we get Stella back to her car, and I’ll come out to the lot as soon as I can. I don’t think she needs to see this,” he says to Zoey. His expression and tone are loaded. Zoey nods knowingly. They think I’ve lost it. They’re probably right. I don’t resist as Zoey tows me through the pandemonium of uniforms, equipment, radio chatter, and sopping-wet teenagers. I wonder halfheartedly where Daniel disappeared to.

“Did Sam come back?” I murmur. Zoey smiles sadly at me. She must think I’m delirious and asking for my old friend. “He was here earlier,” I squeeze out, but I don’t have the energy to explain. Once at the gravel lot, we duck under police tape. Michaela rushes away from where she was in the throes of an argument with a cop. Cole’s close at her heels with her cell out.

“Oh my God, are you guys okay? They wouldn’t let me through or tell me anything. It’s a police state out here,” Michaela says, glaring at the uniform over her shoulder.

Zoey’s eyes don’t move from Cole, who can barely contain herself from the full-on rapture attack she’s having. She points her cell at the flashing lights to snap a photo. I want to tell Zoey that Cole doesn’t get what’s just happened; she doesn’t feel the weight of it. “You are not posting pics of this,” Zoey says, a death threat for disobedience implicit in her tone. Cole mutters a confused apology as Zoey shoulders by her and tucks me in the backseat of my car.

My eyelids are heavy, too heavy to resist; I cave to delicious nothingness. The darkness floods the car, and only after ten or fifteen minutes do I blink to focus on the windshield. The swoosh of the wipers brings me back to the land of the living. Cole watches me from the front seat. We must be cutting through neighborhoods, since a wash of light illuminates her blond mane in intervals as we pass under streetlamps. Cole chews her lip as my torso rocks at the slight pumping of the brakes, signaling that Michaela’s driving. My head’s cradled in Zoey’s lap, and her fingertips are tracing tiny shapes on my temple.

“I am so, so sorry, S. I didn’t realize—I would never . . .” Cole trails off. My hand fumbles at the center console, trying to pat her arm.

“Hey, sleepyhead.” Zoey’s face is a moon blotting out the rest of the world as she hangs over me. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’re taking you home. Michaela told Detective What’s-His-Face that he could talk to you in the morning.”

“Mmmkay,” I mumble. I let my eyelids flutter shut again, relieved that I can return to the realm of nothingness. They reopen briefly as Dad tiptoes up the stairs, carrying me like he hasn’t since I was a baby.

Hushed voices. The creak of the door to my bedroom. The squeak of my mattress’s coils compressing under weight. Soft-sounding words float to me from down a very long tunnel. I swat the sound away, letting their tinny ring fade as sleep pulls me under.