The Creeping

My eyes brim with tears. In this moment I understand Daniel’s instinct to pummel the trouble rather than solve it. I want it out of me: everything I’ve held back, every word I’ve ever spoken about Jeanie, every bit of me that exists because of that day. There have to be parts, right? Parts born out of whatever I saw without me even knowing that that’s where they came from. I don’t want them anymore. I plow onward, certain that if I can say everything, then those parts won’t have to belong to me.

“All these years you’ve thought I was holding something back. But I have only one memory of that day, Daniel. Something I remembered at the bonfire right before you showed up. Jeanie hit her head. She was bleeding. She peed her pants. That’s it. That’s all I’ve managed to remember over eleven years.” I half laugh, half sob. “No wonder you hate me. I’d hate me too.”

For once Daniel looks at me without glaring; his eyes are swimming in their sockets. “I don’t hate you,” he whispers. “It just should’ve been you and not my sister.” You’d think that would make me cry more—especially the conviction he says it with—but it doesn’t. Daniel loved Jeanie. I understand.

We march in stunned silence until we reach the abandoned house. All along the way I glower at the strawberry vines. Dad had a vegetable garden two springs ago, and these prehistoric-looking weeds kept popping up in the arugula. For weeks he kept hacking them down rather than yanking them up by their root-balls. Each time, the weeds resurrected themselves with knobbier and thicker stalks. They began to resemble miniature spinal columns. Their bristles catching at my skin was why I stopped picking the vegetables myself. These strawberries remind me of them; feral and stronger for being half murdered over and over again. Nature even lent a hand and sent the bramble as armor.

I go out of my way to stomp on the juicy berries that rest on the lane. The way they rupture, popping red pulp under my shoe, is oddly satisfying. With each miniature explosion, I get a firmer hold on reason. The bone will be Jeanie’s; she was bound to turn up at some point. The little girl will have been the psycho’s next victim. Serial killers have types, and he must like redheads. Bev Talcott will have been on the verge of discovering the killer’s identity. The cops will hunt him down—there are two bodies now covered in evidence and clues—and he’ll go to jail forever. Mystery solved.

“Look, man,” Sam says to Daniel as we spill back onto the Talcotts’ marred lawn, “I know we’ve had our differences, but if you need somewhere to stay, you’re welcome at my place. My mom and dad won’t have any idea who you are, and they’ll be cool with a friend from school crashing. If you’re avoiding the cops, then going to your folks’ isn’t a great idea. And Stella’s right about you not staying here.”

Daniel’s lost his edge. The older boy with his unruly hair, five o’clock shadow, and sharply defined arms looks sunken in. Deflated by the afternoon. He nods slowly and says, “That’s decent of you, thanks. I’ve got to clean up here, but I could head over tonight.” Sam gives Daniel his address, and I wave a silent good-bye to him as we trudge back into the bleak woods. There were birds cawing, toothy rodents scampering, the buzz of swarming bees before. Now it’s eerily quiet. The sky’s clogged with clouds and there’s a stormy cast of light. I’m not even sure what time it is, since I left my purse and cell in Sam’s car.

With each step the water filling my flats gurgles and my fingers turn bluer. Our pace slows to a crawl as my feet grow sore and tired. “You look cold,” Sam says after he helps me over a rocky stream. He pulls his T-shirt up and over his head, revealing a white sleeveless undershirt, his skin showing through the thin fabric. His shoulders are tan and freckled from the sun. “Here.” He offers it to me.

“But you’ll be cold,” I say. There’s a purple welt on Sam’s cheekbone from Daniel punching him. Zoey dated a freshman in college for a week last year; their relationship lasted until the black eye he’d been given at a party healed. Zoey said that bruises do to guys’ faces what makeup does to girls’. I think she was on to something.

“I won’t. I run warm, remember?” Sam says. I take the T-shirt reluctantly. His big muddy-brown eyes on my face as I do, my gaze sticking to his. He grins when I pull the still warm shirt over my head. It hangs low, to my mid-thigh, and smells of my childhood. I can’t pinpoint it exactly . . . maybe chlorine from his pool, coconut sunblock his mom made us wear, and something vaguely mint. Shampoo or peppermint iced tea.