The Creeping

*

I haul myself into the shower at a little past eight. My eye sockets ache, and a throbbing pain gores my head. I dreamed only one dream, but it played over and over again. Waking up between each, heart racing, lying in the dark convinced that what I was dreaming wasn’t a dream at all. It was a memory. Jeanie was taken in June, mere days after summer vacation started. But more than four weeks earlier, she was acting strange. I don’t know if she always acted like a schizo staring out into the woods, but I doubt it. I can’t say why I know that that afternoon was the start of everything, but I know with a certainty that hurts that someone was there in those strawberry bushes. Jeanie, slack-jawed, guarding against the woods. So freaked out she crushed the ladybugs in her fist. Jeanie loved ladybugs; all of a sudden, this is a truth I know.

I avoid my reflection in the bathroom mirror as I get ready for Sam and the library. There’s some flash in my stare that unnerves me, that’s entirely other to me. Did Jeanie know that something bad was going to happen? Was she being watched for weeks before? Hunted from the strawberry vines? Did they see what I didn’t? Their branches were thin, satiny, and a haven for ladybugs. Now the bramble pervades their patch, its thorns guarding the vine’s swollen fruit. Did someone stand in those vines to watch her? Did the bramble grow slowly toward the strawberries to protect them? “Nutso, get a grip,” I tell my reflection, forcing myself to stare me down.

The strawberry vines grew thick and sturdy over time. The bramble that grows intermingled with the strawberries must have skirted them before. It was a casualty to Mr. Talcott’s machete wielding too. All sorts of species of plants and animals develop means of surviving. If Sam were here, or Michaela, they’d launch into a mini lecture on evolution. Mr. Talcott brought those vines to the brink of death for eight years—the time between Jeanie’s disappearance and her family’s move—and each summer they returned more determined to live. When I think about it like that, I can’t help thinking that those strawberries and I have something in common. We refuse to vanish. If Jeanie were being watched, she would have told someone. Her mom. Her dad. Her brother. Maybe she did tell someone, and maybe that person was me?

My hands shake harder as I throw clothes on and run a brush through my hair. A long time ago I got over a slice of my memory being gone. I figured that my recollection of that afternoon, and every day before it, disintegrated like dust along with Jeanie. Turns out neither were as gone as I thought. I refuse to bawl my eyes out like some melodramatic amnesia patient, but what if I could have stopped the person who took Jeanie and didn’t? Never, not even for a wisp of a second, have I considered that I might be to blame.

I grab my cell to turn the ringer on fifteen minutes before Sam is set to arrive. I have a crap load of missed calls and texts. One each from Michaela and Cole, checking on me. The other seven texts are from Zoey, each bitchier than the last.

M said you’ve got cramps?

Call me k?

Where R U?

WTF S?

R U w/Sam?

Lose my #.

And ending with, FU bitch!

To tell you the truth, I expected worse. Once Zoey egged my car because I stayed in to study rather than go to a Scott Townsend house party. She helped me clean the yolk and shells up the next morning, but still, not so nice.

I hit Zoey’s name on the screen and hold my breath, waiting for an answer. After the fourth ring Zoey says, “Now you call? You call at eight-freaking-thirty in the morning, but you couldn’t be bothered to call your best friend all day and night?”

I let out a puff of air. “Can we meet today? I have a lot to tell you, and I can’t say it over the phone.”

Zoey sniffs. “Text it then, bitch.”

I cringe at how callous she sounds. “No, I mean I want to tell you in person.”

“What about Taylor?”

“What about him?”

She sputters and chokes on whatever she’s drinking. “Cooome ooon, Stella. You go hard after Taylor for months. I’m a bitch to every other girl who wants him, so they stay clear, and then you blow him off like that. What the fuck? Why would you spaz right before senior year?”

“Umm, in case you haven’t noticed, the whole town is spazzing out. Dead little girls are turning up. Jeanie’s mom is dead. There’s a killer on the loose. There are bigger things happening.” She’s quiet on the other end, but I can picture her flipping her cell off. “Zoey, please. Meet me at the library at nine. ’Kay?”

“Yeah, whatevs. Caleb’s using my car because my mom’s taking hers to work, so I’ll have to see if I can bum a ride from him.”