I pinched cheese off the end of my slice and popped it into my mouth. I hadn’t realized there were things like scholarships for twirling and wearing bikinis in public.
“Billy was telling us that his dad said we must have just missed the killer,” said Paisley. “Because that body was fresh or else we would have smelled it. Can you believe that?” She leaned into Knox’s shoulder. “Could have been any one of us.”
I stared at my hands, trying to keep my mouth good and zipped, but as usual I couldn’t. “That’s not true. Well, not necessarily, anyway.”
Paisley sat up, eagle-eyed. “And how would you know?”
I scratched behind my ear. “Because bodies don’t start stinking until three or four days after they’re dead.” I looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Whoever killed that boy could have done it days ago, in which case the killer would have been long gone. It’s unlikely that any of us came close to being a murder victim.” Everyone was staring at me, and I knew I was about to do that thing where I let my mouth run away just to quit from feeling awkward. “Bodies smell on account of the gas,” I said. A few boys snickered. “It’s true. A few days after someone dies, these bacteria in the body start to break it down. The pancreas is so full of bacteria that it basically digests itself.”
“Sick,” said Knox, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, then leaning forward to listen.
“The bacteria creates this really rank-smelling gas that causes the whole body to bloat. The eyeballs pop out of the sockets and the tongue gets all swollen.” I puffed my cheeks and stuck my tongue out. “If a woman is pregnant when she dies, the bacteria produces so much gas that the baby will blow right out of her. It’s called a coffin birth.”
Cassidy covered her nose and her mouth.
“Jesus Christ.” William thumped the table with his fist excitedly. “How do you know all this stuff, Victoria?”
Victoria? I blinked, remembering who I was with and what I was doing. I registered the strangeness of being called “Victoria” and felt the stillness of Adam behind me. The realization that I’d been going on and on about death and dying and corpses decomposing while one was sitting right beside me. “It’s just science,” I said, then fell silent.
Adam wasn’t going to bloat and expel eyeballs out of his sockets, was he? His organs wouldn’t liquefy. His skin wouldn’t blister when I touched it in a week, a month, a year, would it? I thought of Adam’s discoloration just before another shock set his organs back in motion. The green and blue-black bruising that surfaced under frosty skin. Sure signs of death.
“Sorry,” I said to Adam when the conversation had picked up again. “That’s … that’s not you. I didn’t mean—”
He moved his hand and placed it on my shoulder, his expression as still as a grave. “Just do me one favor,” he said.
A rush of maternal instinct hit me squarely in the chest. “Anything,” I said.
“Let me know if I start to smell.”
“Adam!” I wanted to clap but kept my voice at a whisper. “Was that your first joke?”
He dropped his hand from my shoulder. The line of his brow curved down. “No,” he said, and I realized that he hadn’t been kidding at all. His takeaway from my conversation was that he actually did want me to tell him when he started to stink. So much for progress.
The table’s conversation had turned to spray-on tans and shampoo brands. I pushed my chair back. Cassidy looked up. “Where are you going?”
“To the bathroom.” I drew out my words and hiked my thumb over my shoulder. “Is that okay?” I said when she stared at me as though I should have requested a hall pass.
“Oh.” She shoved the hummus and carrots aside. “I’ll go with you.”
“That’s okay. Really.” I moved to leave without her. Call me crazy, but I’d been peeing alone since I was five. Cassidy, however, had the quickness of a wild antelope. It must have been all those hours on the elliptical. They’d left her backside both perky and deceptively functional, and I had no problem hating her for it.
She was on my tail before I could take a single step. She trotted along beside me. “This is good, I needed to stretch.” She put her arms up in the air and arced sideways. The bottom of her shirt lifted, leaving a space of skin above her jeans that didn’t lump over the waistband like it did for everyone else. “Coach made us do squats for a half an hour straight on Friday because Ashley was late for practice.”
“She does know torture is an international crime, right?” I swung open the door for the ladies’ room and made a beeline for the nearest stall.
Cassidy didn’t enter a stall of her own. In fact, when I sat down, I could see the toes of her shoes pointed in my direction just, I didn’t know, standing there, I guessed. Was she seriously going to wait and listen to my urine stream? Was this normal?
“So,” Cassidy began the moment I’d committed to start peeing. “It’s … well, I guess we’ve never really gotten to hang out before.”