The Hundred Deaths of Lizzie Lovett
By Friday morning, people were starting to think the worst. The search parties had been at it for four straight days. There was nothing—not a footprint, not a piece of fabric torn from Lizzie’s clothes, not a strand of her long, blond hair. It was like she just snapped her fingers and poof, disappeared.
From the start, people said all sorts of stuff about how maybe Lizzie was dead. But as the first week of her disappearance neared its end, I realized none of them had really believed it. They’d been talking just to talk, trying to shock each other with gruesome scenarios. It was more of a game than anything else. But on Friday, it was different.
Maybe it was because five days was a long time for someone to be missing. Maybe it had to do with the vigil planned for that evening. Maybe it was because when the reporters interviewed Lizzie’s mom, she didn’t seem urgent anymore. She seemed defeated. Whatever sparked the change, the whole school was grim that day, and it made every second seem as long as an hour.
Personally, I was getting for-real bored with Lizzie Lovett. I got why everyone was so upset, but I just couldn’t buy into it. If anything, it seemed like no sign of Lizzie should be good news. If Lizzie had died in the woods, there’d be some evidence. But there wasn’t. Which is exactly what I would expect from a girl who slipped away from camp, trying to make sure no one would follow her.
Unfortunately, no one in school cared what I had to say, no matter how logical it was. That’s why, on Friday, I didn’t hear anyone debating where Lizzie ran away to or what had made her run in the first place. Instead, I heard the Hundred Deaths of Lizzie Lovett.
She was mauled by a wild animal.
She was killed by her boyfriend.
She fell into a ravine and wasn’t able to climb out.
She was butchered by a serial killer.
She was butchered by her boyfriend.
She ate some wild berries and was poisoned (or possibly bitten by a poisonous insect).
She got lost and died of starvation, thirst, or exposure.
She was stabbed, shot, strangled, bludgeoned, drowned, hanged, burned. By her boyfriend.
At school that day, everyone had a theory of their own. And most of the theories involved Lorenzo Calvetti.
Some people thought he accidentally killed her and panicked. Others thought he must have been planning it from the moment they met. I even heard a story about how he proposed to Lizzie that night, and when she turned him down, he murdered her in a fit of rage.
I kept thinking of the picture in the newspaper and how boyish Lorenzo Calvetti looked. Young and in love. Not like a killer. The police chief had even made a statement about how he wasn’t a suspect. The cops thought Lorenzo Calvetti was innocent, and my gut told me they were right. But most of Griffin Mills High School disagreed.
First period came and went, then other equally boring hours passed, and everyone talked about the girl they were sure was dead and the boy they were sure had killed her. I wanted to tell everyone Lorenzo didn’t do it. He was the real victim, ditched in the woods by the girl he loved. But I knew what people would say and how they would look at me, so I kept my suspicions to myself. I figured Lizzie would turn up soon, and everyone would forget the whole thing anyway.
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I ended up eating lunch in the library instead of on the back steps. How that happened was, before I’d taken a single bite of my sandwich, Emily said, “How’d your paper turn out?”
I almost asked Emily what she was talking about. Then I remembered.
“You didn’t do it? Seriously?” Emily asked when she saw the look on my face.
“I meant to,” I said. The paper was probably a great example of what my teachers meant when they said I was bright but didn’t apply myself.
“You had plenty of time,” Emily said. “What have you been doing?” I didn’t like how she sounded like my mom.
I gathered my stuff without answering. I hadn’t been doing anything important. I never did much of anything, which is probably why I was always bored.
“I’m going to the library. I can skip fourth period and get something written.”
“Good luck, I guess.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
I could feel Emily’s disapproval the whole time I walked away.
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