The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi Page A

father at all, but as David got older they started meeting up more often. Every now and then I’d hear about it: My dad called. I have to go drink my bimonthly lunch date.
    We went to the same high school and David still hung out with me, but secretly. He came into the ninth grade when I was in eleventh. The first day of school he walked over and gave me a big smile, and I had to remind him that our friendship was more of a private-type friendship, and not a public-spaces type friendship.
    At home, he’d double me on his bike up and down the alley and through the side streets. I sat on the seat and he stood on the pedals with his skinny body curved around me like a banana. David always made me feel like a kid, a real kid, not a my-friend-got-murdered kid. The bike swung back and forth across the road in wild zigzags and old ladies honked and swore at us. We crashed on the grass, on other people’s front lawns. In a bush, once. Minor injuries. I was getting ready to apply to university.
    Almost all the rest of the time I was pretending to be way older than I was. In the most basic ways I grew up anxious, with an anxious family. That makes it tempting to be a show-off and prove how brave you are all the time. This is how my mother has lived her whole life, like the best way to show you’re not afraid is to pick the scariest situation and purposefully put yourself right in the middle of that. Then you can save yourself.
    Compared to everything else around me, David was relief.

CHAPTER 8
----
    W hat kind of psycho would assign you a research piece on little dead girls?
    My mother had the long-handled garden spade in her hand and plunged it into the slushy ice lining the driveway, then stepped down on the edge of the blade to break it into chunks. I’d been telling her about LexisNexis and how my finger was now on the pulse of international happenings.
    You’re missing the point, I said. I can find out anything now. I’m like the ultimate snoop. I stomped some ice for her like I was Godzilla. I’m She-Ra of the News, I said. And I’m fine. Plus it’s my job. Plus? I’m fine.
    Your father worries about you.
    Well, I said. It’s a good thing you don’t. Otherwise I’d have no one to talk to.
    Grab a shovel, my mother said. There’s a bottle of Baileys inside the house with my name on it. I’m willing to add yours, she said.
    There are two kinds of snow shovelers in this world: meticulous, pickax shovelers like my mother, and then high-efficiency shovelers. My mother would be fine to stay out in the fresh air, working away for hours, so she uses a small shovel. The only other shovel my parents own is trademarked for maximum capacity. It’s capable of moving upward of thirty liters of snow at a time. I mean, if you can find someone with the muscle to push it.
    It’s the Back-Breaker™.
    My father’s car was missing, leaving a bald patch in the snowy driveway.
    I’ll start there, I said.
    He went in to deal with an emergency, my mother said. Six-year-old knocked his new tooth out ice-skating and your dad’s yelling, Throw it in a glass of milk! Throw it in a glass of milk! And this poor woman is on the other end of the line. Milk? Milk? They never speak any English.
    I gave a solid push to the mound of snow I’d collected and tried to heft it against the side of the path, next to the garden. The shovel flipped up to show its underbelly: frozen garden earth, some limp chives, a dead sparrow.
    Bird, I said.
    My mother came over for a peek.
    Still got its head on, she said.
    My parents own a cat that’s famous for bird decapitation. You wake up with a chickadee’s head next to you on your pillow, like the cat is some kind of sharp-nosed feline mafioso and this tiny bird is his way of calling in debts, the warning before he blows out your kneecaps. Once my mother found him with a goldfinch cornered in the back pantry. The finch had two broken wings but it was still alive, bobbing and weaving like a shaky Muhammad