she’s beautiful in her own special way and that’s when she knows she can trust him; the indie kids go back to their homes.
Things get darker in the days after the cop incident.
There are two more dead indie kids. I didn’t really know either of them, except to see them in the hallway at school, but still. “This is worse than when they were all dying beautifully of cancer,” Henna said, and she’s right.
The cops are calling one a suicide and the other a car accident.
The cops are saying this.
And why should we doubt the cops?
Henna and I told Mel and Jared and, fine, Nathan what happened, but none of us told our parents. How could we? My dad’s automatically out of everything important. (I’m not even sure I’ve seen him this week, just evidence – discarded clothes, snoring – that he’s in the house somewhere.) My mom’s in pre-campaign mode, which is probably not the best time to tell her the local policemen have gone crazy and are threatening her son. (I told her I broke the mirror hitting a mailbox; she just sighed and handed me the insurance forms.) Henna’s parents would pack her off to a convent, and even Mr Shurin would be overly concerned and get involved in all the wrong ways.
We’re just going to stick together and tough it out and try to live long enough to graduate. The usual.
The surviving indie kids disappeared from school for a bit. No one knows where they went. No one knows what they saw there. No one knows why they all came back on the Friday.
They won’t tell us what’s going on, even when we ask them.
“What’d they say?” Jared asks Mel over lunch.
“That we wouldn’t understand,” Mel says, frowning like she’s about to fire the world from a job it loves. “But one of them showed me a poem about how we’re all essentially alone. As if they’re not the biggest clique of togetherness that ever was.”
Everyone knows the indie kids don’t use the internet – have you noticed? They never do, it’s weird, like it never occurs to them, like it’s still 1985 and there’s only card catalogues – so we can’t find them discussing anything online. The vibe seems to be that it’s totally not our business. Historically, non-indie kids were pretty much left alone by the vampires and the soul-eating ghosts, so maybe they have a point.
But the deer who caused our accident. And the zombie deer coming out of Henna’s car. And the scary cops. It’s like when adults say world news isn’t our worry. Why the hell isn’t it?
“They don’t look like you,” Mel says, when the prints of my senior photos come in. “I mean, not even a little.”
I didn’t bother with digital files; I knew they were going to be gruesome. The prints are meant to go into my graduation announcements, the ones with that pointless extra bit of tissue paper and double envelope you send to relatives in the hope they send back money. But maybe even that’s out.
“You could be your second cousin, maybe,” Henna says, leaning against the counter at the drugstore. We’ve stopped by Mel’s work to check up on her, even though it’s broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.
“We don’t have
any
cousins,” I say. “Dad’s an only child and Uncle Rick doesn’t have kids.”
Henna blinks. “I’ve got like forty.”
“Excuse me,” a skinny, scraggly man says behind us.
“For methadone you need to talk to the pharmacist,” Mel says, without even looking up from the photos.
“You’re not the pharmacist?” the man asks.
We all turn to him. He kind of freaks out at the attention, pulling his arms around the heavy-metal T-shirt that hangs from his collarbones and shuffling away to the pharmacy counter at the back.
“Poor guy,” Mel says. She goes back to my pictures. “You look like a court artist’s drawing of yourself on the stand.”
Henna gasps. “You
do
look like that.”
I move closer to her, pretending to get nearer to my photos. I brush my arm against her arm. It’s
Katie French
Jessie Courts
Saberhagen Fred
Angelina Mirabella
Susannah Appelbaum
G. N. Chevalier
Becca Lusher
Scott Helman, Jenna Russell
Barbara Hambly
Mick Jackson