The Female of the Species (23 page)

I tell the truth. All of it.

Officer Nolan comes to my hospital room and writes until his pen is out of ink, holds up a finger to let me know he'll be right back, and returns with one from the nurse's desk, an advertisement for an antidepressant stamped across it.

He hasn't said a word and I have no idea if he believes me or not, but when he asked me what happened I wanted to answer, and not just about tonight. Because maybe if I talk about Alex—the Alex from before I even knew her—she won't be able to leave me yet. I'm keeping her alive with words, telling what happened years ago right up until now.

The town will explode, I know. Alex's name will
be everywhere, yearbooks cracked open so people can point and say they knew her. Her name and mine will be linked together forever, our names and faces the first thing that come to mind when the other is mentioned. And that's exactly what I want.

I'm dead calm as I talk, piling the words on top of one another so I don't have to hear my parents' voices in the hall, demanding to see me. I told Nolan to keep the door closed so I could tell the factual version, the one that has dates and times, conversations and locations. I'll tell Mom and Dad the story from my heart, the one with Branley and blood, the smell of smoke in the night and tears sliding over freckles.

The nurse told me I'm in shock and that's why I don't feel anything yet. I'm okay with that, because I know when it hits it's going to be a freight train that flattens me, knocking the wind out and leaving me on my knees, mouth open in a perpetual inhale before the racking sob breaks out.

Branley is already there. She's having a complete breakdown in the next room. I can hear her through the wall, the rise and fall of her voice as familiar as my own but breaking with emotion, whipping everyone along in a tide that floods through the whole hallway. She started screaming when they separated us, feet kicking, swear words flying. It took two orderlies to get her
under control but they must have lost their grip at some point because now I can hear them yelling at her to get down off the bed and stop swinging the IV tree.

“Your friend isn't cooperating,” Nolan says, putting the final period on my statement and slapping his notebook shut.

“Don't expect that to start anytime soon,” I say.

“Okay for your parents to come in?”

I nod and they're through the door in a second, a nurse on their heels. My mom is a mess of tears, her face a mask folding under the mixed pressures of anger and grief, Alex's name a word her lips can't form yet. She just says
your girlfriend
with a question mark at the end of it, and I shake my head no. Dad's more like me, a brick wall that I know I'll have to run smack into as soon as I get home, all the questions and repercussions stopping me short the second I walk in the door.

“We want to keep him overnight because of the shock,” the nurse tells my parents. They try to argue that I'm better off at home, but the truth is I'd rather stay here, and not just because I'm not ready to tell them everything. The sooner I'm home in my bed staring at the crack in my ceiling, the closer I'll be to returning to everyday life; the sooner I'll have to stare at the Hancock pennant my mom hung over my bed and admit that the fantasy Alex and I spun together about apartments
and part-time jobs and Irish wolfhounds was exactly that—a fantasy. One that evaporated right in front of me in a spray of blood.

I know that the seconds are ticking by, making minutes, turning into hours, becoming days that will stretch into weeks and years. And with every sunset Alex will be a little farther from me, her face a bit fuzzier, her voice an echo, our time a memory. And I'm not letting go just yet. Right now life is on pause and I want it that way, because she can't slip away from me entirely until I start moving on.

Branley comes to me in the night, smelling like hospital soap and tears. I heard her shower running through the wall and her skin is still hot from it. Some of the red fades as she lies next to me, her body cooling. But there are spots where she scrubbed herself raw and they stay bright, peeking from under the sleeves of her hospital robe, the hem that stops right above her knees.

“I'm sorry,” she says again, her throat raw.

I wrap my arms around her and she settles into me, her nose fitting in the spot between my collarbones, my chin resting on her head. We've been like this so often, as friends and as more, that it's second nature. Our breathing finds a rhythm together and I feel her soft movements beneath the blanket. I put my hand on hers to still it, where she's rubbing her upper arm. Her
breath hisses out in pain as my fingers pass over three bumps just under the skin, embedded shot.

“I wouldn't let them take them out,” she says, her lips moving against my chest.

I nod my understanding as her hand goes back to them, rubbing up and down in a hypnotic movement that draws us both down into exhaustion. And while she came to me out of habit, I know there's more comfort for her in those wounds than I can ever give.

I'm somewhere I should never have to be.

Alex's grave has already settled, the dirt sinking a little lower with each rain. The grass all around her stone is trampled and muddy, pockmarked from the high heels and camera tripods. But the news crews aren't the only ones coming. I've been here every day in the week since her burial clearing away the debris.

There are the expected flowers, which I've been taking home and putting in vases until Mom said our house smelled like a funeral home, then clapped her hand over her mouth like she wished she could force the words back in. The plastic flowers I took to Goodwill until the girl at the donation center told me they didn't want any more. Now I just throw them in the Dumpster.

There are other things I don't know what to do with. Notes with names and dates, pages of diaries ripped out and weighed down with stones. Some of them have been folded tightly, some wide open, edges flapping in the wind. They're for Alex, not me. I read only a few at first, the open ones that were begging for someone to finally know. I wanted to stop because I couldn't stand the hot weight of all their knowledge in my stomach. Still, I read them. I read them until I understood Alex and what she did.

Her tombstone has become a shrine, the pilgrims coming under cover of darkness to unburden their secrets. The notes I clear away, sending their accusations to the sky with flames and smoke while I sit at the fire pit, across from the empty chair where Alex should be. Some things take longer to burn: a broken necklace, a frayed bra clasp, a pair of underwear with
I was fourteen
written on them in permanent marker.

My father presided over her funeral, not meeting my eyes when he quoted Romans 12:19 (
Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord
), but he looked right at me when he hit on Micah 7:19 (
And all our sins are cast into the depths of the sea
). I don't know if he meant Alex's sins or everyone else's. Or maybe my own.

I hadn't talked to Jack about what he told the cops until we crossed paths at her grave one evening, me hauling away an armload of wilted flowers, him carrying a fresh batch. When he tried to talk to me about it, I punched him in the chest and he let me, crushing petals against him and driving thorns into his skin.

“You really didn't know?” he asked, eyes pinning mine in a way he must've picked up from Alex. I couldn't find words so I shook my head and walked away, but his question stuck with me.

No, I didn't know. Everyone else wants to talk about the Alex who tore Ray Parsons's nose off when he tried to hurt me, the Alex who tortured the man who killed her sister, the Alex who burned a child molester alive and blew a rapist away with a shotgun blast. Nobody wants to talk about the girl who held kittens in the palm of her hand, humming to them while they fed, or the girl who would pick fleas off a dog for hours. Because nobody else knew her.

I'm left to mourn someone alone, someone who I can't square with the one they put in the ground, the one the camera crews want to interview me about. I don't know how to say good-bye to someone who shared only half of herself with me.

Going back to school is the hardest part. The principal makes a big announcement about how we still have
jobs to do even though there's only two days of school left, and we can't let
recent events interrupt our education
. The halls are filled with Alex's name even though she's not here anymore, and the whispers are so loud I almost don't hear Branley's gasp from the next locker down.

Somebody drew a dick on her locker. Anonymous. Erect. Demanding.

“Seriously?” Sara stops when she sees it.

Branley just stands there, a flush rising in her cheeks. I dig in my locker for a pencil, finally finding one with a decent eraser. Sara opens her backpack to find her own and between the two of us there's nothing left but smudge marks in a matter of minutes. But there are still tears in Branley's eyes when she thanks us and walks away as the bell rings.

Sara shakes her head. “Motherfuckers,” she says under her breath.

“Yep,” I agree.

“Dick,” Sara says.

“What?” I ask, eyebrows shooting up.

“Dick.” She points with her pencil at another drawing, this one on the wall down by the science room. The tardy bell goes off and we exchange glances.

“We're gonna need a bigger eraser,” I say.

“I'm happy to let recent events interfere with my education if you are,” she says.

We spend the rest of the period scavenging the halls, rubbing our erasers down to nubs and going to our lockers for fresh ones. I laugh for the first time in a while when Sara tells some other girls about what she dubs Penis Patrol.

“I don't get it,” Marilee Nolan says. “It's not like I doodle pussy everywhere.”

“Maybe you should start,” somebody says, and Sara's eyes meet mine, her fork paused halfway to her mouth.

The next day the front entrance is covered in flesh-colored window paint, the only way in or out of the school through a massive vagina. I almost choke in the parking lot, I'm laughing so hard. Sara joins me at my car.

“What do you think?”

“Don't they have security cameras?”

“Yeah, but it's worth it. I bet half the guys won't even walk through.”

And she's right. The principal has to force a whole herd of sullen males through the doors, yelling at them that they're all late. Sara is called to the office halfway through the morning and I'm surprised to see her sitting in the cafeteria at lunch.

“I thought for sure you'd get suspended,” I tell her, setting down my tray.

“Nah, the art teacher told the principal it was for my
final and that it was a peach and if he saw something else that was his fault, not mine. Then she gave me a book on Georgia O'Keeffe.”

I let the fake smile I've been wearing in public slip away when I go to the bathroom. The grief sneaks up on me when I'm alone, cracking its way through the little walls I've built up to keep it away. Alex is gone but she's very much still here, and not only in my mind. I've seen her in Sara's willingness to skip class and erase dicks with me; in a loud complaint from a freshman instead of just rolling her eyes when a senior smacks her ass; in a
not cool, man
from Park when one of his friends made a rape joke. And she's here in the bathroom stall with me, her hand behind the writing on the wall even if it wasn't her fingers holding the marker.

stay away from Blake C.—date rape 3/26

me too—2/4

chad will roofie you don't party with him

There's other stuff there too:
Branley Jacobs is a whore and Alaina's a man-stealing bitch
, but they're faded like someone tried to wipe them away, the one about Branley half blacked out.

There are tears pooling in my eyes as I sneak into the janitor's closet. I'm armed with bottles of Windex, paper towels, and a Sharpie when I slip into the boys' bathroom in between classes, half expecting to be high
as a kite before I get out of there. The motion-sensor lights kick in and even though it's the boys' bathroom, all I can see is Alex leaning against the sink as I wash my face, telling me why punching Branley isn't going to do any good.

I'm crying by the time I go into the first stall, the door clicking shut behind me as I pump the Windex, ready to wipe away anything that pisses me off. Instead I end up sitting on the toilet, reading things I never expected.

I love Jessica

Yr mom blew me
, followed by

My mom's dead

Then—
Sorry, dude. My bad.

Peekay won't put out

My fingers tighten into a fist, but underneath it I recognize Adam's handwriting:
U don't deserve it.

And on the back of the stall door graffitied in letters as high as my arm:

REST IN PEACE ALEX

I pop the cap off my Sharpie, the smell filling the stall and stinging my eyes as I add underneath,
Amen.
The motion lights flicker off, but I can still see the message imprinted on my eyelids.

And I think maybe, just maybe, she can.

All my books have taken me to dark places, but this one had special corners where the shadows were quite deep. As per my usual I dragged others there with me. Extensive thanks first need to go to my critique partners and fellow authors R. C. Lewis, Kate Karyus Quinn, Demitria Lunetta, and S. L. Duncan for reading without flinching . . . mostly.

I had many questions as I dove into this manuscript, many of them relating to the decomposition of dead bodies and the specific manner of the damage I would be inflicting on living ones. Special thanks to Scott Blough and Lydia Kang for assisting with the dead and the living, respectively.

This was my first attempt at writing from a male perspective, and I must thank Geoffrey Girard and Jordan Nelson for answering my man questions, including how to make a proper fist and not being alarmed when I abruptly text, “Tell me where the
thumb goes again?” with zero context whatsoever.

Always, thanks to my amazing team at Katherine Tegen—Katherine, Ben Rosenthal, Stephanie Hoover, and Erin Fitzsimmons—and the lovely Margot Wood of Epic Reads. Publishing is a business, but they make it feel like a friendly one. Extra commendation to my unflappable agent, Adriann Ranta, who reacted well when I told her I had a manuscript in my closet from fifteen years ago that might be worth dusting off.

Lastly, my long-suffering family, especially my mother, who worries what the people at church will think of my books. And my boyfriend, who patiently cooks dinner and nods while on the receiving end of a manic creative burst coming from the floor, where I'm usually located at those times.