That Girl

People always ask when I last saw Shanice Morgan alive.

That's a strange question.

As if dead people become a different species. As if the version of someone laughing outside the tuck shop on a Tuesday is not the same thing as the version swelling in a gully six days later.

I usually tell them the truth.

I tell them it was the Friday before she went missing, just after school. She was by the taxi stand in her white blouse, arguing with the peanut vendor because he gave her less change. She laughed after. She always laughed after she got vex. That was one of the things I loved about her.

Nobody remembers me being there.

But memory is a democratic thing. The majority decides what happened, and the quiet parts get voted out.

We grew up in the same district in Jamaica. Same school. Same church. Same rain beating on zinc roof every October. She knew me before she knew she knew me. I watched her become a person. Watched her lose her front tooth in grade three. Watched her cry when her dog got poisoned. Watched her cut her hair in fourth form and pretend she didn't care what people thought.

You can know someone very deeply without them ever noticing.

That sounds bad when you say it out loud.

The district pretended to care when she disappeared.

That's what bothered me.

Everybody became detective. Every old woman at the shop suddenly had "a feeling." Every drunk uncle had "seen a strange car." Men who had never said good morning to her mother were beating bush with cutlass like they were in a movie.

But they all missed the smell.

That was what found her.

Not the police. Not prayer. Not posters. Not those idiots from Kingston who came with cameras and left when there was no blood to film.

The smell found her first.

Three boys went to smoke behind the old citrus grove past the dried riverbed. One of them stepped in what he thought was mud and started cursing. It wasn't mud. It was black water leaking from the soil where someone had covered the ground too quickly.

The dogs started digging before the men reached.

By evening the whole district knew.

By night nobody wanted to say what condition she was in.

Adults have this habit of lowering their voice when the details become too ugly, like whispering makes horror polite.

The official story was "decomposition."

That's a nice word.

Makes it sound like science.

Not like skin splitting in heat. Not like eyes gone cloudy and mouth half open like she was trying to finish a sentence. Not like the ants.

Her mother fainted when they pulled the sheet back.

I didn't go close enough to see.

I had already seen enough.

That's what I told police.

They asked why I was crying so hard.

I said she was my best friend.

The officer looked at me for too long.

Then asked what her birthday was.

I laughed because grief does that to you, makes things funny. I said, "You asking me like I'm her boyfriend?"