Gia Killmore hated burying bodies after a heavy rain. Really, she hated the burying bodies part entirely. It was like cooking a good meal--she liked the eating part, but despised having to wash the dishes afterwards. The burials were the cleaning up.
"Don't let him drag like that," her mom, Virginia Killmore, instructed. At least, that's what Gia thought she said. It was hard to tell exactly due to the tiny flashlight shoved between her mom's teeth so that her hands were free to lift Connor Donoghue up by the armpits. Wheezing breaths filled the air with thick vapor as they were both labored by the boy's weight.
Gia stumbled trying to get his butt from dragging along the muddy ground of Beckett Forest, named after the founding family of Beckett Hill. They were still the only people who ever ran for office, claiming it as their God given birthright. "It'd be a lot easier if he could walk there himself," Gia groaned, heaving his feet up by the ankles to better her grip. But that was an empty wish if there ever was one. Seeing as how Connor Donoghue was dead.
Virginia stopped, sending the flashlight beam in an arc over the forest floor with a slow turn of her head. She let the flashlight drop to the ground with a pop of her lips. "This is good." Both of them dropped the body unceremoniously. It made a slurping sound as it impacted with the mud. Gia's stomach turned. It was a strange thing that someone who saw so much blood could still get so queasy.
The dropped flashlight cast a split shadow over Connor's face, lighting him up from the nostrils. His eyes were open, glassy, as they stared off into the distance. But it wasn't just a symptom of death to have eyes wide open and still be unable to see what was right in front of you. Gia turned away from the already gaunt-like contours of his face, the side turned away from the light ghostly pale.
"I'll get the shovels," Gia offered, desperate to get away from the body that was already starting to cast off a putrid odor. It happened quickly, the rotting. Connor had been dead for no more than two hours.
Gia and her mother had their strengths. Gia was the plotter, the bait, who could lure a teenage boy down a darkened alley with a whip of her ponytail. She was good at murder. Live bodies were pliable, almost beautiful in the ways they clung to life. But this, the bodies when they had emptied of breath, this wasn't her strength.
Virginia, recognizing the discomfort in her daughter, grabbed the flashlight from the ground and held it out. "Be quick about it. If the dirt hardens, we'll be here all night."
Gia grabbed the flashlight and trudged back the way they had come. On the walk up the slightly inclined hill, she smoothed over patches of mud that Connor's body had disturbed with the bottom of her rainboot. She had spent months rubbing away at the rubber soles to get rid of the identifiable checkered pattern along the bottom of each boot. They were two sizes too big, to contend with the fact that she had identifiably small feet. She watched enough true crime to know exactly what it took to get away with murder.
Their old Volvo sat at the edge of the treeline. Gia slipped into the driver's seat for a moment, turning the keys her mother had left in the ignition. The car filled with a blast of heat and she held her hands against the air vents to increase the blood flow. They had gone almost completely numb from the crisp New England air.
She pulled her phone from her back pocket, pressing her knees against the steering wheel to lift herself up. The metal phone case was cold against her fingers and it took multiple tries to position her shivering lip just right for the face recognition to register. According to her texts, the beginning of senior year bonfire was still going, despite the temperature dipping into the mid- forties this time of night. If they dug fast enough, she might be able to make it back before the fireworks were set off on the edge of Granger Canyon. They always made an extra loud pop as they exploded, as if it took extra effort to come to life in the frigid welcoming of Fall in Maine.
An incoming FaceTime call flashed across her screen. It was like her best friend, Meghan, was psychic, always calling at the absolute worst times. But if she ignored it, Meghan would worry, and a worried Meghan was a nosy Meghan. The last thing Gia and her mother needed was someone snooping around. Especially someone with a colossal mouth who was the conductor of the gossip express at Beckett Hill High.
"Where are you?" Meghan practically screamed into the phone, her face blurry pixels from the bad connection. Her platinum blonde hair moved like a faded halo with each turn of her head. "You disappeared."
"Yeah," Gia said. "Mom needed the car, you know how it is." The Killmores being a one-car family had gotten Gia out a lot of group gatherings over the years, especially when Virginia moved to a hospital in Portland that was in dire need of nurses and could no longer walk home like she did at Beckett Memorial, a shoddy small town hospital that barely had an ER.
"Well get your butt back here," Meghan whined. "You're going to miss the beer," she shook her red solo cup by her ear for emphasis. It tapped with a slosh against her oversized hoop earrings. "And the fireworks. And," she brought the phone closer to her mouth and spoke in what Gia assumed Meghan thought was a whisper but was still a pretty loud and slurred yell. "Ryder's been asking about you."
Gia's stomach dropped and then catapulted itself back up her throat. She nervously went to move her braids over her shoulder before she remembered she'd taken them out over the weekend and her curls now sat too close to her head to be played with in times like this. "Wait, what did he say?"
She had been trying to get Ryder Quinn's attention for the past three years to no avail. Like most guys at school, he had been distracted by the cheerleaders and the soccer players and really anyone with any athletic ability and a school sports uniform, of which Gia was not a part. Revenge killing took up way too much time for extracurricular activities.
"He said," Meghan started, still talking way too loud for Gia's comfort, "that he saw you at that little book store on Grant, that weird dusty one you're obsessed with, last week or some other week. I don't know, you're there every week, who knows when."
"Meg, focus," Gia said, glancing at the clock on the car radio. She had lost track of how much time had passed, but her mom was probably getting pretty pissed with each passing second. It's not like being in the woods in the middle of the night was an enviable endeavor and it was only getting colder. She had to wrap this up quick, but she was too curious to drop it entirely. It was Ryder Quinn, for goodness sake.
"He said you looked good, sun-kissed. You know how poetic he is. I mean, he didn't become the lead singer of Slipcase for nothing." Meghan stopped to take a large gulp of beer. "But whatever, he thinks you're cute so get back here pronto, before Carolyn sinks her sticky little mitts into him."
"Okay," Gia said. "Okay. I'll be there in," she tried to calculate how long it would take them to dig now that the dirt had most certainly hardened. "A half hour." It was optimistic, but she was motivated.
"Make it twenty," Meghan chirped before hanging up the call.
Gia leaned her head back against the seat and groaned before turning off the engine and slipping out of the car. She was instantly met with a cool blast of wind as she pulled two shovels out of the trunk, hurrying back down the sloping entrance into the forest to where her mother stood impatiently over Connor's body.
"Are you kidding me?" her mother asked, grabbing a shovel. "I said be quick, not take all night."
"Sorry, Meg called. It was an emergency."
Virginia sucked her teeth in disbelief as she stuck the shovel into the ground, stomped on it with the heel of her foot, and heaved out a scoop of now nearly frozen dirt. Gia joined her, and soon the only sounds filling the night were their heavy breaths and an owl's hoot every few minutes. Wind picked up the fallen leaves around them in a rustle.
They dug deeper than usual, to account for erosion from any additional rain storms, and then they rolled the body into the hole. Gia couldn't be sure, but she was pretty positive she had blown way past a half hour. She was surprised she hadn't heard the fireworks go off as they dug. They covered the body quickly, Gia getting one last glance of Connor's ocean blue eyes now faded to a sullen grey, before his face was covered with mud.
Gia felt like she could breathe again. It always felt better when the body was dealt with, no longer there to carve away at the pieces of her that should feel guilt. Because she wasn't sorry. Connor was just another guy in a long line of Beckett Hill boys who had taken advantage of her friends, her neighbors, without so much as a slap on the wrist. It had seemed crazy when the two Killmore women had started this, taking down those the police had failed to punish, giving the girls in Beckett Hill just an iota of the dignity that had been robbed from them. But it didn't feel crazy anymore. It felt good.
Virginia draped her arm over her daughter's shoulders as they made their way back to the car. The mud slipped beneath their feet as they climbed, using each other and the shovels for balance. "So what was this emergency?" Virginia asked as she put on her seatbelt with a loud click.
"Hmm?" Gia mumbled, distracted. She wondered how long it would take before the posters went up along Main Street, how many students would pretend to care for a short time until they remembered that Connor Donoghue had never given his classmates anything but misery. She hoped it would bring Dani Ramirez, the girl Gia had found crying on the bathroom floor during junior lunch last year, peace. She certainly felt at peace knowing that he would never again hurt another girl.
"You said Meghan called you with an emergency," Virginia clarified. She rubbed her dirtied hands against her jeans before starting the car. The shovels clanked against one another in the trunk as they made their way over the uneven ground leading away from the forest and back towards town. She clicked on the radio, letting Stevie Wonder play at a low hum. Virginia was almost her most calm after a burial. She had grown up being taught that very few people got to make a real impact in the world, and that she least of all would ever get the chance to. But she had found a way to make a difference, and because of her, so had her daughter .
"Oh, she was worried I wouldn't make it back to the bonfire before the fireworks. You know how she gets around large crowds and loud noises." One summer they had driven to Lollapalooza in Chicago, and Meghan had gotten so overwhelmed that she'd broken into tears. A seventeen hour drive for nothing. But the bonfire was nothing close to that.
Virginia nodded, not bothering to point out the lack of parallels between the two situations. "Well, I didn't hear any fireworks. If we hurry, we might get you there in time."
Gia looked at her mom, her smile widening. They were closer than any other mother-daughter pair she knew, and it was nights like this that reminded her why. They shared something important, big. Virginia reached her hand over and wiped a line of Connor Donoghue's blood from just below Gia's chin, and then she turned up Stevie and pressed on the gas.
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