Chapter 4

Thana: After killing Justice

We all duck at the same time, knees knocking against the hard floor, our next breath catching in our throats refusing to give us some solace. The light darts over my face, two sharp orbs penetrate through my vision. From the intensity of the light rays, I know it’s only a matter of time before whoever is out there discovers the abandoned junk room.

“Nobody should move a muscle,” Skylar hisses from underneath remnants of a window sill. It’s akin to hiding behind a sieve, hoping no one sees through the holes.

She doesn’t need to repeat herself. Everything inside me is frozen solid, the blood in my veins, the oxygen in my lungs. I can’t feel anything besides the terror hammering at my chest like a feral animal locked up in a cage. Ava, however, slides from my left, moving out of my view. It takes a while for my brain to register her movement, that she’s edging toward the bathroom.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Skylar asks, shooting her a dirty look. I feel it slither over my spine as if she sent it my way. She scares me. Always has.

Ava doesn’t look back when she responds, “I’m not taking any chances on Justice’s body getting discovered.” And just as she says this, I peer at the floor twenty feet beside me and see that already, Justice’s skin is looking sickly and almost waxen, pale in the dim light. “Help me, will you?” I think she’s referring to me, although her eyes aren’t fixed on mine.

The tension in the bathroom is palpably nerve-racking as Ava gets ahold of Justice’s hands and I hoist her legs to the side. I nearly lose whatever food I have left in my stomach there on the floor because two flies stumble upon her nose, peeking in and out. Ever heard the saying where there’s a mass of flies, there’s a dead body? Yeah, me neither. “Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick,” I admit, and instantly Ava’s hand goes over my gaping mouth. It doesn’t stop me from gagging.

“Control yourself,” she whispers. “Don’t lose your cool now, not when we need to think about how to get out of here.”

She’s right, but she doesn’t know seeing so much blood all in one place is like a trigger for me. Together we pull Justice upright against the wall, her legs aligned parallel to the tub. There’s so much blood everywhere, not just a pool of it, but sheets of it around us. I wonder how we’re going to clean this place, how we’re even going to get out of here without being detected by whoever’s flashing a torchlight in the distance. Ava leans away from her. I can hear her ragged breath coming out in rapid succession. “I don’t think we can trust her,” She says this so out of the blue that I’m still grasping the enormity of her words.

“W-why?” I stutter, and unintentionally I look sideways at Skylar.

“You know why.” Ava purses her full lips and regards me as if I’m the dumbest one in the room. She has the ability to do that with ease. In Literature class, at assemblies, I’ve always seen her belittle someone with the knowledge she has wedged in that big brain of hers.

I’ve heard the rumors, but I better than anyone knows what they represent. Rumors are lies or just surface truth. I never believed fully the story of Skylar pushing her sister to her death. But seeing her throw in that hairdryer like Justice wasn’t even in the bathtub tugs at my brain and warning bells start to chime. “It was an accident.” I don’t know why I’m defending Skylar, but someone has to. Hours ago I was the same unmoored girl I was until I met these two and although I feel closer to Ava than her, she’s a loner like me, longer than I have been. Ava will always have someone in the background once this is over, but the same can’t be said for us. “Besides, can I trust you?”

For a moment, the colour drains from her face. She still seems like the Ava I’ve watched saunter through the hallways with her black combat boots and short uniform skirt. But in this four squared bathroom, she looks more of a child than that. She seems confused. “You shouldn’t.” Her answer takes my breath away and suddenly my throat feels dry and scratchy. “Just like I can’t trust you either.”

Noted. It’s not difficult to notice Skylar has graced us with her presence. She looks pissed. Her usual blue hoodie is pulled over her head and her eyes are downcast and wary. “We can’t stay here, you guys,” she says, eyes darting to the slowly receding lights. “Not with Mr or Mrs torchlight shining their way through the park. We’ll get caught.”

“What do you want us to do besides hide?” Ava says. “We walk out of here, we’re screwed. We stay here though we’re still screwed even more so with her.”

She jabs a finger in Justice’s direction and quickly averts her eyes. “What if we call the police?” The silence that descends on us tells me I’ve said the wrong thing. I cringe. This is why I don’t say much.

Skylar gives out a rough raspy sound and her shoulders shake slightly under her hoodie. It doesn’t take long for me to realize she’s holding back a laugh. “And tell them what exactly? Please, officer, we were taking a stroll in the pack and happened to stumble upon Justice Ortega’s dead body. And oh don’t mind the traces of our DNA not only on every surface in this room but on her frigging body and clothes. It’s not going to go down the way you think.” She says sharply to me, eyes blazing. Tears burn my eyeballs and I look away before one falls. God, I’m pathetic.

“I know how the police work. They can twist your words and make you sound guilty.”

Ava chips in. “We tampered with evidence. Mishandled a dead body. It already looks bad.”

“You’re damn right. It does,” Skylar retorts. There’s a bitter taste in my mouth because it’s dawned on me that there’s no escaping this. This morning I was thinking about how Justice has messed with my head, and now I have to worry about how she’s going to ruin my life.

“We’re strangers. We walk the halls without even looking at what the other’s wearing. It’ll look totally bizarre that we were here together at the same time. In short, Thana, we can’t go to the police.”

“So we bury her.” Even as I say it, I can’t imagine closing soil over another human being. “Make this night go away.”

Ava nods slowly and fixes me with a look of pity. Underneath it all, I can see layers and layers of her guilt, but it took three to kill a girl in cold blood. This can’t be happening. I haven’t been to any funerals before. My grandma died when I was five years old, and even then my dad never let us attend her funeral. Then my mum left Nabil and me with my dad and there was no leaving the house except to go to school. I haven’t even been to a graveyard before.

“That’s going to be impossible tonight. And—”

An indistinct voice nears The Crimson Hideaway and causes us to pause. Skylar bites back a curse while Ava flattens herself further into the corner filled with accumulated junk. Meanwhile, my body rocks back and forth as the light nears and my heart all but stops beating in my chest.

A man’s voice creeps its way to my ears. “Is anyone there?” Next to me, Skylar goes as stiff as a board, nails digging into my arm so hard I give a soft whimper.

“One of us has to go out there and distract him,” Ava invents. “It’s the only way we will all be able to leave at least once he’s gone.”

“I’ll go.” I volunteer more to remove myself from Skylar’s side than to keep to the dark with my friends. If I can call them that. “Once I’m out, I’ll try to draw him away from here. You guys have to leave the way we came alright?”

Outside the air is unexpectedly chilly and the neon glow of my wristwatch tells me it’s almost midnight. “Who’s there?” That gruff sound of a male voice pierces through the air again.

“Over here,” I call out. As I venture away from The Crimson Hideaway, I’m imagining myself as someone else. Someone in a school play titled Escape From The Hideaway or something equally morbid as what I’m doing. I picture someone brave, unlike me, someone who can talk her way out of this and I channel her.

The spotlight is on me now. The harsh beam of light is placed on my face. The crunching of leaves stops. “What are you doing here? Who are you?” Through the light, I can’t see much of him, but he sounds familiar like those old folks I pass by on my way to school every morning.

“Sir can you please turn that off. I can’t see.”

I feel his hesitation before the lights go off and I’m able to get a good look at him. My blood goes cold when I realize he’s a security guard from the parking lot. That’s so far away from this part of the park that I wonder how he heard any of us. He’s an ancient-looking scrawny man, probably his late sixties. “What are you doing here?” He asks again.

I fumble for my next words. “U-um I’m just taking a walk, sir.” I wince, finding that lamer than it sounded in my head. “I got into a fight with my parents at home so I just came here for a stroll, that’s all.” A normal teen excuse I hope he doesn’t argue with.

He narrows his eyes at me. “Then how come I didn’t see you pass by?”

If I took a huge chance and confessed that he was asleep, I don’t know if that’ll embarrass him or force him to deny it. “You were asleep, and you didn’t see me come in. Sorry. I walked right by you.”

I can’t absorb his reaction because he’s blacker than night. The only sound I hear is a guttural grunt and shoving of his torchlight in his holster. “Alright then, but nighttime walking is over. C’mon it’s dangerous to be out here at night.” I breathe a sigh of relief. “But don’t mention to anyone that you…er, you know, saw me sleeping on the job.”

I give a weak nod and hope as I walk past him that he follows me as well. It’s the only way to ensure a clear path for Ava and Yoland to leave the junk room. When I don’t hear leaves being stomped on in my wake, I pause and chance a glance at him. Dark beaded eyes are fixed on me. Watching me. My spine hasn’t felt straighter than at this moment. A voice tells me that we weren’t alone all along like we thought. That maybe this guard whoever he is might’ve grabbed Justice from the tub while we were gone and stabbed her seven times. Never mind, he looks familiar. Nevermind either that there’s no gun on him, but there could be a knife.

“Uh, aren’t you coming?” I don’t mean to sound frightened, but my voice quavers out.

The man doesn’t utter a word for a while and that sends my brain into a really dark place where on the morning news the headlines read: Two teenage girls found stabbed to death in the woods of Fox Park. But then he says, “I heard a scream. Did you hear it too?” He sounds delusional, like he can’t quite trust his own ears.

“N-no. I didn’t.” He heard Justice scream when we didn’t or maybe we did. At this point, I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore. That line between reality and fiction have long since blurred out of existence.

I watch as his eyes glaze over, boring into my own. His left leg shoots forward and I scamper back, heart pounding in my ears. “Right then,” he says, not noticing how terrified I am. “Off you go.”

This time, I don’t wait for him to follow me. I ran the whole way home, hoping Skylar and Ava got out in time too.