What She Found in the Woods

I sit up and see dusk is falling. ‘I’ll have to run it.’ I sigh.

‘Can you?’ he asks, worried about me again.

‘I’ll have to,’ I say, reaching for my clothes.

I really don’t care about curfew right now, but I can’t spend the night out in the woods and put my grandparents through that kind of worry. Not after Mila’s disappearance.

Bo folds up the blanket while I stuff my things into my pack. We don’t get to say any kind of goodbye before he’s jogging along next to me, still concerned that I’ve lost too much blood.

‘Go, Bo,’ I tell him, giving him a little shove. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes,’ I say, rolling my eyes. ‘You have further to go than I do.’

‘I love you,’ he says, and then he breaks for home.

‘I love you, too,’ I say, glancing back for him. Poof. He’s already gone.

I feel like I’ve barely fallen asleep when I hear my phone buzzing.

Normally – now, in this tech-free era of my life – I wouldn’t bother answering it, but something reaches inside my dream of rushing water and blood and sex and whispers Mila’s name.

I answer before I sit up.

‘Yes,’ I say.

There’s nothing, and then a shaky, wet inhalation. ‘They found her,’ Aura-Blue gasps. ‘They found her in the river.’

I’m standing. I’m moving. But I don’t know where I’m going. So I stop.

‘She’s dead,’ I say, pointlessly.

All I hear is Aura-Blue’s sobbing. I sit back down on my bed and I wait. ‘Tell me,’ I say when Aura-Blue has calmed down enough to speak.

‘She was stabbed, I don’t know, dozens of times,’ she says, sounding garbled. Probably becau

se her mouth won’t shape words while it’s pulled into a grimace of grief. I wait for her to continue. ‘She must have fought him because there were defensive wounds, and they say it took her a while to die.’

‘That’s good,’ I say, too loudly. ‘If she fought him, there’ll be some kind of evidence. DNA. Hair. Skin.’

‘No,’ Aura-Blue says, and stops to sniff. ‘He was careful.’

I hear my grandparents wake up and call out to me, but I don’t care.

‘They’ll look under her fingernails,’ I shout. My grandparents appear in my doorway with owlish, staring eyes.

‘No, they won’t,’ Aura-Blue says with finality.

I sit on my bed for a long time after Aura-Blue hangs up.

I sit long after my grandparents have given up trying to tell me to pretend that it never happened. To get on with my life. I didn’t openly reject their calm, rational bullshit, and so they took my passivity as compliance and finally left me alone. I’m not catatonic. I know that. I’m just waiting for dawn. Some glimmer through the grey. Just enough so I can slip into the forest and run to Bo.

My phone buzzes again, and I answer it without looking. It’s Rob. He’s crying.

I try really hard to listen to him. He knew Mila much longer than I did. He dated her, and I’m pretty sure she let him do far more than I ever entertained doing with him. I never used to equate sex with an emotional bond, but I do now. Rob is really hurting.

My eyes locked on the window, looking for daylight, I uh-huh him and tell him there’s nothing he could have done. That it wasn’t his fault. He tells me he’ll be back tomorrow – or is it today? Anyway, he’s nearly back and he can’t wait to see me. He needs to hold me, he says.