The Dead Lay Claim
Emily Smith had always loved Michael Gerrard since the second she'd met him. There had been that moment of wonderment, looking at someone so beautiful that it was almost a quasi-religious experience. His soft purring laugh, his mischievous grin that seemed to set his whole face aglow.
And there he was on the soccer field, every bit the sports captain that he'd been elected at. She watched him dodge and parry across centre field, feeling a light bubbling in her stomach of elation. Tackling past Mark and Seth, he threw a left pass to Andrew who passed back. Mike Gerrard swung his left leg back and let out a powerhouse of a kick.
The ball surged into the back of the net and the crowd of men and women dressed in the red of Barkwood Bruins got to their feet, screaming and cheering. As the referee called time, the crowd went into pandemonium and began chanting: "Bruins, let's do it! Bruin's let's do it!"as the blue team slunk off from the bleachers and back benches as the supporters of the red team were whipped into a frenzy and the chant sped up. "Bruins, le' do it!" Bruins, le' do it!
Emily grinned ear-to-ear as she dodged a shower of warm beer that spilled over her shoulder by a large and very rounded kid in the year above. He flushed red and apologised, adjusting his thick spectacles.
Bu Emily wasn't looking at him. She was looking over at Michael. Her Michael. Oh, how she loved watching him as he was lifted up by his teammates and laughing at their victory. Emily didn't care for football. Hell, she didn't even understand half of it or why players had to stand in different places or why you had to keep the ball behind the white lines but she understood that look of happiness on Mike's face and soaked in it like a warm bath of joy.
Her soak was over quite quickly though, ruined by what felt like an ice cube pressing down in the pit of her stomach.
Nina Martinez was the head of the cheer team and ruled it with an iron fist. She'd usually left Emily well alone, preferring instead to demonise the girls who always put their hands up in Math class or were the first ones to hand in their English assignment. Anyone that made her look bad or interrupted the natural pecking order of the school.
It was Nina's belief that attractive and rich get put on top, poor and smarty-pantses on the bottom.
Nina was looking straight at Emily, her gaze almost entirely unflinching. She was no longer smiling and cheering and bouncing with the rest of the team, celebrating the victory of their team.
In fact, looks of genuine cheer were just as missing from her face as her eyebrows were. Emily tried to look away, but it was far too late. Nina noticed, looked at Mike and then back at her.
She burst out laughing and Emily felt herself shrinking back into the stands as she continued howling with laughter. Several other cheerleaders looked over at her, but assumed she was simply in high spirits that their team had won.
Still, Emily pocketed the letter she'd wanted to give Mike after his game. It wasn't much, just a small little card asking if maybe, perhaps, if it wasn't too much trouble, he'd like to meet up for coffee. But now she felt a little too nervous. A little too scared. A little too... little.
Nina made Emily's life a a misery shortly after that. On Monday, she 'accidentally' fell into her in the school corridor, causing her to drop three Chemistry books filled with tiny paper notes that exploded out across the floor like a thousand tiny paper airplanes.
Students tittered with mirth as they walked by, not a single one stopping to help.
"Oops." said Nina.
On Tuesday evening, Emily felt tears running down her face as she looked into the pale blue computer screen and read the messages Nina had sent over. She'd used a fake account, but Emily could tell it was Nina.
On Wednesday, she opened her locker to find that it had been filled with horrible pictures of mutilated animals. She slammed it closed, feeling the gorge fill up her throat. When the corridor was closed, she opened it up again and took out the pictures, dumping them in the bin on the way to class. She was five minutes late.
Looking across the class as she walked sheepishly to her desk, she spotted that it had all been a distraction. Nina was flirting with Mike, running her hands through his hair. The feeling in her throat ran up again, almost overcoming her.
Where was the teacher?
The answer came three minutes later, when she strode into the classroom with her hands on her hips. "Who did these?!" she bellowed, her voice not quite fitting her tiny frame.
In her clasped and wrinkled knuckles that were turning a hot white, were the pictures that Emily had shoved in the bin.
"She did, miss." said Courtney Laurent, in her thick Texas drawl with her head inclined towards Emily A blonde girl at the back of the room, leaning back on her chair and chewing a thick wad of gum. Also, Nina's lieutenant.
Emily Smith couldn't prove that she hadn't, and unfortunately her protests were largely ignored. She received three weeks of detention and was sent back to classroom to watch the man she cared about most in the world look back at her as if she was something he had stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
She didn't blame him, she really didn't. Those pictures were horrific, showing dogs caught under tyres, foxes filled with buckshot and rodents held against the sides of sheds and outhouses by knives that were roughly the size of a baby's arm. In fact, she thought, her mind feeling a glow and a silver lining in a head full of clouds, at least she knew that he cared about all of God's little animals.
A tear ran silently down her face. She wanted so desperately to turn to Mike's disbelieving and disgusted face and tell him that it wasn't her, that she recognised the outhouses and knew that Nina had got the pictures from her cousin, that psychopath Charlie Scriven. Everyone stayed well clear of Charlie.
She so wanted to let him know, give him some signal and reassure him that she wasn't the person that Nina was trying to make her out to be. but she knew that if she tried, if she even thought about trying for too long, she'd start sobbing.
And when the Nina's and Courtney's of the world are trying to get one over on you, there was only one rule: You can't let them see you cry. If you let them see you cry, they've already won.
So she packed her bags at the end of the lesson that seemed to go on forever and left the classroom. When she got home, she ran through to her bedroom and fell upon the single dirty mattress on the floor in tears. Her parents were out at work and wouldn't get home until eleven, when they'd go straight to bed and then wake up, head out back to work, and repeat the cycle over and over. Sometimes days went by when she didn't see them. It wasn't their fault, they had debts and the house was on the edge of repossession so her parents were going all in on the work front to push themselves back from the brink.
She didn't go on Facebook, she simply looked up at her cracked ceiling and thought of Michael. And as she did that, she felt everything start to ease, just slightly.
She got by. Just about. At the end of the three weeks of detention, she apologised to the principal for the crime she hadn't committed and left the office with a hardened face. The principal had simply been fiddling with the pens in his container, thinking about his secretary's ass and mumbling under his breath that he never had problems from his upstanding pupils who weren't darkies.
Emily was walking down the corridor when it happened. Michael was leaning against the fire exit with Nina standing close to him. Close enough to-
When it happened, Emily noticed that whilst Nina pushed her lips against his, she was staring straight at her with a smirk building across her mouth.
By the time Mike pulled away, confused as to why Trey's girlfriend was making a move on him, Emily had run out. Out of the corridor, out of the school, out of the schoolgrounds and all the way across her porch.
But not into the house, into the garage.
The car was an old model, a 76' Ford that didn't even have the wheels. Emily unlocked the door before dragging the broken vacuum out from the corner of the garage which clunked against the stony ground. She'd planned it for some time but found it sad that it had come to it.
Tearing the piping out from vacuum, she poked the funnelled tube through the open window slat and then went round to the back of the car and fitted it over the exhaust pipe.
Getting into the car, she started the engine and lay back in the seat.
After about two minutes, the car filled up with grey gas and she found that her coughing had abated into a relaxing hiss. Her chest rattled as the toxic fumes poisoned her system and her lungs filled up with the evil smog.
As she looked over at the passenger seat, her face broke into a wide smile. Mike! He was sitting next to her as she was driving them to the homecoming dance! She could see the trees and stars swish by out of the window as the tyres on the car that stood on four giant stone cinderblocks revved and they flew through the lanes and roads despite the garage door not even being open.
It was a miracle, but Emily Smith didn't question her last moments. She reached a hand out to cover the hand of her beloved as the car filled up with gas, and then Emily Smith was no more.
When her parents came back, there was grief. Great heaving cries of grief and sorrow as her parents desperately tried to resuscitate her to no avail.
A town mourned, including Emily's friends who had no idea of the hell she'd been put through over the course of a single, but brutal, month. A small vigil was held with candles and photographs.
Everyone grieved, but soon found other things to busy themselves with once they'd used her death to prove to their friends how compassionate they were on social media as boys in the school used it to show how empathetic they were to attractive young girls in attempts to get laid. No, The Death of Emily Smith fell by the wayside along with other things to make way for more important events. Events like homecoming and graduation, for example.
Mr Sakary's funeral parlour was dressing the body of Emily Green in a flowery white dress. Her parents were asked if they wanted to look at their daughter behind a plexiglass screen once the dressing and presentation was finished but even the suggestion of that from the mortician had proved far too much and the parents sat in the lobby.
The father cried, as he always did, as the mother looked on with her stoic face that would never laugh and grin again.
Someone might tell a joke, later in her life, and she might smile slightly. But never anything else. She felt that there would never be another reason to laugh or grin on this Earth for her.
"We have a problem, Ross." said a nervous mortician, who had just taken a call on his mobile outside. Ross Sakary had asked his new apprentice to wait, but he'd insisted it was urgent. He threw the phone to Ross who caught it and put it to his ear.
"Y'ello?"
"Ross, it's Jackie. We need to talk about something."
"Well, not really. You don't sound very dead, Jacqueline."
"I'm in stitches, Ross. I need you to send that new boy of yours over here right now. We got ourselves a problem. Basically, I need new clothes cuz' my delivery didn't come this week. Ya got anything you wanna sell to me? I know you got some nice dresses over there for when you're putting people into the big ol' long dirt sleep."
There was a pause. "I'll see what I can do, Jackie."
"Ciao."
"See ya."
Ross cut the line and looked over at Dennis, his charge of only one month. They were both thinking the same thing. Jackie Finch had money, tonnes of the stuff. Her boutique store bought in customers from all over Texas, from pageant moms dressing their little darlings to stroppy eighteen or twenty one year olds celebrating their birthdays.
Wordlessly, they looked over at the little girl on the slate. If they were to box her up, her parents would never know she hadn't been buried in a nice dress.
"Besides," Dennis said, grunting under the weight of the dead girl as he lifted her, naked, into her coffin. "We can give her folks a cut price and they'll 'preciate it. I hear her parents are mighty poor.
Ross Sakary looked at Dennis as if he's just slapped him. "And have them sniffing around, you fucking fool? You think they're not going to be just a little bit suspicious? Fucks sake, Dennis. I'd hoped you'd catch on sooner or later than we're running a business, not a fucking charity."
Dennis's face became hot and red. "Jes' sayin' that it's homecoming season. I'd say it's a pity if she's in the ground butt-neked whilst all the other girls are wearin' all them purty dresses."
"Dennis, I didn't hire you so you could tell me about your goddamn feelings." Ross spat. "Truth is you're a dropout who needs to learn that in this business you need to put your emotions to one side of it all."
His face softened. "'sides, you know it's always been that way. Poor black girl, up and killed herself 'cuz of the bitches at her school. But Dennis, we get one every season. Every dang season, Dennis!"
Dennis nodded, took up the dress on the morgue table and headed out to the sedan parked in the sunset just outside. He only had to drive two blocks, but did it slowly so that he could find the sunglasses in the overhead compartment as he drove.
He liked getting a nice glance at Jackie's rack whenever he happened to bump into him.
Jackie saw the boy in the ridiculous cowboy glasses get out the car and move towards the shop. She undid the top button on her blouse. Little kids like him were so cute, but she was gonna get herself a deal on the dress, so help her God.
She didn't know how her fucking courier had got lost and how she'd become so low on stock, but she was smiling through it. When a problem with your business strikes, sometimes if you smile wide enough you can keep your head afloat.
She beamed at Dennis as he approached and the two began their small talk and started haggling.
The doorbell jingled as Courtney and Nina entered the store. They were only in for a brief moment to browse, but Nine found what she wanted immediately.
She waited until the man in sunglasses left and then asked how much it was.
"Oh, this? This just came in, dear. I think it's from the new Paris Autumn line. One of a kind with chiffon edging. Very nice, would suit you actually. Would you like to try it on?"
And so, Nina left with her friend. Her hands full and heavy and her daddy's credit card a little lighter.
She felt on top of the world, her dress in a beautiful pink bag filled with even pinker tissue.
When she got home, she wanted to try it on but managed to stop herself.
Homecoming came around, and although things hadn't worked out with Trey, she'd managed to talk Mike into going to on a date with him. She didn't really care for him but it just seemed right.
That little upstart had deserved what happened to her, and this was the cherry on top of a cake she'd been working on for a while.
When the car pulled up and she got in, she spent a while enjoying herself. Kissing, touching. It felt good, although she felt something odd. Maybe it had been her dinner. The two of them set off.
The homecoming ball was set in the football field with balloons and punch and a radio blasting out music through twelve large amps under the twilight skies. As soon as she got there, Nina took a large glass of punch, feeling that maybe it would flush the bad feelings out of system.
She took Mike by the hand and they danced on the grass under the night sky. Unfortunately, that only lasted ten minutes. Nina fell to the ground, her eyes rolling up in their sockets and frothing at the mouth. Mike threw up on his shoes as people all around them screamed. Ambulances were called, but it was far too late.
The cause of death was withheld by the mortuary, but Dennis was fired. He didn't mind though. He knew when he'd taken the dress to Jackie Finch that it had been drenched in formaldehyde.
He could have said something, but something about the poor girl all trussed up in the back end of a wooden box without her clothes on as her parents wept outside just rubbed him up the wrong way.
So Dennis sat on his porch smoking a pack of Camels and staring out as the sun slipped gently away. It was about a week later and Dennis had found himself at a loose end after his unemployment. But he didn't mind, something always came along for ol' Dennis.
And besides, he thought, I don't even regret it. Sometimes the dead need to lay claim.
He stubbed his cigarette into a pot plant and went back inside, closing the door behind him.