Of course, untouchable is not the same thing as unfuckable, which is why this whole messed-up story ends the way it does.
The police won’t hear any of this, either. The men who come around, collecting evidence and asking questions, will get only half the truth—or outright lies, from people like Adam Rines—and I didn’t leave behind a diary to set the record straight. Maybe I should have. Maybe people would actually listen to me now, the way they never did when I was alive. Maybe they’d even understand.
I wouldn’t start at the beginning. I don’t even remember the beginning. Some people say they have memories from way back, clear ones, distinct little glimpses of their lives at age two or three or five. It’s all just a blur to me. Partly, it’s that nothing ever changed: the trailer, the junkyard, the woods beyond. Pop asleep in that shitty recliner in front of the old TV with the rabbit ears on it. The sour smell of last night’s spilled beer. Day after week after year, the same. The only way to tell if a memory is from before or after is that sometimes my mom is there, hovering in the background. I can’t remember her face anymore, but there’s the shape of her. Reddish hair that had started to fade to brown. And her voice, harsh and dusky like the cigarettes she was always smoking—although I don’t remember ever seeing her do that, either. Maybe she never smoked in front of me. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten. I do remember that my father punched a hole in the wall of the trailer the night that Mom skidded out on the county road between Copper Falls and Greenville, going so fast that she flipped over the guardrail and took a long plunge down into the brush. She died on impact. She’d been driving too fast. Stoned, too. Pop never told me that part, but the kids at school all knew, and they were at just the right age to make it hurt. It was an exciting day there at Falls Central when someone in Miss Lightbody’s fifth-grade class realized that my given name, “Elizabeth,” rhymes with “crystal meth.”
I remember the two state policemen standing on the drop-down step outside, one behind the other, holding their hats against their chests. They probably teach them that at the academy, to never give someone bad news with your hat on. I wonder if Sheriff Ryan will take his off when he tells Pop I’m gone.
Maybe I don’t want to tell this part after all.
And I don’t want you to think my life was all bad. It wasn’t. My father did love me, which is more than some people can say. He gave me what he could, and the mistakes he made were out of ignorance, not meanness. Even when he was drunk, and he was drunk plenty, he never raised a hand or said a cruel word. Plenty of people hurt me in my life—hell, I married a man who did almost nothing else—but Pop wasn’t one of them. That house on the lake, the one where I died? He bought it cheap from Teddy Reardon the year after my mother’s accident. He bought it for me, to fix up and rent out for the college education he thought I might want someday. He actually thought that was possible. That I’d amount to something, never mind what everyone said about us.
And when it all went sideways and I ended up with Dwayne, Pop handed me the key to the place and called it a wedding present, and you’d never have known he was disappointed except for the way he couldn’t quite meet my eyes.
Chapter 5
The Lake
Bird’s first thought, as he scrolled through the history on Lizzie Ouellette’s Facebook page, was that she didn’t like having her picture taken. Some girls were downright obsessed with their own faces—his last girlfriend had been one of these, her social media feeds an endless scroll of self-portraits, overlaid with those weird glowy filters that made her look like some kind of cartoon doll. Whatever you called that kind of girl, Lizzie was exactly the opposite. Her profile photo had last been updated three years ago, a grainy picture taken from a distance as she faced into the sun. One hand was lifted to shield her eyes, a can of Coors Light clutched in the other, and her face was a featureless squint—it was impossible to tell what she looked like beyond the basics: pale, thin, red-haired. Bird kept swiping. The next several photos didn’t have Lizzie in them at all; one was a picture of a sunset over the lake, another a blurry shot of something brown and furry—a rabbit? a cat?—nestled in a patch of grass. At some point, she’d tried to take a close-up photo with the camera on her computer, her features so blown out that all you could see were her eyes, her nostrils, and the thin line of her mouth. But finally, he found her. Ten years back, right up close, glancing over her shoulder and into the camera with wide eyes and parted lips, like she’d been caught off guard. She was wearing a strapless yellow dress and a wreath of flowers on her head, her hair twisted up beneath it in a series of elaborate coils, and her cheeks were full and pink. Ten years ago . . . Bird did the math. She would have been eighteen here. Just a kid, off to her senior prom.