She laughed and hugged me before returning to the mirror, admiring my handiwork. “I might just wear the safety pin as an earring. What do you think? Bring punk rock to Pantown!”
We squealed at this.
She ended up wearing those pins up until the first day of ninth grade, when the principal demanded she remove them. She replaced them with prim gold studs, same as me and Brenda wore.
I put on a burst of energy to catch up to Brenda, to remind her of that good day, to convince her that someone whose ears I’d pierced couldn’t be dead, but an ambulance’s shriek had grown too loud, its wailing filling the quarry side of town. The houses were sparse here. Some of the quarries were still being actively mined, fences protecting the snarling machinery, hiding their violence. Others, like Dead Man’s, had been turned into swimming holes and party spots before my time. Dad said he and his friends used to hang out at them in high school.
Brenda veered left off the tar road and onto the gravel that led to Dead Man’s. The air tasted like chalk from all the traffic. The clearing ahead held our green Pontiac and three police cars, their cherries flashing. Behind the vehicles, towering oaks and elms loomed, guarding the quarry. One main foot trail and several smaller ones snaked through the forest, none wide enough to drive on.
When the ambulance was almost on top of us, Brenda pulled off into the grassy ditch. I followed her lead. The hot-red light pulsed on my face, my chest, as the vehicle passed. Brenda covered her ears, but I welcomed the noise. It pushed every thought out of my head.
The same officer who’d pulled up to Sheriff Nillson’s waved the ambulance over to the main trailhead. He was the only other person I could see. The rest of the officers and Dad must have been through the woods, near the quarry.
“They’re not going to let us back there,” Brenda said, her voice high. “No way. Not if there’s a crime scene. I’ve listened to your dad enough to know that.”
“We’ll see,” I said, leading my bike toward the trailhead. I didn’t have any inside information, no plans. It was just that I couldn’t stop moving. I’d slid into a space just outside of reality. A ghost, dazed and gliding through fog. Brenda called to me, shouting my name as I wove around the nearest police car. The dust the ambulance kicked up settled on my skin like ash.
“Hey!” the deputy said, noticing me. He was waiting for the ambulance driver to unload the stretcher. “You can’t come back here. Stay right where you are.”
His words froze me in my spot, and maybe that’s how it was when you were a ghost. Whoever could see you controlled you. I blinked, watching the stretcher disappear down the trail. I recorded Brenda’s grip on my arm as pressure, heard her voice come from very far away.
She has to be alive. Whoever it is has to be alive, or why would they need an ambulance?
I willed that to be true, staring at the trailhead. It didn’t matter anymore if it was Maureen or Elizabeth McCain. I wanted whichever girl they came out with to be alive so bad it felt like I’d die, too, if she wasn’t.
Please bring a living girl out of there.
The rumble of voices signaled people were returning down the path, but slowly. Much slower than the ambulance driver and his partner had rushed down. There was no longer a need to hurry, that’s what their footsteps said. My heart dropped as they emerged, carrying the stretcher, a white sheet covering the form, obscene wet patches soaking the cloth over the still body.
The man at the front stumbled. The corpse’s hand dropped over the side, pulling the sheet off her face, what was once beautiful gone gray and bloated.
CHAPTER 28
“Maureen!” Brenda screamed.
I stumbled forward and melted onto my knees, which put me on level with Maureen’s glassy eyes, open wide, staring at me, a ghost seeing a ghost. She looked as if she’d been pumped full of water, her cheeks stretched, eyes vacant, her mouth a cold black circle that I expected worms to spill out of.
Brenda was gasping like she couldn’t remember how to breathe, but still I couldn’t make a noise.
Maureen, what did they do to you?
But she didn’t answer, her eyes so cold.
Then the sheet was yanked back into place, the blue-gray hand tucked in, and her corpse slid into the back of the ambulance.
“Heather!”
Dad’s voice dropped like a rope in front of me. I grabbed for it, pulled myself up, didn’t fight it when he tugged me into an embrace. He got his arm around Brenda, too, and held us there, weeping into our hair. Brenda matched him, her gasping sobs rocking my body, until finally I found words.