Chapter 22

“Nothing makes me feel more like an adult than consuming an entire pint of ice cream in ten minutes. God I feel sexy.” Cathy stretched against the floor; her limbs sprawled out as her bare toes wiggled. She groaned.

Poe and I laid beside her on the floor of his room, having eaten two large pizzas between the two of us. I wanted to lobby for a sleepover tonight, since we’d made it to another Friday. I could have lied to my parents about where I was, saying Cathy and I would be at her house. The real trouble would have been if Poe’s parents minded.

“Has the douche spoken to you since your spat?” Cathy asked, reaching for a bag of chips beside her. “Also, I’m crazy pissed I missed it. We’ll have to do it again so I can play.”

Poe answered her, since I wanted nothing to do with anything Peter related. “As far as I know, he’s said nothing. I’m surprised that he didn’t try and corner Clover when we weren’t around.”

“That hardly happens,” I reminded him. “Since you all have me on Tammy watch.”

Poe patted the side of my leg, probably too lazy to do anything else. “It’s for your own good. Also, for the good of the school, because if anyone hurt you again, I would have to become a murderer. I want to at least make it to my twenties before that happens.”

“You sure?” Cathy asked. “You could be like that Bonnie and Clyde couple from Texas. Sounds cool.”

I shot her a look. “Tell me how it’s cool that two kids our age helped murder a bunch of people at a charity event.”

“I shall,” Cathy said, sitting up as she took the challenge. “They said that the girl killed her parents, so I assumed they had it coming. And I heard the boy got thrashed by his asshole of a father. Clearly those two are doing the best they can.”

Poe sighed. “Only you can take murderers and make them sound like heroes.”

“Of course they’re heroes! They got shit done. You think that people flip like that for no reason? They don’t. I’m on the side of those crazy bastards, and I hope they get the very best in life.”

I offered no comment.

Poe and I restarted our video game, while Cathy hurt herself with more food. She moved over to the bed for it and judged my and Poe’s every choice in Mario Party.

“When are your parents getting back?” I asked Poe.

“Um…” he said, staring at the TV as his character fell off a platform. “Probably another couple of hours. Why? You wanna do it on their bed? I’m not into that, but I’m down for the floor or something.”

I play-shoved him, then told him of my sleepover wishes. I mostly didn’t want to be alone for any amount of time. The nights seemed to be getting longer, and I couldn’t sleep through them.

“Am I invited?” Cathy asked with a gleeful grin.

“Obviously,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

“Maybe you and Poe wanna get all snuggled. I don’t fuckin’ know what you do when I’m not around. I mean, other than grinding.”

My cheeks turned red. “Shut up.”

“Nah.”

Poe looked over his shoulder, at the bed we sat in front of. “Is it going to be weird, us all sleeping in a bed together? I can sleep on the floor.”

“No,” I said, answering both sentences. “We can share. I think it’ll be fine.”

Cathy sighed, hanging her head. “Imagine the fanfic… You can be the meat in our platonic little sandwich, Clover. I would rather not accidentally get all up and close to Poe if he gets all happy in the morning.”

I didn’t fight her. One, because I knew that Poe did get all ‘happy’ after a nap. And two, the thought of her feeling it gave me the irrational urge to murder her, and it would have been a shame to lose a friend like that.

“So it’s settled,” Poe said. “I think my parents would be fine with it. Since it’s the both of you. They wouldn’t think I had enough game to bag two girls.”

I frowned. “Aww. Wanna prove them wrong?”

“Yeah,” Cathy said. “I’ll screw you to prove a point. I can close my eyes and pretend it’s a girl inside of me…” Her face got a little sad. “I didn’t like how that sounded out loud.”

“No one did,” Poe said. “And might I say that I’m offended you’d have to pretend I’m a girl. You like dudes.”

“Barely,” our friend said, literally rolling off of the bed. “Come. I want ice cream, and I wanna pick up my jim jams. No need to wear your clothes to sleep.” When the two of us got up, she smirked. “I bet Poe just loooves it when you wear his clothes.”

“I deny nothing,” Poe remarked.

We walked together downstairs, no one commenting when Poe handed me his sweater before we got out into the chilly dusk. Cathy waggled her eyebrows at me though, and I stuck my tongue out at her.

Poe grabbed me by the arm out of nowhere, and did the same for Cathy, pulling us back roughly. It almost hurt, and he didn’t let go. Before I could question it, I saw where his gaze landed, and mine froze on the same spot.

Maybe fifty feet away, Tammy leaned against a brick wall that separated the two streets we stood on. She didn’t move when she saw us find her, and I couldn’t read her eerily blank face. She looked like a mannequin, so stiff and empty. I saw nothing in her eyes that could have even suggested Tammy saw anything. If she ended up being dead, and pinned against the bricks, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

But Cathy’s scream did.

She ripped herself away from Poe before I knew what happened. Then I saw her running to her car, broken glass of her door window on the ground beside it. My eyes went there first, but to the rearview mirror second.

It looked small, and fluffy, and white, and bloody. The thing hung from her mirror, and my heart might have stopped beating when Poe and I started hurrying after Cathy as she screamed out Cujo’s name. She didn’t heed the glass around her car, trying to dive in after the white and red lump. Poe got to her before I did and pulled her away from the car. She fought, hitting him in the arm.

“Get her,” Poe told me, holding Cathy back.

I did my best to keep her, and Poe did the dirty work of getting into the car. Cathy stopped, and hid her face against my shoulder at the same time I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the mangled dog, and I didn’t want to hear the scream when Cathy knew for sure what this had been.

Poe sighed, but I didn’t look. “It’s not Cujo,” he said, letting all the pressure out of our heads.

Cathy turned to him, and we looked at the same time. She still clung to me, and I saw Poe cradling the corpse of an innocent rabbit. At a closer look, it became more obvious than before. His bent ears and shredded body made me feel cold, but he wasn’t Cujo. Blood stuck to his fur, coming from the many…many wounds on his body. The holes looked about the width of a pencil.

“Oh my god,” came out of my mouth.

Cathy’s head whipped around, fury in her eyes. “Where’s that little bitch? I’m about to take a life here.”

I raised the glass on the ground, making Poe step back. “I got about two hundred little bullets here that I can direct anywhere you please.”

“Good,” Cathy growled.

But neither of us saw Tammy where she had been standing. I searched, and the girl had vanished.

“TAMARA!” Cathy screamed out at the sky.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I saw Poe behind me. “Think for a second and breathe.” He set the bunny down on the hood of the car and stared for a moment at the blood on his shirt.

I couldn’t kill Tammy, and it seemed obvious now. Instead of cutting Tammy to pieces, I put the window back together while Cathy paced, and attempted to pull herself together.

“What kind of a psycho bitch…” she said. “What the hell is her problem? This isn’t pictures, or threats. She killed an animal and put it in my car.”

“An animal we have to take care of,” Poe said. “Follow me. I’m not throwing it in the trash.”

We all went to his backyard, and Poe got a shovel from his shed. Poe started digging a hole while Cathy seethed.

“This ends here,” she said. “We’re going to the fucking cops and telling them everything. And then I might go kill Tammy anyway, and then cuddle Cujo for like ten years.”

I put my hand on Cathy’s back, hoping to comfort her. “Okay, we can talk to the police. After that, we’ll go to your house, get Cujo, and come back here. Does that sound good to you?”

She breathed, and then nodded. “Fine.”

Poe finished the grave and laid the bunny inside. I wanted to thank him for being the one to do all this, since it couldn’t have been pleasant for him either. Instead, I stared at the bloody mess, realizing with perfect clarity, that I was the reason this innocent animal died.

“We should say something,” Cathy insisted. “Give him a proper burial.”

Poe looked frantic for a moment, stalling with, “Umm. He was a good bunny… A brave bunny…” He bumped me. “Help please.”

I had trouble too, but I made the effort. “I’m sorry, little bunny. I’m sorry that a psycho bitch killed you, and I’m sorry that she did it because of me. I will avenge you.”

Poe pulled me to his side, and rubbed my arm while Cathy stepped to the grave. She stared at it, angry and ready to murder. “I’m sorry too, Mr. Bunny. I’m sorry I didn’t scare the hell out of Tammy before she got to you. And I’m sorry that Clover is crazy and thinks this is her fault.”

Before I could correct her, Cathy glared over at me, daring me to fight it. I didn’t.

Once Mr. Bunny was laid to rest, we took Cathy’s car, and headed down to the police station. It made me twitchy just to be there, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. My anxiety liked to screw me over like that, convincing me the police would magically discover I’d broken a law, and lock me up. Never mind that I didn’t break a law or look like I might have. I didn’t look like I could have done so much as swatted a fly away.

We walked in together, and it took no time for an officer to see my bloody friend and approach us. His body language came across as cautious but concerned. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s not my blood,” Poe said, half a second before realizing he shouldn’t.

The officer—Fallow, by the name on his uniform—blinked. “Are you here for a confession?”

Cathy cut in, and Poe and I didn’t get a chance to say anything. “A girl from our school busted the window in my car, and put a murdered animal inside, trying to make me think it was my dog.”

The man blanked for a second, and then told us to follow him. The three of us went into another room, with officers moving around, and some talking on phones at their desk. We sat at his, after he got chairs to put across it.

“Did you see this happen?” he asked. “Tell me everything.”

Cathy still led the conversation, explaining how Tammy had a problem with me, starting back to the car thing. She laid out all the facts as we believed them, deciding that we didn’t have to hide anything from the officer. I guess we didn’t, since none of us did anything wrong. My smashing the car had been an accident, and everything else, had been Tammy.

The man wrote it all down on a yellow pad of paper, but I couldn’t see exactly what the notes said. He filled a page, so I assumed he got all of it. He sighed, and looked up at us, his eyes catching Poe’s bloody shirt.

“Do you have the dead rabbit?”

Cathy narrowed her eyes. “We didn’t stick it in a freezer to keep him fresh. It got buried.”

“Okay. Did you drive here in the car that was broken into? We’ll have to take a look at it.”

My eyes closed as I cursed to myself. “I’m a glass worker,” I said. “I fixed the window before we got here.”

Officer Fallow sighed. “The only physical evidence you had is buried, and repaired? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Cathy wasn’t about to let this go, and I didn’t blame her. If someone tried to scare me like Tammy had, then I would have destroyed her like she wanted to do with me. “I feel like the blood on my buddy over here is evidence. Not to mention that we saw her when I found the rabbit. And she had someone punch my other friend in the face. See all the bruises.” She pointed to me. “Does that count for nothing?”

The man looked displeased. “Unfortunately, it makes my job a little harder. All I have is what the three of you said to me.”

“And that’s not enough?” I asked. “Because that sounds like bullshit to me.”

He held his hands up, stopping me. “I’m going to try and do everything I can here, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up. You can file harassment charges if you want to.”

“What will that do?”

Cathy cut in, leaning toward the officer. “She goes to school with us. That won’t do anything helpful. It’ll piss her off more. Clover’s been ignoring her since she made the first threat and look what happened.”

“You assume it’s this girl, but it could be any number of people. It’s my job to find out who that is and take care of it. So if you don’t mind, I would like to try and do my job.”

I knew then, sitting there and staring at the tired looking man. Nothing would come of this meeting. The only one harmed here was that rabbit, so why would the man have thought this urgent? A few scared kids did not an emergency make, and an almost broken nose didn’t seem to matter either. We were on our own. Three against one. I should have felt better about the odds.

“I want to hold my dog,” Cathy grumbled. “We’re wasting our time here. Thank you so much, officer, for showing that you care. When a dead person pops up out of nowhere, I hope you don’t feel guilty. We won’t, since we’ll probably be the ones dead.”

It shouldn’t have shocked me that we weren’t getting help. We didn’t have any solid proof, and everyone liked to remind us of that. Why wasn’t anyone willing to believe us? Even my parents, but I guess they knew better. I’d been unstable, and they would have thought everything out of my mouth had to be taken with a grain of salt. They didn’t want to help me, and that hurt, despite their reasons. What was I supposed to think of myself, that my own parents didn’t care enough about me to even make a call to the school? They knew someone hurt me, and they did nothing. Nothing at all. They didn’t even follow me to my room when I stormed off.

The three of us stood up, and the cop remained in his seat. “I’m going to look into this,” he promised. “But I think you all need to calm down and take a little breather. You got spooked, and these are some pretty harsh charges you have for a girl who might not even have done anything.”

Ugh, I wanted to get far away from there. I tugged my friends along, only nodding at the officer. We didn’t even sign anything, because it felt like an utter waste. They had dead people to give justice to, and criminals to find. What did a crazy teenager matter?

“I need to go get Cujo. I don’t trust my house, or Tammy not to break her crazy ass in and make trouble. Can we still have our sleepover?” Cathy asked, frowning as we walked to the car.

“Of course,” Poe responded. “I wouldn’t miss out on my chance to get cuddled by two people.”

“What makes you think I cuddle?”

“Doesn’t matter. Clover does.”

Cathy smirked at me. “Oh, I see. You got him hooked with all your weird friend naps. Alas, I knew this was how it would end.”

I felt only marginally better as we got back in the car and headed off to go fetch a dog. We pretended that we didn’t have a storm coming or plans to make that would keep us protected. It felt like there wasn’t anything to be done, so we let ourselves have a mental break. God knew I needed it. There wasn’t much of my mind left.