Girl in Snow Read online

  Alone with the body now, Russ lifts his radio to his lips and speaks. The microphone is off. You there? Russ mumbles to the plastic, keeping his gaze on the girl’s hair, all blood and straw. Can you hear me? Russ presses the radio to his chapped lips but he can think of nothing else to say. Ivan smiles, cheshire and mischievous, a hulking mass of testosterone, the amber-glowing cigarette dangling like a dare.

  Cameron

  “You’re the dead girl’s stalker, aren’t you?”

  The girl in the scratchy armchair outside Principal Barnes’s office was speaking to Cameron.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re the freshman they’re all talking about. The kid who stalked the dead girl. Right?”

  Her head rested against the wall behind her chair, bored and effortless. Cameron had noticed her before. She lived in the neighborhood and she was always alone. Her jeans had chains hanging from the pockets. Her eyes were ringed in black; raven, greasy hair swooped over one eye, and she wore a T-shirt that sported the name of a band Cameron didn’t know. The T-shirt was cut sloppily above her midriff, and two inches of pale stomach rolled over her waistband even though it was winter and she was probably cold. A spattering of acne spread across her chin and forehead.

  The girl raised one slanted eyebrow at Cameron. He wanted to raise one back, but every time he tried, the other went up automatically, and he didn’t want to look stupid.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I was just wondering. I don’t care either way.”

  “Oh,” Cameron said.

  “The dead girl and I babysat the same kid.”

  “Lucinda.”

  “Whatever. It’s illegal, what they’re doing. They can’t interview minors without the consent and presence of a parent. They think because there are no officers in the room they can frame it as grief counseling, but that’s bullshit, if you ask me. They still had police officers walk us down the hall. Scare tactics, I think.”

  She nodded, satisfied with her own rebellion. Her eyes were perfectly round. Cameron loved Lucinda’s slanting eyes, and these were their opposite: marbles, circular and glassy.

  “I’m Jade,” she said. “Like the rock. I’m a junior.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  “I got off easy.” She shrugged. “My sister’s name is Amethyst. And you’re Cameron Whitley. Freshman. You live down the block from Lucinda. They’re all very worried about your mental health, because your dad is the police officer who—”

  “Please,” Cameron said. “Don’t.”

  “Didn’t that happen, like, a long time ago?”

  Cameron wished he were better at carrying on a conversation. He generally disliked talking to people because he never knew what to say. Even with the simplest questions, he was overwhelmed by the number of potential answers—which would sound best, or which was appropriate, or which would make the other person feel least awkward.

  He could ask Jade why she dressed like that. He could ask what she thought about first thing in the morning—or why her parents had named her Jade, because it was unique and he liked it and he wanted interesting names for his kids someday, too. He could ask Jade what her favorite school subject was, but that seemed dumb and cliché. He could ask if she’d ever been in love, but he had enough sense to know that was too personal.

  “Did that hurt?” Cameron finally said, because Jade was glaring at him, harsh, expectant. He pointed to the thin silver ring that wound around her lower lip.

  “Yeah, it hurt a little.”

  “Oh.”

  “Want to see my tattoo?”

  “Sure.”

  Jade held out her left wrist. The outline of a dragon had been etched in black, its wings unfurled across white skin. The ink rippled and danced where it spread over blue veins.

  “Is it real?” Cameron asked.

  “Usually, I would say yes. I tell most people it is. But you keep looking at me with that intense face, so, no, it’s not real. I draw it on every morning.”

  Cameron couldn’t figure out if this was the nicest or meanest thing someone had ever said to him.

  “So,” she said. “Did you actually stalk the dead girl?”

  “Lucinda.”

  “Oh, I super don’t care.”

  Cameron hated the word “stalk.” He had other words for his relationship with Lucinda, but they were words no one else would understand. Words like vibrant, frantic, twinkling, aching—

  The door to Principal Barnes’s office opened and a woman with hair pinned tight against her head stepped out.

  “Jade?” she said. “We’re ready for you.”

  Jade rolled her eyes at Cameron like they were sharing some joke. As she stood up, Cameron caught a whiff of grape shampoo, and it occurred to him that he should have rolled his eyes in response, but Jade had already started to walk away. He didn’t expect her to look back.

  Cameron had started playing Statue Nights when he was twelve years old. The summer after sixth grade, he realized he could pop out the screen in his bedroom window. The jump to the planter below was doable, if he bent his knees at the right moment.

  The game of Statue Nights began with the Hansens, next door. Cameron would stand on the curb outside their house for hours, watching them eat microwaved food and argue. Mrs. Hansen would put her hair in curlers like a woman in a 1950s sitcom, and Mr. Hansen would walk around in his boxers, skin sagging and drooping in a way Michelangelo would have appreciated. You could see Mr. Hansen’s bones. They left all the lights on; it was impossible to avoid looking. The human eye was naturally attracted to light—a fact Cameron had read about the retina in The Map of Human Anatomy.

  That first summer, Cameron made his way slowly down Pine Ridge Drive. If he stood perfectly still, he wouldn’t be seen. Cameron documented the tiny things: Mrs. Hansen kept Mr. Hansen on a strict diet, but he stored chocolate bars in the Crock-Pot next to the refrigerator.

  Next door to the Hansens, Cameron once watched the Thorntons have sex on their kitchen table after the baby fell asleep. It looked violent and out of control at first, like fighting dogs thrashing around, then close and rhythmic—a rocking boat. After, Mr. Thornton hovered on top of his wife, kissed her forehead slow. Some nights the wife stayed up late, bouncing their crying baby around the living room while her husband took the limping little dog for ten o’clock walks, ushering Cameron home with his stranger presence on the street.

  As he waited to be questioned, Cameron pulled his favorite kneaded eraser from his pocket and molded it into different shapes. Mr. O had given it to him for when he needed to Untangle, which was often. He tried to mold it into a perfect square against the surface of his thigh.

  Cameron had started watching Lucinda around the same time Mr. O’s class started a unit on figure drawing. He started seeing mountains in people’s cheekbones and spider legs in people’s eyelashes and translating these into different shades of black, white, and gray. He loved the way Lucinda’s face curled and rolled.

  When Cameron watched Lucinda, he played this game of Statue Nights. He liked to imagine that he was one of Michelangelo’s figures, frozen on paper, etched in one position for all of eternity. But at some point he’d hear his own heartbeat or an inevitable exhale. One of these certainties would break the silence, and he’d be forced to recognize that no matter how still he stood, he did, in fact, exist.

  He never knew how much time passed, but the whole point of Statue Nights was that it didn’t matter.

  On February 11, 2004, almost exactly a year ago, Lucinda’s father opened the sliding back door. I know you’re there, his voice boomed across the empty lawn. I know you don’t mean harm. But you need to leave. If you come back, I will call the police. Cameron had run home, to the other end of Pine Ridge Drive, and huddled underneath his covers with Dad’s tattered copy of The Map of Human Anatomy. He memorized the functions of the human kidney, because he imagined that somewhere near the kidney was where the body stored that hollowed feeling: guilt.

&
nbsp; He hoped the police wouldn’t ask about that night in Lucinda’s yard. Cameron was awful at lying, and he couldn’t tell them the truth—that he found people fascinating when they thought no one was watching. He couldn’t tell them about the sincerity of life through windows—that he hated himself for it, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.

  There was this feeling Broomsville gave you, with all its short, pastel buildings and open spaces. It was voted number five on CNN’s Top Ten Friendliest Places to Raise a Family, and no one was surprised. Broomsville was an overgrown cul-de-sac of square lawns, browned from the Colorado droughts. It was not the sort of place for white picket fences, but Broomsville had good public schools, with after-school programs you could join if you didn’t have money. The average family lived in a beige house just like Cameron’s, with two floors and three bedrooms and windows that faced the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. People drove mountain cars, pickup trucks or Outbacks or Trailblazers, with bumper stickers that yelled, “BUSH CHENEY ’04!”

  And above, the mountains. Always watching.

  Colorado air was so crisp, it stung your nostrils. Once, Mom’s friend from college visited from Florida, and on the first day she passed out from altitude sickness. They called an ambulance and everything. The EMTs stuck plastic tubes in her nose to help her breathe. They took off her shirt and her bra to better reach her lungs, and her naked breasts flopped to the sides on the living-room floor. Cameron tried not to stare.

  After a day or two she was fine, and they went on short hikes in the foothills—the small, rolling mountains that formed the base of the Rockies. Colorado had this specific smell in summer, like pine needles recovering from a miserable winter and hot, red dirt sliding down steep mountainsides.

  You could see Pine Ridge Point from the Tree, and that was partially why Cameron had picked that specific aspen. You could lean against the smooth white bark and look up at the hill that enclosed Pine Ridge Point, where Dad first took him when he was six years old.

  The sun was setting. There were plenty of natural phenomena that went unrecognized (snowflakes kissing a windowsill, fingernails dug into the skin of a tangerine), but Cameron could see why people made such a big deal of sunsets. The sunset at Pine Ridge Point always made Cameron feel so disastrously human, caged inside his own susceptible self.

  Pine Ridge Point was a cliff suspended over a reservoir at a perfect ninety-degree angle. The reservoir had no waves. It waited, still and complacent, a pool of blood spreading away from a wound.

  On the other side of the cliff—the side that didn’t face the water—sat the town of Broomsville, all quaint boxy houses and lawns with clicking sprinklers, starkly different from the chaos of the Rockies. You could see Cameron’s street, a minuscule Pine Ridge Drive, and everything else converging to this plateau. From the horizon of Pine Ridge Point, Broomsville looked like a cardboard town filled with paper people. Cameron’s hands could rearrange it however he pleased.

  He often daydreamed about bringing Lucinda to Pine Ridge Point.

  Look, he’d say. Don’t you see how weightless we are?

  “Hello, Cameron.”

  The social worker’s hair was slicked back into a wet bun. Her eyes were tunnels. Her smile was hard.

  “Hi.”

  “My name is Janine. Do you remember me?” She sat with a notebook in her lap, legs crossed, jiggling one of her clogs.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is a voluntary school-conducted interview, okay? We’re just checking in with our kids. You’re free to leave at any time. You’re free to abstain from answering anything that makes you uncomfortable. Do you understand and consent to continue?”

  Once, when Cameron was flipping through a cookbook in the kitchen, he found a poem tucked inside. Lord Byron. Mom did this sometimes—put fragments of poems in unexpected places. Cameron took the Byron poem to his bedroom and taped it to the inside of his closet door. Mom had transcribed it onto notebook paper in her scratchy handwriting, with a pen that exploded in bursts of ink.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Cameron, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Lucinda Hayes?”

  (She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;)

  “Cameron?”

  (And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes)

  “That’s all right. Let’s start with an easier question,” Janine said. “Where were you last night, February fifteenth?”

  “At home,” Cameron said.

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “My mom was there.”

  In truth, Cameron couldn’t remember February fifteenth. Last night. At home; my mom was there seemed like a simple and believable answer. He had somehow lost this night—it had slipped casually into all the Statue Nights in his Collection. It scared him to lose time like this, though he was no stranger to the concept. If Cameron could get every moment of his life tattooed on his body, he would, just to prove they had all happened.

  “Cameron.” Janine paused, so stern in her turtleneck. He wished she would stop saying his name like that. She leaned across Principal Barnes’s desk, breathing coffee too close to Cameron’s face. “How would you describe your relationship with Lucinda Hayes?”

  (One shade the more, one ray the less,

  had half impaired the nameless grace)

  Cameron often worried the beating of his heart would overpower the small space it occupied. Mom used to say his heart was too big for his chest—she meant it as a compliment, but Cameron started to imagine his heart swelled so big it clogged up his airways. He could feel it now, growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking. He was sure this would kill him one day.

  “Cameron?”

  He wanted to tell them how Lucinda looked in the morning. How the sun hit her face, how sleep congealed in the inner corners of her eyes, how long blond hair stuck, matted, to the back of her head. Her tan legs in their plaid cotton pajama pants as they slid out from beneath the purple comforter. He wanted to tell them how the pillow left crease marks on the side of her face, rivers on a map of an empty state.

  (Which waves in every raven tress,

  Or softly lightens o’er her face;)

  “He’s not responsive,” Janine said to Principal Barnes. “We’re going to need to talk to a parent. We can bring him in for voluntary questioning if they’ll agree to it.”

  It dawned on Cameron, in an unexpected moment of devastation, why they had pulled him out of class and why they were asking these questions: they thought he had killed Lucinda Hayes.

  It all happened very fast.

  Cameron was standing up, knocking over the plastic chair with the backs of his knees; he was opening the door; he could have been crying, he wasn’t sure, but his cheeks were hot, his skin was burning; he was Tangled, he was so Tangled.

  A manila folder sat on the receptionist’s desk outside Principal Barnes’s office. Police officers stood in a semicircle a few feet away, talking in gruff voices. Cameron knew what the folder contained—Dad had been a police officer, after all. Cameron had seen plenty of folders just like this one. Dad used to pore over them in the den, drinking whiskey from a coffee mug, his back hunched, blinking fast with reddened eyes.

  Lucinda Hayes was in the folder.

  “No,” Principal Barnes said from directly behind Cameron. “Don’t—”

  She was sprawled in terrible angles on the carousel at the elementary-school playground. Someone had hurt her, someone had really hurt her, because her head was turned to the side and her profile against the snowy red metal was mangled, twisted. One arm was tucked beneath her chest and the other was thrown over the edge of the carousel. She wore her favorite skirt, the purple one from school-picture day. Sparkly tights. And the blood—it dripped down from one side of her skull, smearing pulpy into clean snow.

  This was not Lucinda—instead, some smashed and violated version of her, some sick thi
ng he didn’t recognize, a photo from his own childhood he couldn’t remember taking.

  Everything throbbed. Cameron was collapsing; he was converging. He did not dare to look away, though he was sure he would see nothing else for a long, long time. He could feel his heart shrinking and growing, shrinking and growing. This version of Lucinda was not aching or twinkling—he didn’t understand how someone had taken this from her.

  (Where thoughts serenely sweet express,

  How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.)

  One night, almost a year ago, Lucinda stood in front of her full-length mirror.

  She wore only a bra and blue jeans. The bra was white, with a small pink bow sewn between triangle cups. Lucinda shifted her weight from her right hip to her left and back again. She tightened her bra straps as far as they would go, pushing her breasts together with her palms so they’d look fuller. It didn’t make any difference. Cameron loved her back, naked to the window—her shoulder blades, flat and smooth. Those lungs. Humans have thirty-three vertebrae, but he counted only six on Lucinda, a range of rolling foothills, exposed and fleeting.

  These were Cameron’s favorite memories, and he stored them in a mental folder, special for thinking about late at night. His Collection of Statue Nights—on the lawn, looking in, stunned by the pure complexity of her form.

  Lucinda had a birthmark on her right hipbone. It was the shape of a swan and the color of a red pepper gone bad left on the counter too long.

  Jade

  My favorite song is called “Death by Escalator.” It’s about a girl who falls on an escalator and hits her head on the bottom stair—her head smashes against ridged metal with every new stair that pops up.

  If I sit at the right angle beneath the deformed tree in the Jefferson High courtyard, no one can see me. Today, the snow melts halfheartedly in patches, so I sit on a plastic lunch tray. Danny Hartfeld is the only other person outside. He reads The Hobbit with gloved hands. Danny Hartfeld and I end up in the same places sometimes, but he hates me, and that’s fine.