*****
December 20, 2017
I wish I could tell you this was the end. That evil had been vanquished; a fifteen-year-old wrong, righted. I wish I was the fantasy protagonist, the hero at the end of her journey, riding off into my own well-deserved sunset. But I can’t. There’s an epilogue.
It’s December now. In a few days, it will be Christmas. My life has been wonderful, successful, serene and blissful. My parents love their new condo. Alicia did get together with Andy Koperski when he came to LA for work; now they’re a couple, and it’s getting serious. Alicia is moving to Portland to be with him in May. She’s already registered to take the bar exam in Oregon.
Yesterday, I was interrupted while wrapping presents by my father’s phone call. There was some mail for me at the Briar Rose house. Alicia had finally gone through the pile I’d ignored last summer and placed all the envelopes with my name on the couch and, if I cared at all, I should pick it up before the new year. On January second, the barriers will go up and soon after, the bulldozers will move in.
I didn’t really care about the mail - I assumed it was all junk. It was the thought of my childhood home being bulldozed that drew me back to Briar Rose Drive. Despite all that had happened there, I wanted to see the place one more time.
This morning, I drove into town. I met Travis at the mall food court. We hadn’t spoken since the day of my confrontation with Luke; he was staying with his parents for winter break, and I thought I owed him an explanation. After a ten-minute round of “oh my God”s, “are you okay”s, and “I can’t believe he’d do that”s, he broached the subject of our infamous Ouija board encounter.
“The little ghost girl we were trying to contact… Mathilde…”
“I have a confession to make,” I admitted. “I was definitely moving the planchard. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, but the whole Corona thing was all me. My false memories. I talked to my dad, and it was actually the Claremont contracts he’d been looking for.”
Travis shrugged. “Yeah, I thought so. But what I was going to say was, I found some more of her drawings stuffed under loose floorboards, of all places. I thought you might want them.”
He shoved a manila folder to me. I took it, thinking I’d give the pictures to Andy. We chatted for another hour before saying our goodbyes and going our separate ways, him to visit his boyfriend at work, me to Briar Rose Drive.
I nearly drove by my street. I allowed myself a lingering stare into Allister Park, into The Forest. I wondered whether the police had found the rest of Micah’s body - buried in pieces in shallow graves, confined to the tiny enclosed spaces that had horrified him during his life. As for The Forest itself, I no longer felt any fear. Just a tangled, uncultivated grove of oak trees.
My house crouched amongst the mansions, like a shriveled old widow on the bus. Colonel Lewis’s house had been torn down. I saw, through the erected chain-link fence, that the flattening was done but the property had yet to be cleaned up. The entire lot now matched the backyard - piles of splintered planks and eviscerated insulation cuddling up to toppled cinderblocks.
I was surprised at just how small everything looked. My mattress-and-boxspring was gone. Alicia’s bed was gone. The tin table we’d eaten at had been removed, as had the coffee machine and all other indications of my and Alicia’s occupation, except the ruined couch. I sunk down onto it and, before tackling the mail, opened the manila folder Travis had handed me.
Picture of Mrs. Guiterrez from down the street, walking her dog. Picture of two kids at school on the monkey bars. A woman with a baby at Ralph’s. Andy, playing video games. A child in a red hoodie standing outside my door, a white car parked in front of the house.
I think I stared at the picture for a whole minute before I realized what I was seeing. I looked at the date. Then the implications of it all ran me over like a train.
My heart racing, my limbs numb under the weight of flooding memories, I stood up. Calmly, slowly, I walked through the kitchen, down the hall, then back around to the living room. I was hallucinating again. The picture wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It would be different when I got back to the sofa. No. No, no, no.
Tommy and me, sitting on my swings. Me, texting Micah. He’d been sending me apology texts for a week straight. Before, I’d only responded with the occasional “fuck you” or “STOP TALKING TO ME,” but that Saturday I played nice. I told him to come over, that I wanted to talk. Kevin Gideon left him in front of my house - my little white house with big windows.
I collapsed back onto the couch. The picture was exactly the same. Micah, in his little red hoodie, standing outside my door. The date on the picture: the day he died.
Then I noticed something else: an envelope in the small pile of junk mail with no delivery or return address. Just my name. Hands shaking, I tore open the envelope and extracted three folded, handwritten pages of notebook paper. I unfolded the pages. In the top margin, there was an unflattering cartoon of a chubby, constipated-looking woman with a tight bun and pantsuit.
The night before Tommy killed himself, his mother found him at the kitchen table, frantically scribbling in one of his old notebooks. After, she could never find the message he wrote.
It was unmistakably Tommy’s handwriting. I read.
Ansley -
I desperately hope this letter finds its way to you. I don’t know your current address, but the people living in your old house said they’ll pass it along when your family is in town.
By the time you read this, I’ll be dead. I can’t live with what we did anymore.
I don’t know how much you remember, or what version of what happened you actually remember. Luke tried to Jedi mind-trick you after it all - he was scared you'd break down and tattle. He told you he saw some scary fantasy creature drag Micah into the trees and eat him. I guess you believed him. After, you started having full-blown nightmares and hallucinations.
I don’t know if his mind games actually worked, or if you just believed what you wanted to believe. I couldn’t forget it, and as much as I’ve tried to move on, the guilt has been eating me from the inside.
I’m not going to the cops. That’s your choice to make. But I think you have the right to know what really happened the day Micah died.
You and I were playing at your house. You were really mad at Micah because he tattled to your teacher that you’d copied Luke’s old biology paper; you were saying he just did it because he was jealous of Luke. I don’t know if you realized this, but Micah had a crush on you. But you liked Luke better. You were practically hypnotized when he was around.
As we talked, you got yourself worked up really good. You said you wanted to play a joke on Micah. I went with it, because I thought what he did was really asshole-y too. So you texted him and told him to come over to your house. You said you wanted to apologize and be friends again.
He’d been trying to apologize all week, so he jumped at the opportunity. He came over; the geeky dude who owned the video store, Kevin, gave him a ride. You were sweet to him. You led him into your room.
That little closet in your room - with the sliding doors - was empty. Your family had packed a lot of stuff, because you were moving to Miami as soon as the school year ended. The door was open. You shoved Micah into the closet, then I slammed the door shut and jammed it with that wooden rod you had.
Micah hated small, enclosed spaces. He was terrified. He started screaming and banging on the closet door.
The scratches on the back of the closet door.
BANG BANG! Help me, Ansley! Let me out! Ansley, please! I’m sorry!
We ignored him. We went to the living room and turned on the TV. After awhile, Micah stopped screaming. We heard him breathing really hard, but we didn’t think much of it then. And we weren’t as concerned as we should have been when he stopped making noise altogether.
Finally, about a half an hour later, we thought Micah had suffered enough and went to let him out. Except he didn’t come out. He fell out, fell onto me. He was so, co cold. Then he fell facedown on the ground. We rolled him over, and I’ll never forget his face. His skin was blue. His eyes bulged and just… rolled backwards. His skin felt like a dead hamster.
He’d had an asthma attack. The stress made him hyperventilate, and all the dust in that closet (I think you guys had termites) made his throat close up. Later we found his inhaler, wrapped up in his sweater, under your bed.
We were terrified. We didn’t know what to do. We killed our best friend. And we were scared to call the cops, because we thought we’d go to jail forever.
You must have called Luke instead. Because he was over, and he was screaming and yelling at you, and you were crying and crying, and I guess he felt bad for you because he said he’d help us hide the body.
Thinking back, it was a project for Luke. He was always so obsessed with true crime, and he wanted to see if we could trick the cops and get away with murder.
He left, and came back with his dad’s old hunting knife. He dragged Micah’s body into the bathtub and cut off his arm. I’m still haunted by the mental image of the knife cutting through tendons, blood pouring out, the nasty crack when Luke snapped a bone.
Blood in my bathtub, red staining porcelain, tricking down the drain.
We buried the body. Then, Luke wrapped the detached arm in bubble wrap and stuffed it in his backpack. We walked to Allister Park. We played hide and seek. Except, instead of hiding, Luke was burying Micah’s arm.
He said it was to throw the cops off our scent. They’d search the park. They’d find Micah’s arm. They’d suspect that the rest of him was buried in the park, and they wouldn’t go looking around the neighborhood for the body.
A boy, digging. Something - some sort of heap, a pile of clothes, blue and white and red.
You were hysterical. I don’t know how you held it together for your parents, but you did. You found the sweater and inhaler a few days later. By that time, everyone was already suspicious of Kevin Gideon. So Luke and I took it all, climbed through an air vent we’d found, and stashed the evidence above the ceiling tiles at Atomic Video.
I can’t do it anymore, Ansley. The selfless part of me is guilty for what we did, and the selfish part is terrified that, any day now, they’ll find Micah’s body - the rest of Micah’s body - and it will all come crashing down.
Despite all of this, know I still treasure the memories of our childhood, and I’ve never regretted, for a second, knowing any of you. Do what you want with this information. But if you do go to the authorities, please, as a last favor to me, keep Luke out of it. He was only trying to help us.
I’m sorry, Ansley. I’m sorry for everything.
- Tommy
*****
I read the letter over and over. I remembered. I remembered it all. I would have screamed. I would have cried. God, I wish I could have cried. But neither tears nor wails would come. Just cold, hard pressure; boiling, nerve-numbing resignation; all the lies I’d told myself splitting open and dripping acid on my skin.
And the body. Tommy hadn’t revealed where we’d hidden Micah’s body. But I knew. It was in Mathilde’s rhymes, in her clues, hard-wired into my dreams like the blood in the bathtub and the slamming on my closet door. Mathilde had been right. I already knew.
Can’t make it through the front so you’ll have to climb, nobody will find what you hid in the slime.
The one stanza I hadn’t figured out - what we hid in the slime. We’d hidden Micah’s body in the slime. Tommy and Luke had climbed to hide the sweater. When I’d snuck into what was formerly Atomic Videos, I’d found powdered concrete.
Empty eyes and gum-less teeth, the weapon waits for you in a room beneath.
The room beneath. The bunker. Which my dad had filled in with concrete.
Twin skeletons on a warm spring day.
Colonel Lewis’s house had been the twin of mine. And, since we had an underground bunker, it only made sense that he had one as well.
Among the festering ruins, children laugh and play.
He didn’t fill his in with concrete. He filled it with dirt and grass and rotting vegetables, turned it into a compost heap.
My first clue - the shovel. I’d held that shovel before. My dreams. The stench of rotting vegetable waste. I’d been knee-deep in it, wading in the slimy carrot heads and moldy lettuce, frantically digging a giant hole. The compost was soft. Easy to cut through. The stench would cover the smell of Micah’s rotting body.
I left the letter. I ran through the back door, into the gathering dusk. I ran to the chain-link fence. I leaned on it, staring into the junkyard that had once been my playground. The cinderblocks, strewn around. The chassis were gone. The shed had, once and for all, been flattened. I breathed in. Breathed in the acidy, rotten stench.
I dug his grave. The boys dragged the body through the hole in the fence. The thick hedges that lined my backyard hid us from the view of the neighbors. We buried him deep. We buried Luke’s blood-stained clothes. We smashed Tommy’s cell phone, and buried that too. (“If they look at phone records,” Luke had told me, “they’ll see you texted him, but not what you texted.”)
Then Luke had an idea. He climbed up a pile of cinderblocks. He started kicking, thrashing, throwing blocks until the pile collapsed over the compost heap and its new secret, covering our tracks.
Footsteps. We froze. Colonel Lewis, with his dark glasses and walking stick, charged out his back door. If he hadn't been half-blind, he would have seen me, holding a shovel, my face swollen with tears. He would have seen Tommy shaking, Luke’s shifting glance. As it was, all he saw was the three of us, playing too rough in his backyard. He yelled that we needed to be careful, lest we’d break bones. Then he shuffled back into the house.
I stood, staring at the weatherbeaten cinderblocks that marked my best friend’s grave. And, finally, the tears came.
I’m typing this from the couch in my old living room. It’s fitting, I guess, that I’m starting a new chapter of my life in the place where my life began. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all this information yet.
I could go to the authorities. I could tell them the truth, lead them to Micah’s body, plead with them. I wouldn’t do much jail time, I don’t think; I was a child at the time of my crime, and plenty of people could testify to my mental state. I’d face my sins, do my penance. See the pain and disappointment in my parents’ eyes. Make Alicia cry. Watch my career, and my prospects, and my future disappear in a puff of smoke.
I could delete this entire account, hop in my car, and drive south until I see the US border in my rearview. I got really good at Spanish in Miami. I could teach English. My parents will be pained and disappointed, and my sister will still cry, but at least I won’t have to see it.
I could stay here and wait it out. Maybe, in the new year, the construction workers will find Micah’s body. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll never connect it to me. Maybe I’m stressing out too much, and I’m already in the clear.
For all the mistakes he made, Luke Andersen was right about one thing. I didn't repress my memories, I created false ones. I created my own world. Luke started it, but I was his willing victim - I made monsters, I rewrote history, so I wouldn’t have to face my guilt. Maybe I could do it again. I could start from scratch, stop taking my pills, slide back into the delusional dreamscape where I’d so willingly played.
But then I think about all the people I screwed over. All the people who were hurt because of what I did, and everyone to whom I owe an explanation. Tiffany Gideon. Poor Kevin Gideon - I still imagine his rotting, blood-stained face, and it brings tears to my eyes. Naomi Wall. Carol Liu. Andy Koperski. Luke’s family. They deserve the truth.
If you're reading this, know that for all that happened, for all I did, I cherish every memory of my childhood. I’ll never regret knowing Micah, or Luke, or Tommy. And when I’m sad or angry or upset, I’ll go back to the world we created, where we fought monsters and mixed potions and saved the neighborhood every night before bedtime. I think about our games of hide and seek in the park, our covert missions into Colonel Lewis’s yard, cheering as Micah effortlessly worked the joystick in the Atomic Videos arcade, and I smile.
My childhood wasn’t perfect. Far from it. But it was mine. And the girl I was then - the schizophrenic demon-fighter defeating the monsters in my imagination with my three best friends - that was the real me, more than I’ve been since I left the little house on Briar Rose Drive.
*****
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