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I didn’t peg Charlie for a details gal. I was a little shocked she’d ask, which was why it took me a minute to say, “It was.”
“Good,” she muttered. “At least you didn’t skin him like some animal.” That last part referenced some of my most recent kills, although not all of them were mine. Some of them belonged to my cousin; I’d just dressed the body up after getting inspired by that Montgomery girl’s artwork.
Besides, skinning someone took time, and you had to have privacy to do it. When I’d killed Zak, I was pressed for time. It was a semi-public place, so a neck snap was the easiest thing to do. The quickest.
Charlie tried to get back to work, which left me feeling some kind of way.
All this felt too easy. She hadn’t reacted like I thought she would when she found out about Zak—not that I’d really thought about the consequences of that particular murder before doing it. I wanted to believe everything would get quiet now, that she wouldn’t get any more calls from her mysterious stalker because he was dead, his neck snapped and forever bent at an unnatural angle.
But what if he wasn’t?
What if Zak wasn’t her stalker after all, and I’d been wrong?
Chapter Six – Charlie
Classes resumed Wednesday, and the week passed in a blur. Not the fun kind of blur, where you were having the time of your life and hours felt like minutes. No, more like a foggy haze, at least for me. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, but it didn’t feel real.
Zak was dead, and Brett had killed him.
For me.
Yeah, I couldn’t forget that last part. Brett had killed Zakfor me. I didn’t think he was lying when he’d told me. No, he was a freaking serial killer, so his mind clearly worked differently than the average, everyday person’s. Zak had hurt me, and in Brett’s eyes, that meant he deserved to die. Of course, he tried to say Zak was probably my stalker too, and that was the whole reason I’d asked for his help.
Had Zak been my stalker? It made sense, I guess, even though I didn’t want to believe Zak could’ve been capable of something like that. Calling me, using some kind of app to change his voice, breaking into my room and sketching me while I was sleeping. Calling me his. None of that screamed Zak to me.
But neither did kissing Amelia and not pushing her away. I thought he’d be loyal. I’d thought he’d loved me. Maybe I didn’t know Zak half as well as I’d thought.
His funeral was Saturday. No police had come sniffing around, and from what I heard from my mom—who checked the news constantly for updates on the case—they didn’t know who did it. His body had been found on the side of the Greek fraternity he lived in, and no one had seen anything.
It would seem that Brett was right. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He knew how to kill someone and dump their body so he wouldn’t be caught. That whole mess in Eastcreek was just because he wanted to get back at someone. I wasn’t sure; I didn’t know the whole story there.
It was a strange thing, not wanting Brett to get caught for multiple murders, even stranger to still feel safe when I was around him, even though fresh blood was on his hands.
As the week went by, we didn’t really talk about Zak or his impending funeral. We’d talked about it enough. Nothing could change the past.
I didn’t condone what Brett did, not in the least, and I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure Zak was my stalker. I was a mixture of emotions, everything inside me at war.
My mom took me shopping Friday night for a new outfit for the funeral. She bought herself a new black dress, along with a new dress shirt for my dad. I decided on a pair of pants, along with a loose black blouse. I didn’t do dresses. I didn’t have the curves for them. I was basically a living stick figure—the reason why Brett sometimes said I had the body of a fifth-grade boy.
Yes, that was the man I couldn’t get out of my head, the one I dreamed about. A killer who insulted my physical stature. So many things were wrong with that, but at this point, I was done trying to make it make sense.
When Saturday morning rolled around, I could feel it in the air. The tension. The anxiety. My parents weren’t really talking to each other, not during breakfast, and not as they got ready. The house was so silent you could hear a pin drop. I got ready in my bedroom when it was time, curling my hair and applying some makeup—something I didn’t normally do, but I was doing it to make my mom happy. To make it seem like I was trying, like I cared about Zak being dead.
And I did. I didn’t think he deserved to die, because a part of me didn’t believe he was my stalker. The part of me that would always love him and the short happiness he’d brought into my life during those tumultuous years grieved him.
He was my first love, and for the longest time I’d thought he would be my only.
We filed into my dad’s car once it was time to go. The car ride was silent, just as the house had been, neither my mom nor my dad talking. The radio had been turned off. I guess they wanted to lose themselves in their own thoughts.
There was no wake. Only a funeral and a burial. The funeral was held at the small church Zak had been a part of since he was a kid, and the place was so jam-packed with people that many folks had to stand in the back of the church during the whole thing. We’d gotten there early, so we were able to nab seats in a pew, only a few pews from the altar, where the casket was.
My parents weren’t the religious sort, but I’d come here sometimes with Zak, when he’d asked me to. The priest that started the sermon was the same priest it had always been, a man pushing eighty, with thin, white, wispy hair and loads of wrinkles. I forgot what his name was.
Once it was time, he greeted the congregation and started to talk about Zak. I drifted off, letting my eyes roam along the altar, past the casket, to where a few pictures of Zak sat, blown up so the whole church could see. One of them I recognized as his senior yearbook picture. That stupid, manicured smile all photographers seemed to be able to capture.
I remembered that day. He’d stopped by before going to get the pictures taken, wanting my opinion on the different outfits his parents had told him to wear. We used the same photographer, and you could do up to four different outfits—for those parents who wanted a plethora of pictures to choose from. I’d just done one, but Zak was forced by his parents to do them all.
As the priest droned on, reading a passage from the bible, my gaze fell to my lap. I’d clung to Zak so hard for so long. It felt weird that he was gone, stranger that the man responsible for it was hiding out in my childhood treehouse… and I didn’t hate him for it.
