Chapter Text
“It’s a simple question. Are you arresting me or not?”
The cop called Smith took a long breath in, and let it out as a sigh, briefly shutting his eyes. Like this conversation pained him.
Avery couldn’t bring herself to feel an ounce of sympathy. Even with her shoulder – dislocated, according to the paramedic who was now taking her pulse - braced, her knee elevated in the back of the ambulance where she was sitting, her left hand packed with ice, and sweet, sweet painkillers coursing into her bloodstream, she was, after all, the one who was really in pain.
She was just stalling for time, and they both knew it. Tiffany, in the end, had been right. The little scene she’d set in the boiler room below the gym was the only reason why Avery’s ambulance was still sitting here in the school parking lot instead of on its way to the hospital, the only reason why she was still sitting here getting asked asinine questions she refused to answer and asking unanswered questions of her own. Well, okay, the scene in the boiler room and the horrorshow in Courtney’s bedroom.
Evidence. It lied like an expert.
What Avery’d done didn’t matter. Except to all those people she’d saved from being blown up, she guessed. But they’d never even know why they were really in danger.
Tiffany’d still managed to beat her, after all.
“I just want to know,” Smith repeated, finally, opening his eyes and giving Avery that long, sympathetic stare he’d fixed on her before, when he’d offered to let her tell her side of the yearbook story. Avery hadn’t fallen for it then, and she wasn’t falling for it now. “What happened tonight? Where is Tiffany Bright?”
“And I already told you, I don’t know –”
“Avery! Avery!”
Both Avery and Smith looked up at the sound of the shout. Mallory was hurrying down the short sidewalk from the gym, pushing past Cooney at the double doors, where he’d been stationed to keep angry parents from bursting in. He clearly hadn’t been prepared to stop anyone from bursting out, exactly the way Mallory had just done. “Let me through, she’s my friend – Avery! Are you okay?”
“Peachy keen,” Avery ground out, between her teeth, as she flashed them all in a smile that felt closer to a grimace. “What about you? That was a nasty fall -”
“Please, one of the first things they teach you when you become a cheerleader is how to take a fall. I’m fine. Siobhan’s gonna be sore tomorrow, but she’s fine too. You look like you went three rounds with a gorilla. A gorilla with a black belt. And you lost.”
Avery couldn’t resist a genuine grin, at that. That sounded more like the Mallory she knew. “You should see the gorilla.”
“Would that gorilla happen to be about five-two, blonde, and new in town?” Smith asked, without any apparent trace of humour, puncturing Avery’s good mood. “Miss DiAngelo. Avery. We found this in the basement.” He didn’t say with the bodies and the knife and the dynamite and the remote detonator and the Satanic ritual circle. His eyes said it for him. “Several people have confirmed for me that it belonged to Tiffany Bright. That she was here tonight. And now she’s nowhere to be found.”
Avery didn’t have to look to know what he was about to hold up. But she did anyway.
The little gold cross winked and flashed even through the plastic of the evidence bag, reflecting the red and blue of the ambulance’s silenced lights.
Avery shrugged, or tried to. Between the brace and the dislocation, it sent a pulsing throb through her shoulders, even with the painkillers starting to do their numbing work, and she had to catch her breath before she could speak. “Maybe she got spooked when I caught her setting up her little tableau in the basement, knocked me out, and ran.”
This time, Smith pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as he shut his eyes, stuffing the little gold cross back into into his jacket pocket. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation before -”
“She’s telling the truth.”
It was Avery’s turn to stare at Mallory in flabbergasted shock. If she’d been climbing up into a stunt, she probably also would’ve fallen over backwards.
Mallory met her stare for a second, her eyes defiant. As she turned away from Avery to face Smith, though, Avery could see them start to melt into shimmering, innocent pools. “It’s true. Tiffany was the one who set this pep rally up -”
“A very good reason for your friend here to want to sabotage it,” Smith pointed out, but Mallory wasn’t done with him yet.
“No. Avery was trying to stop her. Tiffany -” Her voice broke, dropping into a frightened whisper, like she thought Tiffany might still be somewhere close. Like she thought Tiffany might be listening. “Tiffany is evil.”
The look on Smith’s face said loud and clear how convincing he found that.
Mallory let her lower lip wobble, raising a hand to tug nervously at the end of her curly blonde ponytail. “I knew you wouldn’t believe it. None of the parents or teachers did. Nobody thinks a seventeen-year-old girl could actually -”
She broke off ominously, looking all around her.
“What’s your name?” Smith asked Mallory, still with that thoughtful, sympathetic tone.
“Mallory.”
“Mallory, why do you say Tiffany was ‘evil’? What was Avery trying to stop her from doing?”
Mallory batted her eyelashes at Smith in a move Avery recognised as pure Tiffany. “She wanted to blow up the gym. With everybody in it.”
Smith’s face gave nothing away. Avery couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “And how do you know that?”
“Because -” Mallory faltered, for the first time, playing with the hem of her skirt.
Her eyes were on the toes of her sneakers as she said, “Because she made me help her get the dynamite.”
…
The cheerleaders backed Mallory up.
Avery didn’t think they’d discussed it beforehand. She wasn’t sure when they even would’ve had the chance to. But one by one, Siobhan and Krista and even Jennifer lined up to tearfully tell the cops their tales of the horrors they’d endured at Tiffany’s hands. Of how they’d all been helpless victims of her reign of terror, forced into frightened silence as she lied and manipulated and killed with impunity. Of how they’d all barely survived months and months of hell.
Of course, Avery didn’t get to know about any of this until afterwards. Officer Cooney was posted outside her hospital room for three days, awkwardly hanging around like nobody could decide whether she was under arrest or not and they just wanted to make sure she didn’t flee the country. On the fourth day, her parents came and picked her up and took her home.
Apparently, the Waynesbridge police had been following up on a routine call in a residential neighbourhood, a complaint about a foul stench coming from a neighbour’s house. They’d found the bodies of John and Charity Bates, John propped up in his favourite armchair by the radio, Charity at her sewing table. They’d clearly been there for some time. The greasy stain in the rough shape of John, left imprinted in his armchair, would be indelible now. Parts of whatever garment Charity had been working on had fused into her putrefying flesh.
Their seventeen-year-old daughter Angela was still missing.
But her school photos – and her apparently ‘disturbing’ diaries – weren’t.
“Seems as though I owe you an apology,” Smith said, without betraying a trace of whatever he must actually be feeling, when Avery was finally recovered enough to go in to the station to give her statement. He didn’t elaborate.
Avery didn’t know what to say to that. So she didn’t say anything at all.
…
If Avery’d had any hopes that the fuss would’ve died down by the time she got back to school, they evaporated on the spot the first time she stepped through a classroom door and the whole room went suddenly silent.
Between that happening every time she stepped through a door and the way people instantly started whispering the moment her back was turned, by noon, Avery was ready to just pack it in and go home. She hadn’t retained a single thing from any of her morning classes, and she was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with her still-healing leg and shoulder and hand.
She was almost even starting to wish that she hadn’t chosen to wear her pentagram today. It had seemed like a good idea that morning, imagining the looks on everyone’s faces when they saw it. When they saw her. But actually being the target of those looks, all day, the naked suspicion and mistrust in people’s eyes, the weight of the knowledge that everyone thought Tiffany’d been framed, that Avery’d gotten away with something…
The bitch had been right, after all. The truth didn’t matter. Just what people perceived.
And what Avery perceived, as she unpacked her brown bag at the little picnic table overlooking the parking lot, was that she was going to be eating lunch alone from now on.
“Is this seat taken?”
“Only if Courtney somehow magically comes back to life,” Avery answered automatically, and then looked up.
Mallory looked back down at her, anxiously combing a single bleach-blonde curl between her fingers.
They ate lunch together that first day in silence.
…
The school’s football team actually made it into the playoffs for the first time in nearly a decade, driven on by the cheer squad, with Mallory at the helm. And Avery actually turned up to all of their home games, lurking up at the back of the bleachers with her fingers freezing off under the thick fleece blanket vainly trying to keep out the cold. She told Mallory that expecting to see her at away games was pushing it. Mallory didn’t protest.
The two new girls they’d managed to get to join the cheer squad, to fill the two empty spots, were really good. Sisters, according to Mallory. One a full year older than the other. From her perch in the bleachers, Avery couldn’t tell them apart. They were both perky, peppy, suntanned and blonde. Seemed like perfectly nice, perfectly normal people.
Avery didn’t let Mallory leave her alone with them, if she could help it.
…
The door leading back behind the stage let out a noisy creak, as Avery tried to ease it shut behind her, and every other sound in the room instantly went dead.
Five pairs of eyes turned toward her, and Avery had to swallow down the sudden urge to turn and walk right back out that door again. The locked door leading down to the basement boiler room dragged at her vision, but she forced herself to focus on the motley crew of juniors-or-maybe-sophomores clustered around a folding card table covered in books and junk instead. Since when were there five of them? Hadn’t there only been three when they’d accosted her at the picnic table?
“Nobody told me Arlon was so popular,” Avery cracked, into the ringing silence. She forced herself to take a step farther into the closed-in backstage space that could generously be called a room, towards the table, away from the basement door. “How many of you little geeks are there?”
The scrawny dark-haired scarecrow of a kid, the freckly one who’d been the spokesnerd when he and his friends had first approached Avery, squinted suspiciously at her across what Avery could now see was a massive illustrated map, laid out across the table in front of him. “What’re you doing here?”
“Letting you know your ‘Wizzard’s’ funeral is going to be Saturday at one, asshole,” Avery said, without any real venom. “In case any of you felt like turning up. Leave the cloaks and pointy ears at home.”
This time, the silence felt far more somber, far less judgmental, than it had when Avery’d walked in.
“Thanks. Where’s it going to be?” the red-haired girl who Avery definitely hadn’t seen with the geek squad before asked, after a moment of intense eye communication between the boys around the table.
“The Elks Hall for the service. Dunno if they’re doing anything graveside. I think that’s just for the family.” It was going to have to be a closed-casket funeral. Avery tried to wrench her mind away from that train of thought, her eyes landing on the map again. “So how does this even work? Is it really just like the world’s fanciest, dorkiest game of Monopoly?”
“Sort of, but not really?” the flat-top kid started.
He didn’t get a chance to elaborate before curly was launching into what sounded like the start of an enthusiastic, memorised sales pitch. “It’s more of an open-ended, open-world -”
“Why don’t you sit down and we’ll show you,” the other kid Avery hadn’t seen before, the one with the terrible haircut, offered. He looked and sounded sincere, but Avery didn’t trust it. There was a glint of mischief in his too-innocent eyes.
“Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I just came to give you all the bad news. I told Arlon I’d play his stupid games -”
“Over his dead body,” the kid with the bad haircut finished for Avery. “That’s what he told us you said, anyway. Didn’t you mean it?”
For a second, Avery couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Touche, shitlord,” she said, at last. “Fine. Is there another chair kicking around here somewhere?”
Avery sat back and watched the kids throw dice around and yell at each other for what felt like a small eternity. Every time her eyes started getting dragged back toward the basement door, curly – she’d been given each of their names, and immediately forgotten all of them – would elbow her and launch into a long-winded explanation of something that would leave her more confused than when he’d started, or the kid with the bad haircut would ask if she was following and then give a significantly more helpful but distinctly more metaphor-laden explanation. Or flat-top would ask Avery’s opinion on a course of action he'd definitely already settled on like he actually cared what she thought and she had a single clue what was going on, or the scarecrow would make a big deal over her not even paying attention and why was she still even here if she didn’t want to learn. Or the redhead would catch Avery’s eye across the table and roll hers.
By the time curly and the kid with the bad haircut put their heads together and started whispering about something, Avery had almost managed to forget the basement door was lurking on the edge of her vision at all.
She didn’t find out what the whispering was all about until the kids were all shoving books into bags and tucking dice and figurines into little boxes or pouches and the redhead was arguing with the scarecrow about something or other that didn’t seem to be related to the game. Curly stopped Avery, as she was stacking her borrowed chair back atop a precarious pile tucked into one of the shadowy back corners, with an unexpected hand on her elbow from behind. It took everything Avery had in her not to obey her first impulse and deck him. “What?!”
Curly took one short step back, eyeing Avery like she was the big scary dragon he was here to slay or whatever. But he held out a couple sheets of paper. “If you wanted to come back next week. Arlon had this NPC who was travelling with our party. We started a new adventure, because obviously nobody has his notes from the one he was running when, y’know, or really knows where he was going with it or with the campaign overall, but we didn’t want to stop playing while we figure out who’s going to run the next campaign and we’ve all gotten really attached to these characters and -”
“You had a point in here somewhere, right?”
Curly bit off a sentence mid-word. “Yeah. Anyway. We’re right at the beginning of an adventure. It’d be a great place to jump in. If you wanted to play, we could totally doctor some of these stats and you could just use her instead of having to come up with a whole new character from scratch.”
Avery was just opening her mouth to gently thank him and refuse when curly interrupted. “And even if you don’t want to play…”
He tapped the top of the first sheet he’d handed her, giving his eyebrows a meaningful little waggle. “We decided you should probably have this, anyway.”
Avery looked where he was pointing.
Beside a rough, unflattering black-ink sketch of a woman with an unruly mane of thick, dark curls, a bad-tempered expression, and a monstrously exaggerated nose, Arlon’s neat, angular writing spelled out the words Lady Avelina.
The page suddenly turning a little blurry in front of Avery was not, she decided, due to water rising in her eyes.
“Dork,” she whispered to herself, and then hugged the papers close against her chest.
…
Avery put off talking to Courtney’s parents for as long as she could.
She didn’t know what the police might have told them, in those terrible few days between Courtney’s death and Avery’s release from custody. She didn’t know what Courtney’s parents might think. And a big part of her didn’t want to.
So in the end, Courtney’s parents had to come to Avery.
“She would’ve wanted you to have these,” Courtney’s mom said, shoving the cardboard box she was holding at Avery, who stood dumbfounded in the doorway. Avery took the box reflexively, noticing as she did how Courtney’s mom seemed to avoid her eyes. “And – and we’d like you to say a few words. At the funeral.”
“I -” Avery started, but Courtney’s mom was already turning away.
“Just – think about it. Please.”
…
Avery thought about it.
She thought long and hard about it, as she unpacked the box Courtney’s mom had brought over. At one point, her own mom came down the hall and hovered in the doorway of Avery’s room, watching her, but Avery ignored her until she went away again without, uncharacteristically, saying a word.
Avery thought about it as she pulled out the group photos from her and Courtney’s shared years in gymnastics, the crafts from summer camp, the woven friendship bracelet she’d made Courtney at one of those camps. The strip of photobooth pictures of the two of them that they’d taken at the mall on Courtney’s thirteenth birthday, Courtney with her checkerboard sunglasses, Avery with that awful blue eyeshadow she’d thought made her look so cool, both of them laughing almost too hard to make faces at the camera. The teddy bear with the tiny sparkly pompoms Avery’d begged her parents to let her get for Courtney when Courtney’d first made the cheer squad.
Avery thought about it as she carefully arranged the bear in pride of place between her pillows.
Avery thought about it all through classes the next day, and as she sat down at the picnic table overlooking the faculty parking lot, where she and Courtney had shared so many lunches. Avery thought about it until Mallory asked what was on her mind that had her so quiet.
When she told Mallory, all Mallory said was, “You’ve got to.”
And that seemed to be all there was to say about that.
…
There were four funerals in a week. Avery’s dad made a crack that it was lucky so much of her wardrobe was black.
Avery’s voice broke partway through trying to tell the assembly of friends, family, teachers, coaches, acquaintances, and rubberneckers who’d turned up to Courney’s funeral that Courtney had been her best friend. All those eyes, staring. All those people who, not that long ago, would have been perfectly willing to believe that Avery had killed her.
And no Courtney to laugh about it with her. Not ever, ever again.
Avery was horrified and appalled at herself when she tried to compose herself to finish the short speech she’d written, and instead, dissolved into noisy gulping tears. Courtney’s mother had to lead her away from the lectern with an arm around her shoulders, while Avery sobbed so hard she couldn’t speak. She had to go out and sit in the hall until she could catch her breath again. The funeral director’s eleven-year-old son brought her a cup of watery Tang, with the solemnly bored expression of someone who did this every other week.
It only made her cry harder.
Avery was certain she’d cried herself out by the time Arlon’s funeral came around. The turnout was smaller, though gawkers still swelled the ranks of mourners. Arlon hadn’t been head cheerleader.
Still, there were more people in attendance than Avery would’ve expected. As she scanned the crowd, she recognised the enormous glasses of the assistant librarian, the flaming red hair of the one girl sitting with the rest of Arlon’s tabletop group. And faces Avery didn’t recognise at all, slipping into the back rows, with the solemn looks of people there to pay their respects instead of the eager eyes of gawkers. Arlon had known more people than she’d realised. Left an impression on more lives.
His parents were dressed for the occasion, in their own eclectic way, his mother in a drapey purple stonewashed dress that laced up the front and his father in a black satin shirt with full, flowing sleeves and collar points down almost to his waistband. They’d had Arlon laid out in his cloak and chainmail, his father tearfully explained to Avery, as she and her parents passed along their condolences. Of course, she wouldn’t be able to see. The funeral was closed-casket.
The funerals were all closed-casket.
Avery was certain she’d already cried herself out. But she found a few more tears to squeak out when, near the very end of the ceremony, they played a song over the PA system that Arlon’s parents had chosen. One of his favourites.
As the quiet, gentle strains of ‘Rivendell’ crackled out of the community hall intercom speakers and washed over the assembly, Avery realised that Arlon had, in the end, gotten the last laugh. Maybe it had been over his dead body, but he had finally gotten her to play one of his stupid tabletop games.
And now, here she was. Listening to Rush.
Avery mostly went to Steve’s funeral because she knew she’d feel guilty if she didn’t. It was a short ceremony, generic, delivered graveside by a pastor who kept checking his watch. Nobody stood up to say anything for Steve.
They’d actually managed to dredge up some parents for him from somewhere, though, a skinny woman with eyes that looked like they’d burned up whatever fat she might once have had on her tiny frame for fuel, and a bored-looking man with a greasy duck’s-ass hairdo that’d gone out of fashion with Elvis and a peroxide blonde hanging off his denim-wrapped arm. He hadn’t bothered to scrounge up something black to wear. The blonde had, but Avery was pretty sure it’d take about ten more yards of fabric to make it appropriate for a funeral. She wasn’t sure what the appeal was. Steve’s father might’ve been called handsome, once, before the beer gut and cauliflower nose, but he sure as hell didn’t look rich.
Avery didn’t stick around long enough once the coffin was in the ground to try to find out.
She didn’t go to Bret’s funeral.
…
By Christmas, the whispers in the hallways had started to die down.
By Valentine’s Day, Avery could even sometimes go as long as a week without having to clean something rude, insulting, accusatory, or threatening off her locker door.
Still, by the time May rolled around, she was desperately looking forward to graduating, getting the hell out, and never, ever coming back.
She’d planned to skip the prom. But Mallory had begged. Apparently, after the Tiffany fiasco, success on the cheer team didn’t translate automatically into dates. Actually, the pompoms were now doing a pretty effective job of scaring boys away.
And Avery’d come home one day to find a velvet, satin, and lace confection of a gown in black and deep blood-red hanging off the inside of her bedroom door, and her mother standing nervously outside when she opened the door again, wringing her hands.
It was, actually, a dress that Avery might even have picked out for herself. And it fit well enough, after her mother put a couple of darts in the bodice.
Avery refused to wear the dainty red satin slippers that went with it, though. It didn’t need hemming if she wore it with her combat boots.
Mallory arranged to borrow her dad’s truck for the evening, so she could pick Avery up. Avery’s mom had tried her level best to make Avery make a hairdresser’s appointment, but finally they’d come to a compromise – Avery would let her mother do her hair, instead of just backcombing it up as big as it’d go like she’d been planning to do. Avery had to hold her breath when her mother zipped up the back of the dress and pushed her out in front of the full-length mirrors on the sliding doors of the master bedroom closet.
But she let the breath out in a long exhale when she saw her reflection looking back from that mirror at her, looking primped and polished to within an inch of her life but still, unmistakeably, herself.
“I think I have some garnet drop earrings from your great-aunt that would look just marvellous on you,” Avery’s mom gushed, giving the piled-up cascade of curls on top of Avery’s head one final poke with the pick end of her comb, pulling free one ringlet to hang down over Avery’s bared shoulders. “Let me see if I can dig them up.”
Avery nodded. “I’ve got a choker I think would look nice with this, too. I’m going to go get it. Give me a shout if Mallory shows up, or if you find those earrings.”
She glanced over at her bed as she clomped into her room, and then did a double take. Courtney’s cheerleader bear wasn’t sitting in its usual place at the centre of her pillows.
Avery stomped over to the bed, and pulled the bear out from under the comforter where it had somehow gotten hidden. It was kind of funny – the way the bear was lying, on its side with its back to the window and only its head sticking up above the covers, it almost looked like somebody’d tucked it in. She wondered if her dad might’ve done it. He’d probably think that was hilarious.
She wasn’t sure why a shiver of sudden unease rippled through her.
Bear restored to its rightful place, Avery hurried over to her purple-painted dresser, eager to get her choker and get back out to where there were other people. Suddenly her room felt too strangely, stiflingly quiet. The discordant twinkling music box tune that spilled out of her jewelry box lid when she swung it up didn’t make it better. Avery looked down –
And stopped dead, a flood of cold horror freezing her in place.
Lying on top of the tray of her charms and pendants, the fine golden chain lay like a coiled rattlesnake, glittering malevolently in the lowering sunlight. The clasp was closed, but a break in the chain let it lie in a sprawling snarl. The twists and loops and spirals it had fallen into almost resembled letters in a language Avery didn’t know, like symbols from an alphabet that had never been seen on earth before.
And oh-so-innocently threaded onto that broken chain, like it had always been lying there with Avery’s other jewelry, just waiting for her to throw open the box, winking and flashing brilliantly in the light –
Was an all-too-familiar little gold cross.
THE END…?