The Strangest Forms by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 1
Empty All Receptacles
Watson was late.
I paced, planks creaking underfoot. The old boathouse was dark; starlight filtered through where boards had warped and no longer met and the tin roof sagged. The air smelled like waxed canvas, dust, dry wood. When I turned too fast, I bumped one of the boats racked on either side of me. I made my way to the south wall, bumping another boat in the process, and pressed my eye to one of the gaps in the wall.
On the other side, the twinkle of The Walker School’s lights broke the mountain night. No movement. Me, and the murmur of the lake, and that was just about it. Then a golf cart whined, its shadow moving down the path less than a hundred yards off. A girl said something, and a boy laughed drunkenly, and then the golf cart was gone, the whine fading toward the glow between the trees. Friday night fun. Still no Watson.
I checked my jacket pocket. It was September, and down in the valley, it was still too warm to need another layer, but up here, on the back of Timp, the temperature dropped quickly. The zannies shifted under my touch; the plastic baggie rustled. I paced back the other way, toward the roll-up doors and the dock that pushed out into the lake. I told myself, For fuck’s sake, stand still and stop making so much noise.
It wasn’t always like this; it wasn’t always Xanax. Sometimes it was beer. Well, more often it was rum or vodka or hard seltzer. Sometimes it was Ding Dongs or Twinkies or Doublemint, stuff you couldn’t buy in the canteen. There was a manga girl who paid me a shitload to bring her a case of Milkis every month, covered in all that Korean writing I couldn’t read, and then that little bit of English: New feeling of soda beverage. Sure, whatever. There was a wannabe tweaker, a little white boy, who wanted Sudafed. There was another white boy, not so little, who wanted live crickets, and I never asked why. One time, this real butch Mexican kid had wanted a Snuggie. So, you never knew.
It didn’t matter what they wanted. They were stuck up here—that was the whole point of Walker, a place rich people could send their troubled teens to be kept neatly out of sight—and I wasn’t. I knew what that meant; I hadn’t read all those Wikipedia articles on economics for nothing. What mattered was that the rich kids paid, and some months they paid enough that Dad and I weren’t completely underwater. Of course, that had been before I bought hundreds of dollars of zannies on credit from Shivers and Watson decided not to show.
Never again, I told myself. Never buy on credit again.
When I made my next loop, I pressed up against that gap in the boards, looking out again, and called myself every kind of stupid. Nothing. The boathouse was a good spot; it didn’t get used much during the school year, and it was far enough from the rest of campus that people wouldn’t stumble across you—with the exception of the occasional joyride or the kids who wanted a quick fuck. I had an excuse for being here if anybody spotted me: the raccoons dragged trash up this way sometimes. I always had an excuse. The rules were clear; any trouble, and Dad would be out of a job, and so I’d be out of a job, and what the hell would we do then?
I made one last loop of the boathouse and gave up on waiting any longer. I let myself out and locked the door behind me. I headed south, toward campus, the buildings faintly visible between the trees like the fairy lights Mom had hung on our Salt Lake porch. I fumbled the custodial cart out from where I’d hidden it behind some trash cans and wheeled it toward the maintenance building.
I pulled on my headphones, fired up Dad’s old Discman, and turned up the volume as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” started. Kurt sang hello. How low. I tried to think. I’d finished my route for the night, so I could drop the garbage in the dumpster, put away the cart, and head home. But then what? I had almost five hundred dollars’ worth of zannies, and we had bills that were due. Past due. I figured I could try to track down Watson, make her pay, but what if she’d changed her mind? Rich kids did that sometimes. I’d had a girl asking me for weeks to get her this skin cream, something Korean, and I did, only it took two weeks, and when it finally got here, she didn’t want it anymore. I changed my mind, that’s what she said. And who ate the eighty dollars? You’re goddamn right I did. What was I going to do, tell Mr. Taylor or Headmaster Burrows?
And Watson wasn’t some nobody first-year. She was a junior, and she was pretty and wore expensive clothes and was nice, I mean, as far as I could tell, and she had that family name. She was a prime candidate for missing white girl syndrome (thank you, Wikipedia); if she was more than ten minutes late, I was probably legally obligated to start a national news campaign. And, of course, Watson had Supercreep for a best friend. I’d sold to Holloway Holmes—aka Supercreep—a couple of times. Addys. And sure, he was pretty, if you were into white boys who looked like statues, and oh yeah, the statue was based on someone who had been a gaping dickhole in real life, like he hunted foxes and had a butler and stuff like that. But pretty or not, he was also scary as hell—didn’t say anything, sometimes didn’t even seem to breathe, just stared at you like he was waiting for you to turn around so he could suck your blood. And he was a Holmes. Like, related to that Holmes. I’d heard some of the kids talking—they didn’t even seem to see me sometimes, like I was just another part of the background, picking up their trash, cleaning up their shit, literally—about how he’d asked a girl to Homecoming at his last school, and when she’d said no, he’d leaked all these nudes, and she ate like eight Tide pods and they had to put her in this special home in Switzerland or something. So, yeah, the short version: Watson and Supercreep were above my paygrade, no matter how badly Watson screwed me.
The edge of campus was quiet except for the night breeze coming off Timp’s ass, making me shiver as I pushed the cart. The thing about Walker was that it was full of these rich, entitled assholes, full of teachers, full of staff like my dad—and, by extension, me—full of people, in other words, and you could still walk five yards this way, ten yards that way, and be the only person in the whole universe. The sky was thick with stars. The pines, the tall ones with their branches hanging down at their sides, made me think of crime-scene bodies, chalk outlines against the horizon.
My old, dumb, brick of a phone buzzed, and when I checked it, I saw a message from Shivers: what up
I put my phone back in my pocket and kept going. When I reached the little concrete slab bridge over the Toqueah, where the cottonwoods grew like someone had drawn them against the water with a Sharpie, I stopped and got my broom from the cart. I went down the sloping bank, bracing my foot on cottonwood roots, careful to keep from pitching into the water as I did a quick sweep. Kids liked to smoke and vape down there, and it smelled like that, like stale cigarette smoke mixing with old leaves and mud. Tonight I came up with some empty pods and a few butts. I dumped them in with the rest of the trash. Mr. Taylor didn’t always check; he was like that, he wanted to catch you by surprise. When he knew I was covering for Dad, he did petty shit like that.
My phone buzzed again, another message from Shivers: Jacky tough shit.
Nothing but that—nothing but his stupid nickname for me.
As I pushed the cart across the bridge, the casters clattering over the slight unevenness of the concrete, the bad one still squeaking like crazy, I tried to think. I had other people who bought zannies, sure. Not this many at one time, but it’s not like they were going to go bad. The real problem was the cash. I checked my phone; the messages, both of them, were still there on the screen, still marked unread. There was a girl, Lin, who bought Xanax from me sometimes. I pushed the cart a little faster. She always had extra cash. And there were a couple of guys in Anderson. They hadn’t bought zannies before, but they were into chemsex—they wanted Viagra, MDMA, a couple of times coke. And, more importantly, they liked me. Hell, one time they’d gotten me halfway out of my pants, back when I’d just started hooking up with Ariana, and that had just been them messing around.
The maintenance building came into view ahead: a single-story brick structure, security lights cutting sharp corners out of the night. Using one elbow to steer the cart around back, I tapped out a message to Jonno, one of the Anderson boys. I needed the money, and I was single, right? And they were both cute if you were into twinks.
As I came around the corner, the cart hit something, and metal boomed. I looked up from my phone. Someone had wheeled one of the dumpsters out from the wall, and I’d run into it with the cart. Shaking my head, I shoved the phone into my pocket, took the headphones off, and pulled the cart back a few feet. I moved around to the dumpster to shove it back into position; the garbage truck drivers were assholes, and sometimes they wouldn’t pick up a dumpster if it wasn’t right where it was supposed to be. I stopped to grab a broken piece of plastic from the ground. Probably a stupid prank, I thought as I got to my feet. Or a dare. Or a challenge. Although what the hell kind of prank—
I stopped.
Watson—Sarah Elizabeth Watson—lay like a broken doll on top of the black garbage bags, dead.