Page 28 of False Idols

We wedge a chair beneath the door and I almost tell Sunny about what happened to me last night, but I don’t. My phone keeps buzzing with messages but I don’t check them. Neither of us sleep that night.

11

BEAU

“Did you see the papers? They found that girl’s body down by the Mill.” I’m talking to Jordan or at least I am trying to. He’s forced me back onto the team and now I have to fucking play along because playing football, even as a third stringer, was all I ever talked about when anyone asked me what I was going to be doing after high school.

Playing ball.

That had always been my answer. It doesn’t matter that I don’t give a fuck about football, or school, or this town. There is only Nevaeh. Everything else is just in the way.

“She washed up on the shore. Some volunteers picking up trash at the Mill found her yesterday.”

The Mill is what people call this old water wheel some pioneers built in a river that you can’t really count on because of how dry it can be on the prairie. Sometimes it’s a trickle and barely a creek and other times it’s a roaring torrent you have to yell to be heard over when you’re walking beside it. It’s a wide river and when it’s calm, it’s barely a foot deep. People like to park their trucks out onto the limestone that slopes down from the prairie and set up camper chairs in it to cool off in the summer.

It’s not calm right now. Not with the storms that we’ve been having. Right now it’s wild and it’s flooded past the limestone onto the prairie. It’s all mud down there right now from what I heard.

“What the fuck was she doing out there?” I ask.

“Bro, I don’t fucking know. Heard she was a bio major, probably out there doing science shit? That or he took her there, you know?”

“Mmm, sounds about right.”

I’ve studied The Reaper almost as closely as I’ve studied Nevaeh, but he doesn’t interest me like she does. Funny considering everyone thought I was him for four goddamn years. Morbid curiosity about the killer everyone thought I was had me reading up on the shit he did. He picks pretty coeds as prey. He prefers to kill where he has the time to make it last from the photos I saw. He took one girl’s head clean off. For all the shit he did to Carrie, at least he didn’t do that to her. He isn’t particular where he kills them, their home, out at a house party, somewhere remote like the Mill. It’s all the same to him. The riskier the location, the better.

It’s like The Reaper is a ghost. He comes and goes. He takes who he wants, when he wants and there’s not a thing anyone can do to stop him.

“Too bad he didn’t fucking gut Nevaeh.”

I raise an eyebrow and I’m glad we aren’t face to face. The way I’m looking right now would be a dead giveaway he said the wrong fucking thing. No one touches Nevaeh but me. Jordan’s words have me thinking, though. He was the one who wanted to leave her out for The Reaper yesterday.

“And why is that?”

“She deserves it for what she did.”

I lean forward and brace my elbows on the counter. I’m in my kitchen fucking around with breakfast. I’m supposed to be eating healthy for the workout regime I’m about to jump into for the season I’m already behind on, but I just slammed as much bacon as I could take and I fucked up the pancakes I was trying to make until the smoke alarm went off, but I didn’t care. I ate it all. Food tastes great, even if you burn the shit out of it, when you’re not behind bars. At least here I can choose what I want and when I want.

“That’s all in the past,” I lie.

Jordan scoffs. “You sound like you really did forgive her.”

This little shit. Does he see what I’m playing at? “That’s because I did.”

“Whatever, man.” He yawns and I can almost see him waving a hand at me to show me he doesn’t really care what I’m saying. Jordan’s the Captain of the team and he let that shit go to his head. He was a skinny little shit the last time I saw him who could barely hold onto the ball when anyone so much as looked at him. He thinks he’s hot shit right now. If The Reaper catches anyone it should be this bitch.

“We’ll take care of it for you since you’re going to be a boy scout about her.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she’s going to make up for what she did to you. You’re one of us. No one, especially not some trailer park trash cunt, is going to get away with fucking with you. Don’t worry, bro. We’re going to handle her.”

“Listen, Jordan-”

“Hey, did you clock the workout this afternoon?” He interrupts and I have to take a deep breath. If I was acting like my real self I’d drive to Jordan’s house and beat his brains in with his toilet seat, but I can’t do that.

Not yet.

“Yeah, man.”

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