Page 42 of Beach Bodies

The rain has stopped; the wind has gentled to a playful bluster. I head straight for the beach, filling my lungs with clean, sharp gulps of air. Somehow, it’s past six o’clock, and the clouds are shredded ribbons of pink and orange, like gashes in the grey dome of the sky. I hit the sand and pause to cuff my sweatpants before making for the shoreline, my strides long.

I need space. Space to move, to breathe, to feel that I’m not actually trapped.

Back in Daniel’s room, at first, I relished the feeling of being hemmed in; the heady scent of his skin, the sticky heat melding us together, the tight wrap of his body, holding me down. But now—

I walk fast, towards the shore.

See? I’m not confined.It’s just a feeling, a brief panic. I can go where I want, as far as I want, as fast as I want…It’s not like Mom.

On the other side of the plexiglass, she no longer looked like an avenging goddess with the remains of her just sacrificeat her feet, but a pale, small woman swallowed by the orange jumpsuit. Fragile, with her bloodless lips and her limp hair and her roots showing. Stripped of power, stripped of choice.

‘I’ll be out before you know it,’ she promised through the black phone as we pressed our hands to the glass. Almost meeting. But not quite. ‘I’m gonna find a real good lawyer and it’s all gonna be fine.’

It was not all fine.

I didn’t lie to Daniel. Mom did die of breast cancer, but in prison. She’d been diagnosed shortly before the Trevor incident. She hadn’t told me yet. And who knows if that’s why she cracked. Some instinct that she wouldn’t always be around to protect me. That she had to do what she could, while she still could, consequences be damned.

Go big or go home, Lily.At least she practised what she preached; she went big. She did not come home.

Trevor.It’s hard to separate the real man from the stereotype he’s become in my head. Tall. Gauntly muscled. Handsome face, hungry look in his eyes. Always out of money. Always drinking. Greasy nails from the mechanic’s shop where he worked. Funny as hell one minute, angry as a devil the next. He sure could make Mom laugh. But he could just as easily make her cry.

It took a couple of weeks for the cops to come knocking, but come knocking they did. Everyone in Calumet Heights knew Mom had been seeing Trevor; she wasn’t the most private person. And trailer parks don’t hold secrets, especially not when it concerns the so-called slut that everyone loves to hate. Even neighbours who had been friendly to Mom’s facewere more than eager to join the witch hunt. One woman claimed she had seen us loading him into the borrowed truck. Another implied this may not be Mom’s first time killing– she had always been high-strung. Unhinged. And then, of course, there was the hard evidence. Traces of Trevor’s DNA in the bed of the truck. In our carpet. On the skillet.

As my life fell apart around me, I obeyed Mom’s instructions and repeated ad nauseam the two statements she made me promise to stick to, no matter what:I don’t knowandI don’t remember. My only defence against a justice system that, I was quickly realizing, was not just at all.

In the years that followed, as I bounced from family to family in Ohio’s foster care system, and Mom died, and I grew taller and curvier and failed in school, that horrible afternoon when Trevor’s body crumpled at Mom’s feet became an obsession. Trevor had received justice. But Mom had not. Could it have played out differently? It turned and turned in my head like a never-ending carousel.

What if, instead of Mom reacting so instinctively, we’d arranged an ‘accident’? What if we’d bleached the truck… ripped out the carpet… chopped him into pieces and got rid of them one by one…

I killed Trevor and disposed of him in a thousand different ways over the next years as I suffered through another sleepless night, or rode the bus to school, or spaced out during another test I knew I’d fail anyway. Each time, I mentally followed the progression of each manner of death step by step. The pros, the cons, the risks. In the infinite realm of possibilities, there had to be one perfect kill, one that left no evidence behind. One that left me and Mom together.

I started to sleepwalk. Lose weight I didn’t have to lose. My collection of C and D grades dipped into Fs. But it just didn’t seem important to find the slope between two points or remember the dates of Civil War battles.

In a way, those obsessive nights were a waste of time. You can’t outsmart the past. Can’t redo it, can’t save yourself from mistakes already made and paid for. In another way, they prepared me to make my own plans, now. And maybe I’ve taken a foolish pride in how good I am at it; at choosing the perfect death for the best victim that raises the fewest questions. But now I’m wondering…wasMichael the smartest target? For such a high-profile person, was bathtub electrocution the best way? Should I have pushed him off the yacht instead? Facilitated an overdose that mightn’t have raised any questions at all? An injection might have been cleaner. It’s not like I was any stranger to that method– I’d used it before, with Sophie Coste, who went into very convenient liver failure. For Michael, I could have secured some heroin on Saint Vitalis, no problem, and…

I’ve reached the shoreline. I stop, letting the wind flatten my sweatpants against my legs, and look out at the water. The waves are rolling out the last of their passion, drawing their nearly spent energy up on to the sand for one final release, then sighing their way out. I let my memories of Mom and my lingering what-ifs sigh their way out, too. It’s the present I need to be worrying about, and this very real journalist who is way too interested in a death that does not concern him.

How?How did Daniel know all those details about Michael’s death? Why does he care?

I set off walking again, arms wrapped around my body,stepping over broken shell bits and piles of seaweed the storm cast up, avoiding the occasional beached blob of jellyfish. As I pick my way through the debris, following the wavy, ever-changing line between water and sand, my mind launches fragments at me. The bobbing orange Bluetooth speaker. The little craters pockmarking Michael’s chest.

That night by the pool wasn’t the only time Carli and I talked about Michael. One night, I saw her head for the sauna, so I followed her there. As luck would have it, we were alone.

As we sat in the heat together, she opened up again, just as I’d hoped she would. She was going to get on the pills Michael had been touting. It wasn’t as sketchy as I might think, she explained, because a legit doctor was involved; he helped a lot of celebrities. Michael had promised it would boost her career, and he hadn’t led her astray yet.

‘I know it’s a grim reality. But chunky doesn’t sell.’ She shot a half-grin my way. ‘Unless you’re Lizzo.’ She leaned back against the wall, sweat rolling down her face. ‘God, I love her.’

‘There’s room for more than Lizzo,’ I said, scraping my hair into a top knot to get it off my neck.

She made a noncommittal noise, and then we were silent. I knew better than to lecture her.

We sat there in the heat, and I knew in that moment what I had to do. I had my target.

‘Well, I’m going to hit the shower,’ she announced after a while. Before leaving the sauna, she stopped in front of me, dipped her face and kissed me on the lips. Short, salty. Somehow whimsical.

‘You’re sweet,’ she said, tucking a stray curl behind my ear.

‘And you’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘Just like this.’ If only she could see it. She leaned in for another kiss, this one slow, savouring, and I cupped her cheek. I pretended to enjoy it. It was only polite. But I didn’t actually feel anything towards her.

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