The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(87)

That’s the thing about high school. Even social outcasts can’t help but overhear gossip. Like how kids were already daring each other to go out in the woods in the middle of the night, to the place where Lizzie killed herself. It was turning into another site on the Griffin Mills haunted tour. First stop, the Griffin Mansion; next up, the Lizzie Lovett suicide grove. With an extra reputation boost for anyone brave enough to stay there all night.

Pretty soon, it would be like Lizzie had never been a real person at all.

If Enzo were there, I could have told him it scared me how Lizzie was already becoming irrelevant. He would have understood. He would have turned my feelings into a painting, allowing me to distance myself from them.

Or maybe he would have made everything more complicated.

I folded the map and set off.

When Lizzie had walked through the woods, there hadn’t been a path. But with so many people trampling through during the past month, a trail was starting to form.

I wished I had been the first to follow her. But my feet stepped in the same places hers had, and my clothes got snagged on the same underbrush. I tried to see the woods the way she would have on the night she died.

What had she been thinking when she walked through the trees? Was she scared? Was she sad? Was she happy that she was making her escape?

When I found out about Lizzie, it was the first time I considered that I was eventually going to die. I was going to die, and so were my parents and my brother and my friends and everyone in the world. Death is the only thing in life that’s for sure going to happen. Didn’t someone famous say that once? It’s true. One day, we’ll all die.

It was the mystery of death that I found most awful. Will it be fast or slow? Will you be young or old? Will it be easy or painful? There were so many ways to die. Accidents and sicknesses and even more terrible ways, like murder. Leaving your house is dangerous. Staying inside is dangerous. The odds are against everyone, and it seemed like dumb luck so many people stuck around for eighty or so years. And that bothered me.

I was going to die. But I didn’t know when.

What if Lizzie thought the same thing? What if that was part of why she killed herself? Maybe she hated being out of control, knowing that someone or something else was dictating her fate. Because it’s really not fair. A drunk driver runs a red light, and you end up dead. A guy in a movie theater coughs on you, and you catch some rare, fatal disease. You sit in class minding your own business, and there’s the kid from sixth period holding a gun in his hand. Why should other people be in control? Why should someone else get to choose when you die?

Maybe Lizzie decided the world was crazy, and it was always going to be crazy, and there was nothing she could do about it. But her death? That was another story. That was something she could control. She could beat everyone to it, do it her way.

On the other hand, I’d learned from Enzo’s stories that sometimes it’s better not knowing the ending. The most magical part of life is the mystery. When she killed herself, Lizzie gave that up.

The path I was on was hard to navigate, and when Lizzie walked there at the end of summer, it would have been even more overgrown. And she did it in the dark. Did she have a spot already picked out? Or did she just walk until she was too tired to go any farther? How did she manage to take step after step, knowing what waited for her at the end?

I heard a noise behind me, something like a twig snapping. I scanned the woods. Nothing was there. Unless it was Lizzie’s ghost.

What about ghosts? And what about heaven? Did Lizzie believe in it? Most religions consider suicide a sin, so Lizzie probably wasn’t religious. But did that mean she didn’t believe in the afterlife at all?

I wasn’t too sure about the afterlife either. My dad always said that he didn’t know one way or another, but he wasn’t going to worry about it while he was still alive. My mom would say people have different beliefs about where we go when we die, and maybe everyone is right in their own way. I wished I knew what Lizzie believed. I wished I’d asked Enzo. But why would I have? I thought we were chasing a werewolf, not a dead girl.

It crossed my mind that I might not know the spot when I got there. Maybe I would walk past it and go deeper and deeper into the woods until I was hopelessly lost, more lost than Lizzie. But I didn’t need to worry. After hiking down a steep ravine—where I was very aware of the danger of slipping and breaking a leg—I saw a piece of crime scene tape still tied to a tree.

I froze and sucked in my breath. I’d sought out the site of Lizzie’s death, but I hadn’t anticipated how much it would hurt to actually be there. It was like being punched in the stomach.

The woods around me weren’t special. There was nothing to indicate why Lizzie had chosen that spot for her last moments. I looked around for anything she might have left behind—an earring that had fallen out, a shoe that had been kicked off. But there was nothing. I wasn’t even sure which tree was The Tree.

The woods had swallowed Lizzie’s secrets. She had lived, and she had died, and now, there was no trace of her. Elizabeth Lovett was just a name in a newspaper article, a statistic, someone people used to know.

Another crack came from behind me. It sounded like a bone snapping, something crawling out of a grave. I spun around, part of me expecting to see Lizzie, purple skin and ligature marks around her neck, asking me why I was disturbing her.

But it wasn’t Lizzie. It was my brother.