Undead Girl Gang(7)

“Mila.” She flattens my name like it’s a bug under her shoe. She doesn’t want to play with me anymore.

“I’m serious. You can’t legally try to talk me out of my religion. Church and state. The state is your employer, right? Technically that’s where your salary comes from?”

Her mouth snaps shut. She’s trapped, not that she’ll admit it. I watch her brain switch tactics. “Your best friend killed herself.”

“She’s dead, yes.”

Dr. Miller clasps her hands on top of the Red Folder of Mila. “She killed herself. Your parents seem concerned that you haven’t come to terms with this. It’s understandable. Denial is the first stage of grief, and there’s no rushing—”

My parents. Of course. Additional retribution for me threatening Izzy and Nora. Additional distance between them and me. This week I’ve finally tipped into feelings so big that all they can do is deny them entirely. Feelings so big that they’ve made my parents scared of me. Who knew that you could be so sad that no one would even be able to look at you out of fear of contracting your feels?

“Either way, Riley’s dead,” I say. “Why does it matter how it happened?”

“Are you familiar with the concept of a paranoid delusion?”

I suck the spit off my teeth. Now she’s pissing me off. “Do you talk to everyone you counsel like this or just the grieving ones?”

She ignores me. “Your belief that Riley didn’t take her own life is understandable. As her friend, you might feel responsible, like you could have done something to save her—”

“I probably could have saved her from being murdered, yeah—”

“—or that maybe something you said or did caused her to—”

I slam my hands down on her desk. A small wave of tea splashes over the side of her mug and starts to seep into a corner of the notepad that’s blank except for the word wix. The smell of spicy ginger—as biting and hot as my temper—fills the small space.

“I didn’t do anything to her. We went to a funeral, split up to do homework, and then someone drowned her in the creek. She had no history of self-harm, she wasn’t a depressive, her grades were fine, and she wasn’t even PMSing! All she did was cross the wrong person. And no one is doing anything about it. There’s a fucking murderer walking around and no one cares!”

“Language,” Dr. Miller chastises as she opens a desk drawer and retrieves a box of Kleenex. She whips out a tissue and blots the tea spill on her desk. “Riley’s death was ruled a suicide by the Cross Creek Police Department. Why do you think that you would know better than the professionals what happened to her?”

“Because I did the research.” I don’t tell her that I did the research at four in the morning because I haven’t been sleeping. Because every time I close my eyes, I can taste the creek filling my nose and throat, pulling me down with Riley. “Thirteen percent of teen deaths are homicides. Only eleven percent are suicides. It’s statistically more likely that she was murdered.”

She pitches the tea-stained tissue into the trash can under her desk. It lands with a hollow thud. “Except we were told that she wasn’t. Unfortunately, the likeliest solution isn’t always the correct one.”

A thought lights up my brain. “Then what about June Phelan-Park and Dayton Nesseth?”

Her eyes stray back to the red folder in a flash of panic. “Were you friends with June and Dayton, too?”

I snort at the idea. Me, friends with Nouns. “No. They were awful. But the police said they were suicides, too. What makes more sense? Three unrelated suicides or three connected murders? Have three people ever committed suicide within a week in Cross Creek before?”

“I don’t have those statistics for you.” Her upper lip twitches. She’s getting worse at hiding her disdain for me. “But I can tell you that Cross Creek has never had a serial killer before either. It’s not as common as movies make it look. I understand that this is a traumatic time for you. And it’s not unusual for someone to create a scenario that would be more palatable to them when faced with something awful. But your friends and family are worried about you.”

I lean back in my chair, flexing my shoulder blades into the hard plastic. “I don’t have friends. My only friend was fucking murdered.”

“The truth is that Riley took her life, and we may never understand why.”

I think of Xander at the memorial service: I’ll never understand why . . .

Xander is the only person who knew Riley as well as I did. Neither of us understands because it literally doesn’t make sense. She wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t leave us. She’d stay, she’d rail against the system. If she were here instead of me, she’d get justice even if she had to burn the world down around her to do it.

She’d do a spell to find the killer.





THREE



I’M SURE THE school—probably kind-faced Ms. Pine—will call my parents and tell them that I disappeared after third period. But I think I get to keep pulling the “my friend is dead” card for a bit longer. Like the next couple of years? Besides, since every adult in my life now agrees that Riley’s death has pushed me into a paranoid delusion—thanks for the cool new vocab, Dr. Miller—I might as well lean into it and say that my first counseling session sent me to a dark place. Which isn’t even a lie. The Yarrow house is hella dark.