It's Her Own Fault

In time, the town would forget, the story would become myth. Only to be brought up again late at night, by the patrons of the dive bar on Oak Street, murmuring into their pints. “Remember those girls?” The bartender would shoot them a warning glance. The winters outside were cold enough without certain topics sending shivers down your spine. But gossip has a life of its own. It twists under door frames, and lives in the corners of our minds. And it thrives in the space between school desks, written on scraps of paper passed hand to hand, whispered in bathroom stalls.

When the 911 call had come in the dispatcher had had a hard time hearing what the hysterical girl on the phone was shouting over the sound of wind in the background. It was a snowy night in February and the dispatcher had expected only to get calls of cars sliding off the road, old people slipping on ice.

“I can barely hear you miss, what happened?”

“SHE PUSHED HER INTO THE POND!”

Police vehicles and ambulances were directed to Round Pond, where in the small parking lot they found four girls huddled inside a Range Rover, one of them clutching her phone and still on the line with the dispatcher, and another teenage girl outside, beating at the windows and screaming to be let in. Police detained the screaming girl and finally were able to encourage the four others out into the open.

“THEY TOLD ME TO! THEY TOLD ME TO!” The girl screamed, pointing at the others as she was dragged into a police cruiser. Around 4 in the morning the drowned body of Taylor Heathley, age 17, was pulled from the water.

Marilynn shivered in the interrogation room, despite the heater in the corner. She couldn’t get the image out of her head, the white hand reaching up from the black water, manicure ripped and torn from scratching at the ice, the blood fresh on the snow. The five sets of hands pushing down, up to the elbows in freezing water. The drugs the girls had offered her were still in her system and she rocked back and forth, sweating and shivering. When detective Brian Thomas entered, two cups of black coffee in his hands, she was hyperventilating.

“Slow down, sweetie, calm down. Here, drink this.” He set one cup in front of her and sat across the table from her with the other. She moved her handcuffed hands unsteadily but settled her shaking fingers around the styrofoam.

“Ok, Marilynn, I want to talk about what happened tonight. Can we do that?”

She nodded.

“Ok,” Detective Thomas opened the folder he had brought with him. “I see that you just moved to town a month or two ago?”

She nodded again.

“And you had just become friends with Haley Mills and Sarah Bingham?”

“We’re not friends.”

“Sorry?”

“We’re not friends. They invited me to a party ‘cause I don’t know anyone here and I went and they gave me something.”

Detective Thomas frowned. “They gave you something? Something like drugs? Or alcohol?”

“Both...I still can’t...think right...”

“We’re checking on your bloodwork. You were pretty upset on the ride over here, do you remember that?”

She shook her head.

“You scratched Officer Wills pretty good...do you remember that?”

She shook her head slowly, suddenly realizing her nails had been cut for her, when did that happen?

Detective Thomas sat back, considering her, something dawning on his face. Something like pity.

“Ok, so you went to this party, were there other kids there, or just you six?”

“Just...just us…”

“Ok...Ok...so where was the party?”

“At the campfire, in the woods…”

“So, you guys had a little alcohol and you said the other girls gave you something? Was it a pill? Or something you smoked?”

“They said it was just weed...but...I don’t think it was…”

“What makes you think it wasn’t weed?”

“I’ve tried weed before...it doesn’t feel like that…”

“What did it feel like?”

“Like...nothing was real...like they were monsters…” Marilynn shook herself, trying to get rid of an image of Haley, her smile growing too wide for her face and revealing sharp teeth.

“What was Taylor doing?”

Marilynn shivered. Taylor, who hadn’t taken anything, gazing up at the other girls, her eyes wide, shivering, looking like she was about to cry. And Rachel and Sarah, pushing her, telling her to “run little rabbit, run!” Her face twisting, the tears starting to flow, the anger that had filled Marilynns’ chest without reason.

“She was crying...and Sarah…her face...”

“What did Sarah do?”

“Her eyes went black.”

“Black like, her pupils got wide?”

“No like...totally black,” tears streamed from her eyes, which didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular, “and her fingers got long like this long-” Marilynn held her hands as far apart as the handcuffs would let her. “And she had claws. And the other girls started to look like that too, and they all started barking at Taylor, like screaming at her, but not words.”

“Barking? You mean like how dogs bark?”

She nodded.

Detective Thomas sat back, watching her. “What happened next, Marilynn?”

Marilynn shut her eyes tight. Taylor’s tears like rivers, and her fear palpable in the air, and the anger rising higher in Marilynns’ chest.

“I hated her face...she looked scared and it made me mad...I wanted her to change her face…”

“What did Taylor do while you all were...barking at her?”

“She started crying. Haley got quiet and the others stopped yelling too. But...she didn’t look like a person anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her teeth were all pointy and small...her eyes were black and she was smiling at Taylor, and kept saying, ‘It’s your own fault’...”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I don’t know!” Marilynn wailed. “I want to go home, I want my m-mom!”

Detective Thomas waited for her sobs to subside and said quietly, “I think you have an idea of what Haley meant...what do you think she meant by ‘It’s your own fault’?”

Marilynn took several deep breaths, brushed at her eyes with the heel of her hand like a child.

“I know Haley and Taylor got in a fight...they didn’t hang out for a while in school...I didn’t know what it was about...but Haley said something about ‘screwing like a rabbit’...I’m not their friend, they just cornered me after gym yesterday and told me to hang out with them tonight...they said we were going to drink beer and that my mom would never know...I just thought...th-they w-wanted to b-be friends with me!” She wailed again, face in her hands.

“What happened after that?” Detective Thomas pushed a box of tissues across the table.

“Taylor got really scared...she said…’I’m sorry, I told you I was sorry’...And then Haley pushed her. She almost fell over, and Haley kept pushing her, and they all said ‘run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, rabbit’...” Marilynn started to repeat the phrase over and over and stopped when Detective Thomas placed his hand on hers.

“Did she run?”

“Yes…” She breathed. The flight through the woods, the darkness piling on as they howled, the black trees, the white snow, the sparkle of Taylor’s golden hair catching the moonlight, the flatness of the frozen pond, Taylor’s terrified face looking up from the ground.

“You pushed her down.”

Had she spoken aloud? She was still speaking…

“...she didn’t look right, her face was all covered in blood...and the others caught up and pushed her down again and the ice broke…”

Taylor, spluttering and screaming, her voice too shrill, too loud.

“...when she came back up we...pushed her down...I don’t know who started it but I helped...too loud…we let go and she wasn’t breathing anymore...and the others all turned and said, ‘it’s your fault, it’s your fault’ and they started running back to the woods...and they got in the car and they were going to leave me they wouldn’t let me in…oh god...I want my mom!”

She dissolved into sobs again.

Detective Thomas sighed deeply, closed the folder and stood up.

“Your parents are talking with your lawyer right now, they’ll all be in soon to see you. Take a deep breath, kid. Drink some coffee.”

Outside the interrogation room Detective Thomas met with the four Detectives who had been interviewing the other girls.

“Blood work came back, there was a small amount of PCP on that crappy weed they smoked,” said Detective Bend.

“What do you guys think, some kind of initiation?” asked Thomas

“I talked to Haley, she said that they just drank and smoked pot that she had gotten from some new dealer, she said it was an accident...but she said that after the chase in the woods they found Marilynn, alone, next to the ice. She said she did it,” said Detective Malone.

“Same with Sarah, she said Marilynn smoked more than the rest of them and just went crazy,” said Parker.

Detective Yun coughed, said, “I don’t think that’s what happened.”

The four others looked at him.

“I interviewed Gemma Vaught...She was pretty high, but she said that Haley had a fight with Taylor, something about a boyfriend, and she said they were going to scare Taylor, give her a big shock. She said they should bring along Marilynn since she didn’t know anyone and if they got caught with the beer they could blame it on her. I think they were planning to use her as a scapegoat if things got out of hand. Gemma also said something about taking the drugs to have an excuse…?”

“They could blame any harm done to Taylor on being high…” murmured Bend.

“Jesus…” whispered Parker.

“But why...I mean, they beat her up! The amount of blood on that ice...why drown her too?!” cried Malone.

“Sarah...it was like she didn’t even care where she was...Like, she was bored…”

“Haley too.”

“So, what, they don’t care they just took part in the murder of their friend?!”

“Marilynn said the other girls looked like monsters...she hallucinated that they were monsters and Taylor was like...I guess prey to them…” Thomas rubbed his eyes tiredly. “It might have started out as some kind of prank but I guess the drugs got on top of them. Turns out to be a pretty good excuse I guess…”

Suddenly, singing and wailing started coming from one of the interrogation rooms. The four detectives went to room 5 and looked in through the glass panel on the door on Gemma Vaught, eyes still rolling, pupils fully dilated, and handcuffed hands clapping.

“Did her fingers look extra long to anyone else?” thought Thomas.

Laughing loudly, she cried in a broken sing-song voice, “She did it to herself! She did it to herself! It’s all her fault the little rabbit, she did it to herself!”