Just Another Dead Girl Underwater

By the time the fisherman finds me, I'll have been dead for thirty-three hours, six minutes, and twenty-nine seconds. Eighteen hours since the police declared me missing. Fifteen hours since Zoe told my biology teacher that my tent was empty, that I hadn't returned from the party we'd snuck out to the night before. Careful, quiet, every twig a possible snitch. It was invigorating—our hearts hammering, the smell of pine and seaweed thick in the air, the moon a perfectly curved sickle.

Zoey gripped my sweaty palm, not letting me go till we had gained the group by the lake, passed the tents, and made out Billie Eilish's raspiness emanating from somebody's phone, playing loudly enough to discern the tune. The dark of the water could be so deceivingly cold when one of the guys passed us a beer that was kept cool right in its pitch-black midst. And I remember distinctly thinking: I couldn't tell where the lake ends and the forest begins.

The first article in the local newspaper reads: "Promising High School Student Missing After Night Swim in Lake." Soon enough, the searching duties are taken over by the water rescue and fire brigades. Dogs comb the area, noses trailing in the damp earth. A human chain forms, moving through the woods slowly, eyes scanning for any sign of me. Even a helicopter hovers overhead, its whirring blades slicing through the heavy, charged air. The search drags on for hours, stretching into the twilight, but the woods remain silent.

The police begin their questions: "When was she last seen? What was she wearing? Had she been drinking? Did she seem out of character? Angry? Sad? Suicidal?" No, no and no. She was singing, she was dancing, she seemed happy.

When the fisherman finds my body, miles away from where I was last seen, certainty sets in. An autopsy shows a hematoma on my head and purple spots behind my ears. The coroners examine the water in my lungs and confirm that I wasn't dead before entering the water. I died by drowning.

My classmates are questioned again. Zoe insists that she left early, but I remained back with her twin brother Tom, who has been in love with me since middle school. Tom's behavior does, however, seem suspicious to the police. He says he did not talk to me much, though several others saw us leave the party and be gone for a couple of minutes together. When my body is examined, traces of Tom's skin are found on my clothes, trapped between the fabric layers. Still, Tom sticks to his story, perhaps because the truth would embarrass him for some reason. Or maybe he's just afraid of the questions that would follow, and the scrutiny that might come with them.

Tom is right, you know, in the broadest sense. We really only exchanged three or four sentences that night, but only because Tom's mouth was otherwise occupied with me. I had relished every second of it, and looking back now, I wish I would have given him a real chance. But I worried too much about what everybody else might think. So, as usual, I brushed him off, left him to walk away from the party feeling hurt.

Cassandra says she heard Zoe and me fighting that night, right before Zoe came back to the campsite. She says we were arguing over Tom. Well, naturally she would say that. What else would two girls fight over but a boy? Cassandra even goes so far as to claim that Zoe pushed me, though Zoe swears that didn't happen. She denies talking about Tom at all, convinced it was something else, something that wouldn't surface until later, when it turned out our biology teacher was a suspect. But Cassandra sticks to her story.

There's always been something about Cassandra, is that she's just a shadow. The type of girl whose name the teachers forget two weeks into spring break. Kelly? Cindy? Carrie? Something with a 'C' though, right? So, she is willing to speak to police and be a participant of the investigation when opportunity comes. Unfortunately, Cassandra wasn't much help for investigators. She bounces at 2 a.m. just forty minutes before I die, leaving me alone with a group of guys who brought some 'tranquillisers' along for the ride. Sitting next to them was like becoming trapped in that fever dream where Jacques Derrida explains quantum physics at a frat party.

Anyways at some point, I decided it was time to return home. One of the guys asked me, casual, if I needed somebody to walk with me, and I said yes—and nobody moved. I turned back; through the cold, white light sifted by the pines, I could see the campsite dimly: only a few yards away, just through the trees. I had walked that path for days, never once threatened by the shadows in the bushes. But tonight, that sinking feeling in my stomach wouldn't go away.