xx.

Meet the other guy, try not to worry.

Shay Sylvester is going to be sorry. 

Not because of the gang of surly boys from his high school who are on their way to pound him, no; 

Not because his mom and dad have found the little baggie of weed he keeps inside the helmet of his Sammy Sosa bobble-head. 

Not because his older brother Sumner has gotten it into his head that Shay’s got a thing for his girl. 

Shay Sylvester is going to be sorry that he took the path through the woods home today. 

It’s hot and muggy, as if someone cranked up the thermostat and then threw a soaking wet blanket over the whole town. Stifling. 

Cicadas are chirping and clicking, the pressed soil of the path has a little more give than usual beneath his feet. 

Shay is punishing himself for some unknown reason. He could have called for a ride, he’d be in his air-conditioned bedroom watching illegally streaming TV shows on his laptop by now. 

The mosquitos are killer this year, bigger and meaner than any summer Shay can recall before. The thick, sopping air is filled with their incessant buzzing. 

He doesn’t just get bites, he gets welts. 

Pink-red raised patches on his skin like very itchy continents on a lonely map. 

Shay hears the snapping of twigs, rustling of leaves. He supposes it must be a fox or a coyote, spooked by his presence. Maybe a deer. Even a large rabbit. 

Okay, maybe not a rabbit. 

Shay hears the unmistakable sound of unzipping, and this time he stops in his tracks, waits for something else, another noise to make the first noise okay. 

What he hears instead is what sounds like muffled sobbing, heavy panting, muttered cursing. 

He hears the sweaty sound of skin slapping against skin, hard. 

Shay Sylvester is already starting to feel something burbling up in his gut, something a lot like fierce regret. 

He regrets taking this path today, because for some reason, he knows. 

He knows that what he hears isn’t the sticky, rushed copulating of two teenagers. 

Shay Sylvester takes a shaky breath, pushes his hair off of his forehead, which is damp with a sudden flood of sweat. 

He hides behind the trunk of a wide, mossy tree. Waits. 

What else can he do? 

He’s seventeen, strong enough for his age, but what if the person doing the unzipping and the grunting has a knife? What if he has a gun? 

It seems like hours before the man comes out onto the path, huge stains under the armpits of his touristy t-shirt. It has palm trees and a cute, perky mermaid cartoon on it. A little bit of kitsch, incongruous with the increasingly upsetting tableau unfolding. 

He isn’t anything special, Shay thinks he’s probably seen the man around before. 

Sandy hair under a ball cap, bushy little mustache, more than a few extra pounds on him. 

He looks like the kind of guy who goes bowling a lot, is a regular at the diner, lives alone in his parents’ old house. 

The man heads down the path towards the neighborhood, whistling something jaunty and crunching twigs merrily beneath his boots. 

Shay Sylvester feels sick to his stomach, but as soon as the man has been out of sight for a few minutes, he rushes into the copse of trees the man had come from.

Shay sees her lying there in a patch of what he is almost totally sure is poison ivy. 

Naked, posed like she’s sleeping. 

Her body is perfect, teenaged-perfect, and if it weren’t for the blood pooling under her head, he’d have thought she was just passed out. 

He tries not to, but everything he ate for lunch and probably breakfast comes clawing angrily up his throat and spilling out onto the dirt below. 

She’s so beautiful and so sad just lying there, and when Shay finishes hurling, his gut twists again because it’s Emilia Fisher. 

Emilia Fisher who’s lived next-door to him all his life, who tagged along for kickball games and ghosts in the graveyard, who had turned shockingly pretty over the last year or two. 

Little Emmy Fisher who he’d asked to the Spring Formal, who’d said yes. 

Shay Sylvester goes numb in the sticky, muggy forest. 

The sunlight streams through the trees, fractured, making stained glass patterns on the skin of dead Emilia. 

There is a patch of wildflowers beneath her head, stained by the startlingly crimson puddle of her blood. 

Shay Sylvester drops to his knees because he doesn’t know what else to do. He stays that way for what could be a few minutes or a few hours. 

When he finally goes home to tell his parents, to get the police, he realizes he’s got poison ivy-rash running all up his legs. 

Author's Note

r&r, let me know how you like it :)

Reviews

[Mark Emerson]

you have a real talent i cant believe how good these are i'm kinda scared to reed the next one

[Rhiannon]

thank you thank you *tips hat*