Then Zach pressed his lips to my neck.
Suddenly, trailing after Tasha yet again didn’t seem so appealing. I tilted my head back and let him do his thing, trying to relinquish the knowledge that this would be awkward and involve an unsexy amount of spit.
I caught one last glimpse of Tasha’s fiery red hair before I closed my eyes. She looked so small, all alone in the dark.
The sheriff found us, parked at a stop sign. He knocked on the window and we broke away, mortified. I never made out with Zach again after that. We didn’t even kiss. I mean, nothing kills the mood quite like getting busted. But when it’s by the police, and it’s because your best friend is missing, not even the strongest of hormones can prevail. I stopped talking to him.
And then they found her body. Then I didn’t talk to anyone.
There were five other girls besides Tasha. At first they thought it was a one-time deal, that Tasha was horribly unlucky and nothing like this would ever happen again. But then they started finding more girls, all in sunflower fields, all chopped up into itty-bitty pieces. Then it was a serial killer. Then it was worthy of national news coverage and the FBI.
Then it was the Sunflower Murders.
I went out to Tasha’s field last week. You know, where they found her. It’s bare now. The guy who owned the land got sick of the media coverage and mowed the flowers down. When I found out they were gone, I was angry. Everyone in town seemed so relieved, but I was livid.
Tasha was dead. I understood that. But she was still there, in that sunflower field. If she was going to be dead, then she should at least be somewhere beautiful. Not in an empty field.
So I went.
It was two in the morning, and there was no moon and everything was bathed in black. I thought I’d feel closer to her there, but I was as empty as the field. I tried lying down; the earth was dry and scratched my face. There were no sunflowers. There was no sun.
There was no Tasha.
I stared at the stars and waited for the tears to come. They never did, and when the sun came up, I went home. It was like I hadn’t even gone. So I thought that if I wrote it down, it would help. But it hasn’t. Nothing’s changed.
My best friend was murdered, and I made out with a boy in his truck. My best friend was all alone when someone grabbed her from behind, and I worried about what to do with my hands.
She had unspeakable things done to her that everyone spoke about anyway, on national news, with official-sounding words meant to mask the unpleasantness of it all, and I let Zachary Feldman do things to me that would’ve been whispered about in locker rooms and hallways if everyone weren’t already talking about poor Natasha Robeck. The lost little girl. The angel in heaven.
The first of the six Sunflower Murders.
I’m sorry, Tasha. I’m so, so sorry.
Carrie Ryan
Almost Normal
It was stupid of us and we knew it. The news said we had a few more days before the dead made their way this far south, and Wylie was the one to suggest we have one last blowout. The roads were too clogged to leave town and everyone’s parents were freaking out about how to secure their houses, so it wasn’t hard to sneak away once night fell.
All the restaurants were closed and everywhere else was packed with panic. It was Sarah who saw the lights down the hill and made the decision for us. “The coasters are still running,” she said. And sure enough, when I squinted my eyes up tight, I could see the streaks of cars sailing over the humps and ridges of the monstrous metal serpents writhing along the horizon.
The amusement park was still charging admission, which we all agreed was pretty stupid, but what else would we spend our money on, anyway? Almost overnight, currency became useless as, before the military hit town, people just broke into stores and took what they wanted. Apparently no one thought about breaking into the amusement park. That was one of the strangest aspects of the whole thing: the rules that persisted and the ones that were quickly lost.
My family was no exception to jettisoning inexpeditious rules, even though I know it bothered my mom an awful lot. I remember that first morning hearing my parents arguing about how they’d get enough food to stock up the pantry, and my father was telling my mom they had to get to Costco with the minivan and fight their way inside.
There were bodies piled up outside the store, she’d told him. They’d been shot by packs of soccer moms who’d taken control of the place and were only doling out food to people they knew.
“It’s a good thing Connor was an all-state keeper this year,” my father told her, and that was that. We got a full car of food because in the semifinal games of the state championship, I’d guessed their star forward would fake left and shoot high center. I’d been right and blocked it.
And here I was, no one caring about trivialities like high school soccer anymore because everything in our world was falling apart except for these roller coasters. As kids, this place had been our Mecca. During the summer, Sarah, Bart, Wylie, and me would spend every waking moment trying to convince our parents to drive us out here, swearing we’d take on any chore imaginable just for the chance to spend a day sticky with sweat and cotton candy, standing in line for the moment when our hearts would race loud and hard.
It was our own kind of rapture, the rides so fast they’d strip away all layers and leave us bare until the car came skidding back into the wheelhouse for the next group of kids to worship.
Though none of us said it, that’s what we were looking for: we thought we wanted to forget the crushing imminence of the end of our world, the dead walking toward us with a slow and steady determination.
But really we wanted to recognize the end of the mundane: unreciprocated crushes, failed tests, blank college applications sitting in a drawer waiting. These things that had once been so all-encompassing but were now rendered moot.
The park was emptier than we’d ever seen it before, which made sense with everything going on in the world. People were out looting stores for food and weapons, but there was nothing to take from this place. Besides, I think most people liked the idea that something could still be going on as it had before. You could see the lights of the coasters from nearly anywhere in town, and staring at the spinning and whirling of them almost made us forget about the truth of our new reality.
Our little group wasn’t the only one that had been drawn to the park that night. We stood in line for the Tower of Doom behind a slew of kids from the class below us, and we saw a few graduates attempting to bribe one of the Western bar slingers to tap a keg for them.
Beyond that there were several families trying to pretend that spending the night in an amusement park before the end of everything familiar made the most sense in the world. I had a hard time watching them all, kids’ eyes so bright with excitement over the heady combination of missing bedtime and getting access to the rides after hours, and the parents trying not to shatter under the strain.
“How many of them know they’re not going to make it?” Wylie asked, nodding his chin toward a family hovering by one of the maps to choose their next ride.
Sarah slipped her hand into mine. But it was too late. Already Bart and Wylie were turning it into a game, muttering “lunch” every time they collectively voted that a pack of strangers would soon become food for the dead.
Except we weren’t in the amusement park that night to remember that everything was falling apart, we were there trying to remember that once it had all been held together by something indefinable. Maybe we wanted to prove we weren’t friends just because we shared a second-period class or sat at the same table together at lunch but that there was something deeper bonding us and we wanted to hold on to that until the very end.