Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone
Kat Rosenfield
AMELIA
ANNE
IS
DEAD
AND
GONE
DUTTON BOOKS
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Published by the Penguin Group
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright
©
2012 by Kat Rosenfield
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Published in the United States by Dutton Books,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/teen
ISBN 978-1-101-57492-8
for Brad.
I owe you a solid.
Contents
PROLOGUE
T
he night before Amelia Anne Richardson bled her life away on a parched dirt road outside of town, I bled out my dignity in the back of a pickup truck under a star-pricked sky.
The back of a pickup truck. A country song, jukebox cliché. I was eighteen.
Afterward, the late-night mosquitoes floated out of the dark to settle on my thighs. Hovering and sucking at my skin, drawn in by the thick, mingling scents of sex and sweat and summer.
I swatted them away and lay back alone on the oil-stained steel, legs twisted into the scratchy cheap fabric of a K-Mart sleeping bag, propped dizzily on my elbows, examining the moisture collecting under me by the weak glow of the moon and the dashboard lights. James was a silhouette in the cab, nonchalantly smoking and tapping his knuckles against the window glass. His sweat dried on my skin. The sound of blood in my ears, rushing and receding with each breath, pulsed in time with the flare at the end of his cigarette. He inhaled, the cherry glowing, illuminating his mouth. His teeth were slick pearls behind the filter.
That afternoon, I’d walked across a rickety platform to collect my high school diploma from the principal—a beaming man with sweat-darkened patches on his collared shirt, a man whose mouth stretched with broad, smiling pride when the highest achievers of the graduating class laid one hand on the rolled slip of paper and the other in his outstretched palm. Hearty handshakes all around for the top kids: the bright future–havers, the scholarship winners, the team captains, the college bound.
He nodded at me, the salutatorian, the aspiring lawyer, bound for a high-powered life in a city far away. “I know you’ll go far,” he said as he pumped my hand.
But then, after the photos were taken and cheeks kissed and polyester gowns shucked off like a snake’s skin, I’d gone only as far as the outskirts of town, where James turned the truck down a rutted road through the woods, into an open field, and parked with a jolt on the rough grass.
Parked under a wide-open sky pricked by thousands of stars.
Parked his hand between my legs and half threw me out the tiny back window and into the flatbed, where my feet flew over my head and I scrabbled for purchase on slippery steel. I peered back at him; he smiled, shrugged.
“Ha,” he said.
“You can’t throw the salutatorian around like that,” I said.
A sleeping bag came through the window next, and then James himself, all long legs and arms. He was long, lanky, the most spiderlike boy I had ever seen. His Adam’s apple bobbed on his fleshless neck. Skinny wrists gave way to huge, bony hands with knuckles that gnarled and knobbed like an old man’s. He exited the cab, his clothes whispering against the glass. I lay down.
Graduation night, too-smooth boyfriend with a beater pickup and no diploma of his own, the sky full of stars and the night full of chirping crickets—a perfect, planned-out, teenaged tableau. This wasn’t the first time I’d been here, not even the first time I’d thought that I was too tired, the truck bed too dirty, but gone ahead anyway, letting him groan and shudder on top of me until he’d finished and lay his damp, musty hair against my chest. I liked the sex, sometimes. But more than that, I liked the closeness of afterward, the way his skinny arms would wrap around me and we’d lie, tangled and warm, breathing moist air into each other’s mouth. And this day, they’d told us, was ours. A step into the future. And now, right now, a moment for two bright young things on the verge of the rest of their lives to stop, strip, and spend one more night—one more hot, beautiful, stagnant summer—together in the back of a pickup.
James straddled my hips, grappling with the glinting button on my jeans, baring my legs and belly to the breathless openness of the blue-black sky. His shoulder pressed into my open mouth, and I could taste the damp cloth of his T-shirt against my tongue.
It was quick.
He didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound, and neither did I. Not until, with his sweat still drying on my skin and his scent still draped over my body, he pulled back and looked down at me. In the dark, his features were nothing but vague lights and shadows.
His voice came from somewhere above me.
“This is the last time we’ll ever do this.”
I laughed at first.
“We’ve got all summer,” I started to say. All summer to be here, be together. The words died on my lips as he looked back at me.
“We’re done,” he said. “This is done.”
I inhaled, one deep breath. Our eyes met. His were opaque. Mine were swimming. When he moved away, I only knew by the sudden sensation of air—cool and empty, moving over my thighs.
It was over in minutes, seconds, in the flutter of an eyelid. I gaped up at the place where his face had been moments before, blinking, seeing only the stars partially obliterated by a thick piece of hair that had fallen over my face. I thought about crying—thought about screaming, begging—but my throat had seamed itself shut. My jeans were twisted into an impossible knot around my knee.
I disentangled myself from the twisted sleeping bag. Kicked the crumple of denim off my leg, thinking to myself,
it’s a little late for dignity.
I laid back on my elbows and watched James. Watched him wrap his sensual mouth around one cigarette after another. Watched the sweat and slick evaporate from my thighs.
* * *
Later, I would sink down into a bathtub full of scalding hot water, lay my swollen eyelids against the cool porcelain, and shake so hard that my bones made soft clinking sounds against the tub. Later, I would toss back four painkillers against my clenching throat, and let my thoughts ramble and circle back again to James’s heavy-lidded eyes and hard, clutching hands. To an article I’d once read that included the phrase, “For many, the emotional trauma of a broken heart can manifest as real, physical pain”—and that I thought, at the time, was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.
In the corner, above the sink, the small black second hand of the clock silently ticked away toward midnight.
It was still graduation day.
CHAPTER 1
T
hey found her just after dawn on June 24th, crumpled awkwardly by the side of the road with a rust-colored blossom drying in the dirt beneath her.
Grant Willard, a rough man who worked the overnight shift at the stationer’s plant outside of town, was the one who saw her first. Later, he told anyone who would listen that he’d thought someone had left a bag of clothes lying in the dirt there, where the snaking curves of County Road 128 crossed briefly over Route 9 and then veered off toward the swelling, distant Appalachians.
“Looked like a damn rag doll,” he announced to an enthralled crowd at the local bar later that night. He tugged on the scraggly beard that grew in burnt-orange patches on his chin. Drops of Bud Light accumulated in his mustache.
“Just all jumbled up together like that, looked like someone threw her out of a truck and kept right on going.”
“Was she naked?” another man asked. He pronounced it
nekkid
. The bartender, a woman with a home perm and a mouth that bled lipstick in cracked, radiating lines, rolled her eyes and snorted.
“No, man,” Grant said. “She had on some kind of dress thing. She looked all crumpled up, kinda boneless, like, in a pile.” He paused. “Yeah, like a boneless pile.”
He liked the sound of that and said it a few more times, smacking the top of the bar for emphasis, before one of the ladies on a neighboring stool turned to him and said, “Grant, shut the fuck up.”
Grant, a local celebrity for a few weeks after the incident, didn’t mention that he’d been near to falling asleep at the wheel, drifting toward the shoulder when he recognized a human form in the dust at the side of the road. He had jerked the wheel hard to the left and then skidded to a stop just past the body, with his truck straddling the faded yellow centerline, gaping in the rearview mirror at what was definitely a woman’s delicate arm outstretched toward the pavement. He told no one the full truth. He had seen her, sure, but seen her too late. He had run over her fingers. Breakable bones, the tiny phalanges and brittle carpals, splayed and splintered in the gravel. Ivory dust mixed with rough rock, but no blood. She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath.
* * *
Within twenty-four hours, there wasn’t a person in town who didn’t know the story: how the dead girl lay in the dirt, how the state police blocked the road and avoided looking at her while they worked, how the day turned so swiftly, blistering hot. Choking waves shimmered, rose in stifling S curves from the pavement while the men mopped their foreheads and guzzled water and professed exasperated bafflement over the dead body that lay at their feet. Before they came, just after dawn, the hometown cops—both just twenty years old, both local boys—stood awkwardly over her as they waited for someone with more experience to show up. They shuffled in the dirt, admonished each other by turns not to disturb anything, stole sidelong glances at the body.
“What the hell was she doing out here, anyway?” said Stan Murray, who was still trying to regain his credibility after leaping away from the corpse fifteen minutes earlier when a passing truck caused tiny vibrations in her dead fingers.
“Aaaagh!”
he had screamed in a stunning soprano voice.
“It’s moving!”
Jack Francis, his blue polyester policeman’s shirt unbuttoned as far as decency would allow, exposing the kinky, straw-colored hair that spilled over his undershirt collar, rubbed a dust-darkened finger against his chin.
“She bled out right here,” he said authoritatively, hands in pockets and indicating the rust-colored stain on the ground with one pointed toe. “Someone probably brought her out here just to do this. Premeditated, and all.”
“Who is she?” asked Stan, reaching toward the ragged skirt bunched around spindly, ashen legs, studiously ignoring the stains in his single-minded quest for identification. Jack swatted his hand away.
“That’s a skirt, Murray. She doesn’t have any fucking pockets. Get your fingers away from the evidence.”
Stan squatted dangerously close, more blue polyester straining against his ample backside, holster sticking awkwardly off his hip.
“Jack, you ever seen anything like this?”
“Dead body, you mean?”
“No, everyone’s seen a dead body, man, I mean like this.” Stan’s gesturing hand passed over the woman—the life wrung out in bruises beneath her eyes, soaking and blooming and drying in the dirt, as he waved his palm over her breasts and the curve of her hip and her delicate, motionless face. Rice-paper skin slack over hard, hard bone. Even like this, you could see that she’d been pretty.
Jack turned away and stared up the road, away from the strange intimacy of Stan’s hand making its slow journey through the air above the dead woman, up at the heat-distorted shape that would soon reveal itself to be a caravan of police cruisers.
“Never seen a dead body at all, to be honest,” he muttered, gritting his teeth against the swirling dust and squinting at the line of cars, slowly coming into focus.
Jittery chatter gave way to machismo posturing as the police chief’s cruiser pulled up. Beside it, crime scene workers disembarked from a van and made cautious circles in the dust, searching. One of them held up a cigarette butt. Jack Francis visibly stiffened next to him. He turned toward the younger man. “Officer, something wrong?”
“Sorry . . . that’s mine.”
The chief of police, a man with a deeply creased face and shiny, bald pate, who for twenty years had been fighting the urge to call younger officers “son,” beckoned Jack toward him.
“Son,” he said, “it’d be a good thing if you tried
not
to single-handedly mess up the entire crime scene.”
Jack reddened. “No, sir.”
Stan Murray, emboldened by the presence of the other men, sidled over to the place where Officer Jack Francis stood, red-faced and with hands still jammed into his pockets.
“That was smooth.”
Jack didn’t answer. Stan’s smile faded into a look of discomfort.
“Fuck you,” said Jack, finally, but without venom. The two stood together, looking lost, too young to buy booze or grow a beard. They shifted from left foot to right, hands finding purchase in pockets, groping for cigarettes, chain smoking and straddling the faded yellow line that was criss-crossed by the snaking skid marks of Grant Willard’s unfortunate truck. They turned together to watch the by-the-book movements of the state police as they circled, measured, photographed, lifted cold limbs and then let them fall. They stared toward the specter of death that lay in a heap on the side of the road.
Innocence can only last so long, especially that kind that comes from growing up sheltered by quiet neighborhoods, immaculate concrete sidewalks, so much nothingness for miles around. Kids riding plastic Big Wheel bikes too fast down dead-end streets; spills taken on sharp corners; asphalt picked out of knees and elbows that bleed, scab over, then heal. Same faces, same streets, day in and day out, eyes that never witness anything more desolate than those empty, gravel-strewn county roads. And then, one day and all at once, the veil lifts. Jack and Stan, looking miserably at their feet and each other, knew this.
The dead girl, whose name no one knew yet, lay still. Her wide-open eyes, glazed, dead eyes, fixed their milky gaze on the Appalachians, looked up to the last patch of asphalt where County Road 128 turned a corner and vanished. The mountains swallowed it. The men looked at her as she looked away from them. Seeing Amelia, who saw nothing at all.