“I think maybe… he grabbed me and you guys jumped him to protect me?” Soojin extemporized as she played with one of her barrettes, opening and closing it with a click. I felt like I’d stumbled into an awful after-school improv theater class project. Just a bunch of girls, doing an enrichment exercise, using our creativity to invent an alibi for why we killed our teacher.
“I still think that… technically… this was murder. It wasn’t like with Scott.” As I said it, I glanced at Heather, who knew better than any of us what it was like with Scott.
She looked back and shrugged. “Do you want to go to jail for life because we killed a guy who was going to kill us, or kill some other girls in the future? For all we know, he’s killed girls before.”
“Look, I’m not saying he wasn’t heinous and evil and obviously… I’m the one…” I trailed off. I wasn’t actually sure who among us had delivered the killing blow. It was a blur of glass shards and globby viscera in my memory. But I was the one jamming thumbs into his eye sockets. I was the one holding him down.
“So just in case…” Lizzy’s tone held a burr of annoyance. “Let’s settle on a story. Setting aside all this other stuff. Because I think we all agree that we shouldn’t go to jail over some fucking assface molester.”
“Okay.”
“The story is that he invited us to his house, tried to get us drunk, and said we had to take off our clothes. Then he grabbed Soojin, and we attacked him without thinking.”
“And we didn’t go to the police because we were so scared.”
“We didn’t realize he was dead when we left.”
“Oh yeah, that’s good. We thought we’d only beaten him up.”
“Are you okay with that, Beth?” Everybody looked at me.
“Sure.” I nodded vigorously, but some unnamable feeling compressed my chest so hard that black dots fizzed at the edges of my vision.
Our homicidal improv exercise turned out to be overkill in the end. A week later, the story hit the papers everywhere. It wasn’t a snippet in The Orange County Register like when Scott died. The cops claimed they’d discovered the mastermind of a child porn ring, right at Irvine High School. They suspected that Mr. Rasmann had been murdered by some of his co-conspirators. We all got letters on official Irvine High letterhead, explaining that nobody had reported any wrongdoing at the school, but they were doing a “thorough investigation” anyway. They helpfully included a list of churches we could call for counseling.
Also, apparently, Soojin hadn’t been entirely wrong about the serial killer thing. Police were reopening the unsolved murder case of a girl who went to an L.A. high school where Mr. Rasmann had been a student teacher. Several of the evening news shows ran pictures of her and said the police had evidence that she was one of his victims. One of the girls in his look book, perhaps? I should have felt better, but instead it made me feel worse.
I couldn’t sleep, but I couldn’t open my eyes either. My mom knocked loudly on my door at noon on a Friday. “Lizzy’s on the phone! Do you want me to tell her to call back whenever you decide to get out of bed?”
Waking up was like swimming through reeking hydrocarbons. “I’ll get it. I’ll be down in a sec.”
Bleary and exhausted, I went downstairs and picked up the phone. “Meet at the usual place?” Lizzy sounded breezy. “Soojin and Heather are coming out too.”
“Sure. Can you pick me up?”
Lizzy and I met up with Soojin and Heather at the mall cookie shop across the street from UC Irvine. We shared sugar and cigarettes in our favorite spot at the top of an unnecessarily elaborate bridge leading to the quad where a scene from one of the Planet of the Apes movies was filmed in the ’70s.
Heather kept high-fiving us. “Heroes! We are goddamn heroes!”
Lizzy grinned and blew a smoke ring.
I still thought we should have done it differently. But I couldn’t say that out loud. It was getting hard for me to keep track of all the things I couldn’t talk about: the sex, the abortion, the murders, and my worry that we’d done something really, really wrong. Nothing felt real. The physical world was a blob of light at the end of a long, elastic tunnel that kept squeezing shut.
“Who’s our next target?” Heather rubbed her hands together and cackled.
I knew she was joking, but suddenly I couldn’t deal. “Hey, so… I promised my dad that I would get all my chores done this afternoon,” I said. “I think I’m gonna take off.”
“Are you sure? Do you need a ride?” Lizzy sounded genuinely concerned.
“Naw, I’ll take the bus.”
As I walked away, I heard Heather ask Lizzy if I was doing okay.
“Obviously she’s dealing with a lot of shit…,” Lizzy replied.
And then I was out of earshot. I really did need to do my chores, but first I wanted to sit in the middle of all the huge eucalyptus trees at the center of the UCI campus. The place was pretty deserted in summer, except for a few wandering college students who ignored me. If I concentrated hard enough, I could pretend I was one of the trees, eating light and sucking energy from soil.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
I almost jumped up and ran. It was the woman from the night of the murder, sitting on the other end of the bench. What was she doing here? Suddenly, I couldn’t stop feeling Mr. Rasmann’s eyeballs under my thumbs. My hands shook and ice clotted under my skin, but I couldn’t move. The woman wasn’t in that Gunne Sax outfit anymore. Now she looked relatively normal in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. In the light, I could see her long hair was streaked with gray, and her tiny wireframe glasses looked like something out of a Merchant Ivory movie.
“It’s you again.” I was too freaked out to say anything else.
“We really need to talk.”
“Yeah, I think we do.”
She looked relieved. “Oh good. That wasn’t what I thought you’d say.”
“Who the fuck are you, and how do you know Lizzy and me?” It came out harsher than I intended, but I was too strung out to translate my feelings into words a grownup could handle.
“Beth, this is going to sound really strange, but bear with me.” The woman took a deep breath and resettled her glasses on her nose. When she spoke again, there was a tremor in her voice. “I’m you. From the future.”
My brain was doing the thing that happens when a PC crashes and the screen turns a blank, menacing blue. I couldn’t fully process anything. Finally I found my voice. “Isn’t that against the law?”
“Well, it’s not technically against the law unless I tell you something that would limit your agency or give you an unfair advantage? But yeah, it’s a gray area. I could get in a lot of trouble.”
I scrutinized her face, looking for traces of myself, but all I saw was a middle-aged stranger. Our conversation had gone from unnerving to seriously dangerous, and I considered the possibility that every fucked-up thing in my life had finally driven me insane. Given that, I might as well find out what this possibly imaginary person had to say. “So… what are you… am I… doing here?”
“I’m here to tell you to get away from Lizzy. She’s going to keep killing people and it’s… you know it’s wrong. Plus, she’s a toxic friend. She’s not good for you.”
Those were words I had not allowed myself to think and I desperately wanted to change the subject. “You’re a traveler? I thought we were going to study real geology…”
“A lot changed after you… after the murders. I can’t tell you much, but it was really awful. I wanted a totally different life. I changed our name, too. I go by Tess now.”
“Are you serious? I hate that name.”
“Remember how we used to hate dark chocolate in elementary school? Now it’s the best ever, right? Things change.”