Beth Death

Chapter One: Beth Death

Damn my vivid imagination. Living next door to dead bodies has clearly made my already morbid thoughts go off-the-charts sick. I swear I hear voices coming from the funeral home. Like, I know there’s no one in there but my stepdad––well, no one living anyway. And if he’s in the house, then there’s no one out there. But I swear I hear people calling me. It’s really freaky.

And now I’m hearing them at school. I peek down the hall toward the bathroom where the eerie noise is coming from. Somewhere deep inside me I know the spooky sounds aren’t real, but I still slam my locker closed and speed-walk to the exit of this farce of a senior school. More noises assault me . . . but unfortunately, these are not just my imagination. Not a dead body, either. I don’t have that much good luck.

“What are you staring at, Beth Death?” Freya, the sparkliest dazzle of them all, is standing there with her sidekicks. She’s wearing pink eyeshadow with glitter in it. Totally perfectly applied, and the exact same shade as her lipstick. The whole group has the same glittered look with matching rolled up school skirts—so short their butts are practically hanging out.

I totally wasn’t staring at her, but her comment draws my attention, so now I am, like a rabbit trapped in headlights. My lips might even hang a little bit open. I’m caught in that siren spell everyone always seems to fall into around her. Well, maybe not the same siren spell as everyone else. They’re all wrapped up in how pretty and popular Freya is. It’s more the kind where you can’t believe something is happening. Like a train about to crash, and you know it’s about to hit the wall, but you just can’t bring yourself to turn away.

Freya’s perfectly pink lips curl as she snarls, “I’m sorry, I’m not into girls, especially someone all black-and-white like a living Instagram filter. And neither is my sister, so you can stop that daydream. She wouldn’t give someone like you the time of day.”

How did she know my thoughts about Jessica? And I can’t help it if our school uniform is black and white. Well, okay, I may have added a black jacket and a healthy amount of black eyeliner and lipstick to match my hair and nail varnish. But that’s just as valid a choice as her infantile pastel.

“I think it must be mandatory for their weird family,” adds her Barbie-wannabe buddy, Lucy. “Dress like a corpse and maybe it’ll get your dad’s attention. . .”

Her lackies all snigger, like some weird cult with perfect blonde hair and cotton-candy manicured nails. Their giggles scratch the air, like forks on a plate. My eyes dart around the hallway. Luckily, it’s the end of the day, and most kids have gone home or back to their boarding rooms.

Barbie Number Three, aka Rachel, nods eagerly. “You’re so totally right, Lucy. No one would dress like that willingly. Daddy issues.”

A flash builds in the back of my chest and shoots straight through my fingers, a harsh cutting wave of heat. There’s no quicker way to absolutely make me lose my cool than bringing up my family.

For one, he is NOT my dad, and for two, Freya and her sister Jessica may be the school darlings, but underneath their superficial beauty there’s literally nothing pretty.

Lucy accuses, “Freya, I think she was staring at your arse!”

Rachel snickers, pressing a hand to her mouth. “Creepy. Who knows what she would do to a person!”

I defend myself, “No, I’m staring at you, trying to imagine you with a personality.” Hopefully that’ll be the end of it.

But Freya just won’t let it go. “How many emo kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

Her lookalikes demand an answer.

“None, they all sit in the dark and cry. Are you going to cry, Beth Death?”

There’s a curl to her words when she says it, a little sharp up tick like she really thinks she’s the funniest thing in the world. Like that joke is going to make absolutely anyone laugh.

Well, it makes her minions laugh, but I’m not sure they count as people. They’re more like the things you grow in tubes to mimic each other.

“She looks like she’s been crying already,” says Lucy, with another tittering laugh. It can’t be real, right? I mean, there’s no way she’s actually got a laugh that grating.

Rachel joins in, “Or her make up looks that bad because she put it on in the dark.”

“Maybe she’s trying to look like her dead neighbours,” says Freya.

My head is about to boil; steam practically coming out of my ears. The smart thing to do would be to hold my tongue and go the other way, but it’s hard to be smart when you’re brain dead after a boring day at school. Plus, she’s literally right there, staring at me. My tongue is loose. My temper is hot. I can feel the words slowly breaking free.

And…

Here…

They…

Come…

“Drop dead, Freya!”

I regret my response immediately. My comebacks are usually way more witty, like, “I’m thinking that someday you’ll go far, and I hope you’ll stay there,” or “I’d give you a nasty look, but I can see you’ve already got one.”

But no. I come up with something a six-year-old would say. Of course I do.

Chapter Two: A Deathly Silence

Drop dead Freya!

I wake up with yesterday’s words echoing in my head. A totally lousy rating on the burn scale. I’m year 11, not primary school.

I face palm my forehead, sit up to crank up my Bluetooth speaker and drop backwards on my bed, exhaling a deep groan.

My gaze sweeps across my bedroom, taking in the folded laundry on the end of my dresser waiting to be put away, and the growing pile of dirty clothes at the side of my bed where I’d slung my uniform onto yesterday. I’ve tried to make my room as dark as possible, but Mum drew the line at painting the walls black, so they’re still the same rosy cream shade as when we moved in eight months ago.

“Beth! How many times have we told you to stop playing your music so loud?” My stepdad’s voice ruins the song.

Is he standing outside of my bedroom door, or just in the hallway? I can’t tell. My hands press over my face, and I dig my fingers into the skin just above my eyebrows.

Just because he works with dead people shouldn’t mean the living can’t make any noise. But he’s got all kinds of hang-ups with making sure the house stays quiet and presentable. That’s probably why Mum wouldn’t let me paint my walls black.

It’s too unpresentable for HIS house.

I turn my music a single digit quieter as a token effort and sink back on my bed with my eyes closed. My stepdad’s place might be bigger and nicer, but our old place was way better, with just me and Mum. There was a garden out front, and I had my own bathroom, too, where now I’ve got to share.

More importantly, our old house didn’t have a funeral parlour attached, earning me the shame-name ‘Beth Death’ at the shitty school I transferred to last month. The joke’s on them, though. I actually like it. ‘Beth Death’ has a ring to it and, best of all, keeps people away.

God, I hope it does today.

Late for school, I speed walk in my clunky boots, cursing myself, once again, for taking too long to apply my black eyeliner this morning—I can’t leave home without it. I have my Beth Death image to live up to. Plus, I want to look as different from those prissy popular girls as possible.

I tug my faux leather jacket tighter in the crisp morning air. My breath comes out in white puffs like the time I tried one of my stepdad’s cigarettes. It’s way colder out than I had been expecting, but whatever. I like my jacket, even if it’s not like, the best at keeping me toasty. It’ll be totally fine once I get to school, anyway.

I turn the corner to be bombarded by blue lights flashing around the school. My brows pinch in confusion and my steps falter.

What the heck is going on?

The whole school is gathered outside. Not just the students, but the teachers too. I dash across the street and onto school grounds, eager to listen in on the new gossip.

A flood of tension and whispers fill the air––everyone mumbling to the person next to them, stuff I can’t quite successfully earwig. Nobody speaks to me, which is nothing new. The closest I get to any interaction is a dirty look from the head of the netball team––stuck-up cow. Still, it rubs me the wrong way this morning. More so than usual.

Whatever is going on, it’s clearly a big deal. You would think someone would be willing to let me in on the secret, right?

Curiosity pulls me through the crowd. I crane my head this way and that but can’t see through the swarm of students. It’s like trying to figure out what’s going on from the very top of an ant hill.

“Hey, what’s happened?” I ask a skinny kid I recognise from some of my classes, but he just shrugs and turns away from me, pointedly shuffling elsewhere. I bet he knows what’s going on and doesn’t want to tell me as Freya’s put this big ugly mark on my back.

I can taste my bad mood on my tongue, and I use my elbows maybe a little more than needed to make my way through the crowd towards the source of all the swarming.

The commotion is coming from outside the boarders’ building, where some of the students live, so I head towards it, my boots trample the manicured grass, trimmed in precise angles to resemble a chess board. This school is so pretentious. The teachers are trying to hold back a growing crowd of students. The creepy feeling in my gut tells me nothing good has happened—like Mr. Humphries, my annoying history teacher, having a heart attack.

I’ve always had the ability to sense when something bad was up. The kind of bad you don’t turn into a joke by the end of the week. I knew the moment the police told Mum there had been an accident four years ago. A deep feeling in my gut that someone is dead.

I have that feeling now.

Everyone is too keen to see what’s going on and snap some footage on their phones to notice me as I bob and weave my way through the masses. There’s another ambulance and two more police cars, too. So yeah, this is like––a huge deal. I’ve never seen so many emergency services in one spot.

At my old school, we had a kid that went into shock after eating something he was allergic to, and he ended up getting taken off in an ambulance to the hospital. But only one vehicle had shown up for that.

One.

Not six.

I’m about to slip between the two police cars when someone grabs the back of my shoulder.

“I can’t let you through there.” The woman is short, but her grip on my shoulder is strong as iron.

Who is this person? Wonder Woman? No, she’s wearing a paramedic outfit.

“I just want to take a look,” I mumble, craning my neck to look between the gap. A pool of red glazes the floor. I’ve seen blood enough times on TV, but a dumbstruck part of me still has to ask, “Is that blood?”

There is a sea of gasps as a black body bag comes through on a stretcher. It feels like death is crawling over my flesh. The stretcher rolls past me as if in slow motion, and people part like the Red Sea. Whispers repeat under their breath over and over again.

“Suicide.”

“Suicide.”

“Did she jump or was she pushed?”

It doesn’t seem real.

Did one of the boarders really kill themselves? The thought sends a chill down my spine, like I’ve just stepped out into a winter rainstorm. Goose pimples raise along my arms and my fingers curl up against my palm, forming nervous fists.

Who can it be? I want to ask someone, but my mouth is dry. They probably wouldn’t answer me anyway. I manage to get saliva on my tongue, but it sticks like sludge, and I choke it back uncomfortably.

A dead body shouldn’t affect me so much as I live next to a funeral home, but that’s strictly off-limits, so I have never been this close. Knowing someone died at my school, and seeing all this blood, I feel suffocated. Like I’m the one in that awful zipped up bag.

I seriously feel like I am. Like there’s black canvas wrapped around me. A zipper over my eyes. My limbs have gone into rigour mortis, and my heart has stopped. It’s not racing. Not a steady thump. Totally still in my chest.

I can’t move. The cold extends past my spine and sticks me to the floor. I stay like this, a living statue, until the ambulance doors close with a bang. I blink and my breath comes out in a heavy rush of air.

The paramedic shakes her head at Mr. Taker, “I hoped I wouldn’t be back again like this so soon.”

Mr. Taker’s haunted blue eyes clash with his handsome, yet deathly pale face. All the girls fancy him. He might be cute, but I don’t see it. Too . . . male for me. I like him though, especially compared to most of the other teachers at this school. He doesn’t give me shit about my heavy eyeliner and not-so-natural jet-black hair, so I pretend to give a shit about Shakespeare in return. Which seems fitting now, as we are obviously in some kind of tragedy. He pushes his glasses up with his middle finger and gives a stout nod.

Acknowledgement.

Somebody is dead. A student.

I want to ask him if he knows who it is, but I don’t have the chance.

“I see you looking, Beth Death. This is right up your alley, isn’t it?” Lucy wails. She’s so close to me, I can smell the bubblegum on her breath. “You wanted her dead. Hell, after what you said yesterday, I wouldn’t be surprised if you pushed her.” She snivels and dabs the corner of her eyes with a tissue, while Rachel tries to comfort her.

My eyes widen. I’ve been accused of some pretty messed up stuff before, but this really takes the biscuit. A tonne of witty responses come to mind, but she’s clearly upset. She might be a cow and deserve them, but I’m not heartless.

“I don’t even know what happened.” I choose as my tactful response. It’s true, of course, and anyway, didn’t someone say it was suicide?

Lucy cries, “I can’t believe your creepy dad is going to have his hands on poor Freya.”

She goes on, but all I hear is a low-pitched buzzing. I don’t even correct her about him not being my dad. Freya is dead? I feel like I’ve been punched in my gut. Something’s not right. Not Freya and especially not from suicide! She wasn’t depressed. She was super popular and always had money to get manicures and those false eyelashes that looked like two spiders on her face. She was happy. Wasn’t she?

I mean, she always looked like she was happy. She was always laughing and hanging out with her friends. And she always looked great, parading fashionable clothes and accessories. Maybe it was all just a show?

I don’t mean to say it out loud, but the words, “I guess you never know what goes on behind closed doors,” slip past my lips.

“You’re so weird.” Lucy rolls her eyes. There are tears in them, but she clearly doesn’t want to ruin her makeup and keeps dabbing at them.

Dab. Dab.

Dab. Dab.

“You probably can’t wait to get a look at her,” she continues, “That’s the only reason you’re even over here, isn’t it? You just want to see what she looks like now––”

“That’s enough.” Mr. Taker comes over, his usually smiley face strangely sombre and upset. His eyes are bloodshot. “What happened here is tragic, it’s no time to bicker.”

“Sorry, sir,” I mutter, but the words are so under my breath, I doubt anyone hears.

Lucy doesn’t say anything at all. She just crosses her arms over her chest and gives me a look like this is somehow my fault. I can see it in her eyes. She blames me for Freya’s death.

“Did she jump? Tell us, Sir,” someone shouts from behind me.

“Who’s dead?” adds the boy to my left.

Questions are flying in from all directions, everyone talking at once.

I still can’t move. It’s awful. Just awful.

“All right, all right. Settle down. Now, please move out of the way of the emergency vehicles . . .” Mr. Taker shoos us away. It takes a bit of work. “Come on, everyone. This isn’t a game. I need you to move out of the way, now.”

The crowd reluctantly disperses and shuffles to the side. Somehow, I manage to tug my foot from the earth and get out the way as the ambulance cuts through the crowd. As soon as the vehicle starts to move, it’s like everyone collectively loses their voices at once. There’s a deathly silence. The school grounds have never been so quiet.