We were in shop class fucking around with a piece of sheet metal when Justin told me he had seen a dead body only yesterday so it might still be there. I wasn’t too surprised about the body—of all the guys at school, Justin was the one who would have been voted Most Likely to See a Dead Body. What did surprise me, though, was that Justin would tell me. A guy like Justin was usually either ignoring a guy like me or he was beating me up. I knew the only reason he was talking to me at all was that we were partners in class, and the only reason we were partners was that Cody, his regular partner, was absent.
+++++“You want to see it?” Justin asked me. “You want to see the body?” It sounded like a taunt.
+++++Usually my shop partner was the teacher, Mr. Bishop. On the first day of class, Mr. Bishop assigned everyone a partner, but there was an odd number of students in the class, so I got him, which turned out to suck even more than you might imagine. I thought that working with the teacher would at least make things easier, but Mr. Bishop didn’t think it was fair for him to do too much, so he did exactly nothing and I basically didn’t have a partner at all. Sucks to be me.
+++++“Absolutely,” I said. “I want to see it.”
+++++Every day I hoped someone would be absent so I could get a real partner, and this was shop class, so people were always absent. But it had to be an odd number of guys who were absent so the total number got evened out, and that day only one guy was absent: Cody Mitchell, the most pathetic guy in the school and the partner of Justin Wilson, the scariest guy in the school.
+++++“Really?” Justin said. “You really want to see it?”
+++++I almost wanted to stay with Mr. Bishop, but I figured Justin would at least treat me better than he treated Cody because he couldn’t treat me any worse. Cody was the human shield for all us other guys who might go to school and come home bullied to a pulp. As long as Cody was around, the rest of us were more or less safe. With Cody absent, I had to worry about becoming Cody for the day.
+++++“Yeah, I really want to see it,” I said.
+++++Shop class met during the last period of the day, so I wondered if Justin had invited anybody else. He would have had all his other classes to tell people about the body, and if he had invited me, then he had to have invited other people. Right?
+++++“Okay,” Justin said. “Meet me after school outside the gym.”
+++++For the rest of class, Justin talked about only our work, but I felt like he kept looking at me when he should have been looking at the sheet metal. Was I imagining things? When the bell rang, I started walking fast to my locker to get my books for homework, but my locker was on the other side of the school from the gym. If I took too long, would Justin think I had skipped out on him? I turned around and headed for the gym. Justin was waiting outside.
+++++“I thought you might have skipped,” he said.
+++++“Not me,” I said, and I looked around. “Anybody else coming?”
+++++“Just you and me,” Justin said.
+++++I was trying to play it cool, but my nerves were building. Justin turned toward the woods behind the school and started walking. He was moving fast, and I almost had to run to keep up. The pine needles were thick on the ground, and our feet weren’t making any noise.
+++++“Why isn’t anybody else coming?” I asked. Was I Cody for the day? I wanted him to deny it.
+++++“I told some other people, and maybe they didn’t believe me, or maybe they were too scared. You’re the only one who wanted to go.”
+++++I started seeing beer bottles poking up through the pine needles, which meant we were getting close to the water tower.
+++++I couldn’t stand the silence, so I started babbling: “I don’t mind dead things. Sophomore year, in biology class, when we dissected fetal pigs, some people were totally grossed out, didn’t even want to touch them, but I didn’t mind, I thought it was cool. I even got the best grade in the class.”
+++++“No surprise there,” Justin said.
+++++We came to the clearing around the water tower. Justin slowed down. Beer bottles and cigarette butts were everywhere. I saw the torn foil packaging from a rubber. This was Justin’s domain. A lot of this garbage was his.
+++++Justin walked around the water tower to the left. He stopped at the edge of the clearing where weeds were heavy. I stopped next to him.
+++++“There you go,” he said, pointing, though he didn’t have to point. The body was face down in the weeds right in front of us. It looked like a boy, maybe a teenager.
+++++“Who is it?” I said.
+++++Justin looked at me. “Who do you think?” He made it sound like the answer was obvious.
+++++I looked at the tangled blond hair on the back of the head.
+++++“I think it’s Cody,” I said.
+++++I stepped into the weeds and leaned down to look. I grabbed the hair and pulled back, and Cody’s dead face came out of the weeds. His throat had been cut so deep that his head almost came off in my hand.
+++++I let go of Cody’s hair and stepped back.
+++++“You’re not going to believe it,” I said.
+++++I moved behind Justin, out of the way between him and Cody.
+++++“Go ahead,” I said. “Go look at the body.” But Justin stood motionless in front of me, just like Cody did before I left him there.
+++++I grabbed Justin’s hair, pulled back, and cut his throat.

by

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

David Rachels

David Rachels’ noir fiction has appeared (or will soon appear) in Dark Corners, Shotgun Honey, Flash Fiction Offensive, and Pulp Modern. As well, he has edited the short stories of noir great Gil Brewer Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories (UP of Florida, 2012).

Latest posts by David Rachels (see all)

• Entry 1 – I Was Pen Pals With A Serial Killer - November 30, 2015
• The Body - July 14, 2015