Disclaimer: Most characters contained within do not belong to me.

Author's Notes: I really appreciate all the reviews I've gotten on this story in such a short amount of time. Thank you very much. Also, I cannot say enough about my beta, PhDelicious, who not only puts up with constantly getting mail from me, but also cheers me up when I'm down. Thank you, hon:)

On another note though, anyone who knows me knows that I can handle constructive criticism. I've been trained to develop a thick skin about my writing. So negative reviews don't bother me. In fact, I try to learn from them. But I what I find distasteful is when someone who didn't like chapter one, left a review saying so...but comes back for chapter two and leaves an even less constructive message. If you don't like this story there's something very simple you can do. Don't read it. If you have something to say about it that you think I could benefit from, at least have the courage to leave your email address, so we can exchange thoughts. That's all. Just had to get that one off my chest.

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Courtney Wallace

by Kristen Elizabeth

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I already had my favorite people at Gil and Sara's lab.

I liked Greg because he was really cute. His hair was all floppy and I always wanted to play with it. He seemed like the kind of guy who would let you. I also liked him because he made people smile. Even when you could tell that they really didn't want to.

Nick was kind of cute, too, and I liked his accent. Catherine reminded me a lot of my mom for some reason. I only saw Warrick a couple of times. He was always talking on his cell phone with someone named Tina.

Sometimes it was fun just to stand next to the soda machine and watch them come in and out. They drank a lot of coffee. And they talked about stuff like accelerated putrefaction and gas-liquid chromatography and striations. It was like listening to another language that only they spoke.

Sometimes they'd talk about each other, and that was even more fun. They talked about Grissom a lot. It took me awhile to figure out that was Gil's last name. I think they all liked him. He was kind of like a camp counselor. He was in charge of them, but he had his own boss, too. That was Ecklie, who no one seemed to like.

I didn't really like Gil until four days after my body was found.

It wasn't that Gil was a bad guy. And it wasn't anything he did or said. But let's say there was someone in your class named Melissa who was really horribly mean to you. For the rest of your life, every time you meet someone named Melissa, you're always going to think of that really mean girl. You know? It was kind of like that.

Even though I didn't like him, Gil was one of the good guys. And he did want to find out who had killed me. His way of doing that had something to do with the maggots he'd picked off my body back in the woods.

I always thought maggots were just worms. But it turns out, they're baby flies. They hatched after about a day. Gil killed a few of them and pinned their bodies to a big, white board. The others he let live. He fed them hamburger meat.

I'd really wanted to be a vegetarian like Sara. I was so excited when they ordered lunch one day, and she got a meatless hot dog. I'd stopped eating red meat during eighth grade. Mom said I could only stop eating chicken and pork when I started eating beans and lentils. Something about protein and iron. I wasn't really paying attention, because beans and lentils are gross.

On the fourth day, Gil and Sara were in his office, which looked like the science lab at my old school with all the dead animals in jars. It was really late at night. They didn't go home very often, but whenever they did, they always came back looking like they hadn't slept. I didn't think it was right to follow either of them home to see if they did or not. At least not until I knew them better.

Gil was hunched over his work table, studying the hamburger meat he was keeping under a little mesh tent. There were already maggots crawling all over, and this seemed to make him happy. I was sitting cross-legged on top of his desk, playing with my hair. I had a lot of bad features, but my hair was pretty nice. Long and brown…chestnut, my mom called it. I'd gotten to play Rapunzel in third grade because of it.

"Four days," Gil said out loud. I scowled at him. He was going to wake up Sara.

She had been sitting at the desk looking through the pictures she'd taken of my body. But now, she was asleep. Her head had fallen forward on her arm; her fingers were almost touching my foot.

"Sara." He kept talking without even looking up to see why she wasn't answering. "She'd been dead for four days. The bugs tell the tale."

Finally, he looked at her and realized what I already knew. I thought maybe he'd be upset that she'd fallen asleep while they were working. But he just smiled and took off his glasses.

I drew my knees up to my chest when he walked over to the desk. Kneeling down, Gil moved Sara's hair off her face. She really was pretty, especially when she was sleeping and her eyebrows weren't all scrunched up like she was thinking too hard.

But I didn't like the way he looked at her. It wasn't a good look. I remembered that look. I wished I could create a distraction or something. Move some papers on his desk. Make his pig in a jar fall and break.

She opened her eyes when he started stroking her cheek. Instead of getting away from him like I wanted her to, she just whispered, "Someone could come in."

Gil shook his head. "They're all in the field. Do you want to go home? Get some real sleep?"

Sara lifted her head from her arm and yawned. "I'm fine. My second wind will kick in soon." She looked at the meat under the little tent. Her nose twisted up like mine did whenever Mom talked about lentils. "Got anything yet?"

"She died on Thursday," Gil said. "The day she disappeared."

I guess it was kind of cool that he figured that out. Now if only he'd quit looking at Sara like he wanted to do bad things to her.

Sara started rubbing her eyes. They looked kind of reddish. "He must have planned to kill her if he took her all the way out there. It wasn't just a rape that got out of hand."

I hadn't let myself think about my actual murder much since I realized I was dead. It was this fuzzy memory that was always there, though. If I actually thought about it, I could remember everything. And I didn't want to do that.

Gil put his fingers through hers, the way Brandon Prigge had when we went to the movies together in seventh grade. I hadn't minded, even though his palm was kind of sweaty. I guess he was my first boyfriend. I was really glad I'd had a boyfriend, although he did move away the summer before eighth grade. He was probably the only not-stupid boy I ever knew.

"Are you having trouble with this one?" he asked her.

I watched her face really carefully. She didn't want to say 'yes'; you could actually see it. But she ended up nodding. I guess she can't lie to him. Or maybe he'd know if she did. "I don't know why," Sara said in this sad voice.

And that was when he kissed her.

Brandon had kissed me, but I wouldn't French. I think I should have because now, whenever I think about kissing, all I can feel is my killer's tongue in my mouth. And I want to choke.

But Sara wasn't choking. And she wasn't trying to make him stop. She actually seemed to like kissing Gil.

I wasn't going to count this as them making out, because they didn't even kiss for, like, a minute before they both pulled away. Sara's cheeks were pink.

"You sent everyone away on purpose, didn't you?" She sounded like she was scolding him, but she was smiling, too. "So we could be alone?"

Gil winked. It was kind of weird to see him do that. "You know me too well."

He stood up and walked back over to his meat. Sara watched him go. "Maybe." Gil put his glasses on again. "Hey," she called out to him, making him look at her. "You make me very happy."

Even though he didn't say anything back, you could just tell he was thinking the same thing. So, I guess I had to like him.

A little.

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When I wasn't at the lab or at home, I was at the high school. Even though I'd never really been a student there, a lot of my old classmates from junior high had gotten together and put up one of those shrines to me in the main hallway. For the first week of classes, it stayed up, and everyone who passed by couldn't help but look at it.

Sometimes they'd stop and talk about me.

"God, I can't even imagine being murdered." Neither could I until it happened.

"Her killer's, like, out there somewhere. I bet he's crazy insane." Maybe. But you'd never guess it in a million years.

"I heard she was cut the fuck up." Not even.

"It's really sad. Shit! We're gonna be late for bio!"

On Thursday, a week after I died, the flowers in my shrine started to turn brown. The candles had to be blown out because they could be a fire hazard. The tape holding my picture up to the wall started to lose its stickiness, and one corner drooped down. On Friday afternoon, after all the kids had gone home, the janitors cleared it away. No one seemed to notice it was gone on Monday morning.

Maybe if I'd gone to the school, even for a few days, it would have been different. But I never had a locker of my own. I never checked anything out from the library. I didn't join any clubs or play any sports. I didn't really exist there. And I'd already graduated from the junior high, so I didn't exist there anymore either.

Sometimes it seemed like the only person who remembered me, besides Gil and Sara and my mom, was my killer.

I don't really like using the word 'he' when I'm thinking about my killer, because my killer stopped being a person to me when everything went black and suddenly I was standing over my body. And my killer was still on top of it. That person became my killer. I can't describe it any other way.

My killer took my clothes home. They lay on the bed, and sometimes my killer would lie on top of them. Maybe they still smelled like me. My killer would call my name and start touching that thing that hurt me so much. I would leave when my killer did that, and go to the lab. If Sara wasn't there, I'd hang out with Greg while he worked. He played music and sang along really badly and I'd stop feeling my killer between my legs.

Gil and Sara think I might have been the first person my killer ever killed. They had someone from the FBI do a profile, which was basically just a lot of guessing about what my killer might be like. The profile said my killer had probably killed before. But Gil and Sara disagree. They think my killer was too sloppy, that there was too much evidence left behind, that someone who had killed before would be better at it.

My killer told me I was the first, the only, that there was no else and couldn't ever be anyone else. But my killer also told me that it was too hot outside and my hot fudge sundae would melt if I didn't get in the car. My killer said if I did what I was told, I could go home. My killer sat across from Captain Brass and told a story about being on a fishing trip when I disappeared, and even offered to show Captain Brass the fish.

My killer lied a lot.

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To Be Continued