Part of J.D. worked above-board, everything almost like a normal life. The basement door to his father's explosives stayed closed. He visited Martha Dunnstock in hospital and played poker with Monopoly money with her, mostly talking about movies and books. He started a scrapbook of passive-aggressive notes from the neighbors for excessive sax playing to the radio at one in the morning. He handed in homework. He found a part-time job at the Snappy Snack Shack, pulling the late shifts no one else wanted. He would have liked to think his encyclopedic knowledge of product got him the job, but it was more likely his ability to stand upright while breathing.
The other half of him had different plans entirely.
J.D. sidled into the science lab, slipping the large envelope out of his coat. Heather Duke glared at him as if she wished that looks could kill, greedily snatching for the first photo in the pack.
The photograph had To Athos from Milady with love XXX written on the corner, in flawlessly neat handwriting. The 'i' was dotted with a heart. Young Martha Dunnstock wore a bicorn and a men's shirt and looked straight at the camera, while Heather Duke, dressed up in a ruffled skirt and petticoat, kissed her on the cheek.
"Me and Martha Dumptruck. Where did you get this?" Heather said. "I'll give you a week's lunch money."
Heather Duke was a poisonous green candy in a wrapper of constant knee-crossing. Ever since Chandler died, she had ambitions of taking over. He needed a co-conspirator. It would have been better if Veronica were with him, she'd understand. But he would play Mephistopheles to Heather Duke's Faust and entice her to greater heights - and lower depths. There would always be Heathers in this hell.
"I don't want your money. Strength is what this school needs," J.D. said. He grabbed the photo back from her. "The time for mushy togetherness is over. The white whale drank some bad plankton and splashed through a coffee table. Moby-Dick got dunked. Heather Chandler's gone, and you're the one who deserves to take the helm."
Heather smiled slightly. "I think she couldn't handle the pressure."
"I think you can. I want a favor." J.D. brought out his sheets of computer paper, with the subject line taped to the top of the page. "The Heathers did polls. This is a petition to get the Big Fun band to play at prom. You know, Teenage Suicide Don't Do It." Their biggest hit. Terrible music, but too ironically appropriate for him to ignore. "Big Fun will choose the school with the most signatures to play at. Get everyone's John Hancock on this and it could be Westerburg."
He could practically see the wheels turning over in Duke's mind, calculating and comparing. She wanted to defeat Heather's memory and outdo her, and the lure of an idea even slightly different caught on like oxygen in her compressed, conformist soul. "Interesting. When do I get the photos back?"
"When everyone signs, we'll burn the pictures and the negatives," J.D. promised. "In the meantime: strength. I brought you a present."
The red scrunchie ran as smoothly across his hands as a bloodstain. It was the same ornament Heather Chandler used to wear like a crown. "From a Heather to a Heather," J.D. said.
She forgot to ask where he picked it up.
—
I can't do my plan yet, Veronica thought, not while Martha's still like this. So she sat and watched crappy TV with her erstwhile friend in the hospital bed, hoping that some fragments of what they once had were still there. On the program, Bill Sykes and Oliver Twist were running from the law. The murderer was fleeing up to the roof with a noose wrapped around his body. She looked away, cringing.
"You want it off?" Martha asked, and she nodded. "Maybe that's enough of a guilty silence," Martha said.
"I've told you and I will keep telling you until you believe it. I am so sorry for what I did," Veronica said. "I should never have written that note for Heather. I shouldn't have said the things I said - "
"I don't want to talk about what you did," Martha cut her off. "Why do you want to go backwards, Veronica?"
"We were innocent and heartless. We didn't know what was coming," Veronica said. "We fought imaginary enemies in the treehouse and we always won."
"Maybe no one's an enemy," Martha said. "I've been thinking a lot, I haven't been able to do anything but think. When I go back, nothing will change. No one will be different. I don't understand why I ... I'm still here, I guess. Mostly planning to stay that way." Even with the heavy casts on her, Martha sat as if she was trying to take up the least space in the world she possibly could, curled up over herself. She held her sprained wrist close to her chest.
"Take things slow," Veronica said. It was a lovely piece of advice that was so generic that everyone could say it was right and no one could follow it.
"It's all right. You weren't the only person who did something wrong," Martha said with a sigh. "I'm sorry I said those crazy things about that J.D. kid. Don't tell him, okay? He's come to see me a few times now."
"What?" Veronica knew she was overreacting, going over the top like a bottle rocket at a bowling club lunch. She couldn't control herself. "Why? Shit. What did he say to you, Martha?"
Martha stared at her. "I hate to ask, but is there something going on between you two? He seemed really interested in the story where Heather Duke pushed you out of the treehouse."
"We dated for about five seconds," Veronica spat out. She had to stand up, clutch the back of her chair. The treehouse thing was just a silly kids' game, surely even J.D. would not - use it as an excuse. "A very disappointing five seconds," she improvised. She couldn't tell Martha exactly what she was disappointed about. But the possible innuendo seemed to fly above Martha's head anyway. "It was super awkward. What else did he say to you?"
"That's not a weird question at all." Martha seemed to enjoy the rare opportunity to be sarcastic to Veronica. "He mostly talked books, I guess. We played card games. And he said he got a job at the Snappy Snack Shack."
"Well, how nice for him," Veronica said. "Gosh, I hope he doesn't get too many rude customers." Because they might end up dead. "Seriously, Martha, I'm not the bitter ex, I dumped him, but believe me J.D. is not a nice person."
Maybe Martha thought Veronica was being way too harsh. Pity the poor kid who got not-so-falsely accused, who sadly became an orphan as a result of his own murderous activities!
"Hey, I've always been a Frederick Wentworth type of girl. You're the one who thought Heathcliff was so complex and interesting and deep," Martha said.
Cathy should've taken Heathcliff out behind the woodshed and shot him, Veronica thought. "I don't think my thoughts on Wuthering Heights are the point of this conversation," she said.
"How about this point? I might be the one in hospital, but you're not looking so well either," Martha said. "You seem kind of pale, and you're obviously pretty angry and unhappy about stuff. You want to talk about your feelings like a mature, sensible person?"
"Hell, no. Let's watch some terrible kids' cartoons and never speak of this again," Veronica said. "I brought lemonade and my mom's cookies."
Veronica actually felt better after being with Martha. But she knew it wouldn't last long.
A bright-colored shadow trailed in Veronica's wake, on her way out of the hospital. She'd let Heather in, and she would have the strength to end this. Her footsteps slowed and she shuffled as if she were too tired to walk properly. Let Heather think she was broken, for just long enough.
"What, did you forget to add the drain cleaner into her lemonade?" Heather asked.
—
David Harper turned into the Snappy Snack Shack with his wheels squealing, and parked his mean machine in the handicapped spot. He'd only be like five minutes; where was the harm?
He whistled to himself, smelling the weed and alcohol on his own breath with every exhale. Fun party. Sure, the majority of the girls there were not very and the ones that were picked other guys, but it still wasn't half bad. David was a sophomore at Remington University, and the parties and the networking and the contacts you made were much more important than whatever bullshit grade you got for your philosophy midterms.
The topic was thanatos, the death instinct, and David had totally deserved a better grade considering his dead girlfriend. Poor Heather Chandler, cute and gullible, could suck like an Electrolux hose, had a rich daddy, kind of bitchy except when he could shut her up. Girls like that were way more fun than the shrill Gloria Steinem wannabees he saw in his classes. After the funeral, he'd tried it on with one of Heather's friends - a bit tacky, 'offering to comfort her in her grief' was a better way of putting it - but he'd been rebuffed, by a little flat-chested kid with Moby-Dick under her arm. Better luck next time, David. He sang a Big Fun song to himself as the bell rang over the door.
Place was deserted at this post-midnight hour. There was only the clerk, a pale guy wearing all black. Probably a teenager, whether high schooler or Remington freshman or dropout, David didn't know or care. He lurched against the merchandise and knocked a bunch of packets to the ground. He recognized the bright red of BQ corn nuts - Heather's favourite. He had the munchies and would totally get a packet, sort of in her honor.
"Good choices." The clerk had moved pretty quietly and quickly next to David, helping him pick up what he'd dropped. Somehow, the packets were ending up in David's arms rather than back on the rack. "BQ flavor marks a true connoisseur. Did you know ninety-nine out of a hundred doctors agree, the sugar walnut slice is bad for you? That's why the taste is so good," the clerk said. "But you're definitely missing something, my friend - the nut texture can be a little dry, so you'll need a Super Sipper to go with that." David found himself over by the drinks machine, blinking owlishly at the huge cup. Hey, maybe a sugar rush wasn't such a bad idea. The clerk continued. "You're a Remington University man, am I right or did you beat in a guy's head with a tire iron and steal his clothes?"
David was wearing his frat jacket and he was pretty drunk, so he laughed.
"Nice car, classic ride," the clerk said. "Have you heard about our amazing line in auto products? You got a scratch there on the right, but it'll buff right out with Stanley Mayo's Paint Restorer followed by Via Appia Turtle Wax. Oh, yeah, apply with X-Treme Wipe cloths - proudly using the same elastic technique as astronauts for some reason nobody is entirely certain about." He quickly took the products off the shelf, piling them into David's arms while he was trying to manage the Super Sipper.
"Seriously, dude? I just wanted to party," David said. He was holding too many things, but felt sort of bad about just dropping them on the ground, like it would be rude. The clerk helped him to the counter.
"You don't have to carry all this stuff," the clerk said helpfully, "we do carry free plastic bags."
"I don't want any of the car cleaning shit," David said.
The clerk looked kind of disappointed and put the turtle wax to one side. "That's okay," he said, like he was trying to make David feel better about it. "I can get you something really special. This is your final chance to sample the very last of today's donuts." David looked at the cardboard box and the coloured icing. Chocolate, banana with sprinkles, even one of the rare caramel type. His stomach rumbled a little bit. "They're the good stuff," the clerk hissed, in a hushed and almost reverent tone.
Okay, fine, Mr. Weirdly-Intense-Convenience-Store-Clerk, whatever, David decided. He fumbled in his wallet. The clerk was ringing up a lot of stuff, and the last time he got cash out was - yeah, he had it covered.
"Almost perfecto. That leaves a dollar ninety-three in change for you. Most people put it straight in the Humane Society tin over here. Who doesn't like animals better than people?" the clerk quipped. "Although you clearly don't have much to give, every little bit counts."
David felt kind of embarrassed that he had so little change on him. Then he shook his head because that was silly, and just went with dropping the money in the jar. His wallet was super light as he fumbled it back into his jeans pocket.
I planned to spend like five bucks. How did I empty my wallet? David wondered to himself. He maneuvered himself to the door with two heavy plastic bags in one hand and the Super Sippy in the other. The bell rang again over his head as he stumbled out.
He thought he heard that clerk mutter to himself, behind him. Something like, "I actually love this job."
David rolled down his window and let the night wind blow in. He was David, King of the Road, smoothly rolling over the bumps and hollows of life, alone on the highway with a whole bunch of donuts all for himself. He licked off some of the flakes of caramel icing on his fingers. Then he shivered, very cold and very tired all of a sudden. He shrugged into his jacket to get it wrapped more closely around him. He was just about at the bridge. The streetlights repeated into infinity in front of him, all exactly the same as each other. He had to make the turn. He pulled on the wheel, but it didn't respond to him, as if some chilly force he couldn't see crept up by his side and held his hands back.
The car tipped and went over the bridge. David was half aware of flying in the air, and then everything disappeared. When he next came back to consciousness, he could hear water flowing somewhere near his head. He couldn't feel his legs, and he had a vague idea he was upside down.
His car had crashed, and he was probably dying, he thought. He had some good memories. Mom and Dad and his little brother at Thanksgiving chowing down on pumpkin pie, hitting the winning goal in the final basketball playoffs, shooting back beers with his buddies down at the creek, partying hard with hot girls like Heather. Life flashes back through your eyes. It was almost philosophical.
In his thanatos paper, he'd spun off some lines about the instinct, the death-acceptance theory, that those who didn't fight it were not doomed to become ghosts. Other dead philosopher guys basically said it was all about the survival of the fittest and you had to fight, man. But David wasn't really that kind. His life was all about the pursuit of pleasure, and in the end he didn't want anything badly enough to struggle for it.
So David Harper lay there in his broken car, apathetic, not in any pain or anything, a kind of pleasant drunken haze still filling his mind. Yeah, it wasn't a bad life, despite its brevity. He could almost imagine his mom there beside him, stroking his hair like she did when he was sick.
The cold he felt numbed him. He thought he heard something faint in the chilled air around him, something that sounded like Heather's voice. He could almost picture her above him, his red-gold angel coming to show him into an afterlife of frat celebrations and BQ corn nuts and beer that never ran dry.
"I guess you're not coming to my party, David," he thought he heard Heather say, while he drifted peacefully away. "Oh well. I'm inviting a whole bunch of other people. It'll be so very."
David's last breath slipped into the wind.
—
"Thanks for coming over. I really needed another pair of hands," Martha said. The cast on her wrist wasn't coming off for at least another month, and she was doomed to ride in a conspicuous motor scooter in order to get anywhere.
"Why aren't you milking it as long as you can? Why go back to school at all?" J.D. said. The sour smell of cigarette smoke clung to him as he walked into Martha's living room, behind her scooter.
She felt sorry for him, and still felt a little bit guilty over her past assumptions. J.D. was so cynical and negative all the time; like Mr. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, hiding in his library and mocking the world instead of actually trying to do something right. Or like Holden Caulfield ... No. It would be too cruel to compare anyone to Holden Caulfield.
"Because my parents would kill me," Martha said. "Uh, sorry, terrible metaphor."
"None taken," J.D. replied.
"Here it is. My extra credit for Mrs. Pope. I've missed a lot and I'd like to keep that solid B-average up," Martha said. J.D. was in the class as well, and, like Martha, had actually read the book. "It doesn't look like much right now, but I'd almost finished it before ... well, you know."
Making dioramas was her hobby. The Pequod from Moby-Dick had been Martha's most ambitious project yet, not just a model but also due to go in a bottle. She'd built it from a generic mail-order kit, but added custom decorations to the ship. Papier-mache whalebones, painted white with a luminous blue glow, turned the ship's bulwarks, bow, and stern into a ghoulish display. Captain Peleg, like a cannibal, decked out his vessel with the bones of the whales he'd hunted and slain. The masts and sails were all down, of course, with threads attached to pull them into position later.
J.D. had dropped down to one knee to study it intently. "This is cool," he finally said when he looked up. "What do you need?"
"I need the tiller fitted, then it goes in the bottle," Martha said. "There are printed instructions. The tiller's going to be tricky, but I think I made it right. It might need some shaving off at the base." Like in the book, the tiller was meant to be a whale's toothy jawbone carved in one piece.
J.D. took his time, reading through the instructions and studying the tiller from each angle. Martha was glad he actually took it seriously, instead of mocking or suggesting she light it on fire for a better effect. His fingers, passing over it, were much darker than his face, and then she realized they were covered in old scars.
"What happened to your hands?" Martha blurted out. Maybe that wasn't the most tactful of questions, she thought, a moment later, and flushed.
"It's only superficial. My manual dexterity's fine," he said. He seemed calm enough. "For playing the sax," he added.
"Is it a removalist thing?" Martha asked. She had a vague memory of a detective story, Holmes or something, where a removalist was murdered, the prime suspect had similarly damaged hands, and he turned out to be the victim's partner in disguise. Still, in modern days, you didn't expect to see stuff like that.
"I'm not one, any more," J.D. said. He looked like he was smiling, though his head was still bent over the tiller and it was hard to tell. "Lost my apprentice license after, ah, recent events. No license means no paying jobs. The feds have my name on a list somewhere, but they don't conscript people unless a major disaster happens."
He didn't sound like he missed his job much. Martha wouldn't have minded being born with some special trait, something that told you what to do with your life other than read books and be a laughingstock. Were people like Veronica and Heather Chandler marked out at birth for some sort of grand destiny, effortlessly moving into leadership and fame?
The tiller clicked into place. "What next?" J.D. said.
She talked him through getting the folded-up ship into the neck of the bottle, then how to pull the threads to watch it unfurl on the inside. The Pequod's flags proudly flew from inside the glass. Martha awkwardly added the cork to the bottle with her left hand, the last finishing touch.
He seemed kind of interested in the stuff she built, so Martha showed off her Mansfield Park model and her Lady Audley's Secret scene. Dressed in crimson velvet with golden ringlets in her hair, the wicked Lady held court in her richly furnished boudoir, made out of an old dolls'-house.
J.D. picked up Lady Audley's figure to look at it closely. At the time, Martha had put a lot of work into the fine details of the figure, painting the doll's features under a magnifying glass. "Blonde hair, penchant for wearing red, a particularly evil glint in her lovely blue eyes?" he said. "Who is this, and do I detect an uncanny resemblance or do I detect an uncanny resemblance?"
Martha sighed. At the time, it had felt cathartic to paint the doll after a real-life model. Now - things were different. "She's Lady Audley," she explained. "You'd probably like the book, it's got a lot of attempted murder in it." J.D. seemed to have a decided preference for dark and grim. "She's a beautiful woman who married a baronet for money and a title, except her first husband was still alive at the time. So when he comes back from Australia, she tries to kill him and then she tries to kill all the witnesses to her secret."
Martha had used a yearbook photo of Heather Chandler as a reference for Lady Audley's face. It felt like making her own personal voodoo doll. Of course, she hadn't literally stuck any pins through it, and what happened later was just a coincidence.
"And, at any point, does Lady Audley take a plunge through a coffee table?" J.D. lifted the figure up in a dramatic arc and swept her back to the diorama like a plane coming into landing, placing her face down on a mahogany dressing table.
"That's not funny. In the end, she fakes being insane so she doesn't have to go to jail, and ends up in an asylum in Belgium for the rest of her life," Martha said.
"Happy ending." J.D. put the figure back in its original place. Martha's dog, Harrison, was snooping around the stranger. He bent down and scratched him behind the ears. "Is he yours?"
"Yeah. He's almost six." Her parents bought Harrison when they started to realize how isolated Martha was becoming at school. He was a big dog but a coward at heart, timid and careful, and tried to befriend the local cats instead of chasing them. "You have any pets?"
"A hamster," J.D. said.
"I'd have guessed a tarantula or something," Martha said. It kind of slipped out. It just felt unexpected from the dark scary trenchcoat kid, who was still kneeling on the floor petting her dog with both hands. "Sorry - " She started to apologize for the joke, but he laughed a short, dusty laugh.
She ended up asking him to stay for dinner. He didn't say a whole lot, but went for her mom's buttermilk pie like there was no tomorrow. He had a typical teenage boy's appetite, at least. He's not a nice person, Veronica said; J.D. was certainly offputting, but Martha liked to think that no one was all bad. Maybe you could survive in this world if you had even one friend willing to reach out.
—
Note: It's difficult to compare Heathers characters to Jane Austen characters, because Austen didn't write about serial killers.
—