DEDICATION

For anyone still living, this is a memoir.

This is how it happened.                                 

                           Fiona Mars

1. VERBS PAST AND PRESENT

There's a fractured second when a choice stops being a backseat passenger and becomes the driver.  At which point, it could be said, that the choice has grown up and flourished into a decision. But my decisions aren't like that. They're not children crossing the bridge into adolescents; they're hijackers, seizing control and accelerating away from that long bridge and off a cliff, instead. One moment, I'm debating what sits on my right and left shoulder and the next I've got a gun—which wasn't sitting on either shoulder—and there's blood on the rug and I'm pointing it at someone I've known my whole life.

I can't blame my subconscious for it; she doesn't have a body. But my body is nothing without me, and sometimes I think it's angry about that arrangement because it was my hand that picked up the gun and my foot that kicked in Door Number Three and I never once thought, "Fiona, now is a good time to be a hero."

My subconscious isn't stupid. If anything she's above average, cultivating the rows of brain matter in my head with guilt and regret and fat hate seeds. But, while it can be said that I act stupid about a lot of things, I know I'm not THAT stupid.

I'm no hero.

Heroes don't get high and kill somebody with their car.

Heroes don't let their daddies lie about it.

I did.

So it wasn't me that kicked in Door Number Three holding a gun from the trunk of a stolen police cruiser.

But my finger pressed the trigger.

Choices become decisions when you change their tense, from choose to chose then bang bang bang. Up and down rotate with the couch cushions. And gray was always white before.

What I do isn't that simple.

If it was, I'd make it stop.

2. DISHES

"Dad," I said.

"Fiona." He said it Fee-o-nAH.  He liked to put my name through a juice squeeze when a point was moot and the conversation was over. Mine usually were. And it always was in four minutes flat.

I wrapped the coated phone cord around my finger until the tip paled yellower than the aged linoleum under my bare feet.

"See you when I see you," I said.

And hung up.

Month two of Life After Mom, I stopped calling his desk to ask when he'd come home. Then, the daughters of Nowhere South Dakota started turning up in dumpsters and behind trees with their necks strangled and he never came home. If he did, I never saw him.

I'd called now because "hey, did you know there are veins under my skin the size of train tunnels?" and I wanted to dig them out to hear them echo.

"Fiona, don't waste my time," he'd said.

Gee, sorry Dad, but I noticed them running and now they're chasing me, help.

When you get the yen to hurt yourself: Tear up a phone book instead.  That's the advice the school's grief counselor gave when we lost Busy. But where we lived, where I lived, there weren't that many pages.  Thanks to my yard-sale-whore mother, my house had as many dishes as there were leaves on the arthritic oak tree out back. That's what I did when I was by myself and got the yen, or rather, that's what I didn't do.

I didn't do the dishes.

I couldn't make my dad stay on the line, so I left the dishes everywhere. In the sink. On the counter. Spread across the waxy table top as if the soup bowls might catch a better signal than the antenna on the roof. It was my way of finding evidence of a life other than mine. A life that crawled the kitchen at two in the morning, frying eggs and leaving the blood to harden on the spatula.

A life that went weeks without seeing his daughter.

Mom wasn't around to clean up the mess anymore. Not since he asked her to clean up mine and she screamed "No!" in our faces. Overnight my dishes multiplied. My crumbs doubled and tripled until we weren't just feeding ourselves, and when I slunk down the stairs on a Sunday, to see the week-long castle we'd built, I felt less lonely.

Occasionally, I'd clean it. But usually, I left it until I was eating cereal out of coffee mug and he was forced to post a note on the fridge:

                           Dishes please.

                                            Dad

Somehow, his notes made me worse. The tunnels doubled and the trains ran faster under my skin.

On that morning, the morning the fourth dead girl was found, it was mid-summer. I was in the kitchen, sweating in my cotton shorts and braless in my handmade tank top, watching mice perform on the counter: tiptoeing on the high-wire edge to nibble the toast from Wednesday.  A swollen black fly hummed along, building suspense as it darted from one jaundice blood smear to another.  A breeze tattooed the lintel with the loose porch door. I crumpled Dad's note and dropped it on the linoleum. I walked away from the phone.

I've since wondered—in the movie theater, in the backseat of an NPD cruiser—how things might have been if I'd decided to stay home that Sunday and cleaned, instead of driving myself and my Christ foul mood to Rick's Roadhouse. But I pulled on my scabbed combat boots anyway, and snatched an oversized flannel from the coat closet. My dad's crusty pick up was in the backyard, and I trotted off the porch steps with my laces free and my open shirt stretching its wings.

3. MENU

Lunch and Dinner

Hamburger............................$2.00

Cheese Burger.......................$2.35

Hot Dog.................................$2.00

Chicken Sandwich................$3.29

Steak and Potatoes..............$4.99

Meatloaf................................$3.99

Grilled Cheese.......................$1.49

French Fries...........................$1.99

Slaw.......................................$0.50

Breakfast

Roadhouse Special...............$4.99

2 Eggs    3 Bacon or 2 Sausage    Hash Browns and Toast

Eggs and Toast......................$2.00

Short Stack............................$2.00

Full Stack...............................$3.00

Bacon, Sausage or Ham........$1.99

Coffee on the house.

Beer 12oz...............................$4.25

4. LOOK-A-LIKE

Busy Hutch was the first girl to die. And it was my fault, though no one knew and neither did I. Time stuck to itself and I couldn't pick apart one day from another because I chewed my nails. I didn't remember hitting her with my car. I didn't even remember it being a Saturday. My week went Monday, Monday, Monday. Or Thursday, Thursday, Thursday depending on which square I glanced at on the calendar. Whatever was printed on the top, clogged my head and filled me past the line.

Busy died instantly. Neck broken. I heard that posthumously. My car died slowly, degrading piece by piece, hidden in an impound lot with the VIN number scratched off.

Cops make good criminals. My dad, Sheriff of Nowhere, was top-notch with a paint scraper. His second, Deputy James Bithell—now there was a man who'd committed a crime. He looked at everything like he might get off immolating it. His inner anger made mine fidget; I'd have fucked him in his cruiser had he asked, just to see if we'd combust mid-action.

Busy was my fault. The other girls were not.

One night, my dad came home nursing a file. It was late. I couldn't sleep. Busy was in my dreams again; she had horns and a white tail that flashed in my headlights.

I waited for the shower head to explode.

Fried eggs smelled like vag. The lights were off in the kitchen. I was snooping between someone's legs, pushing papers around on the plastic table cloth, bending down to read labels in the moonlight from the window above the sink.

Cross-legged in my ankle socks and an oversized tee shirt, I spread the autopsy photos on the cream carpet. My desk lamp cut around me. My shadow reached for a corner, wanting to be held. Dad had been absent. More absent than was normal without Mom.  I knew about Anna from the newspapers crammed inside the racks on the street corners, pressing their noses to the box windows, hoping to be freed by a quarter. She was missing. Waitressed until seven o'clock and vanished by eight. What I snuck into my bedroom told a different story.

An everyday-kitten, soft and easy to handle. Her short dark hair loved her ears, slicked back behind them, still damp from her invasive scrub. Her skin was bright white like Busy's in my dream, made brighter by the gunmetal morgue tray.

Anna was the second girl to die, they said.

But really she was the first.

Counting Busy, there were six by the end.

But I didn't count Busy. She wasn't the first, not how they thought.

"I look like them," I said, sitting in the front see of a vehicle that didn't know my body yet and couldn't hold me right.

"Like who?" asked Lucky. He was driving.

"The dead girls."

"Well shit."

I'd only just met him, but I figured that meant he agreed.

5. GRILLED CHEESE

Rick's Roadhouse was a dive. Sawdust on the floor. The kind of lowlifes on the corners who had escaped school by not attending it. Denim and cow shit was the dress code, and the ability to count to one was prerequisite. No one knew when a piece in shorts might stumble off the highway and need a dollar for french fries.

The neon beer sign behind the counter lit everything within its sphere a menacing limesicle. This included Janet; whose frosted tips drank up the off-color glow like a withered plant. She wiped the bar in circular motions, adjusting coasters and condiments, adding pretzels to baskets with worn napkins. She reminded me of Jamie Lee Curtis if Jamie Lee Curtis gained twenty pounds and worked in a truck stop.

"What can I get you, honey?"

I took up a barstool and grazed the menu. Fan blades turned overhead. The hot air slowly tangled into knots and hung, depressed, from the metal grid between the nicotine-stained ceiling tiles.

A Jukebox played a piano record.

Pool balls clacked together.

"Grilled cheese."

Janet called it in. Stacks of antique beer cans lined the shelves on the wall behind her. In the middle was a window; in the window was the kitchen; in the kitchen, someone was about to cook me breakfast.

"Anything to drink?"

I shrugged and hunched on the counter, my feet hooked around the stool legs. I was too short to reach the floor. Grilled cheese was the extent of my conversation. I was in a mood. When I was in a mood, my ears stuck out and my mouth became a ruler you could measure by.

Janet couldn't read Keep Out if I painted it on my forehead. She popped the top on a creamsicle soda and pulled a straw from her apron pocket. "Where's your daddy this mornin'?"

I thought about his note and ripped the paper off the straw, pushing it into the long neck bottle so I could slurp and not answer.

The straw fought me, wanting to come up for air. "Work," I said at last. I didn't have money in my pajama bottoms, I had to play nice. I didn't even have my driver's license. If I got pulled over now, my dad's department would have to ticket me. And then dad would have one more thing to soap from my record. I wondered what he did with his dirty sponges. Did he throw them away? Or keep them as trophies.

A year ago, I'd killed Janet's daughter. She didn't know it and I couldn't remember and I'd heard she had another kid somewhere so it wasn't the end of the world, but seeing her was like picking at a sore. I was oddly attracted to the pain.

My dad didn't want me seeing her which is why I did whenever he made me angry. He was afraid I'd tell.

I did things sometimes: told secrets or broke stuff or took too many diet pills and stayed awake for days, watching the hours run fluid through a straw. When I surfaced, I ate grilled cheese.

Once, I quit smoking (because it was contrary) and cut the sleeves off my Mickey Mouse Club shirt. I'd noticed the scissors were sharp and it wouldn't leave me alone until I'd done something about it.