Turn Every Good Thing to Rust

The first time Andrew kills someone, he’s seventeen, half out of his mind with fury and fear and lashing out at this boy called Jacob who’s been giving him hell for weeks.

(He’ll tell himself it’s self-defence, later, that he had to kill or be killed, but pure survival instincts don’t explain the way he pummels the other boy over and over and over and over wherever his greedy fists can reach. He only stops when the rage has ebbed out of his veins and that’s a long time after the mushy mess underneath his hands stops moving.)

He calls Carey, after. Curled up into a ball a few feet away from the body – he can’t think of it as Jacob, he just can’t – he digs in his pocket for his mobile and dials a number that is as familiar to him as his own.

He has to start again twice, his hands are shaking so badly.

(He’s still sort of numb all over, can’t quite feel the rawness of his bruised, broken knuckles, but he’s not numb enough that the pervading feeling of wrong can’t penetrate his protective shell and stab him in the gut. He’s fucked up. He knows that for sure.)

“I’ve done something stupid,” he blurts out when his best friend picks up the phone. “Can you meet me-” He breaks off to glance at his surroundings, gauge where exactly he is. “-round the back of the park? You know, where the big clump of scary trees are, the ones that look like serial killers? Or maybe ninjas, I’m not really sure.”

“Of course,” Carey says, without asking why or what he’s doing at the park in the middle of the night. “I’ll be right there.”

Andrew closes his eyes and thanks a god he’s not sure he believes in for Carey Mulligan, then says, quietly, “Can you bring a shovel?”

***

He’s staring at a patch of blood-stained pavement, chewing relentlessly on his nails, when Carey arrives, sleep-rumpled and bleary-eyed and the best thing Andrew has ever seen. There’s a golf bag slung across her shoulders and it knocks against the backs of her knees as she walks.

She stops dead when she sees the body, the bag smacking into her leg with a painful thwack.

“Andrew,” she whispers, eyes wide with horror, “what have you done?”

Andrew drops his hand from his mouth and sits up from where he’s slumped against the wall. “It was an accident,” he says quickly, his voice quavering with desperation. “He jumped me and I didn’t know what to do and I had to defend myself and I just-”

“Okay, it’s okay,” Carey says, squatting on the ground next to him. The horror’s all but drained from her face now, replaced with a determined steeliness that belies her fifteen years. “It’s going to be okay, Andrew, we just have to get rid of it.”

Andrew just nods – he asked her to bring a shovel for a reason – and lets her pull him to his feet. They both take one side of the body and haul it up off the ground.

(Andrew never really understood the meaning of the phrase ‘dead weight’ before now.)

They drag the body over to the serial killer trees and dump it back on the ground, relieved to be free of the load. Carey takes two shovels out of the golf bag and hands one to Andrew. He takes it with a muted nod and doesn’t meet her eyes.

The soil is softer than Andrew was expecting – it’s rained a lot recently, which is probably why. He digs his shovel into the ground and pushes like Carey showed him, heaving the clump of soil over his shoulder. It isn’t long before he’s worked up a rhythm of dig-shovel-toss, dig-shovel-toss, and he loses himself in the monotony of the work.

By the time Carey says, quietly, “I think we can stop now,” the sun’s peeking out above the horizon and the sky is streaked with yellows and pinks and it’s beautiful, so beautiful. Andrew doesn’t let himself look at it for too long, though, before nodding and climbing out of the gr- hole, extending a hand to help Carey up when he’s out.

They shove the body inside and fill in the hole they’ve made and neither of them say a word. Andrew’s arms are aching and his fingers burn with fresh blisters but he keeps going because Carey does, and together they pat down the soil until it’s like the hole never existed.

When they’re finally done, they collapse on the ground, holding each other tight. Andrew’s shoulders are shaking and Carey lets him tuck his head against her collar.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, breath ghosting over his ear. “It’s okay, everything’s going to be okay. You snuck out and came to my house and you spent the night on my bedroom floor.” She kisses the top of his head, noses at his soft curls. “You were with me the whole time.”

And Andrew just nods and nods and swallows hard and squeezes her tighter because he doesn’t know how to thank her for this.

The sun’s all but risen in the sky when Carey gets to her feet and hauls Andrew up with her. She doesn’t let go of his hand and they walk back to her house like that, fingers entwined and shoulders brushing.

There isn’t much point in them going to bed – they’ve got school in a couple of hours – but as they’re stealing into Carey’s room, silent as possible so they don’t wake up her parents or her brother, Andrew’s hit with a wave of such utter exhaustion his knees buckle. He can’t help but collapse onto Carey’s bed and bury his head in her soft blankets that smell so much like she does, soft and delicate and so familiar it grounds him, gives him something to focus on which isn’t the overwhelming current of I killed someone tonight I killed someone tonight I killed someone tonight. Carey gives a light chuckle and lies down next to him, hands clasped underneath her head.

“I’ll move in a minute,” he promises, though he’s not sure she understands because he’s sort of mumbling into her pillow. “Just need- lie down. Need a lie down. But I’ll move. In a minute.”

“Okay,” Carey says softly, shifting a little to stroke the hair away from his face. “In a minute.”

He closes his eyes – just for a minute, he tells himself, with as much determination as he can muster, just for a minute. It doesn’t work. Within moments he’s fast asleep, twitchy and restless from the nightmare images playing across the backs of his eyelids, and Carey isn’t far behind him.

***

When they get to school that day, nearly twenty minutes late because they overslept, Andrew does a very good job of not flinching when Jacob is mentioned. “Have you seen him?” people ask, so many they all blur into one in Andrew’s head. “He isn’t in today.”

And Andrew just shrugs. Jacob isn’t his friend. No one’s expecting him to know; they’re just asking for the sake of asking. He doesn’t exhale until they turn away, though, and his heart keeps pounding against his ribcage so loudly he’s sure Jacob can hear it from beyond the grave.

***

He’s still absent three days later, and people are starting to worry. His disappearance makes the national news – the authorities are always more interested when it’s a public school boy with rich parents.

Andrew’s just waiting for the bomb to go off, for the police to march into his school and drag him off to prison. (Not Carey, he wouldn’t let them take Carey, even if he had to serve her sentence as well as his own, even if he had to fight them off with his bare hands.)

The police do come, but not so they can escort him away. They want to talk to everyone who knew Jacob, everyone in his year. They think he might have run away. Andrew exhales, just a little, and tries to smile when it’s his turn to talk to the friendly-looking policewoman (PC Marshall, she introduced herself as). He’s got the alibi Carey dictated to him memorised by now, thinks he can recite it with just enough conviction and sincerity to make it believable, but it turns out he needn’t have bothered. Her questions are straightforward and easily answered.

No, he hasn’t seen Jacob.

No, he doesn’t know where Jacob could have gone.

No, he didn’t even really know Jacob.

Yes, he’ll tell them if he sees or hears anything.

As he leaves the classroom that’s been set up as a makeshift interview room, he can’t help but feel like he’s gotten away with something he shouldn’t have. His stomach churns, but out of guilt or relief or something else entirely, he doesn’t know.