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He says, flatly, “Ms. Slaughter.”

“I was helping with Leah tonight,” I say. “I’ll be headed home.”

“Oh,” he says. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t move from his spot until I leave.

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(cur | prev) 21:02, XX January 20XXPaul Val

Declining submission: For the last time, can you assholes STOP trying to make a page for a mentally ill teenage girl? Or at least wait until she kills someone? If it really matters, put the child’s information on the father’s page. DOES NOT MEET NOTABILITY GUIDELINES.

When I get home—after taking the Green Line from Navy Yard to L’Enfant, then waiting in the station for Blue and Silver to go past before boarding the Orange, my line—Mom is asleep on the couch, in the dark, with one of Hexagon Productions’ documentaries playing on the TV.

I stand right inside the front door, huddled into my jacket. An old woman sits hunched in her living room while a recording plays: a man ranting, I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch. Her chin wrinkles, and then she begins to cry. She presses a liver-spotted hand to her mouth.

I don’t want to see this. I turn it off.

“Mom,” I say. She doesn’t respond. “Mom.”

When she still doesn’t move, my mind latches onto the possibility that she’s dead. It provides every single detail of calling 911, getting the death certificate, figuring out what to do with the body, struggling through legal paperwork, all in a second. I let it wash over me, refusing to entertain a single detail in case it gets caught on loop.

Not that I’d mind if she died. It’d make things a lot easier if she did. But I’d rather not stay up until one researching how to sell a house as a minor, convinced that I’ll need the information by morning.

I nudge her foot.

Mom, alive, groans and scrunches her face.

“I was watching that,” she says.

I can’t stand to look at her.

“Get up,” I say. “Unless you want me to leave you here for the crew to find in the morning.” I head for the stairs as she yawns and tries to find her phone in the couch cushions. “You’re embarrassing.”

Before bed, I take the pictures out of the jacket.

Morgan

I got crime scene and autopsy photos

monday, free period, don’t be late

FK

HOLY SHIT WHAT

Monday is far enough away that I can get a head start, spend the weekend going over the pictures myself. Truth is, I don’t even know what I’m looking for—is it really just one detail to jog my memory? A clue? A perfect lockpick for one of the sealed boxes in my head?

Whatever it is, it’ll be better if I do it on my own.

I can’t bring myself to look at them again, though.

I lay the pictures upside down on my bed, willing myself to turn them over. The photo paper glints dully in the lamplight. My room hasn’t been redecorated since middle school, when Mom did a full overhaul for social media, and the pictures of dead girls sit there surrounded by five-year-old macramé and fake greenery I haven’t bothered to dust in months.