“How’s she doing?” I whisper to her, lifting my chin toward the tree.
She smiles and nods. “Better.”
“This is everyone,” Roya says, her voice a little too loud. Paulie catches my eye and her lips tighten.
“Thank you all for coming.” Maryam is stiff, oddly formal. Her hands are tucked into the big front pocket of her hoodie. “I’m really sorry, but I just—I needed to talk to you all about what happened, and what you’re going to do about it.”
“I thought you didn’t want to be part of this,” Iris hisses. Her eyes are mean.
“I don’t want to be part of it,” Maryam snaps back. “But I love you all, so I want to talk to you about it because I’m worried, okay?”
“We’ve got it under control.” Roya’s too loud again, and Marcelina glances back toward the house. No lights come on, but Roya notices and closes her mouth pointedly.
I clear my throat. “What do you want to talk about, Maryam? I think that if we tell you what we’re going to do with the body, that kind of makes you part of it, right? So we probably shouldn’t do that.”
Maryam flinches at the word “body.” She folds her arms across her chest, then thinks better of it and unfolds them, shoving her fists back into her pocket. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “But I think this is wrong, you getting rid of the body. It’s not just that I can’t be a part of it. None of you should be a part of it. This kind of thing, it stays with a person’s soul.”
Iris starts to say something, but Marcelina gets there first. “I think you’re right,” she says. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. But … but what else are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to explain it?”
“We don’t even have the whole body,” Roya says. “It’s all in pieces now, and the pieces are—”
“They’re weird,” Iris interrupts. “They’re preserved and weird and if we brought them to the cops, there wouldn’t be any way to explain why they’re like this. We don’t have a choice. We have to get rid of the pieces.” She sounds certain, like she always does.
“Did you even try to bring him back?” Maryam asks. She asks it softly, gently. She already knows the answer. Iris folds her arms and looks away.
“Iris?” Paulie whispers. She’s being painfully gentle. “Did you try to come up with a way to bring him back? Or did it feel too impossible?”
Iris doesn’t look back at any of us. She’s staring into the tree line as if she’s watching the woods for something. Everyone is so still that I can hear Paulie breathing next to me, slow and even, the way she breathes when she’s trying to stay calm.
“I didn’t … It didn’t occur to me to bring him back until Alexis asked about it,” Iris says at last. “I mean, it would have been impossible, right? I didn’t try to come up with a way to do it because it just felt so outrageous to even consider it.”
“Even just getting rid of him seemed too hard,” Roya says. “Hell, it was too hard. We didn’t even pull that off. How are we supposed to try to bring him back?”
Paulie wraps her arms around herself. “What if something even worse happens?”
“I get it,” Maryam murmurs. “But we have to at least make an effort. I think we have to try to do the right thing, before we can find excuses for having done the wrong thing.”
What she’s said settles over us. It’s heavy with truth.
Roya swears, then lets out a noise that’s between a sigh and a growl. “You said ‘we.’ Does that mean you’re with us?”
Maryam nods. “I still can’t help you get rid of a body, but if there’s something I can do to help you bring him back, I will.”
We all look to Iris. She’s still staring at the woods. It’s light out enough now that I can make out her face pretty clearly. She’s chewing hard on her lip, fighting an internal battle. I think I can guess the conflict.
“Iris?” I venture. “I don’t think you did anything wrong. You were trying to help. But maybe—maybe this can help too?”
She shakes her head, then shrugs and says, “Fine. Do you all have your parts? Let’s get them together. Maybe we can make it work.”
Everyone except for Marcelina drops a duffel bag or a backpack to the ground. Marcelina has to go back to the house to get hers. She asks me if I’ll come with her, and I hand my backpack to Roya, relieved. I know that she won’t hesitate to pull out the heart and the head while I’m gone.
I won’t have to do it.
It’s not that I’m grossed out. It’s not that I can’t face what I did. It’s just that I don’t want anyone to see. I don’t want them to see me cradling Josh’s head in my hands, my fingers in his hair. I don’t want them to see me with my thumbs over his eyelids or my palm on his cheek. I don’t want them to see his face and remember that he was a person, and that he might deserve more than having his head in a backpack.
I keep Fritz and Handsome quiet while Marcelina sneaks into the house. When she comes back out, she’s carrying a dark bundle—the liver, wrapped in a T-shirt I don’t recognize. We walk back to the rest of the girls in silence, our feet swishing through the grass. Just before we reach the group, Marcelina pauses.
“Are you doing okay?” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I reply, because it’s the only answer that
