1st 5 Pages August Workshop - Miles Revision 1

Name: Melissa Miles
Genre: Young Adult
Title: Hashtag Witness

 

It had honestly never occurred to me that I could become the next casualty of the so-called Reign of Terror until the day that the second victim's body was found. Her decomposing corpse had just been discovered in a rural location. The gruesome state of her remains was now dominating the lunchroom conversation, replacing the previous day's prevailing topic of Netflix binging plans for the upcoming summer break.

 

Until lunch, this had been a relatively decent day. The teachers seemed even more ready to be done with the school year than we were, so we had just been signing yearbooks and goofing around for the most part.

 

“Aren't you worried Mindy?" The anxious expression on Whitney's face clearly conveyed that she thought I should be.

 

Trying appear more nonchalant than I truly felt, I shrugged. "Not really."

 

Whitney plowed ahead, ignoring my denial. "But both of those girls disappeared within thirty miles of ya’ll’s house up at the lake.” She held up her phone showing a map of the area in question just to prove her point.

 

“Do you have any idea how big of an area thirty miles is?” I was already growing exasperated by this conversation. I really didn’t need anything putting a damper on my one place of refuge. Ditching this small town for my family's secluded place on the lake was the one thing that I’d really been looking forward to during these last weeks of school.

 

"Whitney's making a good point for once." My head whipped around to gawk at my best friend Sanjay. Not him too. His expression bore a trace of amusement, but he wasn't being entirely sarcastic for once.

 

Sanjay popped a handful of Cheetos in his mouth, looking as if he was seriously pondering this point. After swallowing, he persisted, “Well, Min I’ll tell you. If the killer was limited to travel on foot you might have a fair point. But considering that our perp has access to a car, as widely reported by the press, I don’t think thirty miles is a significant enough buffer zone for my personal comfort level.”

 

As if to further validate his point, Sanjay broke into a perfect simulation of our principal's voice making an announcement over the PA system. “Students and faculty, may I have your attention please?” He provided the realistic pause to allow for everyone to shut up and actually pay attention. “In one short week, the normally sensible Bob and Laura Jackson will be removing their enticing daughter Mindy from the relative safety of small town South Carolina, and plunking her into the path of a serial killer. You might want to make a special point to say farewell to her before school is out for summer.”

 

I glared at him, one eyebrow raised. “Seriously?” He evaded a swipe of my yearbook against the side of his head without any apparent concern for my hostility.

 

He shrugged, completely unabashed, allowing me to rant. “I had really been looking forward to what you would come up with to amuse us during lunch. I figured four whole periods of salacious gossip would have provided more than adequate fodder for something better than that.”

 

“I don’t know Min,” he retorted with a wink. “I think your folks going on a little vacay at the ‘lake house’,” his fingers made air quotes around the words, “in the midst of the largest manhunt in the history of the state is rather salacious in itself.”

 

“You are such an ass,” I said, even though I was completely unable to refrain from smiling. Sanjay found it hilarious that my parents had put a double-wide trailer on such a prime spot on the lake. Our trailer lake house was an ongoing joke between us, and the tone in which he said the words was too funny not to elicit at least a brief smile. He had spent his first class period drawing a picture of me hanging clothes on a line, wearing Daisy Dukes and a cropped top outside of a trailer. The caption under the picture read: “How trailer people do laundry.” I planned to keep the picture forever.

 

Whitney brandished her phone again. “It says right here that the suspect is now a person of interest in as many as five other unexplained disappearances of young women over the past two years. This is getting massive.” When my expression didn't render an appropriate level of concern, she quickly added, “It’s been all over CNN,” as if hoping to sway me decidedly into freak out mode.

I eyed them each suspiciously. “Do you guys want me to completely nut up over this? You’ve both been up there. Nothing remotely exciting ever happens—that’s kind of the point. It’s a place to just go and relax.”

Sanjay waved a hand. “Forget I brought it up.” He immediately switched gears, leaning in close to whisper, “1985 called and asked Laurel to return that big hair!”

I laughed, agreeing that I’d seen Delta jets with a smaller wingspan than Laurel’s hair—but not completely forgetting the unnerving conversation about the serial killer's proximity to the very place we’d be heading in just a few days.

 

I pretended to listen as Sanjay and Whitney debated a rumor about our English teacher hooking up with the much younger assistant football coach, but I was too distracted to stay focused. Mainly I just sat there feeling grateful to have finally made some friends in this stuck-up small town. When my dad took the job as the minister of the Presbyterian church, I didn't think I ever would. But now I have this quirky group of friends that don’t care what my dad does for a living.

 

Having a dad as minister of a church instead of a normal job like a bank president or accountant, means you have hundreds of people who think they can tell you what to do--especially what they think you are doing wrong. You can’t get away with anything. If you think I’m kidding, just the other day a woman whose son is the biggest pervert I’ve ever met, told me that I shouldn’t come to church without wearing pantyhose.

Pantyhose? Really? Even my own mother calls them stockings, and she’s cool with me not wearing them. It isn’t 1922 anymore, and I seriously doubt my bare legs offend any normal un-snobbish person under the age of seventy. So I just smiled, thanked the woman for her concern, and went on about my business in my bare legged glory. But still, it completely gets on my last nerve.

Why doesn’t she worry about her own son Edwin, who grabbed my hand and pulled me into an empty room on our first Sunday here to ask me for a blow job? It seems to me that propositioning the new minister’s daughter for oral sex is a bigger disgrace than a lack of hosiery. But of course, I didn’t work up the nerve to tell the woman about her son’s special interest in me—even when she asked me in her fake syrupy voice if Edwin was making me feel welcome. Oh, he made me feel welcome, all right.

 

As we headed to our last few classes of the day, Sanjay gave me a wink and said, "We weren't trying to freak you out, Min. I'm sure it will be fine."

 

God, I hoped he was right. I really needed a couple of weeks up at the lake to just chill.