Crazed Minds | ✔️

twenty three

"I'm feeling strange in the night."
-Alive (Nightmare), Kid Cudi
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After Alec and Jasper find three shovels in Mr Jefferson's shed, we begin digging a hole about fifty metres from his house. The rain is crashing down, almost so hard that we can barely stand. But we power through its violence, and finally make a six foot hole in the ground.

Jasper and Alec head back to the house and return a few minutes later with Mr Jefferson's body, hanging limply in their hands. They stand above the hole, both shooting me an uncertain look. I nod, and they drop him in, and then we fill the hole again.

Once we're done, and we're standing watching the hole in the pouring rain as if Mr Jefferson would crawl his way out, I take my knife out of my shoe and glance at it. "We should get rid of the knife."

They nod, lips pressed together, and I pick up my shovel before digging another hole a few meters away. After a final glance, I chuck the pocket knife into the hole and fill it back up again, feeling both of their gazes lingering on me.

Once I'm done, the three of us slowly trudge back to the shed behind the house, store away the shovels and then head inside to clean the blood off the walls and our hands.

***

It takes a long time to say the least. A very long time. And it's not just the amount of time it takes that bothers me. It's the fact that the three of us buried a dead body because we'd be accused of killing him in the first place if someone found him.

And my knife. Why was it there? Obviously it was the murder weapon, but I think I would remember killing somebody. But the blood on my bed this morning...it all adds up.

"Someone is trying to frame me," I say, interrupting the silence that has been hanging in the air since we buried the body. We've all faced death- or for Alec, a state close to death- so it's not the fact that the groundskeeper is dead that is bothering us. It's the unknowingness of it all. We just don't know what we've got ourselves into.

"But who would do that? And why?" Jasper replies as we walk into the dining hall. Dinner ended quite a while ago, but we're all starving and we can only hope there's a little food left.

I shake my head. "At this school, it could be anyone."

Alec nods in agreement. "She's right. Whoever killed Mr Jefferson must be a student here. And in this place, everyone is a suspect."

We make it inside, and it's completely empty of students. But I see a few leftover ham sandwiches on the counter, so we get some plates and fill them. We find a table and sit in silence, quietly chewing on our food, until Alec says, "It's not like we can tell the police it isn't us if they find him. Everything points to us. And they're not going to believe three kids from Redwood Academy, are they? We're troubled youths, remember? We should figure out who did it. Before they find Mr Jefferson's body and come to the conclusion it was us."

Jasper nods while chewing on his sandwich. "You've got a point. I don't wanna any of us to be blamed if they figure out that he didn't simply skip town. I could ask around, see if anyone has a grudge that bad against Olivia."

I shake my head abruptly. "Nope, no way."

They both turn to me, faces incredulous. "What? Why?" Jasper questions.

I drop my sandwich and brush the crumbs off my hands. "We are not Sherlock Holmes. We are not going to go sniffing around for clues. If someone finds out we're looking, people will be suspicious."

Alec scoffs. "First it was his cat. Now Mr Jefferson himself? How many people need to die for you to realise we have a killer in our midst?"

I roll my eyes. "Okay, Nancy Drew, good deductions. Really. Maybe next you could figure out what sort of meat is in this sandwich because I really doubt it's anything less than human."

"I'm being serious, Liv. Unless you wanna go to jail for burying a dead body, then fine," Alec says, dropping the crust of his bread onto his plate with a sigh.

"It doesn't matter anyway," Jasper interrupts. "If they find the body and know we had detention today, we're all screwed. So we all need to keep our mouths shut. You got that? We can't trust anyone."

"How do we know we can trust you?" Alec says, frowning.

"I could ask you the same question," Jasper hisses, leaning forward in his seat.

Before I can interrupt the argument, Rosa approaches our table out of nowhere, and all I can hope is that she didn't hear any of our conversation.

"How was detention?" she asks calmly. "I can't imagine you found it easy in this weather."

"Actually, Mr Jefferson wasn't in when we went to his house. So we came here instead," Jasper says blankly.

She gives us all unreadable looks, before nodding and replying, "You should get yourself into a change of clothes. Wouldn't want you getting a cold, would we?"

"No, we wouldn't," I reply dryly. She presses her lips together and nods, before turning and leaving, her pitch black hair bobbing up and down.

"You know," Jasper muses, "there's something not quite right about that woman."

Thank God someone else thinks so.