Meeka is better than me at figuring things out. Plus, I trust her more. I mean, the body is on her property. Why the hell would she try to mess things up?
I fill a travel mug with the burnt coffee left over in the carafe from Dad’s morning fix and I hop in the Jeep and it’s cold as fuck but that’s okay. The soft-top is flapping and the duct tape covering some cracks is peeling off and letting in air. Helps wake me up and straighten out my head.
When I get to Meeka’s, she’s sitting on a rocking chair on her front porch, legs crossed, feet covered in brown boots that are lined with fur. She hops down and she’s hugging me as soon as my shoes hit the gravel.
“You tell me the truth and you’ll only have to tell me once,” she says. “Was it you?”
“The picture?” I ask. “No. Hell no.”
“Good,” she says, and she kisses my cheek.
“So it was Logan, then?”
Meeka looks up, all lost. “No idea. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would he?”
“Why would Holly?”
She grabs my hand and leads me across the yard to the barn. She pulls the big doors shut as we walk in and then she hops onto the hood of a Trans Am her dad has been “restoring” for close to five years. Not the sort of car I could see Mr. Miller ever driving, but hey, we all have things that turn us on.
“You guys thought you had a good plan and I know it wasn’t supposed to be easy, but . . .”
Meeka’s voice fades into nothing and it looks like she’s going to cry, but she’s good at keeping that stuff locked in. She holds it together.
“I hear ya,” I say, and I slide onto the hood next to her. I wait for her to lean into me, and she does, and that’s when I put my arm around her. “Remember. You’re here. Alive. With me. As it should be. Because of what we did.”
She shakes her head. “The phones were buried. We know they were in the ground.”
“Logan dug them up,” I say. “That’s the only explanation. He’s trying to fuck us. For whatever reason.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know? Have you been out there?”
She thinks about this for a moment, then nods. “You know the stone wall out there? Right next to where we buried him? Did you know we were sitting on that wall the first time Cole and I kissed?”
I did know that. Cole had told me once. He kissed Meeka there, then a few months later, he threatened her there. And last week, we buried him there. The symbolism isn’t lost on me.
“I’m not asking about the stone wall,” I say. “I’m asking about digging.”
She shakes her head and says, “Digging isn’t the issue here.”
Got it. I don’t press her because she sounds so sure. Instead, I focus on the data. If no one went out there digging, then that means the phones are still out there, buried deep with Cole. I don’t know a lot about how iPhones, or Galaxys, or any phones, for that matter, work. I don’t know if there’s a way to hack into them using other phones or computers, even while they’re, like, turned off and underground. But Meeka is smart, so maybe she does.
“Do you think Logan hacked in?” I ask. “Does he know how to do that?”
Her heels tap the grill of the car and she looks at her phone but she doesn’t say a thing. Then she holds the phone up and snaps a quick pic of—I don’t know, the barn door?—and she taps it a few more times before finally talking.
“Someone fucked up. Maybe not intentionally, but someone fucked up.”
LOGAN
I’M STARING AT THIS MEME with all four of our ridiculous and terrified faces and a caption that says: WHO FARTED? And what I’m thinking is: “WHO MADE THIS?”
It’s all I’ve been thinking since Holly forwarded it to me last night. Obviously, whoever created it has seen our video. And since they’ve seen our video, then that’s it. We’re done. Through. Game over.
It’s nine in the morning and I haven’t slept a wink. I’ve been stumbling along the path of this nightmare for hours. There are other versions of the same pic with different captions, fonts, and layouts. The meme has already made the rounds on Facebook, but that’s the realm of our parents. I can’t believe the meme could’ve started there. Nothing ever starts there. No, it must have been born on Reddit or 4chan or 8chan or some other site where the sad and friendless hang out and all these memes originate.
But I can’t find a beginning. Using a reverse image search, I find a few Reddit threads with titles like Check out this fellowship of doinks and Meme the fuck out of these turds posted over the last day or two. They’re sprinkled with Photoshopped pics and snarky comments, most of which I’d rather not remember. It’s like middle school all over again. I won’t even mention the chans. They’re cesspools of porn and violence and I have to turn away as soon as I open the first few threads.
There’s no debating that the picture is unflattering. But if you’ve ever done a screen cap of a video, any video, you’ll easily find unflattering frames. What I don’t get is why it caught on. And I can’t for the life of me figure out who brought it to Plainview High. It’s not like there’s anything in the picture identifying who we are or where we’re from. It seems to have reached here almost immediately.
I message Holly: Where did Riley get the meme?
She writes back: IDK. On my way to Meeka’s. Come too.
* * *
• • •
The first time I ever went to Meeka’s house, it was the summer after second grade, for her birthday party. She was turning eight. We weren’t necessarily friends back then, but she’d been in my class and so I was invited. I think I might have given her Legos.
It was a laid-back affair, with cake, presents, playing in the yard around her house, and a walk past the barn to a pond where we all went swimming. Meeka had always been friendly, but this was another level entirely. She was exceedingly happy to have us all there. She kept saying things like “Do you want a tour of the house?” and “Do you want to sit on the tractor?” and “Do you want to see where the rabbits live?”
If we were older, it might’ve come off as desperate. But for a kid, it was impressive. She had a gorgeous old house with built-in cubbyholes, multiple lofts, and—I assumed, though I didn’t see them—secret passages. It was on a picture-perfect farm with antique equipment that probably didn’t work, and didn’t have to, but was rusty in all the right ways.
Plus, Meeka’s parents were cool. They’d lived in Boston when they were younger and had that city confidence about them. Yet they also fit right in around here—all trucker-hatted, earthbound, and friendly—even if the older generations might’ve called them flatlanders.