Jennifer--s Body -2009- Site

“The hunters,” I said.

I’m still hungry too.

I stepped to the edge. “You brought a dead heart to a best friend fight.”

The cops ruled it a gas leak. The town buried her on a Tuesday. I stood at the grave until everyone left, then I carved into her headstone with the same scissors: Jennifer--s Body -2009-

She blew on her nails. “Chip was a boy. And he tasted like insecurity and AXE body spray. Next question.”

“You said boys,” I said. “Not Chip.”

I smiled.

She touched it, looked at the red on her fingertip, and licked it clean. “Am I?” That night, she showed up at my window. I didn’t hear the glass slide open. I just felt the cold.

I flinched. She’d always called me “Needy” as a joke—because my name was Nidia, and I clung to her like a life raft. But now it sounded like a diagnosis.

“Freak accident,” she said, tilting her head. Her hair, which used to be mousy and fine, now fell in a black curtain that seemed to drink the fluorescent light. “Poor guys.” “The hunters,” I said

I closed my eyes. The wind smelled like her hairbrush.

“You brought scissors to a demon fight?” she laughed.

I should have run. I should have called the police, a priest, the guy from the Discovery Channel who debunks myths. But Megan leaned in and pressed her cold forehead to mine. For one second, she smelled like the girl who let me copy her algebra homework. Then she smelled like the inside of a slaughterhouse. “You brought a dead heart to a best friend fight

I picked up her hairbrush. It was crusted with something dark at the bristles. “The thing inside you. Can you feel it?”

I went home and sharpened my mother’s sewing scissors. The final scene happened at the town pool, after hours. Megan had lured the entire football team there with a text that said “skinny dipping and no consequences.” She was in the water, floating on her back, when I walked in. The boys were already gone. The pool was pink.