Not silver-tongued like the devil but silver bullets like the ones that kills werewolves. Alice always switched words, said something other than what she meant. But we’d all gotten used to it, gotten used to filling in the gaps in her Madlibs to make sense of it all. We’d all grown up together, spent our summers in the creek, in the local outlet mall, tracing our names on muddy banks of the man-made lake at the edge of town. If we couldn’t understand Alice by that point then we wouldn’t have been good friends.
But when she calls us up years later, the awkward video call where all our tiny screens blink at one another, and says that she needs a lot of God so she can kill the monster in the lake, we have to pause and take stock of the situation.
She’s the only one who still lives there. Has always lived there, as we broke away to jobs and college and spouses, and keeps us appraised of all the town gossip long after we remember Ben from first grade or Mrs. Hutchers who rang up grocery stores at the IGA. So when Alice says monster in the lake, we all search our memories because Alice always was right and we’d end up remembering that Ben broke his arm jumping from a high arc on the swing and that Mrs. Hutchers would slip lollipops in our mother’s shopping bags. Alice was the town memory and we knew this. But a monster.
A monster wasn’t what we were expecting. One of us asks, “are you joking?” and Alice flinches. And one of us asks, “are you feeling okay, Alice?” and Alice blinks back tears. She says, “don’t you remember all the girls who disappeared? One a year for years? Nobody cared about them. Don’t you remember that summer when Missy Black disappeared? The summer we spent searching the woods for clues? When we found her shoe on the banks of the lake and her ghost kept us at night?” But Missy Black we all knew ran away. They all ran away. Everyone said so. Missy Black was no good, four years older than us and a troublemaker with a capital T as our parents would say. So we all shook our head. We didn’t find a shoe. We saw no ghost at night. And Alice got frustrated. She looked us each in the frame one by one, scanning our video squares. She said, “please” but she meant, “goddammit.”
When Alice leaves the chat, we all look at one another for blame. We had let Alice down. Alice who spent one summer babysitting and putting every single dime away to help Leah afford the coat that her parents couldn’t, so she’d shiver on the playground, pretend that she was fine, hiding her hands in her pocket. Alice who once punched Billy Masters in the jaw, the goddamn jaw, because he’d forced Molly to kiss him. Billy had screamed at her, and the older boys had come looking, pointed at him laughing, and Billy never bothered any of us again. Alice who was Alice through and through, holding our hands in the dark. Alice who once told us she loved us, but because it was Alice she said she trampolined us but we knew what she meant. We always knew what she meant.
“Maybe…” one of us begins, and the next says, “we did see a ghost. Was that the summer I kept having nightmares?” “Was it the summer I always left the light on and my parents made me see the counselor?” “Was it the summer when I woke up spitting blood because I kept biting my tongue in my sleep?”
And one of us says, “Missy’s shoes were pink all-stars. We all were so jealous of them. So, of course” and one finishes, “of course we noticed them on the lake shore. Pink. Bright.”
So we call Alice back up. Let the video chat ring and ring but Alice doesn’t pick up. We watch each other in our squares, all thinking, thinking. “She’ll be fine,” one of us says, and “Alice must have meant something else.”
But we all know what Alice means when Alice switches words and Alice meant Monster.
That night we dream of something coming out of the lake, the sinews of its body, the sharp of its teeth, the way it twisted into us and pulled everything out until we were left beautiful paintings after a night in the rain. We dream of Missy, four years older, and still she’d say, “hey, kiddos” when we saw her at the diner, extra whip on our hot chocolates for free.
We don’t live too far. There isn’t enough space between us to be a problem. We can bring silver, we can bring God. We will fight and tear and scream until our throats are raw. Beat our fists like knights who refuse to lose, after their weapons, their armor, is gone. No monster will stand a chance. Alice will look at us and she will say, “we are starlight” and we will know what she means.
