Shortly before Linda’s thirteenth birthday, her parents were giving her the kind of look you’d give your shadow. In those days they had almost given up on her. First, it was matches in the field. Then she was caught sipping a Coors by the old tool shed. Short skirts and cigarettes followed. Most recently, it was the body she dragged back home.

“Where did you get that thing?” Linda’s mother asked. Her gray curls seemed to flick and bounce with greater fervor after each stunt she and Linda’s stepdad had to confront.

“I found it in the junkyard just past Sundance Rest Home.” It wasn’t a real body, of course, but a mannequin of sorts, perhaps a crash dummy. If you looked closely, you could see faded yellow-and-black circles on the sun-bleached plastic skin of the temples.

“Why did you bring it here?”

“I don’t know; it’s October, I thought maybe I’d scare someone.”

“It’s creepy, Linda. Get it out of here, and be back by dark.” Linda’s stepdad nodded and grunted in agreement.

Linda knew where to take her “body,” and why. Just past mile marker 53 was a small trail that led into the woods and then down to Cottonwood Creek. It was a long way down the ravine at marker 53, the slope steep and the soil slippery, and the trail edges were dotted with jagged rocks. It was the perfect place to scare her “friends.”

Linda, chubby and freckled, simply didn’t fit in with Tonya and Sarah, the spoiled girls at school who always had the best clothes and lived in mini-mansions on the Southside. They called Linda “mushroom top” when she first wore the skirts and spread rumors about her and boys.

But, when they heard of the body, and that Linda knew its whereabouts, they became her friends.

“Love those earrings, Linda. Can you show us the dead body?” Tonya said.

“Cute top today, Linda. Will you take us to see it?” Sarah said.

“Sure, meet me after school.”

The girls followed Linda on their bikes. The highway narrowed as they entered the canyon, the crumbling strip of asphalt on the shoulder becoming less navigable as they rode. It reduced to a pot-holed strip of just a few feet at marker 53. They parked their bikes inside the trailhead. Linda walked them through the dried wildflower stalks where black butterflies played in the summer. Chickweed husks poked through their socks, and fir branches swatted their faces as they pushed through the trees to the edge.

“There,” Linda said, pointing.

The girls peered through the brush toward the creek bank. It was a long way down the ravine at marker 53, the slope steep and the soil slippery, and the trail edges were dotted with jagged rocks.

“I see it!” Tonya said.

“An arm!” Sarah said.

The rest of the body was barely visible through the latticework of overlapping needles and branches.

“What’s the head look like?” Tonya said. “I bet it’s all bloody with maggots and oozing and stuff.”

“Gross!” Sarah said.

It was past sundown, and Linda’s friends were too afraid to go any farther. They surmised it was the boy who had been missing from Phillipsburg, but how did he get all the way here? They debated calling the police, but Linda said she didn’t want to get into any more trouble and they should just let him rest in peace.

~

Linda was still a shadow in her parents’ lives when her mother gave her the message a week later.

“Someone named Tonya called. She said she found your ‘thing’ or something like that in the woods, and she’ll bring it to school tomorrow. I hope you’re behaving.”

“Oh don’t worry, Mom, she’s my friend. She probably found my notebook for class.”

Between second and third periods, Tonya waved Linda over to her locker.

“Found your body, Linda.” Tonya held her locker door open, revealing the plastic arm of the dummy. “Nice try. I sent my boyfriend to mile marker 53, and that’s what he brought back.” Sarah snapped her gum and laughed from behind. Other students gathered around and snickered. Linda was sure she heard “mushroom top” muttered from the group.

Linda found the rest of the dummy dumped in her front lawn. She hunkered silently under her parents’ glares at the dinner table while her mother waved a finger and scolded: “I told you to get that thing out of here.”

~

“There’s a real body there now,” Linda told the girls a few days later in the cafeteria, “just in time for Halloween.”

“Yeah right,” they sneered.

But, before costumes and candy and parties, they nonetheless joined her that afternoon for a ride into the narrowing canyon.

“This better be good, Linda, or you’re dead meat at school,” Sarah said as she toed the kickstand of her bike to the ground.

“Let’s see it,” Tonya followed. 

The three walked through the wildflower stalks and swatting branches to the edge.

Linda pointed.

The two girls looked down and said, almost simultaneously, “there’s nothing there.”

Linda was aware of this, but she instructed them to “look closer.” They leaned forward.

Sarah snapped her gum, and Linda observed her pull her Aqua Net-sprayed “wings” to the side so they wouldn’t get in her mouth as she continued to chew.

As Tonya leaned, Linda noticed how well-divided the hairs were in the middle of her skull, pulled tight by the turquoise bobble ties so perfectly placed equidistant from each other, and how the ducktail of hairs too short to reach the ties curved down, down toward the rippling water below.

She sensed their disbelief as they leaned closer to the edge. It didn’t matter. Linda was going to start over with new friends. And more bodies.

It was a long way down the ravine at marker 53, the slope steep and the soil slippery, and the trail edges were dotted with jagged rocks . . .

Michael Carter is a writer from the Western United States. He's also a Space Camp alum, volcanic-eruption survivor, and wannabe full-time RVer. When he’s not writing, he enjoys fly fishing and wandering remote wilderness areas of the Northern Rocky Mountains. He can be found online at www.michaelcarter.ink and @mcmichaelcarter.