[ Posted 2 Feb | 87k likes | 5k boosts | share | report ]

And this is going to sound like the lamest thing ever, but it helps to keep a journal. Get your thoughts in order and on paper. Sometimes you realize how stupid you were to think, for example, I dunno, running out of milk, was such a big deal. Sometimes, it will help you immortalize the moments you really shouldn’t forget. The really heinous stuff. Oh and the good times. If there ever are any.

Plus a little light reading for the cops, in case the folks finally have enough of you, decide to whack you off and bury you in the basement. Or if you’re the one to go off the deep end and axe the lot of ‘em - ah - mandatory disclosure, because I keep seeing y’all still don’t get it: I am JOKING.

So, yeah. Cheap journals! Buy yours now.

–

Rai had found his energy just in time to negotiate his way into the V______ household.

It was a rusty little abode in a neighborhood packed with them, nearly wall to wall. Tiny strips of dead grass separated the plots but there was not so much as a bush in the way of greenery. It was not as if a larger patch of lawn would have encouraged much outdoor activity, however. Exhaust from the highway stuck to the air, the roofs, the walls.

The boy who answered the door seemed content to let them boil on the doorstep while he took his sweet time reading Rai’s ID. Hazel’s younger brother of two years, if Sao recalled. After several long, sweaty minutes, the parents sidled up behind him, joining him in stony scrutiny.

All the while, the sun bore down. Sao held a hand up to shade his eyes, standing several feet away from the door, away from Rai, as he always did. In case an interviewee came out swinging. Perhaps ungraciously, he wished he’d stayed in the car. The inside of the house looked pitch black, the doorway could have been a solid wall for all he could see; three pale, inanimate masks painted over an impenetrable barrier.

“We have some questions regarding Hazel. It regards a friend of hers. We suspect something that happened to her might be related to what happened to Hazel.”

The wall of faces remained stoic.

“There are a couple of photos I’d like to show you, if that’s alright.” Rai folded his ID and shoved it back in his pocket. “If not… you don’t have to let us in now. You can let us know a better time for you. How does that sound?”

There was no reply, but the boy in the wall teetered a bit. A hand surfaced, brushed a stream of sweat off his forehead. Rai took a tentative step forward. Posing a threat - no, he was only seeking shade. Sao inwardly lauded Rai’s patience. When they’d first met, Rai had been rather forceful when it came to getting questions into people’s faces, and getting into their homes to do so. He’d become gentler; in the past day Sao thought he was bending towards downright empathic. He’d have commended Rai more if they weren’t baking in diesel fumes. The sun felt like a physical force, pounding at his back.

“I know it’s painful for you to have to remember,” Rai said, “but time is kind of a sensitive matter for Hazel’s friend.”

Meaningless.

“I was hoping we could take a look at her belongings, but…” Rai shot a look at Sao, as a preemptive apology. “We can send some professionals for that, some other time. We really just wanna ask about some people Hazel might have known - so, I know, we can talk to you from out here if you really don’t want us inside.”

The thought of holding their faces to the sun any longer finally moved the family. That, or they felt sorry enough for their dim-witted guests, ridiculously clad in jackets and gloves in the summer heat. The door opened.

—

“Close that or the dog will get out,” warned Hazel’s mother. Those were the first words Sao heard from any of the three family members.

The dog in question was flat on its side in a corner of the rather sparse living room, in direct path of the air conditioner. It was a tiny, wiry-haired terrier with beady eyes which opened to see them in, then quickly shut again. Going outside was the last thing on its mind.

“Wen, get them some water,” the mother said.

Wen, the son, meandered toward the kitchen. Rai pulled a finger out of his glove and navigated his phone to a photo of Hazel and her group. “I’ll cut to the chase. Did you ever see-”

“You heard your mother,” the father said, loudly. Sao turned to see Wen eyeing them from the hall. “Go!” the man said, and Wen disappeared. “Too bad what happened to Hazel. It’s already been a rough year, we really didn’t need this.”

“I’m sorry,” Sao offered. He wasn’t sure if the man was referring to their visit, or the fate of Hazel. “About the photo, do you recognise them? Or how about this woman?” He scrolled to an image of Sapphire.

Hazel’s parents hovered over. Sao was surprised how much they both looked like their daughter - they both had bushy dark hair peppered with grays, thin faces (that Hazel had emphasized with contouring) and thin lips (that Hazel had masked with dark lipstick). Wen, on the other hand, didn’t fully resemble any of them. He had the looks, but something did not quite match up.

It wasn’t until Wen returned that Sao realized what the difference was. Hunched behind the couch, looking almost longingly at the miserable inferno out the window, what he lacked was the composure. In her photos, in her attitude, Hazel had carried a sense of great, almost inflated, self assurance. And here were her parents, loudly hemming and hawing and crossing their arms…

“Don’t recognize them,” the father said, when what seemed like a substantial amount of time had passed. “These were her online friends?”

Rai took his phone back. “How much did you know about her online work?”

“Nothing at all. Aside from that she did it, made a bit of money and a lot of racket.” He put his arm on his wife. Not around, Sao thought, but on her - like pressing down a lid. “It’s been quiet since Hazel passed, hasn’t it? She was always talking on her computer late into the night, when she was here. Recording, re-recording her things.”

“She was a perfectionist. She wanted us to be too,” the mother said with a dry laugh. “We’re afraid of even beginning to plan a funeral, Hazel would have wanted it to be perfect, she was very critically minded. High standards. Always the best for little Hazel…”

Rai had chosen to look at the dog for support. “Did you notice anything unusual in the days before she took her own life?”

“No. Nope, I don’t think so.”

“So she was…” Rai paused. “Was she happy?”

A laugh, a completely honest belly laugh, from both parents.

“She wasn’t happy, but there wasn’t going to be a change in that at any point because, well, she was never happy,” her mother said, wiping back a mix of tears and sweat. “She tried very hard to stay upset. That was the thing. The family counselor said it too, plain and simple. No amount of medicines or doctors are going to be able to help someone get better if they don’t want to get better. If you’re not willing to put in the effort, the humility, it’s just an exercise in narcissism. Oh, and she was the one who made us all see that shrink in the first place.”

Her husband patted his belly in amusement. “Heard it firsthand, from a professional, but she couldn’t let it go. It was always going to be our fault somehow. She didn’t take us back after that, instead she would go at us on her own, use big words and talk us into circles. If she forgot to eat or refused to, she said that we starved her. If the car wasn’t available when she wanted it, we were isolating her. She’d remind me of a spanking when she was ten and say I beat children for no reason.” The man gave Rai a blissful smile. “Did some research on our own. They call that gaslighting. You found that one out, right Wen?”

“Um.”

The mother chipped in, “Still, we tried. She was allowed to live at home for free. We fed her, clothed her, paid her bills, let her use the car... We never forced her to do anything.”

“She mostly kept to herself after the family counseling mishap. She only ever really became sweet when she needed cash. Always said it was for self-care, therapy, for medication, but I never saw any proof of it in her health or attitude. She might have kept seeing shrinks on her own, but like the first one said - you can’t help someone so determined to be miserable.”

With that declaration, mother and father threw themselves at the colorless couch.

“Alright, one more thing,” Rai said. “Did Hazel ever learn or practice any sort of magic?”

Another burst of gravelly laughter. It was more pleasant than the previous round, Sao supposed.

“If only she knew how to apply herself toward anything productive. But there was another thing, right? You wanted to see her stuff.” the father said, rising to his feet. “Well, Hazel’s life was all in her room. Have at it - but watch your step. The dog had a run of the place, completely tore it apart.”

Looking at the dog in the corner, the claim seemed dubious.

—

Whether the culprit was the dog or not, Hazel’s room was a wreck. It was not the playful collegiate disarray of clothes on the floor, books and wires lying about, foodstuffs around the bed. There was nothing on the floor, everything was stowed - but it was not clean. Every single drawer and shelf appeared to have been opened, shuffled, and closed. Even the grimy carpet had signs of being pulled back and slapped back down.

“This is peculiar,” Sao said, studying Hazel’s misaligned row of black nail varnishes.

“No kidding. What kind of dog goes through drawers?”

“Maybe they tried to clean up after the dog stormed through. Oh - I meant to ask at some point. You had a dog too, didn't you?”

Rai slammed a drawer shut, but it was so copiously stuffed with black clothing that it bounced back open. “You’ve been looking through my Neocam history.”

“I’m not actually sure if that blurry white photo was actually of a dog. The description - if I recall - was ‘test post’?”

“Invasion of privacy,” Rai said, echoing Sao’s earlier sentiments.

“Give the word, and I’ll stop following you.”

“It doesn’t really work like that,” Rai muttered. “I still have the dog. He was a rescue; I guess he’s pretty old now. He lives at my mom’s house.”

“A rescue, that’s good of you.”

Rai grunted.

Sao believed his statement had been neutral enough to patch out the matter of dogs. “So… I suppose we’re looking for some manner of notebook to see if she continues the pattern of recording her appointments and prescriptions.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking something like this…” Rai drew out his phone and puttered around until he found a video of Hazel, sporting a coy, charcoal-lipped smile, holding up a thick black journal. Her fingers suspended the thing from its upper corners, as if she were presenting a prize catch. “She had this notebook front and center in a few videos. Advocating journaling for mental health - sometimes she wrote in it on camera.”

“It could be that she inspired the others to follow suit.”

Sao brushed a thin layer of dust from the desk, opened the drawer, and stiffened. He glanced at Rai, back at the drawer, and closed it. “Where’s her computer equipment?”

“Saw some of it there.” Rai jabbed a finger at the only door in the room beside the entrance. “Another personal commode. She did her last video - her suicide message - in there, so that’s the last place everything was set up.”

Sao again volunteered to comb through the bathroom. It was a dingy little space, the bathtub rimmed in mold, and unexpectedly chilly. A set of lights and microphone scaffolding had been collapsed and piled, skeleton-like, in a dark corner. There wasn’t a medicine cabinet, but pill bottles were lined up around the sink. All empty.

He went to the desk drawer again and closed his eyes.

“Napping? I thought you’d finally grown out of the habit,” Rai said, somewhere across the room.

“It’s more of a hobby. Once again: give the word and I’ll stop.” He smiled, and tugged the drawer open for the second time. There was no black journal amongst the mess of pens and hair ties and used sticker sheets and craft knives (rimmed with what might have been rust or blood from her wrists; another common subject of Hazel’s) but there was on top of the heap a single square napkin, slightly crumpled, printed with a circular logo. Red dots in a radial shape around a name.

Rock Pool.

He picked it up, and something crackled, fell from the folds. A foil and plastic blister pack, for pills. Sao raised the sheet up to the murky light. There were twelve little pockets, all of them popped open and empty, save for a fine black dust in the edges of one.

“I found some kind of pill wrapper. Empty.” He left it on the table for Rai to check. “Strange that it was here, instead of the bathroom with the others.”

Rai looked it over. “No labels.”

“Could it be the chemical Hazel ordered? The poison…” he let Rai extrapolate.

“Sodium nitrite. But no - EMTs found and confiscated a jar of it from the bathroom.” Rai turned the thing over again. “It was a white powder. The stuff in here looks black. Maybe that’s mold... weird that it wasn’t with her other stuff in the bathroom. I can get Cad to find a chemist to take a closer look.” He wrapped it in the napkin again and stowed it in a tiny plastic bag from one of his pockets. “The state of this place makes me uneasy. Feels like it got searched. And not by a dog.”

“Agreed. The room was turned inside out, and not so carefully flipped back. Result of a quick cleanup for cover?”

“The obvious explanation is the family was looking for something, but no way would they have thought this was a good coverup. Why let us poke around? I said they didn’t have to.” Rai paused. “No… I said we’d get someone else to come by later. Forensics. Someone more suited, so they let us – they must think we’re idiots.”

Eyes flashing, he marched to the living room. Family and dog received him with relative calm.

“Wen,” Rai barked. “You could hear Hazel record videos, right? Did she ever talk about a diary?”

“Like… what for?” Wen replied shakily. He was stroking the dog. For the tremor in his voice, Sao thought, the movement of his hands over the fur was smooth as silk.

Wen’s shoulders moved up, bracing as Rai moved closer, speaking in a low growl. “Did mom and dad know she talked about a diary? There might be stuff in there that could help you get closure, when Hazel died, right? Maybe she said why, what pushed her over the edge…”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you have any ideas of your own, what might have made your sister so upset? She didn’t go out very much, from what I’ve heard. So it’s likely that things here might have stirred her up.”

The dog raised its head. Things were getting interesting.

“I’m just a little frustrated, because there are so many factors about Hazel’s death we aren’t clear about. There hasn’t been an autopsy authorized, and soon the body might deteriorate too much to reveal anything. We know there’s a book where she recorded sensitive details of her life, but it doesn’t seem to be in her room. You don’t all seem to care much about her, but you understand that it doesn’t look good that you’re impeding–”

“Oh, calm down, investigator,” Mrs V_____ said, as if scolding a schoolboy. “We just forgot. We’d have given it to you right away if you mentioned it. Honey, get the silly book.”

Her husband sauntered to the cabinet that held the television and made a show of checking the drawers. “There we go.”

And there it was. Rai swiped the large black volume out of the man’s hand and held it aloft as if it might bite. The faux-leather cover was decorated with peeling stickers. He checked the binding, and opened to the first page. Hazel’s name was there, in spiky capitals, and her phone number in a small line allocated for it.

Sao waited patiently by the door. “You all must have searched very hard for this. You and the dog, was it?”

“The dog destroyed the room, and we tried to fix it. We found the book while we were doing so.” The father sniffed, and folded his arms with even more authority than before. “It’s like you said. We wanted closure. But…”

Rai began looking through the pages. There were five sentences on the first page, ending with ‘more tomorrow!’. The next, a sketch of a flower, not quite a match for Jasmine’s work. The next page had a solitary line, not even complete: ‘today my day went blah blah blah’. The following page was the same. Rai closed the book, reopened it, as if that would magically conjure up the real content, the confessions and condemnations. He flipped through all the pages, brushing the edges with his thumb.

There were perhaps a dozen pages with a sentence or two written in the top left corner, the start of something that never came to fruition, and the rest of the pages were blank. There was one page in the middle of the book that was filled out, but looking closely, Sao saw it wasn’t any actual attempt at writing. He was accustomed to interpreting even the most obscure cursive from his transcripts - and these were just scribbles. If opened to its center the journal would look nicely filled out, but there was nothing in it but filler.

It looked so nicely framed in Rai’s hands from a distance. The illusion of substance.

The journal had been a prop. A prop for a show which, ironically enough, preached the effectiveness of journaling.

Rai slapped the thing shut, scowling.

Gathered at the corner under the air conditioning, Wen was now standing up straight, dog in his arms. He’d joined his parents, become one of them, no longer shy and folded - there was no use for that anymore. He was just another doppelganger. Rai and Sao stared. Three identical smiles sneered back at them.

—

“Could they have perhaps bought a replacement?”

Pouring himself in the driver’s seat, Rai shook his head. With the ever present eyebags, he always looked tired, but at the moment he looked more worn out than usual. “That middle page, I recognized it. Hazel had it in a couple of her videos, I zoomed in and rotated it like crazy to see if I could read anything and I never could. And no wonder. There’s also that drawing of the flower; she did that on camera last year when she supposedly started the diary. I’ll bet she probably only ever cracked open the thing on camera.”

“I hate to speak ill of the dead…” Sao adjusted the air conditioning to blow away from his face. A futile effort as the loose hinges always wound up letting the vents drop back to an inconvenient angle. “Why would she do that?”

“That part’s easy. The facade. Maybe she really planned to use it, but didn’t stick with it as a habit. And to save face…”

“It was such a tedious little topic! She could have just dropped the idea altogether, I doubt even the most pedantic viewer would be asking her to spend more airtime writing in her diary, of all things.”

“Yeah.” It may have been his lapse in energy, but Rai was exhibiting unusual patience. “I gotta wonder if she kept it up to freak the family out.”

“The ransacked room did indicate that there was a search…”

“If that’s right, I didn’t fuck this one up as hard as I could have.” Rai set his elbows on the steering column and mustered a weary smirk. “Hazel implied that she left information about things that upset her in the journal. Family digging for it, they believed there was something in there worth hiding. Seeing as they’ve stalled the autopsy this long, I’m thinking Hazel’s body probably has signs of prolonged abuse. ‘Spanking’ the dad mentioned, with no shame at all...”

“It certainly sounded like they gave her a hard time. Right in front of us, he used her attempts to seek psychological help against her.”

“I don’t think Hazel was a saint either. But it’s funny that she managed to set that kind of a trap. It would go off after she was dead. Again, if I’m right. I haven’t been right too often lately.” Rai hit his forehead on the top of the steering wheel. “On second thought, fuck that. Her journaling scheme just let that creepshow trio spring a trap of their own on us.”

“This means Hazel is the first of the group, so far, who hasn’t kept some sort of psychiatric record in writing.”

“Maybe she kept it online. Or maybe Jasmine and Orchid were the only ones. Who knows if this is relevant at all.”

Red eyed, slumped with hair sticking to the plastic coat of the steering wheel, Sao had to feel sorry for Rai. But Rai wouldn’t appreciate patronizing and pats on the back.

“It’s almost lunch. Let’s pick up some coffee and sandwiches before we move on,” Sao said, breezily.

Rai perked up at the notion of caffeine. When his ruthless, natural smile resurfaced (thankfully directed at fellow drivers, rather than his passenger) Sao breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps he’d have time for a nap before they hit a cafe.

But as they traversed the highway back into the city center, he couldn’t quite drift off. The air conditioning was once again buffeting him head-on. At the same time, Rai was trying to talk to him, speaking at a rapid clip that could barely be made out over the howl of wind. What little Sao heard, he wasn’t sure he could respond to, in any case.

“They didn’t have to mess around with the autopsy. It’s like they wanted her to rot. Out of spite. Could have just shipped her out for a cheap cremation. Like the next one...”

His manic smile looked eminently fragile. Sao felt sorry for him again.