Amelie and I

Amelie and I

                                            by David

          I usually don’t start with setting, but in this case it’s necessary so that you know the circumstances surrounding the deaths of my neighbors. I’m a twenty-four year old fellow living near the Kansas State University campus in Manhattan, sharing an apartment with a French girl named Amélie. In December, one Tuesday, we had a terrific ice storm that froze the region and cut electricity off for 60 miles around. My brother called me on my cell and said that CNN had us on the news. At the time, there were some undergrad or grad students—I don’t know how many—living next door to us who kept us awake with their partying and carrying on. They stole the bikes off our porch, keyed a neighbor’s car, and chopped down trees in the middle of the night with a chainsaw. I wanted to burn their house down and make the world a better place.

          So, when this ice storm came, Amélie and I had this idea that, to pay our neighbors back, I would dress up in my Halloween costume—a realistic, frightening skeleton costume—and knock on their windows in the dead of night. Remember, the electricity was all out, and the whole town was quiet from the ice. Amélie and I laughed about it and talked ourselves into the idea. So, I put on the skeleton costume at about 10:00 or so, and I snuck out my door to the neighbors’ house. Coming up to their house, I began tapping on one of the windows that had a curtain in front of it, grinning behind my mask the entire time. Anyway, the curtain opened, and it was my neighbor, and I made a loud noise and sort of jumped and raised my arms. He screamed like a bitch.

          He ran away, and I ran up to the street, where there was no snow, so they couldn’t follow my footprints back to the house. When I got home, Amélie had hot chocolate boiling on the stove, and I told her my story, and we laughed about it for half an hour, then fell into a discussion about how our neighbors deserved it and got what was coming to them.

The next morning, there were maybe twenty police cars surrounding the neighbors’ house, and the cops were walking across the snow and pulling yellow police tape around the whole of the neighbors’ property. I looked at them through the window and, when Amélie suggested that we walk down and see what was happening, I agreed. As it turned out, there were eight undergrads living in that tiny little house, and all eight of them were found dead and hanging by their necks from an I-beam.

          All of them were found wearing the same skeleton costume that I had worn to scare them. I looked at Amélie, and she looked at me. We decided that, even though I had nothing to do with the murders, we ought to destroy my skeleton costume. Who knows what kind of trouble it could cause? When we got back to the house, Amélie asked me if I had anything to do with the murders.

          I said, “No way. I’m no psycho—I mean, I was only gone for what, six, seven minutes? Even if I was a psycho and wanted to kill our neighbors, a man can’t kill eight people in under ten minutes and hang them all from the rafters. I mean, come on girl, it’s just not possible. Plus, hanging people from the rafters is just weird and sad.”

          She nodded.

          I looked at her, hard, “You didn’t have anything to do with the deaths, did you? How do you know those deaths were murders and not mass suicides or something?”

          She shrugged, “I don’t know if they were murders or not. I guess I just assumed that eight pretty healthy looking guys with a mainstream party mentality wouldn’t dress themselves up in skeleton suits and kill themselves. That’s all. And, for your information, No, I didn’t kill them. I don’t know what happened to them.”

          “What the hell’s going on here?”

          Amélie and I turned around. I had the skeleton suit from last night in my hands, and I guess that was why the cop was asking me. There were maybe eight or ten cops, all of them looking tense, especially one younger cop whose face was really sweaty and whose hand was cheating towards his gun.

          I said, “Whoa! Hold on motherfuckers! In the first place, who said you guys could come in here? And, in the second place, I can totally explain this costume.”

          Right then and there I was going to make a clean breast of the whole skeleton suit thing and tell them everything about my and Amélie’s prank on the neighbors. The story may not seem funny to the police after seeing the dead students, but I had to tell the truth. And, besides, there’s a big difference between scaring an asshole neighbor and hanging eight people by their necks.

          “What do you mean, ‘Who said we could come in here?’” an officer asked. “I could ask the same thing of you.”

          “Whatever,” I said. “I mean, I’ll explain all this,” I held up the costume, “But I’ll explain it outside. You need a search warrant to come in our apartment. I don’t know all my law, but I’m pretty damn sure a lawyer would back me up on this one.”

          The same cop said, “You don’t live here.”

          I said, “I damn well do. I live here with Amélie, here, my housemate. You can ask the landlord, Dr. Eric Koston, who works as a department head at the university. He’ll tell you that not only do I live here, but I haven’t been late for a bill since I moved in five months ago, at the start of July.”

          One of the other cops looked at our couch; his eyes glanced into my room, where the door was open, and he could probably see the foot of my bed. “There’s nothing here but dust and mice,” he said.

          I turned to Amélie and said, “Back me up, girl. Shit.”

          I heard one of the officers mutter to another, “There’s nobody there; who the hell is he talking to?”