im cawghing

In another room, another pair of officers was interviewing Kaitlyn under the attempted supervision of her lawyer.

“I’m going to say this one more time, slowly, so you idiots can understand,” Kaitlyn began. Her lawyer, Ms. Rodriguez, a brown-haired woman in cat-eye glasses who looked like the stereotype of a librarian from the ‘60s, was sighing and rubbing her temples. She’d advised her client not to be combative with the investigators, but Ms. Ka couldn’t seem to manage that.

“Yes, I shot Caleb Hackett,” Kaitlyn said, emphatically, “If I had another chance to make the decision, I’d shoot him again. I have no regrets whatsoever because it was him or me. He wasn’t acting like himself, he was a fucking monster! He ran straight at me like a maniac! Watch the tapes! I took a fucking video on my phone of him turning back into a person. I don’t know how I can make this any clearer.”

“All right Ms. Ka, we’ve got your statement on that, you’ve been very consistent. We’ll review those tapes and the video footage for sure. Let’s talk about something else for a minute. Would you characterize your relationship with Ryan Erzahler and Dylan Lenivy as a love triangle?”

Kaitlyn laughed out loud at this. “No, I was not in a love triangle with Ryan and Dylan, but that’s hilarious. What do you think this is, a YA novel?”

And that was the exact moment when the lights flickered out.

———————————

Sitting at the bonfire with a beer in her hand, Kaitlyn knew she’d brought this on herself.

She was the one who’d mentioned making people kiss when Dylan started this idiotic game and the suggestion almost immediately came back to bite her. She’d never seen karma work quite so fast. She’d been thinking about Emma and Jacob and Abi and Nick when she’d asked the question. She hadn’t even considered that the rest of the circle—herself, Dylan, and Ryan—might be caught up in the sinister machinations she’d set into motion. Hoisted by her own petard, as they said in the cartoons. What the fuck was a petard, anyway? She’d look it up if she had service but since her phone was still just a dumb brick, it would have to wait.

Kaitlyn might have started with Abi herself if Dylan hadn’t pounced on her first thing. She figured Dylan wanted to get Abi to kiss Nick but he should have known she’d pick truth instead of dare. Abi was such a timid little bunny rabbit of a girl, she’d probably never taken a dare in her life. But what had Dylan been thinking asking about her sex life? Surely he knew that well would be dry (you know, not that there was anything wrong with that). What could be the point of exposing her like that? Did he think Nick had a thing for virgins? (Wait, did Nick have a thing for virgins? She really hoped not because that would be pretty fucking gross.) Maybe Dylan actually thought Abi and Nick had slept together already and Nick was keeping it a secret from him, which would have been pretty funny since Kaitlyn figured neither of them would take the initiative, like, ever. Dylan had to very obviously nudge Nick into getting Abi’s bag for her earlier despite how equally obvious she had been in looking to him for help. If Dylan hadn’t yet resorted to physically nudging Nick all the way into Abi’s bed, he should have known damn well that they had not yet consummated their love.

Anyway, Dylan shouldn’t have wasted his turn on Abi, he should have cut to the chase and chosen Ryan, found out who he had a crush on if he chose truth, or dared Ryan to kiss him. That’s what this was really about, after all, wasn’t it? But then Kaitlyn reminded herself that the laid-back, confident exterior wasn’t all there was to Dylan. He was probably terrified that Ryan might turn him down, in front of everyone, and she couldn’t exactly blame him there. They still hadn’t figured out if Ryan liked guys or girls, or both, or even neither. He could be so hard to read. It was a frequent topic of conversation during their gossip sessions in the radio hut.

Then Emma had taken Abi’s turn and drawn Kaitlyn into this mess, where she’d never asked to be. She had chosen Ryan, and Ryan had picked dare.

“I dare you to kiss either Kaitlyn… or Dylan.”

Kaitlyn had involuntarily smiled a little when Emma said her name, but she felt the corners of her mouth dropping when she’d said Dylan’s. She didn’t even have to look to her left to know that her friend was spiraling into a proper four-alarm gay panic, she could feel the nervous energy radiating off of him from where she was sitting. Dylan had been crushing hard on Ryan all summer and they’d tried to determine if the feeling was mutual, to no avail. Ryan had caught Kaitlyn’s eye too, especially early on, but she’d backed off some when she realized how invested Dylan was. She just had a casual appreciation for the stoic sailing instructor’s looks and brooding demeanor, but Dylan had feelings for Ryan. She had no intention of standing in the way of that, not if there was any chance that Ryan would reciprocate. But now the choice was out of her hands and she felt uneasy about it. If Ryan picked her, would Dylan be upset with her? She knew that would be a little irrational of him if he was, but feelings often broke with rationality especially where love was concerned. And anyway, whether Dylan blamed her or not, he’d be hurt, and she really didn’t want him to get hurt.

Dylan and Kaitlyn were what you might call work spouses. It was convenient that they enjoyed each other’s company so much because they’d had to work together a lot, with Kaitlyn coordinating activities and Dylan doing all the scheduling. Dylan had picked up quite a bit of slack for her in the activities department, too, because she’d been doing what should have been Laura’s job at the nurse’s station as well as her own. He’d even covered for her with Mr. H when she fucked up and double-booked the arts and crafts cabin one rainy afternoon and took the extra group of kids to the lodge to write letters home when he should have been taking a well-earned break. They weren’t just coworkers, they were friends. If most of the other counselors had seemed like single-serving friends to Kaitlyn, Dylan had seemed like the take-home kind of friend. She’d go so far as to say they were becoming best friends. They were committed to colleges a couple of hours from each other, but they already had plans for after camp, to meet up on the weekends and go to gay bars. They’d even talked about maybe sharing an apartment in the city for the next summer instead of moving back home, if they decided not to re-apply to be counselors.

It occurred to Kaitlyn that she’d never been less excited at the prospect of a handsome man maybe wanting to kiss her, and she struggled to imagine how she might have felt about Ryan without the complication that was Dylan. Because she did like Ryan, but she loved Dylan, and Dylan was in love with Ryan. Knowing that certainly influenced how she allowed herself to feel about Ryan, because it sort of felt like he was off-limits.

And then Ryan had done her a solid by choosing Dylan instead of her. She felt like she could breathe again, she was off the hook. She watched her bestie plant the cutest little baby peck of a kiss on his man and she fully intended to give him shit for not fucking going for it like he’d wanted to all summer, but she saw his face after and immediately decided against it. He was so in love, it would be like kicking a puppy. A freakishly tall puppy. Kaitlyn could be a little mean from time to time, but she certainly wasn’t puppy-kicking mean. She loved puppies.

She turned her attention instead toward getting her revenge on Emma for getting her into this mess in the first place. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Emma, but for all her ribbing of Jacob, Kaitlyn didn’t love that Emma was playing games with her friend’s feelings. Abi had told Kaitlyn earlier that Emma had bludgeoned a squirrel Abi hit with the golf cart with a giant rock because she said it was suffering. Was that what she was trying, and failing, to do to Jacob? Put him out of his misery? And into everyone else’s misery, Kaitlyn thought.

Truth be told, Kaitlyn had been jealous of Emma. Not because she wanted to be with Jacob, ew, but because the two of them had planned to be counselors together since they’d been coming to Hackett’s Quarry as kids and all summer he’d only wanted to spend time with his “special little booboo bear” and not with her. He was breaking the bro code. She resented Emma playing with Jacob’s emotions and she resented Jacob for allowing her to do it. So Kaitlyn baited Emma into kissing Nick to show Jacob that another night with Emma wasn’t doing him or anyone else any good. Poor Abi had gotten caught in the crossfire though, so maybe Kaitlyn would kick the occasional puppy after all, but only as collateral damage. She hoped the sting of it would spur the rabbit-hearted girl into action with Nick finally, and it had worked until they’d nearly become werewolf snacks.

Looking back at Ryan’s dare though, perhaps Kaitlyn had felt the tiniest smidge of disappointment in the moment she wasn’t chosen, but if she had, she’d tamped it down so throughly that she couldn’t even remember it now. When she told the story back to herself the first time it was slightly obscured, and with each subsequent remembering she’d papered over it with another layer until she was sure she’d never felt anything at that bonfire ring but selflessly happy for Dylan. She’d needed it to be true when they had walked together to the scrapyard and she’d had to reassure him that Ryan would surely like him just as much only the one hand (and if he doesn’t, she’d thought, I will end him myself). She needed it to be true twice as much now that Dylan was dead.