Kill Marguerite and Other Stories Read Free

mind—Feed me, Feed me. It reminds her of that recurring dream she has all the time with the popsicles in the freezer. In the dream Caty opens the freezer door and all of the popsicles, there are lots, all different colors, the freezer is full of popsicles, and they all yell at her, shrieking Eat me Eat me, and the pitch of their voices gets higher and higher and louder and louder until it’s unbearable and Caty wakes in a sweat thinking her eardrums are shattered and the popsicles will kill her for sure. The popsicles, the popsicles, they scream and scream. And Caty now sitting on her bike with crumple-face wonders why doesn’t she ever just slam the freezer door shut in the dream, why does she just stand there and let the popsicles scream and scream, why does she let them do that?
    Shut the door on the popsicles, Caty. Shut the goddamn bitchass door once and for goddamn all motherfucker.
    Caty sets down her bike. She balls up her fists and turns heel, marching back to the clearing. She hides behind a tree and listens to Kim and Marguerite practice The Ugly Song on Brendan. “You ugly. You ugly. Yo momma say you ugly.” But everyone knows Brendan isn’t really ugly and actually Kim has kind of a thing for him and she and Marguerite are just flirting while Shelly and Ray swing on the rope swing whoosh, whoosh, back and forth over Swift Creek.
    â€œNo, fathead, you don’t clap there.”
    Marguerite is being loud and bossy as usual. But, Caty thinks from her spy position, we’ll see how loud and bossy she is when Caty explodes through the woods to obliterate her skank ass. Caty’s hands are sweating. Should she?
    â€œU. G. L. Y. You ain’t got no alibi.”
    Shut the freezer door! Caty zooms forward and pushes Marguerite down into the dirt. Kim backs away and Marguerite tries to get up but Caty grabs her topsytail and yanks with all her strength. Marguerite cries out in pain, then pulls Caty’s legs out from under her. Caty falls, oof, on her bum, but she manages to get up before Marguerite does. Then whoosh. Shelly and Ray swing into Caty and snag her armpits with their tangle of sneakers, and now she is whooshing back and forth, back and forth over Swift Creek with them, her body hanging in the damp autumn air, her torso lodged between sneakers, and then Shelly shifts just a little because Caty’s chin is digging into her shin and there goes Caty into Swift Creek Reservoir, dropped at a very wrong place to be dropped. She hits her head on a rock and there she goes, one of her hearts explodes.
    Caty has died.

LEVEL ONE: THE ROPE SWING

    BEGIN>> Caty is at the mouth of the trail, thinking how she only has one life left, but lucky for her she’s getting the hang of this. So Caty balls up her fists and turns heel, marching back to the rope swing like she means business. She stops a few yards away behind a tree and listens to Kim and Marguerite sing The Ugly Song to Brendan.
    â€œU. G. L. Y...”
    Caty is about to make her move but stops a minute, thinking maybe she will pray first since last time didn’t go so well, even though she was This Close to kicking Marguerite’s tail for good. So she looks up at the sky or the heavens or whatever and closes her eyes and prays to God, “God, please let me kill Marguerite and win back my BFF—please?” And when she opens her eyes, she sees something glinting way up in the tree above her. What’s that, she wonders, and thinks maybe it’s a special weapon sent by God especially for her. So she climbs up the tree quietlike trying to hold in her grunts and see, she can’t be that Fat if she can climb up a tree, now, can she? Finally she reaches the branch where the shiny thing is lodged, and look, it is a rifle:

    Chime! This will be easy.
    Caty slings the rifle over her shoulder and slides down the trunk to the ground. She grips the gun with both hands and pauses for just the right moment as Kim