Devil in the Details

Lou slapped her arm and wiped the remains of the mosquito on the folded-up tarp after a quick examination.

"Did you know you can

make them explode?" Her dad had given her the canvas for rainy days, but

so far the summer had been nothing but sweltering heat.

"Yeah. I was there when

Santi said that." Keke's long, dark legs were dangling off the platform as

she tried to re-tie a piece of fabric to the corner pole. The tree house was

really a tent at best, with a few solid boards as base and several tie-dyed

scarfs and other pieces of fabric they had found in the attic knotted together

and slung over branches and tied up with rope as a roof. They had to redo it

constantly. A few minutes ago, one of the ropes pulling everything up had come

undone, causing the floral beach coverup on the right corner pole to rip.

Lou had climbed up to put the rope back around its branch and tripled the knot,

and was now squatting with her back to the tree, looking at Keke’s back.

“I really want to try it.”

“You’ll have to let one sting you then.”

“But what it the thing stays stuck in there? Like, it explodes but that means the pieces come off and then-“

“Ew, stop.” Keke swung her legs back onto the platform, satisfied with her work. Both of the girls were sweating, and Lou squattled (squat-waddled) closer to her friend, who took a sip from her water bottle.

“And then it gets all infected and yellow and pus-y and they have to take my arm off just because I made a mosquito explode”, the wiry pre-teen went on with a smile somewhere between sly and straight up demonic.

“You wouldn’t have to go back to school for at least a month, probably,” Keke said calmly, suddenly not giving the desired reaction at all and wiping the grin off her face, “and that would be a dick move.”

The tree house had no swear-related rules, but the garden beneath sure did and so swearing would happen, but only ever in a low voice.

“Are you saying you would be mad at me for getting my arm amputated?” Without asking, Lou took Keke’s bottle and used the rest of the water to wet and hopefully cool her head.

“Hey! Dude, you’re getting refills.”

“It’s your turn.”

“And whenever it is you are wasteful.”

Lou, grinning again, started to give an infuriatingly unphased answer, then both of them froze and looked at each other.

“You could maybe not pull some of the splinters from up here and join me in the hospital?”

“First of all, that would be very suspicious, both of us just missing. Then we don’t have insurance at the moment. Also, I didn’t get a splinter since the day Emma came by.”

Lou started chewing on the loose bits of skin around a fingernail pensively. She had pushed the issue to the back of her mind quite successfully for the past couple of days (weeks), but it turned out not to have gotten better with time.

“Last time I do this.” Getting to her feet and walking towards the ‘ladder’ (steps they had nailed into the tree trunk), Keke suddenly looked really tall. They were the same height, but with her hair styled into a big puff she had a few inches on Lou, who now tried to stop her.

“No wait.”

“I’m thirsty, Louisa.” At this, she could not help but back away, full name calling was always effective.

“They had to have cleaning staff go in,” she called down instead.

“Toss me the bottles?”

“They would have found something and just, like, opened the cabinet, right?”

“Not so loud! Throw the bottles.”

“And nobody could tell for sure it was us.”

“I am going home.”

“How are you gonna call your mom?” Lou picked up the discarded phone and waved it over the ten foot abyss.

“Seriously? I’ll just get Meghan to call her, and then she’ll ask why I didn’t do it myself-“

Lou already resigned, as much as she loved the true privacy of the garden, there was a reason her parents stayed away from it. A bit of air-conditioning every few hours was always nice, and although she would never admit it (even to her best friend), she knew she was being unnecessarily provocative and wanted to try and maybe make up for that with snacks. Her friend, even though they had been close all throughout primary and the first year of middle school, would go inside, get some ice cubes (which would melt and be drinkable within minutes out here) and come back. No matter how many times Lou had told her getting Oreos or popsicles as well was fine, she would not touch the snack drawer by herself.

“So well mannered” was Meghan’s favorite term to describe her step-daughter’s friend, with a big smile that would fall off her face as soon as she felt that part of the conversation was done.

Lou let the bottles drop into her friend’s outstretched arms and then quickly climbed down, jumping down from the second-to-last step and running after her. They hung out it the kitchen for a bit, relishing the cold air in silence, before heading back with ice cubes, two cans of Dr Pepper’s Cherry Zero (Meghan was shit at buying soft drinks) and two large pieces from the brownie dish on the counter (but very good at baking, and baking frequently), wrapped in paper towels.

They had their picnic in silence, sitting on the edge looking away from the house and across the street towards the Brodskys’ house, where sometimes the older daughter would do shadow boxing in the front yard.

“They definitely have people cleaning in the summer,” Keke noted suddenly, before starting to choke on a crumb. When she had recovered, she added, “and Mr. Q definitely has, like, admin to do or something, so it won’t be too bad when they find it. But they will find it, and that is the problem.”

“Do you think they will do finger prints?”

“On a frog? That has been dead for days or weeks?”

“All the frogs looked pretty alike, right?”

“Look, I don’t know if they can tell whose frog it is, or if they’ll want to. Thirty people in that class, and then B-period did it too the same day, so there are twice as many people who could have done it.”

“Subjects.”

“Suspects. But out of those people, at least four were called to the principal’s office. They don’t have proof that whoever dissected the frog was the same person that took it and hid it in the drawer. The most likely thing to happen is that they will think it was some of the boys, like maybe Dan Rousseau or George Poulos. Finger print technology is not something you just do for a prank, it’s more complicated than on TV I think, so even if there are prints on the drawers and they haven’t been, like, damaged by whoever opened it, they won’t be able to tell. There will be an announcement reminding everybody of the honor code and some threat of collective punishment, but since it could have been some of the people who are now in high school, not even that is likely to happen.”

Stunned, Lou looked at her friend. She had thought several scenarios through, but this seemed more reasonable than what she had come up with.

“Also, we can’t do anything. All the perfect crimes end with somebody talking, so we have to act like we don’t know anything. Do not act suspicious when we go back, or when there’s an email. If our parents are notified, we have to get in contact with the rest of the class, because that mail will go out to everybody and keeping out of it is worse than participating in whatever happens, outrage or memes or whatever.”

“We can’t say anything that only the person who did it can know.”

“Right. Devil is in the details.” Lou laughed, suddenly feeling a lot lighter, when Keke grabbed her arm and pinched. As she tried to pull away, she saw a dark spot on her skin, rapidly swelling and about to explode between Kekes finger’s any second.