It's Awful, Either Way

They're here about Andrea. We live in Springfield, just outside of Omaha, and we don't get a lot of traffic. We don't have a paved driveway neither, just gravel, so I hear a crunch when the car drives up. Car's quiet so I figure it's folks from the FBI. The papers and TV, they don't come around no more.

The rain is being blown by the wind and it hits the window like slaps. The drops run down the window and collect on the sill in little puddles cause the sill got dinged from a hail storm a year ago and Dad probably wanted to save a little money from the insurance by only getting the new roof. He's been unemployed for a while, although sometimes he works at Mike's Garage when one of the regular guys don't make it in.

Mom, she works at an office in Omaha and she makes good money. She hadn't been there long but they been real nice about everything. She sometimes gets emotional and talks about how they say that she needs to take care of things here and that her job's gonna to be there when she gets back and everything. Then Mom starts crying like she does about everything else.

"Janelle," Dad says from the living room, "come on in here, now." He sounds quiet, like he just woke up. Or maybe he's just sad. I don't know. I don't think he sleeps much.

I give up watching the rain and go out into the living room. Even though it's Saturday, I'm tired of being at home and I'd rather be at school even though I hate school. I hated it before Andrea's disappearance too, but now it's just creepy with all the kids walking around being… not mean. They give me space in the hallways and the teachers are always looking at me like I'm about to start crying. At least no one is making fun of my hair and my clothes and that I'm fat and the way I walk butt-clenched down the hall. I'm kind of like invisible but also everyone sees me and then gets out of my way.

Three men and one woman stand in the living room. The woman and two of the men look alike. They wear dark suits, ties, and are big and strong. Even the woman. She's got short black hair and she's wearing sunglasses which is weird cause it's raining and all. Some folks, though, got to make themselves be something in front of other people, so I guess that's why the woman FBI agent wears them. It's the same thing I do when I wear the same sweatshirt three times in one week and I can't even wash it because Mom says that's wasting water. The other kids know I'm wearing the same sweatshirt but I have to pretend in my head that it's not. Sometimes it's hard to pretend.

"Honey, this is Agent Mallory." Mom is standing by one of the men, the oldest of them. He's white and has brown hair that's going gray. But instead of making him look old it makes him look mature.

So I say hi. He's not the man who's in charge of finding Andrea. In the last two months, we've had a lot of agents and officers and deputies but I know I haven't met Agent Mallory before. The other agents look familiar, especially the woman. She is looking at the wall opposite the TV that used to have family photos, but now all the photos are of Andrea.

"How are you today, Janelle?" Agent Mallory looks down at me and smiles, not a big smile but a real one.

"Doing okay," I say.

"It's too bad it's raining."

"That's okay," I say. Even if it was sunny, my parents wouldn't want me outside the house, even in the backyard, without them looking. I don't have anywhere to go anyway.

Agent Mallory starts talking to Mom and Dad again. I listen long enough to know that he doesn't have any new information about Andrea, it's all anonymous leads they're checking on, so I kind of tune out. Maury's on the TV and he's doing that thing where they do DNA tests to see who's the dad of a baby. Whenever a guy hears he isn't the dad, he runs around celebrating and whooping it up.

Then I look up and see the one guy who isn't dressed in a suit. He's almost as short as me but not fat. And even though it's the middle of May, the guy has on a brown windbreaker-kind of jacket. He barely has any hair left on the top of his head (he's got a lot on the sides though) and he combs it so that it looks like he does. He keeps looking from Agent Mallory to the window like he's making sure someone isn't stealing their car.

He has on a pair of jeans but they don't fit him too well. He stares ahead for a while and then when he looks back at Agent Mallory he's glaring. Then the guy in the windbreaker looks over and he sees me looking at him. He's startled and for a second he looks frightened like I'm the one who's glaring.

We both look away and I'm thinking that maybe I don't know what's really going on inside me. I mean, when I'm at school, I'm aware of everything that people notice about me, from the zit that appeared on my nose Monday morning to how I can't wear my blue pants anymore cause they are too tight on my butt and I'm afraid I might split them in the rear if I bend over.

Anyway, I start to listen to Agent Mallory, mostly because I got nothing better to do (the TV is on commercial). "… our best hope right now is with the credit card receipts, but even then it's tricky."

"What do you mean, tricky?" Dad still sounds tired but he's also a little annoyed too. Like he knows they haven't found anything so why come by?

"Well, as Agent Southwick told you, Vanderwood is only a suspect." Agent Mallory looks like he wants to say more. "He apparently had multiple aliases, false names, and a lot of credit cards that he swapped out. It's one of the things that made him so hard to find in the first place. We think he was in the Omaha area when Andrea disappeared, but we have to consider all the possibilities."

"So you think she might have run away?" A spark of hope flares in Dad's eyes for a second.

Agent Mallory looks over at the man in the brown windbreaker, who is glaring again. "While that is a possibility, it is highly unlikely. Vanderwood's suicide makes it that much more difficult to find answers. However, we believe she was abducted by Vanderwood."

The spark in Dad's eyes dies. "So they send in a new guy to tell me what I already know, that my Andrea is gone and the guy who took her is dead and they don't know anything about anything else." His voice rises up at the end the way it does when someone is getting madder and madder.

"Well, as I said, we have found out a lot of information about Vanderwood's movements, so we hope …"

"I heard all that," Dad interrupts him, which isn't what he usually does. "I just don't know why they sent four of you guys here to tell me that."

"I was just giving you an update …"

"Then why didn't you just come out and say you got nothing. Absolutely …" Dad wants to keep speaking but then Mom goes and put her arm around him and he shuts up and kind of rocks back and forth on his feet.

"We're just tired, that's all. I thought …" Mom says, "… we thought that maybe since it was someone new that you'd have some good news. That maybe …"

Agent Mallory takes his hand and brushes back his brown and gray hair, not like it was out of place but like it was something he did but didn't know about, the way Mom sometimes takes off her glasses and puts one end of them into her mouth when she's thinking hard. "I know that Agent Southwick talked to you about what the likely possibility was, especially given what we know about Vanderwood's other victims."

"Yeah, we know." Mom looks right at the FBI agent. "We can accept as God's will whatever happened to Andrea. We just want to know."

"I know. And we are pursuing literally every possibility, every lead, every suspicion. Please understand that we know Vanderwood killed four girls, that he abducted two more whose whereabouts are unknown, and that there are probably other victims we do not know about."

"We appreciate that, Agent Mallory."

There is a pause. Agent Mallory looks over his shoulder and nods his head toward the door. As if on cue, the other FBI agents turn and walk out of the house. I twist my body and see them stopped just outside the closed door. Only Dad and Mom, me, Agent Mallory, and the man in the brown windbreaker is left.

"Can we sit down?"

Mom nods and she kind of leads Dad to the couch. Agent Mallory sits down on the lazy boy that Dad usually uses because he has a bad back from high school football. The man in the windbreaker doesn't look like he wants to sit down. He makes a motion with his hand to his mouth and I figure he wants to smoke a cigarette. Dad almost quit but then Andrea disappeared and he started right back up again, but he don't do it in the house.

For a big girl I can be real quiet. So I kind of step back and lean against the wall next to where Mom has a china hutch filled with her collection of owls. Nobody's paying me any attention.

Agent Mallory begins, "As I said before, we are doing everything within our power to find your daughter. We hope that she might be alive …"

"There was that girl a few years ago in Utah," Dad says. "Everyone thought she was gone but she was alive the whole time."

Mom says that there is always hope, but we all know that the last time she was seen was at the Kum n' Go out by the highway and that she was talking to a guy who looked exactly like Vanderwood—big and strong, blond hair, beard.

We all know how little a chance there is that Andrea ran away or is in a religious cult. She's dead but she's never been found.

I was the last person who seen her alive. It was March 6th. I didn't feel like going outside because I'd had such a bad day. I mean it was worse than my usual bad day.

It started off with my normal routine--I had to pick which of the three sweatshirts and which of the three pairs of pants to wear (one pair of sweatpants, two pairs of jeans that don't make me look too hideous). I had to think about wearing makeup and decided only to wear enough to make my pimples go away. Then I walked to school. Dad had a car but had stopped driving me. It was his way of telling me that I was fat and I think he was kind of hoping that walking would get me to lose weight.

So I walked to school. Andrea couldn't drive me neither because she had dance squad before school. Not that I would have gone with her anyway. Since the school year started and she started dance squad and got real popular, Andrea had gotten to be a total bitch.

She didn't even tell me I was fat. It was like that part was too easy to be horrible with me. We're sisters so she knew all of the things that could set me off. I knew stuff about her too, so it was about even at home. Not at school.

So I picked the red Nebraska sweatshirt and a pair of blue jeans that didn't smell because I only wore them on Monday and I managed not to spill anything on them. And it was kind of warm so I didn't have to wear that stupid coat that Mom got at the Goodwill near where she works in Omaha. Andrea had that dance squad jacket like it was made of gold but all I got was a big puffy coat.

I had two ways of walking to school. The first is that I walk a few blocks down to where the highway runs through town and turn left, walk about a mile and there I am. But that means walking down the highway and a lot of people from Springfield High School drive down there and I didn't want them looking at me. So I went the other way, which is by the railroad tracks down past where our street ends. So I followed that way for a while until I got to the dog food mill, then I turned right and I followed Cedar Street until it turned into Fourth and there I was.

March 6th was just normal. I went to classes and tried to sit real small so that no one picked on me and the teachers didn't call on me either. I saw Andrea a couple of times between classes but we had an understanding. She didn't say hi to me and I didn't say hi to her. She was working hard at getting popular and she didn't want to remind people we was related.

The only thing interesting that happened that day was in algebra class when I got an A on a surprise quiz Mrs. Loudermilk gave us the day before. I just about dropped my jaw when I saw it. I folded it up real nice so that I could show Mom later. I figured she might even put it on the fridge next to the pictures of Andrea in that Ann's Fashions advertisement in the Springfield Shopper.

So when I got out of school, I thought about walking back my usual route except it had rained and I didn't want to get my jeans wet. My other jeans had spaghetti sauce on them and I didn't want to wear the sweatpants.

I was walking along the highway on the sidewalk about halfway down when I hear a car slowing down behind me. The music's going loud and I figured some of the kids were about to say something to me so I kind of hunched up a little bit and then I felt something hit my back. It was a freezee from the Kum n' Go and it hit me between my shoulders.

Then one of the kids, I never found out which, laughed and they drove off. I looked away from them when they drove off because I didn't want them to see my face and how red it gets when I get ashamed.

There was other people on the sidewalk walking home and I heard them laughing. So I cut through the grass and climbed the fence. I didn't even care about dogs or anything.

So when I got home, I was all out of breath but Andrea was home before me. She was in her room, but I could hear her talking on the phone real loud. I could hear her talking about some teacher who had pissed her off.

"Like I want to take his class anyway," is what I heard before I slammed the door to my room. I took off my sweatshirt and look. Of course it was a blue freezee they threw on my red sweatshirt. I was sitting there crying a little bit and then Andrea knocked on my door.

"You okay?" she asked nicely.

"I'm fine! I just want to be alone!" I yelled back. Andrea was usually a bitch but sometimes she could be real nice. But I didn't feel much like having anybody be nice to me. Sometimes, when you're down it feels better to feel like everyone in the world hates you.

She went away and I sat down in my big bra and big panties and try to blot the slurpee with some Kleenex. Some of it got on my jeans too, but it wasn't near as noticeable. Then I heard a noise from my closet and I opened it to see Andrea wiggling through the hole.

Andrea and I got rooms next to one another and each of us had a closet that is half the length of the wall between us. All that was between the two closets was a thin board. So without Mom and Dad knowing we put a hole through that little wall so that we had a secret passage between the two rooms. Back before Andrea turned popular and I blew like a balloon, we used to sneak into each other's rooms at night and try to scare each other. We also used it when Mom grounded one of us. We'd just sneak through the hole and play quiet with one another.

So Andrea crawled through the hole and looked at me in my bra and panties and I'm crying.

"Janelle," she said, "what's wrong?"

She didn't look at me like I'm gross even though I'm almost naked. So I told her about the freezee and about how all the kids call me Jawhale and Jafatass. Then I talked about how I don't have any friends anymore but by that time I was crying too hard and Andrea probably didn't understand hardly anything of what was coming out my mouth.

She sat kind of on my desk while I blubbered on. Then Andrea went and did the most amazing thing. She hugged me, which was weird because since the beginning of the year she'd been acting like I smelled like dog poop. Then, instead of telling me that I need to lose weight or smile more like Mom did, she said that she got some extra money and she was feeling hungry so maybe she'd go down to the Kum n' Go and get us some ice cream.

Now, if I wasn't such a pig I wouldn't have needed Andrea to be nice to me. Or if I hadn't been a pig maybe I would have said no I'm going on a diet right now or something. But I kind of nodded and Andrea smiled at me and she gave me another hug and said she'd be right back. I picked up my sweatshirt and jeans and I was walking toward the kitchen where the washer and dryer are in the back by the back door. I saw Andrea get into her car and that's the last I saw her.

I must have blanked for a second and when I come back Agent Mallory is sitting with his hands out in front of him and he's fumbling with his words.

"Well, it's like this, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins," he says, "that man over there by the window works for the agency sometimes. He can … I don't know quite how to put … We think he can help find your daughter."

Mom looks over at the man suspiciously. "What, is he some psychic or something?"

The man in the brown windbreaker looks over and talks finally, "Don't call me that." He talks in a really high voice. "I'm not some guy you see on TV telling you about your dead grandma. I'm not some fu—" he looks like he wants to cuss but he chokes it back. "… I'm not some hack or something."

Agent Mallory says, "We don't really have a name for what he does. He doesn't really work for us, you see. Not officially."

"I actually work with computers. I'm in I.T.," windbreaker man says. Then he adds, as though he doesn't want us to get the wrong impression, "It's easy because I don't have to deal with people."

"Sometimes he helps us with cases like this," Agent Mallory says. "It's not a thing we talk about much, and we expect that you will do the same. If anyone asks, we talk about anonymous sources and people out hiking. Things like that.

"With your permission, we would go into Andrea's room and he would handle certain objects that Andrea handled. With luck, he'll be able to give us information that might lead to finding your daughter."

"What's his name?" Dad asks. He seems to be aware again, looking around.

"What's that?"

"His name. I want to know his name if he's going to be in Andrea's room, messing stuff around."

"Mark," Mark says.

"What about his last name?" I'm kind of curious myself. I mean, Mark doesn't seem like anything special. You don't really notice him at first because he's small and he stands really quiet like, but then his face is kind of jumpy.

"Actually," says Agent Mallory, "it's better if you don't know that information. Mark, and the bureau, is very concerned that word about Mark's abilities could become well-known. If people knew he could do what he does, imagine how many people would try to call him, stop him on the street."

"It would be awful," Mark says.

"You'd be rich," Dad says. "Plenty of people would pay you lots of money."

"I'd rather be unknown. Besides, I do get paid. It's a thousand, even if it doesn't work."

"Well, we don't have that kind of money," Mom says. She looks a little angry and a little frightened.

"It's being taken care of, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins."

Mark turns his head to stare at the FBI. "Are you saying the FBI's paying me?"

"We're taking care of it, Mark." When Agent Mallory speaks, tiny lines appear above the insides of his eyebrows.

"Crap, you guys are paying me? Way to make a man feel guilty, Bill."

"Let's talk about this later."

"You're my friend. I don't like taking money from my friends."

"This is neither the time nor the place …"

Mark interrupts him by waving his hands around as if he's batting away flies, "Listen, forget it, let's just do this. Hey, listen …" he looks at Mom and Dad. "I gotta be in her room and you can't be there. It's too tough. I don't know if it will work, either. Sometimes it doesn't and I don't know why. But, I won't BS you. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. But you can't be in the room with me. It's too tough and I already got an ulcer."

"We … We understand," Mom says, but the way she says it makes it seem like she doesn't. But Dad is looking at Mark like maybe he wants to beat him up but isn't sure yet.

"Maybe she shouldn't be here," Agent Mallory gestures at me and all of a sudden everybody's looking at me like I weren't here before.

"Janelle, go to your room and stay there until Mom or I comes to get you," Dad says.

"But I got a right to hear," I whine.

"Janelle, you will go right now," he says in that quiet way that means business. Dad's got this really quiet thing he does before he goes nuclear, so I walk down the hallway. I keep the door slightly open and I hear Agent Mallory talking but it's in a really low voice and I can't make out what he's saying. Mom is saying stuff too. Also, the agents have come back inside.

Before I close the door, I look and notice Mark. He's back at the window but he's looking down the hallway. He looks tired and you can tell he really wants a cigarette. He sees me looking and he kind of nods his head, real quick. It's just like he's saying hi or something.

Anyways, I hear Mom and Dad getting up from the couch and I close the door real softly. I had been thinking of eating that pack of Little Debbies that's under my bed.

Then I remember the hole in the closet and I wonder if I can still fit through the hole even though I'm a biggie. I really want to see what Mark is going to do and so I creep over to the closet and I've got a bunch of crap in there. It's mostly dumb stuff like a box of papers and tests I did good on and some dumb stuffed animals that I don't want to get rid of. There's also old shoes, a couple of notebooks I wrote some poetry in, a bag full of golf balls (I don't know how I got those), and a bunch of other stuff.

It takes like five minutes to move it all from the closet to next to my desk, but I'm working quietly and I'm thinking it's kind of hot in the house and humid too. On Andrea's side, it's pretty cleared out. She's really organized and don't like clutter too much.

Anyway, it turns out the hole is big enough even for me and I crawl through into her closet. I'm wearing a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants (not ones I'd wear to school). Our closets got those folding doors that got slats in them so you can see out. Anyway, I'm just in time because I see Agent Mallory and Mark walk in.

When the door closes, Mark calls Agent Mallory a cuss word.

"Don't start with me right now, Mark," Agent Mallory says.

"You actually let them think their kid's still alive."

"We don't know for certain …"

"Oh, don't give me that. She's dead. I can't believe you didn't tell me. I can't believe I didn't figure it out before we got here. I don't read the papers or watch the news, but even I know about Vanderwood. You're sure he got this girl?"

Mallory nodded, "It was him. She was seen talking to someone who looked like him at the gas station, we have a receipt from a card he was using from that gas station, and Vanderwood kept trophies of the girls he took. We think he took her earrings. We haven't made that last part public knowledge. They're doing DNA testing."

"Then what you've done here is wrong, Bill." Mark takes both hands and rubs his face. "You damn well know that she was tortured and is lying in a grave somewhere."

"That's why you're here."

"I told you I didn't want to do this anymore. Only cases where the victim is alive, I said."

"This is important."

"It's a body, Bill. And the guy who killed her is already dead," Mark says, really mad.

"Quiet down."

"She's dead and yet you want me to do this," Mark whispers loudly, "and you know what this does to me. How hard this is."

"Is it any harder than what those folks out there have to go through every day?"

"You asshole," Mark says, "if you were honest with them, they'd know she was dead and could start moving on."

While they're talking, I feel tears running down my cheeks. They're sad tears but kind of relieved ones too. I mean, I know that Andrea's dead and that she's not joined some cult or anything. I know that.

But everyone's been talking to me the last two months like I can't deal with it. I mean, at least these guys are honest now. And it's not like I didn't know in my heart. It just feels good a little to hear someone say it out loud. I don't know yet what to think about what Mark said about Andrea being tortured. I whisper to God that I hope she didn't get tortured.

"You're being selfish." Agent Mallory says.

"Selfish? Me?"

"You could try some sympathy for these folks."

"Sympathy? Sympathy is all I am." Mark makes that waving his hand gesture again. "I'm here, we both know I'm going to do this so let's just get it done. I'm smoking though, so you better find something for me to use as an ashtray."

"I'll get a bowl or something. I'll tell the parents it's part of your ritual."

"Tell them whatever you want."

Agent Mallory leaves and Mark goes to the window and opens it. A warm wet smell gusts into the room. He pulls a pack of Camels from the pocket of his windbreaker and takes out a cigarette. He fumbles around his pants until he finds a book of matches. He lights his cigarette and takes a deep puff and exhales out the window.

He smokes for a minute and begins dropping the ashes into his other hand. Then the door opens and Agent Mallory and the other two FBI agents come in. The other two are wet and they're carrying stuff. The guy has an easel and the girl's got a large pad of paper that artists use, like I used one like it in art class this year. Agent Mallory has a white bowl from our kitchen and he puts it in the window.

"Where do you want me to set up the easel?" The other guy FBI agent says.

Mark turns around and looks at the room. "Right there," he says, pointing at the middle of the floor. "Facing the window. I'll use that chair."

They put the easel down, luckily I can see it if I get down real low. The girl agent puts the paper on it and folds the cover back so a blank page is facing the window. The other agent pulls a chair up near the easel and then they stop and watch Mark smoke his cigarette.

He stubs it out in the bowl and you can tell he's thinking about lighting another one up, but then he decides not to and he goes to the chair and sits down.

Mark looks up at the man FBI agent, who is standing next to the easel. "I need something personal," he says. He points to Andrea's bed, which has a pink bedspread on it and a few stuffed penguins. "We can try one of the stuffed animals or the pillow. Pillow might work."

"I have something," Agent Mallory says and he gestures to the girl FBI agent. She pulls a clear plastic bag from a box on the floor that also had the pencils and inside it is a key ring. I gasp but no one notices. It's Andrea's. I can tell because she got this attachment on it that shows pictures. It's about two inches square and pink. I got it for her when she turned sixteen last year. I downloaded all these photos to it of me and her and Mom and Dad and Smoky the Cat. It cost me $30 which was more than she spent on me but I knew she'd love it and Andrea thought it was the best thing she got for her birthday.

"I still don't think we should be doing this," the woman FBI agent says.

"Don't touch it," Agent Mallory says. "Just give the bag to Mark."

"Another trophy?" Mark asks.

"It's Andrea's," Agent Mallory replies.

Mark holds the plastic bag in his lap, open. He doesn't reach in for a minute. "I wish I couldn't do this," he says at last.

"I know," Agent Mallory says and he sounds like he's sympathetic.

"Okay, okay, okay." Mark reaches in with his right hand. He's got a pencil in his left. He picks up the key ring and pushes the bag off his lap.

He's still. I thought he might start jerking around or something but he doesn't move. No one else talks and the only sound I hear is the rain outside which is muffled and hard to hear. Something is pressing against my left leg, it hurts and I want to move it but I think they'll hear me.

When Mark speaks, his voice is different. Lower and slower. "Oh yeah," he says, "there she is. My new girl."

His left hand, holding the pencil, shoots up and starts to make marks. It's heavy paper, so even though he's drawing fast the pencil doesn't catch and tear the paper up. Within a minute, a picture starts to emerge. I can see Andrea's car parked at the Kum n' Go and she's still in it. Mark is drawing quickly but I can tell that's her Ford and he got her crazy hair just right. She is just stepping out of the vehicle, her phone to her ear.

For a minute Mark keeps drawing but then his hand jerks away and he waves it. The guy FBI agent leaps forward and rips the piece of paper off, and Mark starts drawing again.

This time it's just of Andrea's face. Mark seems less like he's drawing and more like he's some sort of computer printer stuck in a person's body. As Andrea's face emerges from his pencil, I look at him and his face has a huge smile on it. But it's a creeper smile, not a nice one.

The way he's drawing her is beautiful. Andrea's got this smile on her face and her head cocked a little bit like maybe she just got asked a question. He takes about three or four minutes and then, even though the picture doesn't look done, Mark waves his hands again and the paper is ripped off.

The next drawing starts with a rectangle that takes up most of the sheet. He shades in part of the top left then shades the bottom left and so on and I don't know what he's supposed to be drawing. He still has that smile on his face, though. If anything, it's bigger. "Now, that's a pretty sight," he says in that low voice. The hair on my head prickles up and I feel like I want to pee.

He keeps drawing and drawing and it looks like nothing until it suddenly doesn't. I see legs. They're tied up with rope and she's got her hands tied up too. I want to be sick because that's Andrea in the trunk and he's moving to the right in the drawing toward her face and I close my eyes because I don't want to see it.

But when I close my eyes I think about that last day and how it is that if I'd hadn't been a fat girl then Andrea wouldn't have wanted me to feel better. There's a sound of paper ripping but I don't look back. Then she wouldn't have been at the Kum n' Go and she wouldn't have been seen by that Vanderwood and everything would be horrible and normal. But then Andrea'd be alive. And I'm a horrible, fat, horrible girl, and it should have been me, and it should have been me, because who would have noticed if I'd gone?

I lift up my eyes and look through the shutters of the closet door and Mark is drawing and he's got that smile on and even worse he's got a boner too. And he's doing stuff too, not just drawing.

"Tell me you like this," he says.

"Shut up," he says.

"I know you like it," he says.

And what he's drawing is Andrea. At least I think it's her because the top of the paper ends at her neck. I don't think it's because Mark's being nice because I don't think he's all the way Mark anymore. I think that it's just some body that he's drawing but it's really Andrea. The drawing isn't beautiful like the one in the parking lot of Andrea's face it's like … like Mark is drawing faster and Andrea's naked.

I crawl backwards feeling the puke coming up my throat. I don't care if I make any noise but I get out of the closet and I grab my waste paper basket and I throw up into it. I throw up a couple more times and then I rest my head against the rim of the basket.

It's a time before I want to hear anything from that room. It's quiet and I don't think I hear much. I hear Agent Mallory say something at one point, "Do your job, dammit."

Then, after a while I start to feel better enough that I don't have to sit here on the floor wondering if I'm going to barf again. But I don't want to see what Mark is drawing next but I need to see it. So I crawl into my closet and shimmy through to Andrea's closet and I scrunch up on the floor.

Mark is still drawing but it's real slow, like he's tired. He's got a blank face on and there's a wet spot on his pants and I feel a little sick again but it passes after I close my eyes.

Agent Mallory is watching the drawing. He doesn't have any expression on his face but the other two FBI agents do. Both the man and the woman are looking at Mark like he's something that just crawled in dog poop.

Mark's pencil is drifting up and down and I think it looks like a tree. Or a bunch of trees on the left side of the picture. It's kind of dark and I think maybe Mark is seeing this at night.

"It's outside," Agent Mallory says quietly. The other agents join in with quiet voices as Mark keeps drawing.

"What's that? I think those are grain silos."

"Those aren't commercial silos."

"That's a farm."

Mark keeps drawing, doesn't hear the agents. I look at the drawing and I get this bad feeling starting to form in my tummy. I think I know where it is he's drawing. On the right side he draws a rectangle, and then it's an abandoned building. It don't have a roof. Then I see him drawing a tree that grew up inside of it and I know it's the Tvrdy farm, about two miles from here.

I don't even think about it but I run out of my room, only this time I don't care about being quiet. I run out the back into the open field and I'm running. I'm a big girl but I can run. Maybe I hear Mom yelling at me but I don't turn around.

About halfway to the Tvrdy's I get a pain in my side so I slow down so that I'm only walking fast. I use the railroad tracks because it's the easiest way and the Tvrdy's not too far. I know that tree because in the fall I took a picture of it for my photojournalism class which turned out really good. So I'm walking fast and I'm crying and my nose is running. I wipe it with my sleeve.

Mark's drawing is burned in my head (actually, all of them are, and I think they will be forever), so I know I'm looking for a spot where the main farm is in back of the abandoned building with the tree growing out of it.

I see a bunch of trees near a little stream that isn't too far from the road and whatever bad feeling I got in my stomach gets worse. The pain in my side has gone away and I run up to the bunch of trees.

Although I don't know what I'm looking for, it doesn't take me but a minute to find a patch of ground that looks different than the rest, all churned up. I look around and see if there's anything I can use for digging. I don't even think about going back for the FBI. I caused Andrea to die and I figure I should be the one to find her.

It takes a few minutes but I find this flat rock nearby that I can grab with both hands. I start digging and I don't know how long I dig.

Then I smell something. It's kind of low in my nose but it makes me want to barf again. I look down at the ground and I see something there. It's gold. It's getting toward dark and it's hard to see. With my hands I brush away the dirt and then I see it's Andrea's dance team jacket.

I don't dig anymore. I just want to lie down and sleep. Then I feel a hand on my shoulder. It's Agent Mallory and behind him are the other FBI agents.

My face is all gross and blubbery and I figure he's going to be real mad at me but he ain't. Agent Mallory squats down and looks me in the eye and says real nice, "Janelle, thank you. If it wasn't for you, it would have taken us a long time to find Andrea. Why don't you come back here and warm up a little bit." Now that Agent Mallory says it, he's right. Although the rain stopped, it's gotten cold and I'm wet and shivering.

I stand up and we walk back to the road where there are a lot of cop cars.

"Do you drink coffee?" Agent Mallory asks. I nod and he hands me a cup and makes my hands warm. I take a sip and ask him what's going to happen now.

"We are going to dig Andrea up and process the crime scene. The people are very respectful, Janelle, I hope you know that. We are going to treat Andrea with the utmost respect." I nod and Agent Mallory smiles a little. He says a few more things and then he walks back to where Andrea is. My parents aren't here but he said they will be soon.

I see a motion to my right and I turn and see Mark. He's looking at me and I must have glared at him because he says quickly "You saw, didn't you? The drawings. It's not me, I hate it. I hate that I can do that."

Mark's eyes are real big and his skin is white like he's scared or something. "So you can see through them?" I ask. "The guys who kill?"

"I live it," he says, and the way he says it makes me feel bad for him. "Sometimes I'm the victim, sometimes the killer. It's awful, either way."

"What does it feel like?"

Mark shrugs his shoulders and then quick reaches out and with one finger touches my hand. And then I'm in Mark's head and also in there is every person he's ever touched.

It only lasts a second then it's over and I stumble a bit and drop my coffee. "I shouldn't have done that," Mark says.

I don't say anything and he doesn't make a move toward me. If he had, I would have screamed and run.

"It gets lonely," he says, "that I don't have anyone to touch. I shouldn't have done that, but you're…" Mark kind of squints and shakes his head violently and I think maybe his name is Mark and maybe it's only partly Mark and partly something else.

He points and says, "I see your parents over there. You should go to them. I think you should go now."

I get up and run over to where Mom and Dad are. They are looking at where Andrea is and then we're hugging. They're crying and I'm crying too but not as hard. It's because Mark gave me a little of Vanderwood with that touch and he don't feel sorry at all.

THE END

Bio: I was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where I spend my daytime hours teaching English at a local high school. I have been a fan of speculative fiction ever since my brother forced me to read The Hobbit. Currently, I am editing my first novel, which I hope to send off in next month. “It's Awful, Either Way” is, for me, a story about the difficulty of connecting with others.

E-mail: Andrew Kanago

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