They found my body at the bottom of the lake. I watched them drag the sandy floor with nets and sonar and scuba divers. So many people had been looking for one person. I figured many of the volunteers did so out of moral obligation but I know others got a kick out of it- out of my death. Nothing ever happened in this town and I was the first to go missing after five decades of peace and quiet and ultimately, redundant boredom.

My mother stood next to me as they pulled me out all blue and bloated. She dropped to her knees, crying and begging and pleading and whatever else those who lost a child did. They all bought her little performance; believed her tears and sobs.

Neighbours looked at her with pity and looked at my body with disgust. I suppose dying young didn’t guarantee eternal beauty if you died by drowning. I wouldn’t be put to rest with porcelain skin, absent of wrinkles and time. Instead, their last memories of me would inarguably be the worst I ever looked.

The water didn’t cover my wounds either. I knew the onlookers saw the deep gash along my neck, a permanent necklace with bone as its pendant. Perhaps it was the most expensive piece of jewelry I had owned, it did cost me my life after all.

Our whole town seemed to gather for the festivities. My old classmates and teachers, my coworkers and customers from the diner, even grumpy old Mr. McTavish from down the street came. They watched as my body was laid in a black bag, as if I were a fruit at the supermarket being bagged and loaded into the back of a car. They shut the doors and my mother made a show of running towards and crying against the cold metal of the coroner’s truck. She wailed my name, wailed over her baby.

My stepfather tried to console her, arms wrapped around her tight and murmuring tales of reassurance. Tales is all they were. They would find my blood in the back of her silver, 2005 Ford Focus. They would find the knife sitting innocently in the wooden block on the corner of the kitchen counter. They would surely find my diary, stuffed between the box spring and mattress in the room I slept in every night of my whole life. They would know.

“You will pay,” I said but no one turned to me. They watched their reality like a show. Maybe, I would be and live through those indulging in the newest ten part series on the latest tragedy.

Rage was supposed to be a human emotion but it was the only thing I was left with in death. My only string anchored in breath. My eyes left my mother and set on every last one of them, circling the lake like the halo I would never adorn.

“You will all pay.”