Jonah tramped off through the park, making her way to each attraction that she thought needed to be told to dump chlorine until further notice. The boat rides didn't need it really, until the water started to stink, and the police would probably let them start pumping again before then. The waterslides needed it, but probably less than the regular pool. Lazy river needed it... The list churned through Jonah's brain, and she walked around, methodical and dead eyed, giving out the instructions.

She was met with some resistance.

"When are we going to get our paychecks?" Mario asked.

"What are the police doing in the parking lot?" Qwamae wondered.

"I don't think we have enough chlorine," Rachel said, scratching her head. "Can you get some?"

Every ride, as usual, presented its own problems.

She had saved the flat pool for last, as it would definitely require the most chlorination of all of them, which the staff certainly wouldn't appreciate.

"Hey. Zach," she said, summoning him off his chair. "Order is from Mr. Calvin that we need to start chlorinating."

Zach looked at her, frowning and squinting in the afternoon sunlight. "Why?"

"Pumps are down until further notice."

"Why?"

"Something weird happening at the lake."

His facial expression shifted, but Jonah didn't understand to what. "What's weird happening at the lake?" he asked, sounding slightly disturbed.

"Look, I don't really have that information to give out," Jonah said. "Can you just chlorinate the pool?" She did have the information, of course, but she wasn't supposed to tell anyone, so that wasn't technically a lie.

"I want to hear what's going on from Mr. Calvin."

"Zach, I know you're pissed at me for taking Rebecca's job. But I'm not here to antagonize you or argue with you or whatever. Can you just do it? Clear the pool and dump some chemicals. It's not that hard."

He looked at her. "What's the matter with you?"

"I've had a shittier day than I could possibly explain, and," -- she looked at her phone to check the time -- "there's still like four hours of it to go."

"You'd better watch out, or you'll turn into Rebecca."

"I'm not turning into Rebecca. Do you have some sort of other problem, Zach?"

He shook his head, some of the tension going out of his shoulders. "Didn't get a lot of sleep last night."

Jonah pressed her lips into a line before she spoke. "Perhaps if you didn't spend so much time in places you didn't belong on Friday nights, you'd have better Saturdays."

Zach shook his head. "Forget I said anything."

"Look, if it's any consolation, I'm like thirty seconds away from quitting too, and you can have my stupid job then."

"Whoo." He was unenthusiastic.

"Yeah. About how I feel right now." Jonah ran a hand through her hair.

"Did you not put on sunscreen this morning? You're a lobster."

"Oh. Yeah. I was running late." She laughed a pathetic laugh. "Guess that's not helping my mood any."

"You could take a shower in the locker room. Might help you feel better."

"Somehow I doubt that getting soggy on top of everything else would help."

"Get somebody in there with you..." Zach said, cracking a weird looking smile.

"Fuck off."

"Yeah."

"Anyway. Have you seen Amanda and Kyle? Bay said she sent them to you to help out here, since the wavepool's broken."

"Kyle's scrubbing the locker room. No idea where Amanda went."

"They're not in there together?"

"They're a couple?"

"Yeah, I think so. A deeply unpleasant one."

"That's sure an age gap."

"Whatever. Not my business. If they want to have a nasty falling out in like two months, that's their prerogative."

"It sure is."

"Ok, well, as long as Kyle's working."

"Hey, speaking of working, paychecks?"

"I'll get them as soon as Mr. Calvin decides to hand them to me."

"I eagerly await."

Jonah shrugged and disengaged herself from the conversation, listening behind her as Zach blew his whistle and cleared the pool so that he could chlorinate it. She went into the locker room, looking for Kyle.

He was there, but he wasn't scrubbing. He was leaning against the wall, looking at his phone with intense concentration. The tinny strain of Amanda's voice echoing out through the speakers filled the locker room.

"That doesn't look much like scrubbing," Jonah said, pointing to the mop leaning against the wall next to Kyle.

He looked up at her and, with a guilty expression, put his phone in his pocket. "Oh, hi Jonah. I thought, er, you'd been arrested."

"Fuck off."

"Gladly." He grabbed the mop and tried to beat a hasty retreat from the locker room.

"Kyle."

"What?"

"Where's Amanda?"

"I don't know. In the park somewhere, I guess." He was clearly lying.

Kyle had failed to shut off the audio from whatever he had been watching, and so Jonah could still hear Amanda's muffled voice issuing forth from his pocket.

"Don't be dumb. I'm not in the mood."

"She's investigating whatever's going on down at the lake," Kyle admitted.

Jonah groaned. "Tell her to stop."

"No."

"Kyle."

"Jonah."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

"I don't want to be responsible for her getting in some kind of stupid trouble with the literal actual police," Jonah said.

"And she wants to know if the whole park is in danger of getting serial killed," Kyle said.

"Are you kidding me?"

"She's super worried."

"And so she thinks the best thing to go do is to skip work, hide in the forest, and spy on the police?"

"She came up with this idea on her own."

"And why are you supporting her in it?"

Kyle's voice was unexpectedly high when he responded, "Curiosity?"

"Don't tell me you're worried about getting serial murdered too."

"Yeah," he admitted, and rubbed his chin.

"Don't be stupid. Unless they find more than one person, it's definitely not a serial killer." Jonah paused. "Wait, how do you know that someone died?"

Kyle looked around, and leaned against the locker room door to prevent anyone coming in. "Can I show you a picture?"

"Do I want to see the picture?"

"Probably not."

"Show it."

Kyle pulled out his phone, and swiped away from the... livestream... of Amanda whispering to her phone as she hid among the trees at the edge of the lake, spying on the police. "How many people are watching that?" Jonah asked.

"I don't know," Kyle said, sounding a little too innocent.

"How many people did she send the link to, Kyle?"

"I told you, I don't know."

"Jesus fucking Christ. Show me the picture."

"Okay."

The picture in question was a screenshot of a snapchat, with Amanda's smiling icon at the top. The image was blurry, and Amanda had "helpfully" circled the relevant part in clumsy drawn red, with an all caps "OMG". The image showed police carrying a wet looking white cloth, on top of which was a severed arm, cut off clumsily somewhere just below the shoulder. A hack job, not one that a butcher would do.

Detachedly, Jonah said, "I'm surprised they found another piece so fast."

Kyle didn't say anything in response. She reached out towards the picture, zoomed in as best she could on the already blurry image. Around the wrist of the arm was a tiny strip of green.

"Is that...?" Jonah asked.

"Maybe?" Kyle said in that same, curiously high, voice.

"Take a deep breath," Jonah said, though she could use that same advice herself. Her heart was thudding and noises were ringing in her ears that had no source. She slid to the ground, sitting on the filthy concrete of the locker room floor.

The green bracelets were given out to season pass holders, and got them free sodas at a bunch of the food stalls around Arcadis. They often were passed around between friends and family. Mr. Calvin thought it was a good system, regardless, since he said that even if just one family member bought a season pass, and they passed the bracelet around between them to get free drinks during the day, that still meant a whole bunch of other people paying for tickets. Soda was cheap to pass out, far less valuable than the idea of getting bodies into the park.

"You think that they were killed in Arcadis?"

Kyle shook his head, seemingly helpless.

"Tell Amanda to get out of there. She's just going to give herself nightmares." Jonah put her head between her knees. She breathed deeply, closed her eyes, tried to get all of this out of her head. So much for Amanda having nightmares: she was going to have way worse ones, she was sure. "How did Amanda get to work, anyway?" Jonah asked. "I usually drive her in but I didn't today."

"Er."

"What."

"She passed out at the party last night. I took her back to my house."

Jonah looked up at him sharply. "What?"

He clarified, waving his hands. "Not like, blacked-out passed out," he said. "She fell asleep on a lounge chair."

"If I find out that you did anything to her--"

"I didn't, I swear. Absolutely nothing happened last night." The denial was too false sounding.

"I'm going to have a talk with her."

Kyle actually seemed relieved at that. "Fine."

Jonah stayed on the floor for a second longer, trying to work up the motivation to do what she had to, which was get up and go find Amanda, and get her away from the scene of an active crime investigation. Her body was resistant to moving, or perhaps it was more in her mind. All of her skin felt too tight, and she ached all over. It could be psychosomatic, or it could be the fact that she was wickedly sunburned from not having put on sunscreen that morning. She was nauseous, and that too could have been from the heat, or from her brain, or from the fact that she had barely eaten or drank anything all day, and what she had eaten that morning she had directly thrown up. Miserable. She was a miserable creature, on the floor of a miserable changing room, in a miserable waterpark.

"Should I quit, Kyle?"

"What?"

"Quit. Get the fuck out of Arcadis."

"Usually people don't start saying that until like, after the first month of the summer."

She laughed, a hollow laugh. "Well, this is the first time I've seen somebody get murdered and chopped up into pieces and thrown into the lake."

"There's a first time for everything," Kyle said, a false cheerfulness in his voice.

"Sure. And a last time, too. If I quit I won't have to deal with any of this."

"And if you quit, we'll all be stuck with Zach, who's a real taskmaster."

"You never know, could be whoever Mr. Calvin sees first when he walks out of his office after I quit on him."

"I know you're not going to, so there's no point in you continuing to whine about it."

"Says who?"

"I've known you for years. You're only pretending to be lazy."

"This isn't lazy."

"Sure it isn't," Kyle said. "We need you here."

"Urgh." Jonah peeled her head out of her hands, feeling the crispy and feverish skin of her forehead give a painful tingle as she looked up. "Maybe it would be better if taskmaster Zach was in charge. He'd make you mop."

"I'll mop, I'll mop. You gotta get off the floor, though."

Jonah sighed and heaved herself to her feet. Her body moved as though through molasses, weighing a thousand tons. She stumbled out of the dim locker room, off the blisteringly hot pool deck where Zach was still dumping in chlorine, and out back, pushing through crowds until she got to the edge of the trees. It was with a great reluctance that she entered the woods, though since it was several degrees cooler there, and the sun wasn't beating down quite as hard, that made it significantly more pleasant. She realized she had no idea where Amanda was, but she figured she could find out.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Jonah opened snapchat on her phone, a rarely used app, and found Amanda's icon. It still had the video message she had sent almost a week ago, the one where she had been searching for the correct twine to fix the hole in the fence. Jonah ignored that, and used the app to pull up Amanda's geolocation. She stumbled through the woods, watching herself grow closer and closer to Amanda's dancing emoji figure. It was stupid and too cheerful of a thing to have to watch, as she got closer to the lakefront.

It was a good thing that she had been tracking Amanda this way, because she was nowhere near the pumphouse, and was a good distance away from the police. Jonah got close enough to see her back, the bright orange of her staff tee shirt a dead giveaway as she sat behind a bush. She was hidden from view of the lakefront, sure, but not from behind.

Jonah had no desire to give Amanda a heart attack, so she announced her presence in the classic way: by taking a snap of Amanda's back and scribbling over it 'behind u' as she leaned against a tree about ten meters away. The snap sent, and Jonah could hear Amanda whisper to her livestream, "Why the fuck is my boss snapping me?" before whipping around to stare at Jonah.

Jonah made a beckoning motion, and put her finger to her lips to indicate that Amanda should be quiet. Then she held up her phone, pointed at it, and made a throat cutting motion to indicate that Amanda should kill the livestream. Amanda glared at her through this entire pantomime, but seemed to actually comply, pressing a couple buttons on her phone and shoving it into her pocket before coming over. Jonah grabbed Amanda's arm.

"Ow," Amanda whined.

"Shut up," Jonah said quietly.

They walked back towards Arcadis together, and stopped just before the trees gave way to the real park.

"What the fuck do you think you were doing out there, Amanda?" Jonah asked.

"I needed to know what was going on?"

"What do you think would have happened to you if the police found you instead of me?"

"I don't know," Amanda said. She was petulant and guilty sounding, but that made Jonah more pissed off than it assuaged her.

"It's not a game," Jonah said. "It's not just funsies."

"Don't you think I know that?"

"Then why were you treating it like one? Think it's so fun to livestream the police pulling body parts out of the lake, hunh?"

"People deserve to know what's going on," Amanda said. She put her hands on her hips now. "How do you think we're supposed to stay safe if people don't even know that there's some kind of murderer walking around Arcadis."

"There's no murderer walking around the park, you absolute moron," Jonah sad. She wanted to shake Amanda.

"How do you know?"

"I think the last thing a criminal wants to do is return to the scene of the crime."

"But that's usually how they get caught. By doing the same thing more than once."

"How many true crime podcasts do you listen to?" Jonah asked, intending it as a rhetorical question.

"Uh. Like four?"

"They've clearly rotted something important in your brain," Jonah said. Some of the anger left her as she looked at Amanda, who had her arms folded over her chest. She was just a kid. Jonah sighed. "Look, it's not healthy for you to fixate on this. You're just going to cause everybody to panic. Let's just wait for the police to do their jobs, okay?"

"But people deserve to know."

"They'll learn about it when it's on the news, just like everybody else."

"Tom told me that Mr. Calvin chased the news people away."

"What?"

"Yeah. Earlier."

"Is he like, allowed to do that?"

"I think he owns all this land. So, maybe?"

Jonah rubbed her nose, then winced as it crinkled up her terrible sunburn. "I guess I understand why he'd want to do that."

"Bad publicity to have a murder happen here."

"It might not have happened here here."

"You keep telling yourself that," Amanda said.

"Look, Amanda, I should honestly fire you for you not being at work. Saturdays are already tough. I can't have you skipping work, and causing mass panic among the staff by doing... that." She waved her hand, trying to indicate the whole of this whole mess.

Amanda cringed back. "Please don't. My dad will be so pissed at me."

"I won't. But I should."

"Thank you so much. I'll be on my best behavior for the rest of the summer, I swear."

"Great. The ONLY reason I'm not kicking you is because this is like, major extenuating circumstances."

Amanda smiled up at her. "And because you're a nice person."

"I'm not a nice person. I'm just trying to have everybody make it through this fucking terrible summer."

"You are nice."

"Lie to yourself if it makes you feel better. Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you..."

Amanda looked slightly worried. "What?" she asked, suspicious.

"You and Kyle."

"What about it?"

"Has he been pressuring you? Do you feel safe?"

"Oh my God, are you my mother or something?"

"He's like five years older than you are. I don't want to have him taking advantage of you."

"He's super sweet."

"That doesn't make someone unable to take advantage."

"It's fine. Don't worry about it."

"If he ever does anything to you," Jonah said. "Please tell me."

"Now you're trying to be nice, and it's making me mad. Go back to being mean. Threaten to fire me again."

"If I catch you fucking him on park property, you're both out."

Amanda scream-laughed at that. "You shouldn't talk like that to your employees. Oh, and by the way, you don't have to give me a ride home anymore. Kyle will."

"Cool. Great. That makes me the opposite of nervous about your well being."

"Chill out. You're like an old lady."

"I'm the old lady of Arcadis Park. Here to stop you from having all kinds of fun. Now you need to go out and work."

"Wave pool's broken."

"Lazy river always needs more eyeballs."

"Urgh."

----------------------------------------

Jonah trudged out to the parking lot at the end of the day, then remembered that she had not driven to work. That realization was almost enough to cause her to lay down on the ground and hope that one of the other departing staff members with cars would run her over.

She turned back around and headed into the park once more. Mr. Calvin spotted her.

"Jonah!"

"Hi, Mr. Calvin," Jonah said. "Congratulations on not needing to shut down the park." There was no enthusiasm in her voice, but she didn't have a choice but to talk to her boss.

"It's a miracle I was able to keep the police from causing too much trouble."

"And I was told that you kicked out news crews?"

"Oh, well, just someone from the Lakeside Report who keeps a little too close ear on the police scanner."

"No bigger news stations showed up? From out of town, I mean?"

"I would have kicked them out, too."

Jonah nodded. "They'll report on it anyway, I'm sure."

"Well, as long as they don't go including pictures of the park, and rampant speculation, it shouldn't cause too much of a problem with guest numbers."

"Maybe you'll get all the crime junkies flocking in..." Jonah said with a yawn.

"Oh... That's not a bad idea. I should get someone to turn Belly of the Whale into a horror experience."

"Whatever you say, Mr. Calvin."

"Unfortunately, they're not going to let us pump until they find the rest of the body. How are the attractions holding up with the chlorine?"

"You'll have to buy some more."

Mr. Calvin frowned. "Really?"

"We don't usually go through this much."

"How unfortunate."

"And the wavepool won't be able to work until we can pump again and fill it."

"Now that is a real loss. Maybe I can hook it up to a hose, just use town water."

"The reason you don't do that is because town water costs money," Jonah reminded him. "Better to just keep it closed. And if it drains all the way, maybe you can fix the big crack."

Mr. Calvin laughed. "That is the dream, isn't it. How have the staff been?"

"Fine, I guess." Jonah certainly wasn't going to admit to Mr. Calvin that the staff were emphatically not fine, what with at least a good couple of them convinced that they were going to get serial murdered, and with some of them skipping work to go spy on the police, and who knows how many following Amanda's livestream...

"That's good, that's good."

"Hey, Mr. Calvin, could you maybe like, post a guard at night?" Jonah asked, crossing her fingers inside her pants pocket.

"I don't have the money for that," Mr. Calvin said. "Night guards cost way more than lifeguards." He laughed again, as though that had been some kind of joke.

"Sure, but..."

"You don't think that there's a murderer around, do you?"

"I mean, there clearly is."

"A repeat one, though."

"I don't know. But it would make the staff happy, probably."

"I'll think about it." He would definitely not think about it.

"Cool. I'll let the staff know that you're considering it."

"Or maybe the police will post someone."

"Hm."

"Yeah. Well, I've got a wife to get home to," Mr. Calvin said with a salacious wink.

"Goodnight," Jonah said, but he was already turning and walking away, heading through the gate towards his ugly truck, leaving Jonah standing alone.

She watched him go for a second, then made a slow journey across the park. When she got to the normal pool, she stopped, as against the setting sun, there was the silhouette of a figure on the roof of the changing room building.

"Hey!" Jonah yelled.

The figure jumped, obviously startled, and Jonah was glad that they didn't fall. She didn't think that she could cope with more than one death in a day. The figure walked towards the edge of the roof, and as they got closer, Jonah could see that it was Bay.

"Hey yourself," Bay said.

"What are you doing up there?"

"You're the one who gave me the key."

"That doesn't answer the question."

"I'm getting my camera back," Bay said. "Should have a nice sun trail on it at this point."

"Oh. Well, you should get down and get out of here."

"You going home?"

"Yeah."

"I'll walk with you."

"Okay."

Bay walked away from the edge of the roof. She disappeared into the building, then reappeared a moment later at the door.

"You're right that I probably don't want to be alone here at night," Bay said. "Gotta think twice about this place now."

"Yeah." Jonah scuffed the pavement as they walked together towards the woods.

"How was the rest of your day?" Bay asked.

"Terrible. Yours?"

"Mostly alright. You know the whole staff somehow know, right?"

"Yeah, I'm aware. It's Amanda's fault."

"What did she do?"

"I assume you were paying enough attention to your job to not watch the little show she put on?"

"Show?"

"She snuck out back and secretly filmed the police. Livestreamed it. At the very least, Kyle was watching, but probably more staff were too."

"Her parents will probably kill her for using up so much data."

"She probably has unlimited. I wouldn't do something like that unless I did."

"You want to know the fundamental difference between yourself and Amanda?" Bay asked.

"What?"

"You have common sense. She does not."

"I feel like I really don't, sometimes," Jonah said. "I probably should have fired her as soon as I found out."

"If you start firing people over actually fireable transgressions, you won't have any staff left."

"You're not wrong."

They entered the shadowy woods, and they both turned on their phone flashlights to illuminate the way out. At the fence, Jonah gave up on the idea of climbing over, and just crawled through the hole.

"Told you this thing was handy," Bay said, coming through after her.

"Did you cut it open again?"

"I promise I didn't."

"I really have to find out which of my idiot staff did, then. I don't want to keep patching it up."

"Just leave it open. Makes it easier for me to get through. I'm lazy like that."

"The first time a coyote gets into the park, that's when you'll say 'Oh, man, wish our fence didn't have massive holes in it.'"

"Want to get dinner?" Bay asked, as they got closer to the road, and to civilization.

"I'm filthy."

"Do you have anything good to eat at your house?"

"No," Jonah said, and realized again that she hadn't eaten all day, or at least not since she had pulled a severed head out of the water. She was really trying to block that out of her memory, though.

"Then let's get pizza. I'm sure Pizza Bella won't care if you're dirty."

"You've convinced me."

Their bikes were the last two tossed along the roadside where all the staff left their bikes. They pedaled them down the dim streets, Jonah breathing slightly heavily, feeling vaguely dizzy as they passed in and out of cones of streetlight illumination.

The front of Pizza Bella was a welcome sight, and there were plenty of other people there, couples, teens, other Arcadis staff members, who all seemed intent on ignoring eachother. Bay and Jonah leaned their bikes against the building's outer wall (fairly certain that no one would steal them).

"I'm gonna wash my hands," Bay said. "Be right back."

Jonah slid into a booth as Bay disappeared. She would order pizza when Bay came back.

On the wall, a TV was silently playing the news. Jonah watched it switch from some mundane story about endangered birds to a news reporter standing in front of the Arcadis Park sign. She felt like her eyes were burning a hole in the screen as the subtitles scrolled along.

"Our news team was able to acquire this footage from a witness at the scene who wishes to remain anonymous." The scene switched to something that was immediately recognizeable as Amanda's footage, and Jonah's hands curled into fists underneath the table. The jittery image showed police wading out of the water carrying a white cloth. Jonah presumed that the arm was contained inside of it.

"The victim has been identified as thirty two year old Justine Mulvais, a resident of nearby Sachutt."

A facebook image of a smiling woman.

Jonah felt sick and had to look away. Bay came back and saw the expression on Jonah's face. "What's the matter?"

Jonah pointed at the TV in the corner. Bay stared at it. "They haven't found any more body parts or the murder weapon."

"Just means we won't be able to pump the rides any time soon," Jonah mumbled. She couldn't think of anything more coherent to say.

"Oh, wow, body was in the water for less than a day."

"Not surprising." Jonah's voice felt muffled as it left her mouth. Like she was talking through cotton balls.

"Sorry, I'll stop talking about it. Pizza?"

Jonah stood up, and the two of them went to the counter to order slices.

"I'll pay," Jonah said.

"What? I've got cash."

"I make more money than you."

"Like what, two dollars more an hour?"

"Three."

"Fancy." But Bay stopped protesting, and Jonah paid for both of their pizza slices and sodas.

"Thanks for the pizza," Bay said, as they ate.

"No problem."

"I know I asked before, but are you doing okay?"

"Does it matter?"

"Against my better judgement, I find myself caring," Bay said.

"Hah. I guess the true test will be if this pizza stays down, and if I can sleep tonight."

"Yeah, I feel like there will be a lot of people with nightmares."

"I'm sure."

"Think staff are going to show up to work tomorrow?"

"If they don't, I'll fire them."

"You won't."

"I won't."

Jonah sighed. The pizza was good, but greasy. She ate it, feeling it settle like a lead weight inside of her.

"Do you like being aquatics head?"

"No," Jonah said with a bitter laugh.

"Why'd you take the job?"

"Because I can't say no to things."

"That's fair. You've been working here a long time, right?"

"About a million years. Well, six."

"Why don't you do something else?"

"Curious about my life?"

"Just trying to get to know you. Seems nice since you bought me pizza. My goal this summer was to make some friends, you know."

"Hah. Well, I'm an academic fuckup three fourths of the year, so I get to spend the fourth fourth here instead of getting an internship or something useful."

"What do you study?"

"Biochemistry."

"Nice."

"It would be if I was good at it."

"Why don't you switch majors?"

"Sunk cost."

"That's fair."

"What about you?"

"Film."

"That's cool."

"Well, I worry that a successful art major is still less employable than an unsuccessful biochem major, so is it really?"

"Arcadis Park clearly welcomes all who have made weird choices in life."

"Clearly."

"How come this is only your first year working there?" Jonah asked. "You're my age, right?"

"Senior, yeah." Bay shook her head. "Family just moved here."

"Oh, where'd you live before?"

"The UP. Michigan."

"Cool."

"Eh. It's about the same as here. Just even less stuff."

"Thrilling. Why'd your family move?"

"My mom wanted to be closer to her parents. She's originally from around here."

"Oh, makes sense. Do you like it here?"

"It's fine. I'm not really planning on staying. If I can get a job somewhere else when I graduate, I will."

"Gonna move to LA?"

"Hah. I know people say that you have to be in Hollywood to actually succeed in film, but you know, Toronto is the film capitol of the north, so I might go there. Probably cheaper."

"You'd have to get Canadian citizenship."

"Or just a job that'll get me a visa."

"Yeah."

The conversation had sufficiently distracted Jonah from the thought of the dead body in the lake, but clearly Bay couldn't resist bringing it back up after a momentary silence fell.

"Do you think they'll catch whoever did it?" Bay asked.

"Jesus, Bay, I'm still eating." Jonah put down her pizza crust and took a sip of soda. "I don't fucking know. It's been like, a day."

"Well, if they find the murder weapon, do you think there'll be prints on it?"

"I don't know."

"The killer seems kinda dumb."

"Why?"

"I mean, they chopped up the body, but it was still recognizable, and pieces of it were found right away."

"They probably wanted it to get found. Sick satisfaction from seeing people freak out."

"Oh." Bay looked down at her plate. "I guess."

"Look, I don't know. It's probably bad for everyone to do all sorts of speculating."

"Can't help it. I just keep seeing it in my head," Bay said.

"How do you think I feel?"

"I'm sorry, Jonah."

"It's fine."

"Are you coming to work tomorrow?"

"What else would I do?"

"Stay home."

"And be depressed? And think about how all the staff are probably depending on me, and how the whole place is going crazy? And have to deal with my family? And wonder if Mr. Calvin's going to fire me?"

"Alright, alright," Bay said. "I shouldn't have asked."

"Sorry for snapping. I'm in a terrible mood."

"You need like six ibuprofens and some aloe for that sunburn."

"I know. I'll take some when I get home, and then pass out until I need to be back at work. Just like every sucky day."

"Well, tomorrow at least you can be guaranteed that you won't pull anything else gross out of the filters."

"Knock on fucking wood."