True to her word, Bay did not creep on the social medias of the dead woman, her family, or her friends. She spent the rest of the long, long Sunday guarding the lazy river, including rescuing one particular child who somehow managed to trap himself underneath his inner tube and nearly drown. This made Bay unpleasantly wet, and the humidity in the air made her fail to dry for the rest of the day. She felt like a walking ball of slime when the day was finally over.

Several staff were hanging around the wave pool when she went to retrieve her bike, among them Amanda, Kyle, and Zach. Amanda was laying on the back of the wave pool deck, at the deepest end, reaching her arm down to demonstrate or measure exactly how much water had drained out of the crack in the bottom. The water was still murky and brown, and now had an unpleasant stink to it, the consequence of days of stillness on the piped in lake water. Kyle was watching her with an indulgent expression, but Zach seemed much less happy to be waiting around.

"You eager to get this place open again?" Bay asked, coming up behind Amanda. Amanda rolled over onto her back and stared up at Bay. She blew a bubble with her gum, which seemed to Bay to be an impressive feat, considering the angle of her body.

"I'm just trying to guesstimate how long it will take to drain," she said. "There's a bet out."

"Who's betting?" Bay asked, curious and wondering if she should tell Jonah to stop.

"Bunch of staff," Amanda said. "Kyle's acting as our bookie."

"Ah, yes, I trust Kyle with my money," Bay said, rolling her eyes.

"That was my response as well," Zach said. "I have no interest."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"Amanda doesn't want to be alone here without a double escort," Zach said with a deep frown.

Bay sighed. "Guys, Jonah talked to the police. They arrested the murderer already."

Amanda sat up. "Really?"

"Yeah. Apparently it was someone who knew the lady," Bay said.

Kyle and Zach shared a look, and Bay wondered what it meant. "The police said that?" Zach asked.

"According to Jonah," Bay said. "It'll probably be on the news tonight. They have to give some kind of statement to the press."

"Does that mean they're done searching the lake?" Amanda asked.

"They might not want to let us use it until they find all the, um, parts," Bay said.

"Oh, ew, yeah," Amanda said.

"I guess that means you don't need us to escort you anymore," Kyle said, nodding to Zach and beginning to walk away.

"See you tomorrow, Amanda," Zach said and followed Kyle. Amanda stood up, scrambling to her feet.

"Don't leave me here! You're my ride home!" But Kyle and Zach had already vanished around the corner. Amanda frowned and didn't run after them.

"He seems like a terrible boyfriend," Bay said. "No offense."

"He's fine. He's just been acting like a dumbass the past couple days."

"Well, I'd say his first dumbass move was dating a sixteen year old."

"I'm not that young," Amanda said. "It's really not as bad as you seem to think."

"Maybe only because he seems to have the emotional maturity of a small dog. Puts you on even footing."

"I should probably be offended," Amanda said, shaking her head. "Look, he's not that bad. And I know I'm going to break up with him in like two months, so it literally doesn't matter."

"Don't get your heart broken."

Amanda laughed. "You know, the best kind of sad teenage girl music to listen to is the kind where all the singers tell you to be a heartless bitch. I take all advice from my idols."

"I somehow managed to miss that train," Bay said flatly.

Amanda just laughed. "You hang out with Jonah, right?"

"Yeah."

"She still around to give me a ride home?"

"We're going to get pizza," Bay said. "Actually... Does her car have room for my bike?"

"No way."

"I'll pay you five dollars to ride my bike back to my house," Bay said. "That will solve both our problems."

"Can't you just leave your bike here and take me with you to get pizza?" Amanda asked.

"No, thanks," Bay said.

Amanda frowned. "Come on, I'm a human being too."

"Go find Kyle and get him to drive you home. I'm sure he hasn't actually gone that far." Amanda scowled, but acquiesced, running back down the concrete path and yelling for her boyfriend.

Bay retrieved her bike and enjoyed the looseness and freedom that came from pedaling it down the now deserted pathways of Arcadis. Though she was still in many ways upset about the dead body in the lake, and everything that entailed, the sudden release valve of guests clearing out, and the knowledge that someone had been arrested in connection with the death relieved much of the tension that had been building up inside her. She smiled in the gloom, looking around for Jonah.

Jonah was talking to Mr. Calvin outside of the information desk area, and Bay stopped a little ways away, in the shadow of some trees, so she could hear what they were saying, but they probably couldn't see her unless they were looking. She hadn't meant to eavesdrop at first, but that was what she ended up doing.

"...paranoia among my staff isn't healthy," Mr. Calvin was saying.

"I know, I'm sorry," Jonah said. "I'm trying to calm everyone down."

"I'm not just talking about them."

"Oh?" Jonah's voice was remarkably calm, but the sudden twitch in her legs, like she wanted to run, gave her away to Bay immediately.

"You don't need to go bothering the police," Mr. Calvin said. "I don't want you wasting my dollar or their time. You've been hired as an aquatics director, not as a private detective."

"Sorry," Jonah said, and this time, she failed to sound sorry at all. "I just thought that they should have that information."

"I will ask Frank about where my tools keep disappearing to," Mr. Calvin said. "So I thank you for bringing that little attrition to my attention, but other than that, you're not Sherlock Holmes. You're a lifeguard."

"Okay." Jonah jammed her hands in her pockets. "They arrested somebody else anyway, so."

"Precisely. And even if they hadn't, I wouldn't want them dragging the park further into it than it already is. Seriously, accusing the staff? You understand how much panic you could have caused?"

"The panic was already in progress."

"And you went and made it worse."

"I wasn't about to tell the staff that," Jonah protested. "I have discretion, unlike--" She stopped herself.

"Careful what you say."

"Yeah."

"Anyway, it's all behind us now, so hopefully we'll be able to start running the pumps again." Mr. Calvin's demeanor was back to cheerful, as though he hadn't just been talking down to his employee.

"Fingers crossed on that."

"Alright, I'll see you tomorrow, Jonah."

"Bye."

Jonah leaned against the rough brick of the building for a minute, until Mr. Calvin had vanished. "I see you back there," she said aloud.

Bay stepped out of the shadows, bike at her side. "Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt."

"It's fine. How much of that did you hear?"

"Plenty. Mr. Calvin is--"

"I'm used to it," Jonah said, cutting her off. "Pizza?"

"Yeah. Think my bike will fit in your car?"

"Sure."

"Amanda said that it probably wouldn't."

"Amanda doesn't have the slightest clue how anything works. I can put the back seats down."

"Oh. Great."

"She get over her morning nonsense?" Jonah asked as they walked to the parking lot.

"Amanda? Well she was asking for both Kyle and Zach to follow her around, but she cheered up after I told her that somebody was arrested."

"It's like someone getting arrested actually proves that they did the crime," Jonah muttered.

"They probably did," Bay said. "Most murders are done by people who know the victim. It makes sense."

"Sure."

"Anyway, if Amanda is less paranoid and needing half the male staff in this place to escort her around, that's a bonus."

"She just likes the attention," Jonah said. "And I'm sure Kyle is all too happy to provide it."

"Zach isn't."

"Well, who knows what his deal is. He's still pissed at me for stealing his job."

"I'm sure if he knew the kind of nonsense you're putting up with, he wouldn't want it."

Jonah laughed and unlocked her car, a beat up tan vehicle that was probably at least ten years old. She reached into the back seats and flattened them down, so that Bay could wedge her bike into the trunk. It fit, barely, and left dirt streaks on the cloth upholstery. Jonah didn't notice or care, and just got in the front seat.

The radio was playing some sort of jangly pop music, and Jonah turned it down to barely above a whisper volume. They didn't talk as they drove, Jonah's headlights carving out slices of air. Bay stared out the windows into the trees that lined the road, catching glimpses of things that could have been deer.

"Long fucking day," Jonah said when they got to Pizza Bella. She stopped the car and turned off the engine, but made no move to get out and go in. Bay turned and looked at her. Jonah's head was pressed back against her headrest, eyes closed, chin tilted to the sky.

"Yeah. Longer week."

"You working tomorrow?"

"I don't even remember my schedule," Bay said. "I've kinda just been showing up under the assumptions that I have work."

Jonah laughed. "I think you have Tuesdays and Thursdays off."

"Shit schedule."

"Yeah."

"What about you?"

"I don't think that I get days off?" Jonah said. "Since I got promoted."

"Seems inhumane."

"Not like Mr. Calvin would tell me that. But if he came looking for me and I wasn't there, or if there was some kind of problem that needed me, and I was gone, I don't know what would happen."

"He should promote Zach, and then each of you would only have to work half the time."

"Now that would be the logical move. But when has Arcadis ever been run in a manner approaching logical?"

"I wouldn't know," Bay said. "This is my first summer."

"I'll pray for your sake that it's also your last."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Sounds like you're hoping I die."

Jonah laughed. "When you die, you get to go to the great Arcadis Park in the sky, where no child has ever pooped in the bumper car ride."

"Sounds like a dream."

"To sleep, perchance to dream." Jonah laughed again as she said this, and, with deliberate sluggishness, pulled herself out of the car. "Pizza time."

The interior of Pizza Bella was cheery and tacky, a slice of the universe in which it felt like nothing bad could happen. They got pizza and settled down (Bay paid, as she had promised). As it had been before, the television was playing the local news. Jonah faced away from it-- Bay had noticed her choose her seat with deliberate positioning, so that she wouldn't see the television screen. That left Bay facing it, which she didn't entirely mind. There wasn't currently anyone talking about the murder, but she kept an eye on it to see, as someone inevitably would.

"How does your family feel about you working literally all the time?" Bay asked, as they ate their pizza. "Don't they miss you?"

Jonah snorted. "It's a relief for all of us when we are as far away from each other as possible."

"Really?"

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

"Fair enough. You love them most when you're away at school?"

"Oh, absolutely. It's the dream to not have to come back here someday."

"Do you think you'll have a job when you graduate?"

"You sound like my faculty advisor," Jonah said. She forlornly picked a mushroom off the top of her pizza.

"Sorry."

"It's fine. I mean, that's the goal. And if it doesn't happen, well..."

"Arcadis will always be here to welcome you home," Bay said.

"Until somebody comes to their right mind and shuts it down due to how shit it is."

"Hah. It's not that bad. Probably on the same level as any other waterpark."

"You ever read Dune?" Jonah asked, rather a non sequitur.

"Ages ago."

"I dream of living in the fucking desert."

"There's plenty of it out there for you to move to."

"Someday."

"Yeah."

Jonah tore up a napkin, very slowly, and stared across the table at Bay. Bay was looking up at the television. The story had changed from one about a dispute with the local sanitation union to the pressing story of the day: the murder. A mugshot plastered the screen, and the subtitles scrolled along.

"Bryan Gomes, 32, and a resident of Stackhousen, was arrested this morning on suspicion of having killed his on-again off-again girlfriend, Justine Mulvais. Bryan was arrested in his home, and is currently being held without bail. We go now to Justine Mulvais's sister, Christine, who--"

Bay looked away from the television.

"Do you think he did it?" Jonah asked Bay.

"How do you know that's what I was watching?"

"You were staring directly at the TV. Also, I can see the reflection in the window." Bay craned her neck and saw that the dark outdoor window she had her back to was indeed quite reflective.

"I don't know," Bay said. "I'm not a jury."

"Is it bad for me to say that I hope he did?"

"Well, if the other option is like, a serial killer or Arcadis Park staff, no? I mean, she's already dead. If they've caught the person who did it..."

Jonah sighed and stared down at the scratched, mustard yellow surface of the table. "I guess if I were the police, I'd definitely suspect a woman's terrible boyfriend."

"Let's hope Amanda doesn't get murdered. The police will have to arrest Kyle," Bay joked.

"Fuck all that," Jonah said, and put her head down on her arms on the table, pushing napkins out of the way to do so.

"Sorry," Bay said. "I shouldn't--"

"I'm just losing it," Jonah said. "It's not you or that or anything. It's me."

"You need a break."

"Can't take one," Jonah said, voice muffled. "I'm so fucking tired."

"You can just not turn up to work tomorrow. Pretend like you thought that your old schedule still applied, and that you have the day off."

"I can't. I'm responsible."

"You don't have to feel responsible for," -- a lightbulb clicked in Bay's mind -- "everything that happens at Arcadis. It's messed up if you feel responsible for that woman."

"Haha. You get it."

"It's not your problem," Bay said. "It's so, so, so not your problem, now that they know who did it."

"I can't help the stupid fucking way I feel."

"You need therapy."

"Who doesn't?" Jonah lifted her head up. "Whatever. I'll go to work. I'll make it through tomorrow, and then the tomorrow after that, and then eventually the summer will be over, and fingers crossed that I never have to come back."

"Yeah." Bay felt a resounding pity for Jonah then, who looked extremely lost and tired. Wanting to offer some kind of comfort, she reached out and awkwardly patted Jonah's bony elbow. "It'll be over before you know it."

"This isn't even the worst summer of my life," Jonah said. "The first year I worked at Arcadis was beyond terrible."

"Why would you keep working there then?"

Jonah shrugged, an apologetic kind of smile on her face, though Bay had no idea who she was apologizing to. "I couldn't say no."

"That's crazy."

"Besides, it gets me out of the house."

"Maybe it's like, not my lane to say this," Bay began, "but if you ever need a place to go, you're always welcome at my house. We don't have any furniture, though."

Jonah laughed. "It's fine, Bay. I've lived with my family for like, twenty-one years, I think I can survive them for one more summer."

"If you ever do need a place to go..."

"Thanks," Jonah said, and she looked at Bay with real appreciation. "You're too good for this place, Bay."

"Eh, so are you." Jonah smiled again, and Bay realized that her hand was still on Jonah's elbow. She didn't remove it, though.

"Don't let me drag you down with me," Jonah said. "Get to Toronto or wherever as fast as you can."

"I'll do my best." There was a brief pause as they looked at eachother, Bay unsure of how to fill this new, not quite awkward, silence between them.

Jonah figured out how to break the moment. "Oh, hey, those photos you were taking in the soup cans, how'd they turn out?"

"I haven't developed them yet," Bay said. "It's kinda a tricky thing."

"Really?" Jonah sat up straighter and leaned forward.

"Well, the paper inside them is like, super overexposed. If you developed them normally, it'd just turn black. So you have to scan them in, and you get one shot at it. It always makes me kinda nervous, so I haven't done it yet."

"You should! I want to see how they turn out."

"You could help me," Bay said, the words falling out of her mouth and surprising her. "I'd be happy to have company."

Jonah's smile was wide and genuine. "You know, that sounds like fun."

"I can't promise that the pictures will be that thrilling. I might have exposed them all wrong."

"I don't have any frame of reference, so I'm sure it will all be cool to me."

"When I say you need to keep your expectations low, I really mean it. Solography is really... I mean it's not that thrilling."

"I want to see what your art looks like."

Bay's face heated up. "Really all you'll see is more shots of Arcadis."

"It'll be better because you took them. After all, what's the jingle say? Arcadis-- where the greatest people play!"

"I'm not familiar with that one," Bay said. The way Jonah had sang it made it sound like the cheesiest radio jingle, one from a bygone era where radio jingles were much more of a thing.

"You haven't been around here long enough to remember when that ad was on every local tv station five hundred times a night."

"Sounds like I was spared."

"You really were. That's the least earworm-y part of it."

"I'll take your word for it."

Jonah grinned. "If you're looking for the time of your life, don't look too far away. There's something waiting for you, on every summer day." She was tuneless, but endearing.

"Stop, stop, I don't need more commercials drilled into my brain!"

Jonah just laughed.

"If you really want to help me out with my photos, though, you can come to my house tomorrow night. We can scan them in then."

"I'll consult my calendar," Jonah said, and made a show of looking at her phone. "Oh, perfect, I've got absolutely nothing else going on. I'll be there."

Bay laughed.

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

The next day at Arcadis was long and grueling, but Mondays were always far quieter than weekends, and all the staff had realized that murderer or no, they had to come to work. Bay wouldn't have described it as a sense of normalcy that had returned to the park, and she certainly wouldn't have called it a sense of calm, but it at least was a sense of drudging obligation onto which the function of the park hung. People were still gossiping, talking about their own pet theories, if the police could be believed.

On her break, Bay sat with Qwamae at one of the picnic tables as far from the park proper as one could get, and they chatted about the state of things. Bay liked Qwamae-- he was a solid, dependable guy, and he seemed averse to causing drama, though not averse to discussing it.

"Think they're going to find the murder weapon?" he asked her, as they both gnawed on hot dogs.

"They're spending so long in the lake, I hope they find something."

"It seems like sketchy evidence to convict someone on, if they can't find even how he did it."

"I mean, it's pretty obvious how he did it," Bay said. "Her head was cut off."

"Well, don'tcha think that it'd be easier to take the head off if she was already dead some other way?"

"I don't know," Bay said. "The whole thing makes me sick."

"Oh, yeah, it's a tragedy when a man kills his girlfriend. Happens all the time, though."

"You just said there's no evidence to say that he did it!" Bay said.

"Somebody's gotta play devil's advocate."

"Training to be a lawyer?" Bay asked.

"Hm, my mother'd sure be happy if I made that career pivot," he said with a wide smile. "But I don't think I could stand wearing a suit all the time."

"The money might make it worth it."

"See, making fifteen an hour here keeps my head from getting too inflated," Qwamae said. "Keeps me grounded." He finished his hotdog and wiped his hands on his shirt. "Don't let a murderer getcha!"

"Yeah, same to you," Bay said as he walked away.

The rest of her day was spent in a kind of anticipation, which she at first chalked up to her new posting. With the wave pool still down for the count, she had been reassigned to the tallest waterslide in the park, and the one closest to the lake. This meant that she could easily see over the tops of the trees, to where the police were still conducting their search for who-knows-what out on the lake. She kept staring out at it, then catching herself and returning to sending sunburned teenagers down the chute.

By the time Arcadis closed, her feet hurt, and she wanted to do nothing more than pass out until the next morning, and revel in her potential day off. But then she remembered that she had agreed to bring Jonah to her house to develop her film, and that was the cause of the excited jitters in her stomach. She was excited to see how her film had turned out, and she was excited to hang out with Jonah as well. Friends. She was making friends.

They met up at the parking lot entrance, and once again, Bay was forced to dump her bike into Jonah's trunk.

"I should just carpool you to work," Jonah said. "Now that Kyle takes Amanda."

"You don't have to," Bay said. "I'm fine with biking."

"There's no point in me not carpooling you," Jonah said with a grumble. "You don't live very far from me."

"Well, if you insist," Bay said with a smile. "But don't come pick me up tomorrow morning. I have the day off."

"Wish I had the day off."

"I'm telling you, skip work, hang out with me."

"You don't even understand how tempting that sounds," Jonah said. "Well, let's go get these photos done."

Bay's house was dark when they arrived. "No family home?" Jonah asked.

"They're probably out at a movie. My parents are real film buffs."

"Hah, nice."

"Well, it used to be nice when they would take me. Now I work all the time and they go without me."

"Well, how fun is it to watch movies with your parents anyway?"

"I enjoy it," Bay said. "It saves me money on movie tickets. And besides, if I didn't have a solid film lover upbringing, I probably would have majored in something dumb like biochem."

Jonah just laughed.

Bay let them both into the house. It creaked and echoed around them, being still almost completely barren of furniture. "Like I said, sorry about the lack of like, stuff."

"It's a nice change," Jonah said. "Cute house."

"Thanks. I don't feel like I live in it at all."

Bay led Jonah upstairs, through the dark stairwell, into her bedroom. "Welcome to my little alcove," she said. "We've got all you could possibly need in life: air mattress, clothes, computer, and more cameras than you could shake a stick at." She pointed each of these things out as though she were the arbiter of some great kingdom. Jonah smiled and plopped down on the air mattress, which wheezed, half deflated.

"So, how do you do film?" Jonah asked.

"Er, I have all of the cameras in here, let me get this set up. It's actually good that you're here to help. This will probably be easier with two people."

"Cool."

Bay explained how the process would work. Jonah would go underneath the blankets with her laptop, so that the light from it couldn't expose the film even more. Bay would line up the images in the scanner, and Jonah would press the button to scan them. Rinse and repeat for each broad rectangle of photo paper that Bay would pull from the soup cans.

"They probably won't look like anything," Bay said. "I'll have to do heavy post processing on them to get it to look like an actual image."

"Stop warning me about how terrible it is," Jonah said. "I think it'll be cool regardless."

"I hope so."

They began the process. Bay turned off all the lights in the tiny bedroom. It was weirdly cozy, to be there with another person, with just the whirring of machines and their soft voices. They were alone in the universe.

"Alright, it's lined up. Go ahead and press the scan button."

The scanner whirred, and light flared out under Bay's hands, as she crouched over the scanner on the floor.

"Looks great," Jonah said. "I can see the ferris wheel."

"Hah, amazing. Didn't expect it to come out at all."

"I trust you to make good work," Jonah said. "This just confirms my suspicions."

"One of them has to be a dud."

"Shush."

And they scanned in the rest of the photos. Bay dumped the now destroyed film into a black plastic bag, just in case there was something she could do with it later, and flipped on the lights, blinding herself.

"Alright, you can come out of the blanket now," Bay said.

Jonah emerged, fiercely sweaty. "Oh, thank god."

"Shocked you didn't suffocate under there."

"I, too, am willing to suffer for art," Jonah said. "But I'm glad to be free. Nobody needs this many blankets in June."

"Let me see the images."

Bay took over her laptop and flipped through the photos. They were all negatives, and most were hugely dim and blurry, to the point of being nearly indistinguishable. That could be cleaned up in post processing, but it was also clear that Jonah had just been trying to stoke her ego by saying that the images were good.

"These do not look super great right now," Bay said. "I'll definitely have to clean them up."

"Can you show me what they would look like cleaned up?" Jonah asked, leaning over Bay's shoulder. The warm heat of her body so close put goosebumps on Bay's arm.

"Uh, yeah, sure, I can clean up one right now. But only one. I don't want to spend like six hours fiddling with this right now." She laughed, a kind of nervous tic. She picked one of the most bland looking photos, one that was pretty clearly taken from the top of the changing room that looked down onto the normal pool. It was a boring shot, composition wise, with just one streak of sun going vividly across the sky.

She pulled it into lightroom, and set herself to the task of adjusting it so that it looked like something real. Jonah watched silently behind her, not commenting as Bay inverted the colors of the photo, then cranked the contrast as high as it could go. As Bay moved the sliders around, the image came to take on recognizable forms: umbrellas, lawn chairs, trees, lane lines strung across the pool. The pool water itself was sluggishly dark, probably due to all the mud that had been in it when the photo was taken.

"What's that?" Jonah asked, pointing to one of the lawn chairs, where a blurry form obscured part of it.

"Hm," Bay said, and zoomed in. There wasn't a ton of detail that she could rescue from the image, but she could make a guess. "Looks like someone took a nap. Probably at the party right after I set this up. The film is more sensitive to things that are there for long periods of time, and there at the beginning of the exposure. It's this thing called, um, reciprocity failure, I think." She explained this with only half her attention, zooming back out to the full photo and continuing to try to mess with it. She was trying to bring out the maximum clarity between the umbrellas and the pool deck, because she thought that was the most important part of the composition.

"And what's that?" Jonah asked, again pointing to a section of the photograph, this time in the pool. It was a pale smudge against the dark background of the water, and Bay obligingly zoomed in and tried to fiddle with the dials to bring it into sharper clarity.

As she did, she immediately wished that she hadn't. A body emerged, pale and ghost like, still blurry and indistinct, but clearly recognizable as a human, floating atop the water.