Framed

Eighteen.

The ride, initially, is silent. While Zayn drives, the tires of the van plowing through the mild snowfall, Ellie holds her phone up, searching for reception, although her eyes are glancing everywhere except the cell phone.

"Any luck?" Zayn asks, breaking the ice as best he could.

Ellie's eyes dart back to the phone, and she shakes her head no.

"Damnit, let me drive a bit closer. I'm starting to see electric power lines." Zayn says, speeding up a bit.

The bars show up, and Ellie starts shouting. "I got it, I got it!"

"Then call." Zayn says, his voice empty as the realization of why they're here hits him again.

Ellie's already tapping the numbers on her phone's touchscreen by the time Zayn tells her to call.

"We're fifteen minutes away from the city, please help us. My friend is dead." Ellie says as soon as someone answers the phone, and after about ten minutes, where both Ellie and Zayn tell their sides of the story, the operator lets them hang up, and Zayn immediately swerves the van around in a U-turn, easy to do on the wide dirt road, and heads back.

-

They arrive back at the scene about three minutes before the cops appear, and they collectively huddle in front of the cabin where Dinah had been staying for warmth, not wanting to go inside for fear that doing so would mess with any potential evidence that would be gathered.

They spend about two hours at the scene, still not allowed in the cabin, instead just waiting in the snow and trying to keep mobile. The group tries to keep their eyes away as the officers put their friend into a black body bag that looks too much like a garbage bag. Sometimes the true dehumanization happens after death, Lauren realizes, because while death is the great equalizer, it levels people onto a platform of something a little less than human. A person sees a corpse and thinks body, thinks that they feel sorry for them; they don't see the memories that people anchor to their minds with the look of those person's eyes, or the impact that the loss has on those around them.

They cry until the insides of their throats are dry and rough like scabbed knees, where they think they have no more tears left, but like old water pumps, there is always more that trickles out of them.

They don't speak to anyone unless someone asks them a question, and the authorities question each one of them for a few minutes, making them relive something that still hasn't fully fleshed itself out yet, as two other officers watch over Niall and Selena, handcuffing them before the ambulance comes over.

Eventually, they're allowed to drive home, gathering into Ellie's van. Ellie, too grief stricken to drive, sits in the passenger seat, and Zayn takes the wheel after drinking a coffee that he had brought along with him.

Before Lauren gets into the car, she's approached by an officer. While already assured that she's now fully distinguished as an innocent party in the matter, she tenses nonetheless. The officer, a slim Hispanic man with a mess of brown hair nearly covering his forehead, says nothing, instead handing her a small purple Moleskine notebook, and from the frayed ends of the pages, Lauren can tell that the book's been used. She says a quiet thank you, tucks it into her pocket, and gets in.

The drive home is slower than the drive it took to get there, everyone's minds preoccupied on the events that have occured, the occasional sob echoing through the silence in the car. Camila has her head facing the back window, hoping that the passing of the frozen road will distract her from the faded luster that was in Dinah's eyes when they saw her again, the way those eyes became so dull, like second grade pencils, when she passed on.

She tried not to think of Niall.

The boy had become like the flipping of a coin to her, adopting one persona before the next, spinning like a quarter tossed before landing on a specific side. She hadn't seen him like this until her friend was dead in the snow, body freezing along with the ice. And yes, he had become obsessed with her, but anything related to his affections for her made her cringe, and induced nausea.

He had been obsessed with her, but she was the one he had met in the first place. She was the person he had become enamoured with in the first place.

And as a result, he had killed six people. Six people who were dead due to her presence at the wrong place at the wrong time. Six people who should have been alive instead of her.

In other words, Camila had just as much killed them as Niall did.