One for the Team

30 | after

If someone turns on the tv on any news channel of any house in Northwoods, it is certain that the headline will be about the body of the missing boy.

Levi Brightly, 17, found dead in the woods after weeks missing

A woman sitting on the couch of a small slummy house works her teeth nervously on the butt of her cigarette, and somewhere in the front yard, her younger kid plays fetch with their dog. She knows this is a lost cause because lately, their dog hasn't been up to anything really, and he will more likely run back inside than after anything Archie might throw. She knows soon enough she will see the dog running up the stairs to her older son's bedroom, where the boy has made camp over the last few weeks.

She doesn't like thinking why this is because it takes her back to the time their neighbor's cat got really sick, and more often than not, their own dog would sneak out of the house to go lie down by the poor thing until it finally died.

Instead, she thinks about what's being said on the news. On her television screen, a pretty woman is interviewing several kids as they rush out of Northwoods High at the end of the day.

"So what do you think about all this?" the woman asks. She means their dead classmate, of course.

"It's just terrible," the girl says, an exceptionally tall girl, hair held up by a fat scrunchy and eyes so big, they're scary. "I can't believe he's dead, murdered of all things. I thought he ran away. I really thought he had just, like – I don't know. To think that there's a murderer somewhere on the loose makes me sick to my stomach. Everyone's on edge really. I don't think anyone will, like, be able to have a good night sleep until whoever did this is behind bars."

"I can imagine," the interviewer says in fake sympathy. The news channel cuts back to the studio then, where a man in a suit sits behind a desk and waits for his cue, his lines burning on the paper in front of him.

On the couch, the woman starts biting her nails.

"Police has come out with new information on the case, reporting to have downsized their search to three main suspects..." The woman stops listening, thinks of the names written with a black sharpie on the door of her older son's bedroom.

Her head goes back to the weeks before the body was found. She works long heavy shifts that send her home battled and bitter at unholy hours of the night, and so she rarely sees her kids come back from school, or leave for it, for that matter. But she still does their laundry, and most times, that's enough to know where they've been.

She remembers those weeks after Levi was reported missing. Remembers pulling her older son's clothes out of his laundry basket and finding them covered in mud and dirt. Remembers the small sticks and stones stuck to the bottom of his shoes. Remembers asking him, angry that she worked so hard and still had to come home and slave away to take the stains off his clothes, clothes that she had paid and would not pay for again. What had he been doing that his laundry was so filthy? Rolling around in the mud?

"Running", he said. "Sometimes, I mean, sometimes I go running in the woods."

The woman sucks the nicotine out of her cigarette and ashes it with a shaky hand. On the bottom of the tv screen, the headline shines brightly:

Levi Brightly, 17, found dead in the woods...