My footsteps are slow and steady as I walk along the school hallway, like I'm marching in my own funeral procession.

This is my fifth funeral in eight years. I should get used to dying over and over again but it still hurts like crazy. In fact, this one hurts more than all of them, because I like it here and I have finally let my guard down just enough to make some friends.

Those friends line the hallway now, standing side by side with the others, only none of them are here to mourn my untimely demise. They have not come to shed tears and lament my passing, they've come to celebrate. They're all celebrating, like the ghouls they are, because there's nothing people love more than to come kick a corpse. Even my so-called friends are lining up to take the shot and I can't say I blame them.

Kick the dead girl, I can take it. I deserve it.

There's something pinned to the front of my locker. I can see it from here, where the gaggle of ghouls have parted to give me access to my final destination and I know exactly what it is. It's the public announcement of my death.

Dear Richardson Hill High. We are pleased – no, delighted – to formally confirm the death of one Harlequin Jaden Jones, aged thirteen years. Miss Jones' death was sudden but not unexpected and we hope you will join with us in bidding her a joyful life in Hell. Signed, The Whole Damn School.

I get closer and closer and I can already see their faces – not the funeral hags, but theirs, the dead girls. The ones my Grandpops killed. I've studied those faces so often over the past eight years that I know each and every one of them like they were my own sisters. I know where they lived. I know where they went to school. I know what they were wearing when they went missing.

And there it is. My death notice. My nasty little secret laid bare for the whole school to see, for I am the granddaughter of Mr. Rheemus Jonathan Jones, notorious serial killer of twelve young girls, who met his own fate at the hands of a state penitentiary guard and a swiftly effective lethal injection right into his blood-stream.

Someone has printed out an article from the internet and taped it to my locker door. It's there, in bold black print, complete with twelve identity shots. Twelve pictures for twelve dead girls. I stare at them and they stare right back, just like they always do.

Oopsie! They found you out, Harlequin. They just done gone and found out your dirty, filthy little secret and now you're DEAD too. Just like Grandpops. Just like us. Dead, dead, DEAD!

My locker is slightly ajar and something is seeping out from under the door and drips sluggishly down the locker underneath mine. It's blood. Only it's not real blood, of course, but that crappy synthetic stuff you get at Halloween. They didn't even bother to get a real authentic-looking blood to really make an impact. Must try harder, I mentally scold, but deep down I know they've done a good job here. No one cares that the blood is fake. It's what the blood signifies that really counts. I have blood on my hands. I don't really, because I know I'm not going to touch it even though they want me to. For a moment, even I want to. I want to coat my hands in it and give them all a real show.

Hey there folks, check out the serial killer's granddaughter, covered in the blood of all those itty bitty girls he killed! Isn't she just a chip off the old block?

So I don't touch it. I don't even open my locker. Holding the door in place with one hand, I tear off the print-out in the other and folding it carefully, I place it in my backpack, wedged safely between my dog-eared copy of Macbeth and my Spanish text book.

The school hallway has never been this quiet but I'm deafened by the silence and beaten black and blue by their accusatory stares filled with such repulsion and blame, because of course, I am to blame, right? With my Grandpops reduced to nothing but ashes and safely ensconced in his urn underground, there has to be somebody else to persecute in his place. And what better person to blame than his own granddaughter, the granddaughter who at the time, was about the same age as many of those poor, cherubic angels that he slaughtered? Someone has to keep on paying, you see. This is why I'm here now, running the gauntlet of hate and accepting my death without protests of innocence and public displays of hysteria. They can have my death, but they won't get anything else from me.

With a deep intake of breath, I zip up my backpack and turn around. They are like stone, an avenue of cold, gray statues like the Weeping Angels in the Doctor Who episode I watched last night and I don't want to get too close to any of them just in case they reach out and zap me back in time, probably to relive my deaths over and over again.

Fixing my eyes on the path ahead, I grit my teeth and start to walk again, this time faster than before, because now the truth is exposed and I am dead, and that's when the kicking of the corpse usually starts. I could set my watch on how quickly it takes for the name-calling to begin. As I walk, I chant the countdown in my head. 5-4-3-2-1. They take aim and kick as hard as they can.

It's okay though. I can cope with this walk of shame and humiliation. What I can't cope with is when I look into the crowd and see them – my Grandpop's precious girls, with their curls and ribbons and bloodied, bloated faces – all bearing witness to my fate. I silently call their names, one by one, beseeching them to help me, even though I know they won't.

Susan Tulley. Veronica King. Anne Harris. Charlaine Neill. Terri Rice. Patricia Kerley. Christine Evanovich. Billie O'Reilly. Maxine Brooks. Clara Armstrong. Lois Ackermann. Summer McElroy.

Twelve names. Twelve pictures. Twelve dead girls. Twelve kicks to the gut and twelve twists of the knife.

And as my former friends and fellow students continue their barrage of hate and revulsion, I keep looking ahead because that's the only way I can go now and each time I rise from the dead and start at a new school, in a new place, that's what I tell myself.

Look ahead, never look back.

But I know it's a lie. Because I always look back. I can't help myself.

***

Mama is on the verge of another meltdown.

I can see it in her eyes - that jittery panicked look of a caged animal - and in the way her fingers twitch for her meds. She doesn't know that I know about the meds. Numerous bottles of pills in all shapes, sizes and colors like a candy shop for the mentally unhinged. Mama also doesn't know that I know about the liquor, or maybe she no longer cares much that I do, because I find an empty or two in the trash every morning and it seems she doesn't even bother trying to hide them anymore.

"Honestly, Harlequin, those little cranks at your school will be the death of me. Why is it always the kids, huh? Why are they the ones that ruin everything?" She bites on the skin around her fingernails which is already red raw from constant nervous gnawing.

I want to shout that it's not them that ruin everything, it's Grandpops and his girls because none of them will go away and just stay dead, but I bite my lip and stay quiet because I don't even blame Grandpops. I want to, but I just can't. He was Grandpops, my Grandpops and I don't even know the man they talk about in the online articles and newsstands.

I also don't want to upset Mama, because I can see how terrible she looks these days, how dang tired she seems of everything. My Mama used to be beautiful. I remember how pretty she was, how she used to curl her hair with the irons and how she always wore the most amazing colorful dresses. That was my Mama –full of life and full of color. But not now. Now she is drab and dull and when she doesn't look on the verge of a meltdown, she just looks plain exhausted and stares into space like a darn zombie.

These are the only times we ever discuss Grandpops, when the shit hits the proverbial fan and we know we have to make a fresh start somewhere new. Most of the time, she refuses to talk about him at all. Most of the time, it's like he never existed, like she scrubbed him out of her head as hard as she scrubs the toilet bowl with bleach. I learned quickly not to mention him, no matter how much I wanted to talk about him, because I would see that look in her eyes and get scared she would leave me, like she left Grandma. Sometimes I think she wants to. Sometimes I think she looks at me and sees them – those girls - and that makes her want to run as fast and as far away as she can.

So I say nothing. But she's wrong about it always being the kids at school discovering our family secret. Only a year ago, a guy she was dating at the library where she was working at the time, did a little sneaky Googling of his new girlfriend and found out way more than he bargained for. Well, he told everyone at the library, of course, then Mr. Jacobs the high school math teacher overheard and told his colleagues the next day and by lunchtime the entire school knew. Mama lost her job and that night, our windows were smashed in and we were left with no doubts that we were no longer welcome in town.

"Guilty by association, always so damn guilty," Mama had muttered to herself as she packed our suitcases for the fourth time.

I don't want her to pack them a fifth time.

"I don't want to leave, Mama," I beg. "Please, just this time, can we stay? Things will be fine if we just wait it out."

But it's another lie. I know it. She knows it. She looks at me then in a way that's halfway between thinking I'm just the most pitiful creature she ever laid eyes on and thinking I'm just plain stupid. She hesitates and then opts for the latter.

"Don't be so damn ridiculous, Harlequin," she snaps. "You know full well we can't stay. They know. They all know. By tomorrow I won't have a job and how the heck do you think I'll pay the rent? That's if Mr. Browning even lets us stay here anyway because I'm betting he won't now. No one in this damn two-bit, snotty as sin town will take us as tenants and no one will want to know us either."

Her hands twitch more violently and I know she's literally dying for her meds now. I reckon a few minutes longer and she'll say to Hell with it and go rooting through her purse, swallowing them all down in front of me. I don't want to see it. I don't want to see her at her worst because then I'll never remember her at her best.

I nod my head and flee to my room, not sure which one of us is more thankful to be alone.

***

It never usually takes Mama long to get everything packed up and for her to plan some place new to go and I know I have to work quickly before she comes in here and starts packing up my stuff too.

Closing the door, I wedge the dresser chair against the handle and press my ear against the scuffed wood, listening for her footsteps down the hall. I think I can hear Mama on the phone, either that or she really has had a meltdown and is talking to herself.

I lift my backpack onto the bed and carefully retrieve the folded print-out I put in there earlier, then I reach into the slim gap behind my closet and remove the large purple scrapbook I hide there. Kneeling on my rug, I lay the scrapbook out in front of me and smile as I run my fingers over the front cover, where I wrote my name in my neatest handwriting. Taking the glue stick from the dresser drawer, I paste the back of the print-out and stick it down onto the next free page in the book. Rubbing my palms over the page, I brush out all the air bubbles and sit back to admire my handiwork.

Mama doesn't know I have this book and I know she wouldn't understand. She'd say it's weird and maybe she'd be right, but she has her meds and her liquor and I have this scrapbook. The only difference is that she takes the pills to help her forget, whereas I keep the scrapbook to help me remember. I want to remember him, the Grandpops I knew and I keep the scrapbook to remind me what he was not.

The man I knew wasn't a monster. The man I knew didn't do all the things they said he did. That was someone else. Someone I never met and someone I never knew. And yet it's his face I see again and again as I turn the pages.

When I was younger, after I found out the truth about why we left, I used to imagine that his body had been taken over by some alien parasite and that if I pulled on his face, it would fall off like a mask and underneath would be one mass of worms, all wriggling and writhing and tangled up. Only something as horrible as that could have done the things they said he did.

My grandparents lived close to one of the biggest county fairs in the state. Thousands and thousands of people came from miles around to ride the giant Ferris wheel, watch the rodeo and eat more burgers and candy than the whole of New York could eat in a year. Almost all the girls disappeared from that fair, apart from Maxine and Lois who were taken from the mall, but all of them ended up in the same place. Bitter Creek.

Bitter Creek runs behind my grandparents' property, almost five thousand acres of twisted southern jungle that takes you right down to the state line. When I was a kid, I loved it there, twisted jungle or not. I'd jump over the fence, with Grandpops by my side and we'd trek down to the creek where the water made funny gurgling sounds that made me giggle, then we'd sit on the rocks and he'd teach me how to fish. Sometimes we took a piece of Grandma's apple pie and a jug of her freshly squeezed lemonade and Grandpops would tell me stories about how if you stood real still, you'd hear the wood nymphs whispering to you from the trees.

They say the dead girls whisper down at Bitter Creek now. I read it on an online forum. I shouldn't even have looked, I know, but it's been eight years since I was last there and I was curious. The local kids tell horror stories about it now, about Ripper Rheemus Jones and how he killed those girls and shoved their bodies into crawl-spaces down by the creek, about how he shoved mud and twigs into their mouths to keep them quiet as he cut open their bellies, about how he bathed his hands in their blood. And about how if you stand real still and listen, those twelve dead girls will whisper to you. You might think it's the wind rushing through the trees, but it's not. It's them and if you stay down there too long, they'll never let you leave.

Of course, I printed that one out and stuck it in the book. Another page, another lie I refuse to believe.

Mama is coming down the hallway, just like I knew she would. Quickly I close the book and shove it behind the closet and drag the chair away from the door. She knocks lightly. Mama never knocks.

When she enters, her face looks weird, like she's been crying. She's been crying more and more lately. Sometimes I hear her at nights in her bedroom when she sobs like a child. But there's something else there too. She has a wary look in her eyes and seems almost... guilty.

What did you do, Mama? I want to say. What did you do?

"Harlequin, guess what? Grandma called. I should have told you before but I wasn't sure whether you'd want to go, but she misses you and she so desperately wants you to go stay with her for the summer. School's almost out anyway and I know you don't want to go back and face those horrible damn kids there, so I just spoke to Grandma again and said you could come early. Isn't that great?"

Grandma never left her place in Bitter Creek. She said it was her home, the only home she'd known since the day she married Grandpops and she was staying, and that's just how it is. We speak to Grandma on the phone every now and then, but more recently, Grandma hasn't called as much. I think her and Mama had a fight.

"That's great, Mama," I say and I half-mean it. I'm excited to see Grandma but I can't help but think that they had a hand in this. I called their names one by one. I conjured those girls' spirits from the grave and now they want me to go back.

I was the one who got away from Bitter Creek, you see. The only one that ever did.