There’s something about small towns that’s a little bit off. Maybe it’s the unwanted mesh of generations and creeds, thrown into a blender and ground into a community. Everybody is nosy as hell, because at some point in a population of two hundred, even playground gossip is gonna concern you at some point or another. As rumors come and go, there’s always a big one that’s got everybody’s hand me down, four generations strong panties in a twist. An affair, a scandal, a robbery—something juicy. Something you’d see in the soap operas you watch from between the bars of the stair banister when your folks think you’re long asleep. Well, talk on the town right now is a mystery. A murder mystery. The mystery of who killed Maggie McCullough. And we’re gonna solve it.

Now before I tell you who killed Maggie, you gotta know who Maggie was. Maggie was small, like real small. Looked like you could knock her over with an enthusiastic sneeze. She was shaped like a fire hydrant which was funny ‘cause she wanted to be a firefighter just like her paw-paw and she could knock anybody’s teeth in on account of her daddy being a marine. She had a brain bigger than the stars and the moon and all them little flickering lights that you see once and never again. And she was my girl. She never liked me calling her that.

“I ain’t nobody’s girl, Lily. I ain’t nobody’s anything. I’m me.”

I met Mags back in the third grade. She was one of those kids that comes in ‘round Halloween because she either got kicked out of her old school or her folks wanted to get away from the big city. People were always doing that. Movin’ out here like it was gonna solve all their damn problems.

I didn’t know why Maggie had come to our class, but she walked in with her head high, and everybody talked about her behind her back because she was a year younger than us and too fat for the boys to try and chase her around the school yard.

I thought she was pretty. She had these freckles everywhere, like somebody had taken a bucket full of ‘em and spilled it all over her skin. We were partners for art class and whenever she’d reached for a paint brush, I’d do it too and her freckles would touch my hand and she’d go all red.

I knew it was her when these tiny origami stars started showing up in my cubby. What other kind of seven-year-old made origami stars? My best friend Kat insisted they were from a secret admirer.

“Did you get this from a boy? Was it Bryan? I like Bryan, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like Bryan. I didn’t like anybody. Silently, I shook my head, and Kat smiled and tossed my star into the trash can.

“Good. If it is from some boy and they’re folding paper into stars, they’re probably gay anyway.”

And you know, looking back, I’m sure she had no idea what that meant. Probably heard her parents hurl it at some poor soul in the street, and she thought it would make her sound grown up or somethin’. But as I reached into the trash can when Kat sat down, and caught Maggie staring, I thought maybe it wasn’t just boys who folded paper stars that are gay.

Then Maggie kissed me behind the school and pressed a star into my palm, I thought maybe a little gay ain’t too bad.

Maggie used to say there was nothing in this world like the way I looked at her that day—eyes lit by the sun, reflecting the shine off of the metal on the basketball pole—and any day after it, and you didn’t question Miss Maggie McCullough. She told the truth and the truth alone. When she said we’d be together forever, I’d believed her. But the doctors who said Maggie died from a self-induced overdose, they were lying. They weren’t my girl. They were liars.

So, according to our doctors, and Maggie’s parents, and everyone in the world who doesn’t matter, the answer to our mystery is Maggie. Maggie killed herself.

And you know, she never was the most “durable” of the bunch. She could act it, boy could she act, but I’d known her too long not to see how her hands shook and her speech went high and airy. But we both got real good at lying. It’s not hard when your girlfriend’s parents call the police on any queer they can smell in a mile.

There was this one day I was over at her house, playing with her little brother while I waited for her to come home from her tutoring job, today’s pupil one of the boys in our grade whose parents won’t let him play baseball if he fails geometry. Her brother had handed me a pile of little play shapes and I was helping him make them into a grand pyramid when I’d heard her mom make this nasty noise from her recliner.

“What’s wrong, Piper?”

Ms. McCullough insisted I call her by her first name like we were pals or something, but from the way she liked to go on and on about how good I was with Jack, it was just another way to butter me up so I’d babysit for free.

She had been scrambling for the remote to the TV when I turned to look.

“These damn homos, they’re taking over the airwaves.”

Sure enough, the TV was shadowed, two men embracing tenderly as streetlight curved the soft shapes of their hands gripped in the cloth of their coats. This was ‘taking over the airwaves?’

“Oh, don’t let Jack look at that. It’s unnatural.” Ms. McCullough left no room for argument with her little nonchalant hand-flick while she swore and dug around in the recliner seats for the remote.

As much as I hated it, as much as I wanted to rip the bleach blonde highlights out of Piper’s old bigoted scalp, I cooed at Jack until he looked away from the TV, but I wanted to take one of his tiny hands and beg that he doesn’t listen to his mama. That If he grows up and holds hands with boys, he’s as natural as the heart inside him.

I had to believe my daddy wasn’t like that too. That one day I’d introduce Maggie as the love of my life, and he’d just ask when the wedding was.

Nothing’s ever that easy.

It helped that pops worked two jobs, Maggie practically lived with us and he never even knew. But that kind of freedom chips away at caution. Makes you too relaxed. One day we’d come home from our favorite little ice cream joint in town and before I could even warn, “Mag, daddy’s home,” she’d gone and slipped me a kiss.

It had felt like… butterfly’s wings. Real soft and fluttery like maybe she’d never get to kiss me again. Maggie was always real perceptive like that.

And I don’t know. Maybe she did know. Maybe she caught the shine of daddy’s grey hairs in the window of the kitchen, but she was so damn tired of hiding all the time, so tired of holding hands under a table, and kissing behind buildings. Well, there was no hiding after that.

Next thing I know pops is slamming a hand on the counter in the kitchen, so I push Maggie by the shoulder and I tell her to run! Before he comes out, before we get caught- but then daddy’s outside, and he’s got a paw wrapped around my wrist.

“Lily, go on, get upstairs.”

“Daddy, she didn’t do nothing- “

“Get!”

I shrink behind the front door, because that’s as close as I dare get, and curse myself because my girl is standing there, red in the face and braver than I could ever dream, hair the color of fire haloed by the blue sky, and I’m in a damn door, hiding behind my daddy.

“Hi, Mr. Taylor.”

“If I ever, and I mean ever, so much as catch a whiff of your queer ass near my baby girl again, I will have no regrets in putting a bullet in you or any of your pervert friends. You hear me?”

“Ain’t got any other friends, sir.”

“Get off of my property before I call the police.”

And Maggie, angel on earth, looks around my dad, steel as the handgun he starts keeping by the key holder, says, “See you at school, Lily.” And hops on down the driveway. Even as my daddy whirls on me, I’m too busy watching Maggie’s hands tremble as she descends into the street.

And like I said, growin’ up in a small town you don’t got any privacy. Ain’t no murders or break-ins in a town like this, we’d lose half our population, and everybody’d know the culprit. So, there’s no surprise in my girl’s weary bones when I meet her before class, and some shitheads have sharpied in big, broad strokes: “fat d***” over the gleaming blue of her locker.

Even though we knew it was coming, when my girl picks up on some snickering across the hall, she turns with the fury of hell and becomes like something of the sun.

“Who the hell do you think you are? You think this is funny, inbreds?”

“Maggie-”

“Just shut it, Lily.”

“Why don’t you listen to your little d*** friend, huh, Taylor?”

Maggie is out for blood when I catch her waist.

“Maggie, let it go! Let them go! They ain’t worth it!”

And then I get this look, like the brown of her eyes have shattered. And suddenly she’s quiet. The sky before a typhoon, dull and cloudless.

She pushes me off of her.

Maggie started avoiding me after that. Face to face, at least.

I started getting these little notes in my locker, but they never said nothin’. I could hope for “Lily McCullough” scratched sweetly in a heart, or a few stars around what looked like my eyes. I think she thought she was protecting me. But without her beside me… But I told you already. You don’t question Maggie McCullough.

The last I saw of Maggie was the week before last. I caught her right outside of our favorite ice cream shop, swaying on her feet. She just looked through me. I’d never seen her so pale. Her lips were chapped, and damn it, I wanted to grab her and never let go.

“Hey, Mags.”

“Hi, Lily.”

“How’ve you been?”

That should have been ‘where the hell were you,’ ‘you had me worried sick,’ ‘don’t ever pull some shit like that again.’ That should have been ‘I love you.’ That should have been ‘come home.’

Maggie blinks, like she doesn’t recognize me, and then she turns back to the road. “We met here y’know. This ice cream place. Sometimes I sneak out of my house when my parents get to be too much and I come and sit in the booth right across from the door. And I see this shadow of you, from fifth grade, walkin’ in with this like halo around those gorgeous curls you got, and it’s like nothing matters anymore.”

“Maggie, we met at school. In third grade? We were in Miss. Watson’s class, remember?”

“Did we? I been going to therapy now, you know. My parents make me. I guess your dad called ‘em. Told ‘em they got a fag instead of a kid. They gave me these pills, supposedly to make me want to kiss you less. Ain’t that ridiculous. Nothing’s gonna make me want to kiss you less ‘cept for dyin’. They’re messin’ with my memory though, making bits and pieces fuzzy. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

And then she crossed the street. Next, I heard she’d gone and… she’d gone. My girl.

So, now you know the truth. Let’s solve a mystery.

Who killed Maggie McCullough? The student body, who’d whispered behind her back, poked her until she was digging though her medicine cabinet for the pills her parents gave her because maybe, maybe, if she got the help she didn’t want she’d stop kissing girls and start chasing boys who play baseball, and fail geometry, and invite chicks over when their parents are out of town?  My dad, who kept a rifle by the door in case that d*** came by to poison his little girl? Her parents, who chant about the sins of man, who take her brother’s pink toys, who didn’t have a funeral for their little girl because she wasn’t their little girl anymore, she was a sinner, some deviant, she was unnatural?

Or was it the best friend who told her she looked like a fire hydrant when she was mad. The girl who kissed her freckles and sat by as the light drained from her eyes. The girl who held Maggie when her cat died, who brought her homemade fudge on her birthday, who told her she loved her every day, made Maggie the center of her world, put the stress of being that center on her tiny shoulders. The girl who loved her so much she couldn’t see Maggie was dying.

I couldn’t see she was dying.

I couldn’t see I was killing her.

So, who really Killed Maggie McCullough?

Did Maggie kill herself?

Or was it me?