The Vacation

No one liked him. He was one of those people who grated on everyone’s nerves, who thought he was hilarious, whose presence at a party everyone dreaded because he would get too drunk and demand being the centre of attention. 

Still, though, I’m not sure he deserved this. 

Dustin lies on the floor, staring up at the ceiling with his mouth open in a last moment of shock. I can see why he was surprised: the long handle of a knife protrudes from his chest. 

I stare at his body, coffee in hand. I hadn’t noticed it when I had crept down the stairs about twenty minutes before. I’d washed dishes from last night while my coffee brewed, grabbed a muffin from the fridge, leaned against the counter to scroll the news while I ate. I’d poured my coffee and was about to go out to the back porch when I nearly tripped over Dustin’s body lying on the other side of the table. I feel stupid for not noticing it for so long. 

I take a sip of my coffee, not taking my eyes off of the body. I should check his pulse, I think, though I know it’s useless. His skin is pale, his eyes are unblinking, and his knife-skewered chest is not moving. Still, though, I crouch down to place two fingers on the side of his neck. His skin is cold, and it feels horrifying. I pull away instantly. 

“Well, fuck.” 

——— 

“Mmm, good morning,” Karen smiles sleepily at me as she wakes up. She rubs at her eyes and rolls onto her back, black hair splaying out on the pillow, massive tummy to the sky. Her breathing evens out, and I know she’s fallen back asleep again. 

“Babe, wake up.” 

“Ughhh,” she groans and struggles to sit up. I help her and put a couple pillows behind her back. “What time is it?” She asks, squinting at the window. 

“8:00.” 

“Ew. We’re on vacation, you sadist. Very, very soon we’re not going to be able to sleep in. For like, a really long time. Probably until she’s a teenager.” Karen yawns. “I’m going back to sleep.” 

“I know. And I’m sorry, but something‘s happened.” 

She knows something is wrong, and I’m about to tell her what it is, when a scream rings through the house. Karen looks at me in alarm. 

Everyone is going to be awake now, and everyone is going to see it. I don’t know how to explain it gently, so I blurt it out. 

“Someone murdered Dustin.” Her eyes widen I shock. 

“Holy shit. Murdered? Are you sure? Maybe he just… died?” 

“He was definitely murdered.” 

“Jesus, okay. Let’s go downstairs.” 

I help my pregnant wife out of the squashy bed and grab a housecoat for her to wrap around herself. It just covers her, and she motions to move out of the room. 

When we get downstairs, I see that everyone else is up and standing around the body. Ellie and Jonathan look at me grimly. Mari cries quietly into Ellie’s shoulder. 

“James, it’s Dustin.” Jonathan begins to say. 

“I know. I found him a few minutes ago.” 

“Oh.” 

The six of us stand there silently for a few moments—my two friends, our three partners—just staring at the body. 

“What do we do?” Jonathan asks at the same time Karen asks, “Who did it?” 

We look around at each other, and it’s not clear to me who could have done this. None of us liked him, but to kill him? And what do we do? Call the cops? That seems like the obvious answer, but something is stopping me. 

“It is him, right?” Jen, Jonathan’s fiancee, asks. We look at her, a little confused. “I mean, he liked to mess with people. It’s not some convincing fake body or something and he’s hiding and waiting to jump out and scare us, right?” 

“I touched him before,” I say slowly. “He felt dead. Not fake.” 

“Why did you touch him?” Karen asks me, looking revolted. 

“To check his pulse.” We all look back to the very obviously not alive man on the ground, and I feel a bit silly. Karen crouches down and tries to close his eyelids, which open back up. She leaps back with a yelp. 

“Oh, god. Yep, that’s a dead body. Ugh, ugh.” She shivers and looks ill. 

“Should we call the police?” Mari finally speaks up. Her makeup is in streaks down her face. Ellie laces her fingers in with her girlfriend’s and opens her mouth as if to speak, then closes it again. We wait. 

“I don’t think we should.” 

———

Jonathan had always been the smartest of us, and Ellie had always been the rebel. I had a crush on her until I realized she was gay. She had laughed when I told her, and asked how I couldn’t tell. 

“Love is blind,” I’d responded. 

The three of us became a unit in grade 9. Jonathan had just moved into town, and Ellie was a gothy loner that had come from another elementary school in the district. The three of us ended up being put together for a group project, and that was that. 

When we were about halfway through grade 10, Dustin started coming by our back corner of the school. He was in grade 12, and we thought he was cool. He was an older kid, practically an adult. How awesome was it that a fun, older guy wanted to hang out with us? By the time summer came around, though, I found myself relieved that I didn’t have to see him anymore. I timidly brought it up to my friends one day, and they wholeheartedly agreed. “I really can’t stand the guy,” Jonathan said. Ellie nodded. We came to the realization that he hung out with us because no one his own age would. 

Imagine our surprise when we started grade 11, and there was Dustin, sitting in our hallway. “Yooo!” He’d greeted us. “Guess who has two thumbs and failed grade 12?” He enthusiastically jabbed his thumbs toward his chest, and the three of us collectively sighed. We were no masters of confrontation, so we continued hanging out with him at school while we avoided him outside. 

We found, however, that being friends with a 19-year-old Dustin did have one perk. 

“Okay, so. Canadian, Absolut, aaand, Sour Puss, right?” He grinned at Ellie, who scowled. 

“Fireball.” 

“Right, ha. Fireball. About to get all kinds of fucked up.” Dustin elbowed me in the ribs. “Think you’ll finally have a chance with her then?”

“That’s gross,” I said, edging away from him. “And horrible.”

Ellie sat there, looking beyond uncomfortable.

“Hey, I said fucked up, not unconscious,” Dustin laughed, somehow not getting it. 

Fortunately, Dustin was a terrible student who rarely went to class, and we had most of the time at school to ourselves. We were still relieved, though, when we reached June. 

“Going to go off and travel the world, Dustin?” We asked, hopefully. 

“Nah, gonna chill in town at my mom’s next year. You guys should come over on your lunch breaks!” We nodded, having no intention of doing that, and parted ways with Dustin, falsely believing that that was the last we would see of him. 

It wasn’t. He showed up at high school parties, getting sloppily drunk and flirting with girls several years younger than him. He constantly messaged us on MSN, and would even meet us at the school gates when we left to walk home, insisting on bringing us to his mother’s house “for good times”, where we would watch him play video games and smoke weed, which he would then try to sell to us. 

Somehow, he managed to stay in our lives. The frequency with which we saw him decreased dramatically after we graduated, but every year or two, he would pop back up at one of our houses needing a place to crash. These crashings typically ended with one of us kicking him out after a week, but he would always show up again later as if nothing had happened. 

The reason he was invited along this weekend was Ellie’s girlfriend, Mari. They had only been together for six months. She didn’t know him like the rest of us did. We had booked our trip, kept Dustin out of it, and then he showed up at Ellie’s house, unannounced. Ellie was not home, but Mari was, and feeling bad for Dustin, she invited him on our trip when he explained that we had all been friends since high school. And that was that. 


———

“I feel bad,” I hear Jen whisper in the next room. We had thrown a sheet over Dustin and disbanded, freaked out and not sure what to do next. 

“I do too,” says Jonathan. “I’m a bit surprised you do though. You hated him.” 

“Yeah, but that’s kind of it. I realized I don’t feel sad at all about him being dead, and now I feel bad about it.” 

“Did you do it?” Jonathan asks. 

“No!” Jen exclaims. “Unless I sleep-killed him or something.” Jonathan snorts, and I back away from their door. 

Their bedroom and Ellie and Mari’s bedroom is on the main floor, and I stalk quietly to Ellie and Mari’s door. Mari sniffles loudly, and I hear tissues being pulled out of a box. 

“Are you okay?” Ellie asks. “This is definitely different from the trip I had in mind for us.” 

“I feel like it’s my fault,” Mari says, starting to cry again. “I invited him here. If I had just kept my mouth shut when he came to visit that day, he’d still be alive.”

“Probably not for much longer. I think everyone who’s met him hates him. Someone would have run him over or hit him over the head with a rock eventually,” Ellie responds, bitterly. I remember how Dustin had a field day when Ellie came out to us. He thought her being gay was the funniest thing he had ever heard, and made endless jokes at her expense. She laughed to me one day that at least he stopped trying to hit on her after that. Mostly.

“Ellie!” Mari exclaims, and Ellie sighs. 

“He was a dick, Mari. I know I’m being horrible, but he was. I tried being sad about it, but I’m just not.” 

———

The night before had been a particularly spectacular one for Dustin. He had tried to get us to do shots with him, but we just wanted to relax. We had all been drinking, but adding shots to the mix was not something any of us had any interest in. 

“You’re all assholes,” Dustin said, and proceeded to drink the shots he had poured. Jen made a noise, and Dustin turned toward her, vodka on his chin. “You got a problem?” 

“With you?” Jen asked, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, lots. You’re a loser, and I’ll never understand why they put up with you.” 

“You know, you’re lucky your stupid husband didn’t listen to me about you. Now the poor guy’s stuck with you.” 

“Oh, fuck off, Dustin,” Jonathan spat. Dustin looked surprised—I think we all were. Jonathan was the quietest, most mild-mannered of all of us.

“Does anyone have any sleeping pills we can slip into his next drink?” Karen asked when Dustin went outside to pee. For some reason he always refused to just use the washroom. 

“Or any arsenic?” Jen asked, laughing. 

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Ellie said under her breath. 

“It would be a relief,” Jen chimed in, face flushed. “To finally have peace. To not have to deal with him anymore. Especially for you guys.” She meant Jonathan, Ellie, and me.

Yes, I thought. Yes, life would be easier if I didn’t have to constantly wonder when Dustin was going to pop back up in our lives again. If I didn’t have to hear his booming voice praising my wife’s body, musing what our daughter will look like, asking Ellie “who the man was” in her and Mari’s relationship, hear his seething hatred for Jen. Yes, it would be a relief to have a life without Dustin. I tried to shake off the thought. 

——— 

“His body’s going to start to smell soon,” Karen says when I step into the bedroom. “Worse than it did before.” 

“Hey,” I say gently. 

“Oh god, babe, you don’t have to defend him anymore. He's dead," She stops then, and looks remorseful. "Have you talked any more to the others?” 

“No. I heard them a bit through their doors, though.”

“You were eavesdropping?” She raises her eyebrows in judgement. 

“I guess so, yeah. I wanted to know. To find out who did it.” I sit down on the bed beside her. 

“Why? Are you going to go to the cops?” 

“No!” I exclaim, then retract. “I don’t know. I—I’m glad he’s gone. It’s horrible to say, I know, but I am. And I don’t think I want the person who did this to be punished.” 

Karen smiles sadly at me.

“I’m sorry. I know he was a part of your life. Not a good part,” she adds, “but a part of it. And what happened to him was pretty awful.” 



“What do you think we should do?” I ask her.



“You know what I think we should do.” 



———



The six of us meet downstairs around Dustin’s body again. 



“I think we should bury him,” I say. Karen holds my hand. 



“You don’t think we should go to the police?” Jen asks. 



“Do you want to see one of us in jail?” Karen responds. Everyone says no. 



“Okay. We just need to figure out how we’re going to do it.” 



“They’re fixing up an underpass about 45 minutes away from here,” Mari says, slowly. “And they’re pouring the cement tomorrow morning.” 



“That’s convenient,” Ellie says.



“It is.”



“How do you know?” I ask. 



“I work for the construction company doing the work,” she shrugs. 



And so, we set up a plan. 

We split up. Mari, Jonathan, Ellie, and I go to the construction site. Karen and Jen stay back. Jen starts cleaning as soon as we get the body into the trunk of Mari’s car, and Karen tries to help, but everyone stops her. 



The drive to the site is a fairly quiet one. Mari clutches the steering wheel, knuckles white. Ellie places her hand gently on her girlfriend’s. Jonathan sits beside me in the back, staring out the window at nothing. I do the same. 



The time passes slowly. 



“We’re here,” Mari says so quietly I’m not sure I heard her correctly, but she begins to slow before pulling over, then shuts the car off. We all sit, silently, awaiting her instruction. Her hands remain on the wheel. A car speeds past overhead, and I realize the road we’re on is closed to traffic to fix up the underpass. 



Jonathan gets out of the car first and goes around to the trunk. Mari pops it, and I hear him rummaging around, then pull something out. He comes around to the side and taps on Mari’s window. She jumps. He holds up the shovel. 



We take turns digging, and it’s surprisingly exhausting. Finally, when we’re satisfied with the depth of the hole, we drag Dustin’s stiff body out of the trunk. It takes all four of us to lug it to the hole and toss it in. I regret instantly that there is no gentleness to our actions. 



We stand there for a moment. Mari crosses her arms. “We need to get going before someone sees us,” she whispers. The moon shines down on us, a lone witness to our crime. 



Ellie reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear, and her sleeve falls down. Even in the dim light I can see a long, thin gash going down the inside of her arm. Small scratches accompany it. 



The night before, she wore short sleeves. I remember this, because Karen remarked on how pretty Ellie’s dress was. There were no cuts or scrapes on her arms last night. 



She looks up to meet my gaze, and I can tell: she knows I know. I grab the shovel from her, put it into the pile of dirt, and begin to bury Dustin.



———



The drive back is somehow worse. We stare away from each other, silently bound by the horror of what we’ve done. When we finally pull in the driveway, the four of us get out of the car quietly. Mari and Jonathan head inside, and I hang back. Ellie does too. 



She speaks first. 

“He attacked me.” Every word seems to cause her pain. “It was late, after everyone was in bed. Mari was asleep. I went out to the kitchen to get water, and he was there too. He was so drunk, James.” 

I put my hand on her arm. 



“It’s done, El.” 



“All day I’ve been trying to justify it. He was horrible. He was… awful. Just a shitty person. I’ve been saying so to Mari all day, but I feel so, so guilty. I am guilty. And now I’ve made you all accomplices.” Her eyes well up with tears. 



“You know we’d do it again,” I tell her simply. “We’re a unit, you, Jonathan, and me. Nothing comes between us. Especially Dustin.” 



She forces a small smile, and holds my hand. We head inside, and I’m struck by the normalcy of the cabin without a body in it. Karen pours a glass of wine and brings it to me. She holds a glass of water. When everyone else has a glass, we raise them.



“To us,” I say, then pause. “May we finally enjoy peace.” We clink our glasses, and down our wine. And amidst the awfulness of what we have done, I know that what we all feel at this moment is a sense of relief.