Just Another Dead Girl Underwater

Trigger Warning: implications of death, violence and sexual harassment

By the time the fisherman finds me, I will have been dead for thirty-three hours, six minutes, and twenty-nine seconds. Eighteen hours since the police declared me missing. Fifteen hours since Zoe told my biology teacher that my tent was empty, that I hadn’t returned from the party we’d snuck out to the night before. Careful, quiet, every twig a possible snitch. It was exhilarating, our hearts pounding, the smell of pine and seaweed thick in the air, and the moon a perfectly curved sickle.

Zoe held my sweaty hand and didn’t let go until we’d passed the tents and joined the others by the lake. The music on someone’s phone was turned down just low enough for us to make out Billie Eilish’s raspy voice. One of the guys offered us a beer, kept cool in the pitch-black, lurking water. I remember thinking I couldn’t tell where the lake ended and the forest began.

The first article published by a local newspaper reads, "Promising High School Student Missing After Night Swim in Lake." Shortly after, the water rescue service and fire brigade take over the search. Dogs comb the area, their noses trailing through the damp earth. A human chain forms, people moving slowly through the woods, eyes scanning for any sign of me. Even a helicopter hovers overhead, its whirring blades slicing through the heavy, charged air. The search drags on for hours, stretching into the twilight, yet the woods remain silent.

The police begin to ask questions: “When was she last seen? What was she wearing? Had she been drinking? Did she seem out of character? Angry? Sad? Suicidal?” No, no and no. She was singing, she was dancing, she seemed happy.

When the fisherman finds my body, miles away from where I was last seen, certainty sets in. The autopsy reveals a hematoma on my head and purple spots behind my ears. The coroners examine the water in my lungs and confirm that I wasn't dead before entering the water. I died by drowning.

My classmates are questioned again. Zoe claims to have left early, while I stayed behind with her twin brother, Tom, who has been in love with me since middle school. Tom's behavior strikes the police as odd. He insists he barely spoke to me, despite people seeing us leave the party together for a few minutes. When my body is examined, traces of Tom’s skin are found on my clothes, trapped between the fabric layers. Still, Tom sticks to his story, perhaps because the truth would embarrass him for some reason. Or maybe he's just afraid of the questions that would follow, and the scrutiny that might come with them.

Tom is right, you know, in the broadest sense. We really only exchanged three or four sentences that night – but only because Tom’s mouth was otherwise occupied with me. I had enjoyed every second of it, and looking back, I wish I’d given him a real chance. But I was too worried about what other people might think. So, as usual, I brushed him off, leaving him to walk away from the party feeling hurt.

Cassandra insists she heard Zoe and me arguing that night, just before Zoe headed back to the campsite. According to her, we were fighting over Tom. Of course she would say that. What else would two girls argue about if not a boy? Cassandra even claims that Zoe pushed me, though Zoe denies it vehemently. She denies discussing Tom at all, insisting it was about something else, something that wouldn’t come to light until much later, when our biology teacher became a suspect. But Cassandra holds firm to her version.

The thing about Cassandra is that she’s always been a shadow. The kind of girl whose name teachers forget after two weeks of spring break. Kelly? Cindy? Carrie? Something with a ‘C’ though, right? So, when she finally gets the chance to talk to the police and be part of the investigation, she jumps at it. Unfortunately, Cassandra isn’t much help to the investigators. She leaves the party at 2 a.m., just forty minutes before I die, leaving me alone with a group of guys who’ve brought along some 'tranquillisers.' Sitting next to them felt like being stuck in a fever dream where Jacques Derrida explains quantum physics at a frat party.

At some point, I decided it was time to head back. One of the guys casually asked if I needed someone to walk with me, and I said yes – but no one moved. I glanced back, the campsite faintly visible through the cold, white light filtering through the pines. It was only a few meters away, just beyond the trees. I’d walked this path for days, never once feeling threatened by the shadows in the bushes. But tonight, that sinking feeling in my stomach wouldn’t go away. Still, I refused to be that girl – the one who got scared at every creak in the dark, the one who needed someone to hold her hand for a few steps. So I stood up and said I’d walk alone. Instead of sticking to the dark trail, though, I decided to take a small detour along the riverbank – a bit longer, a bit lighter, and hopefully, a bit safer. One of the guys told me to text him when I made it to my tent. But when I didn’t, no one even noticed.

Sixteen days after my death, suspicion begins to shift toward our biology teacher. Devin, one of my classmates, reveals that he had felt ill that night and went looking for the teacher's tent, only to find it empty. Soon after, the teacher's behavior takes a strange turn. He starts making inconsistent statements that don't add up. One day, he calls Zoe into his office after class, where he insists that his earlier "proposal" to her, before the trip, had been nothing but a joke. She understood that, right? It was sarcasm, he says, claiming that what he really meant was that if she wanted to improve her grades, she should consider attending a tutoring service.

And this is where Cassandra steps in for the final time. She confesses that she visited our biology teacher after the party and that they went to the boathouse, where, according to her, “nothing bad happened. He was just there for me."

The biology teacher is immediately suspended, but the case against him has nothing to do with mine, as Cassandra's alibi clears him. Meanwhile, the suspicions surrounding Zoe and Tom are too weak to pursue. My case remains unsolved, and eventually people begin to accept the idea that it was just a tragic accident – that I must have hit my head when I jumped into the water. They agree that I seemed unhappy, not just that night, but in general, and that my relationship with my parents, who expected me to excel in everything, was strained. Perhaps the pressure had finally got to her.

It’s all unsatisfying, of course. Unsatisfying for the local magazine, whose updates eventually dry up. Unsatisfying for the police, left with yet another unsolved case on their desk. Unsatisfying for my parents, who, decades later, will say in an interview that not a day goes by that they don’t think of their little girl.

Maybe one day, a classmate will write a college essay about my case, reflecting on how it taught them that life can end in an instant. Maybe my story will end up on a true-crime podcast. Or perhaps Netflix will stretch it into a tightly structured eight-episode miniseries, where my body is discovered just three minutes in – enough time for viewers to decide if they’ll keep watching.

Or maybe none of this happens, and I’ll fade away, like countless other women who are silenced every day simply for being born the wrong sex. It doesn’t matter who profits from my story. It doesn’t even matter if they eventually find the two men I crossed paths with on my way back to the campsite, in the wrong place at the wrong time. None of this matters, because in the end, I’m just another dead girl underwater.