“Because I’m me. I wait until my aunt is out of the room and I tug the lid off and peer inside. She’s got mountains of ashes. At least ten times as much as us. And my grandfather was a small guy, so you couldn’t say it was a size difference in the bodies or anything. I think back on all the weirdness at the funeral home, and I just…”
“Pull a Sherlock Holmes orgasm face?” I venture.
“What?”
“It’s something Gabriel says about Eli. He gets this look on his face when he’s trying to figure something out. Like he’s excited to swoop in and solve the mystery.”
George laughs. “Yes. That’s exactly it. I have this feeling something isn’t right – and the mystery of it made me not so sad about my dad anymore. I decide to test the ashes. I do a couple of experiments in the school lab. Mr. Ross even gave me extra credit when I explained what I was doing. The results I get were… not great. But I’m not an expert, so I send a sample off to an independent lab, and they come back and tell me that while there are definitely fragments of bone in my container, it’s not human remains. Possibly a rabbit, they said. Or a gerbil.”
I think about how that must feel to know you’ve been grieving over the ashes of a gerbil, and I want to gouge out Walter Hart’s eyes with a rusty spork. “Then what?”
“I had to tell Mom. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. She took it better than I thought.” George shrugs. “She looks at the urn and says, ‘I never felt like he was really in there.’ I tried to make her go to the police with the information, but she just wanted to forget about it. I couldn’t forget. So I… I made a podcast about it.”
I’m laughing. I can’t help it. This entire story is completely crazy, but so incredibly George. “You made a podcast.”
“Right. A true-crime podcast. It’s called, 'My Dad is a Gerbil.’ It’s quite well-known now, one of the top-20 true crime podcasts on Spotify.” A red blush creeps across George’s cheeks. “Yet another reason kids at Stonehurst don’t like me. A true-crime podcaster doesn’t exactly fit in with their preppy, Hollywood-slick image, yet I’ve got more followers than most of them combined.”
Wow. I stare at my tiny friend, her face animated as she talks about her podcast, and I see a whole other side of her. George is so like Eli in some ways – obsessed with the truth, unable to let go of an unsolved puzzle, and desperate to make the world a better place. She’s more driven and dedicated than all the wannabe actresses and influencers at Stonehurst, and she does it without endless funding from a trust fund or wealthy parents.
“George Fisher, I am in awe.” I hold out my hand. She takes it, and I shake vigorously as I clink our glasses with the other. “You’re awesome. I’m honored you chose to hand me a fork that day.”
George’s face glows. I wish she didn’t relish my compliments. No one as cool as George should be so desperate for a friend that she goes back to her ex-bully. Especially not now she knows I’m not really Mackenzie and I’m a whole package of trouble.
“What happened next?” I prod.
“Things get next-level crazy. I’m putting out podcast episodes and researching what might have happened to my dad’s body. I start getting emails from other families in Emerald Beach, saying the same things – long waits to get their remains, tiny packages, one lady said her brother’s ashes smell suspiciously like cement. Then, an FBI agent gets in touch with me. It turns out they were investigating Memories from the Hart. I share my notes with him, and the contact information for all the people who sent in their stories. They were able to get enough evidence from eleven of them to bring down Walter Hart on criminal charges.
“When the story broke at school, it was horrible. I’m so used to being invisible, but now everyone was listening to my podcast, learning all this personal stuff about my dad. Alec hung a dead gerbil in my locker. It wasn’t even the stuff they did at school – I’m used to being the class freak. They came after me online. They found old class pictures of mine and Photoshopped them onto pornography and sent