Page 42 of People Like Us

“Get married,” he said in a mockingly deep voice. “Have kids. Don’t want too much. Don’t be too loud about it if you do.” Something sour crept up the back of my throat. “So bands like that,” August went on, quieter now, “they felt like rebellion. Like a way to push back. They gave us permission to question things we previously had been taught not to think twice about.”

The host nodded slowly, like he understood. Maybe he did. Maybe he just wanted August to keep talking. August leaned back in his chair again, hands folding loosely in his lap.

“But I never expected them to have taken it as far as they did.” The room seemed to still around that sentence.

The host let out a soft breath, his expression tightening just a touch. “Of course,” he said. “I don’t think any of us in the community expected that they’d take it as far as human sacrifice.”

The words sat there, heavy and unmoving. Human sacrifice. I felt my stomach turn, like something old and buried had just shifted under the surface.

On the screen, August didn’t react right away. He just sat there, looking at nothing in particular, like he was somewhere else entirely. Then he gave a small, humorless nod.

“Yeah,” he said. “That part…wasn’t exactly advertised.”

I dragged the cursor forward, skipping over whole chunks of the interview in jagged bursts. The audio warped and stretched, voices turning thin and unnatural, like something caught between stations. I didn’t need to hear it again. I already knew the story.

I’d read it the year it had all come out—late at night, phone lighting up my face while the house slept around me. Articles stacked on articles. Headlines that felt too big for the quiet places they came from. The band, missing kids, countless bodies that hadn’t all been found.

I pressed play again without thinking. “…you know, I think about this kid that went missing in my hometown,” August was saying. My hand stilled.

“His name was Shannon O’Kinzy. The Amen Thieves had been in town around the same time, and I’ve always wondered if maybe the two events were related. But of course, there’s no way I could prove it. But that’s what got me really thinking about these guys, and ultimately led me to writing about them.”

The name moved through me slowly, like something woken up instead of remembered.

Shannon.

I could see him the way he used to sit in those hard church pews—knee bouncing, eyes bright like he was always on the verge of saying something that mattered more than anyone else realized. Staring at me.

The host’s voice cut in, lighter, almost curious. “It seems like you’ve gotten a lot of backlash on this. Some people think you might be romanticizing the band.”

August let out a dry, quiet laugh. “Well,” he said, “I do have a tendency to romanticize people I shouldn’t, but—”

I slammed the laptop shut. The sound cracked through the room, loud enough to force myself into a pause, waiting to see if I’d woken my son from his nap.

“Jesus,” I muttered, already pulling the headphones from my ears. The cord caught on the edge of the desk before slipping free, falling in a loose coil like something shed. I stood too fast, the chair teetering behind me.

I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I didn’t want to hear Shannon’s name turned into a stepping stone for a book. Didn’t want to hear about the band, or the people they hurt. Didn’t want to hear August talk about his ability to romanticize the wrong things.

Some things weren’t meant to be brought up over and over. Picked at and pulled apart instead of being left to rot in peace like they deserved.

I moved down the hallway without turning on the lights. The house felt dim and close around me, the kind of quiet that presses in on your ears. My bedroom door creaked when I pushed it open, the sound stretching longer than it should have.

I went straight to the bed. For a second, I just stood there, staring at it like I was waiting on the bedspread to beg me to stop, then I bent and lifted the mattress, just enough to slide my hand underneath. My fingers found the journal with ease.

I let the mattress fall back into place and stepped away, already flipping it open, the pages whispering under my fingers. I skimmed without stopping, eyes catching on pieces instead of whole things.

dark between the trees

I think there’s part of you

or maybe part of me

something I’d meant to let go missing

something I’d forgotten to lose.

I slowed on the page, my gaze snagging on the last line like it had teeth.

I pressed my lips together. There was more beneath it—something about light breaking through branches, something about dirt under fingernails, something about not knowing if what I’d found had ever belonged to me in the first place.