You’re Next

by Kylie Schachte

  Who the hell knows? But Cass has her own shit to deal with. She can’t worry about me all the time.

  I gesture to the papers scattered across my floor. “Got this stuff to keep me busy.”

  “You’ll call me if you find anything?” Her eyebrows are drawn together with anxiety, and I remember the slightly hurt note in her voice the other night.

  You went without me.

  Don’t shut me out.

  “I will,” I promise.

  I walk Cass to the front door. “Don’t choke on a vegan buffalo wing, okay?”

  “I won’t.” She starts to leave, then pauses and pulls me into a hug. For a moment, I’m overwhelmed by the temptation to collapse and burst into tears, but it passes. Cass squeezes me tighter, like she knows.

  My fork scrapes against my plate, and I wince. Olive looks at me, then away. She’s been doing that a lot.

  The bloody, wet gurgle as Ava gasped for her last breaths.

  When I’m with Cass, and we’re going, moving, doing, I can almost keep it together. In the quiet of dinnertime, the screams and gasps of the alleyway return.

  Dinner is ratatouille. Gramps is a great cook, but it’s hard to eat when the smell of Ava’s blood is so strong in my mind.

  He’s watching me again. “How was your afternoon? The school called. You left after first period.”

  I draw figure eights on my plate with a piece of eggplant. “I’m okay. You were right. School was too much.”

  Three gunshots crack through the night.

  I know my grandfather doesn’t miss my flinch.

  “Understandable. And where did you go?” His face is calm, patient. Sweat beads on the back of my neck.

  What’s safe to tell? Mom used to get angry when I lied, but when I told the truth she’d get this heavy, defeated look on her face that made me feel unbearably guilty. We got in fight after fight about it, and then she wasn’t there to fight with anymore.

  Gramps has never been like that, but this is my first murder investigation since Lucy. Since Mom left. Until now, nothing has been this serious.

  I twirl the eggplant round and round on my plate. His gaze weighs on me while I work through this stuff, but he doesn’t push.

  He’s the one who stayed. I can’t forget that.

  “I looked through some of Ava’s personal effects,” I finally say, tiptoeing around the great big woolly mammoth of how exactly I got my hands on her stuff. “I found out she was accepted into NYU. Early decision.”

  “So what?” Olive leans forward in her chair. I hesitate, but her expression isn’t resentful or guarded, like usual. Only curious.

  “Cass thinks she needed money. She paid her tuition for the entire year already.” I turn to Gramps again. “Weird, right?”

  He tilts his head. “It does seem an odd thing to do. Of course, there are plausible explanations.” He pauses. “I believe I have a contact in the Global Affairs department at the university. I don’t know what they would be able to find, but I could inquire.”

  “Yes. Please,” I say quickly. It’s relief enough that he takes me seriously, that he didn’t press me on how I got those papers, even though he must know. Now he’s offering to help.

  He chose me. I don’t know why I always have to remind myself of that.

  “Have…” Gramps sounds strangely hesitant, and I pause with my fork hovering over my plate. “Have you heard from your mother?”

  I don’t look at her, but I can still feel Olive going completely still, 100 percent of her attention on me.

  Why did he have to bring up Mom? He should know better.

  I spear a piece of squash with my fork, still ignoring Olive. “She texted me. She said she’d come home. If I wanted.”

  The clatter of Olive’s fork makes me look up.

  “What did you say?” she asks. That open, curious look is gone. She’s staring at me so hard her eyeballs might vibrate out of their sockets.

  I have to rip the Band-Aid off. “I told her to stay in Berlin.”

  “Why?” She stands.

  “Olive.” Gramps gives a low warning.

  “No.” Ugly red blotches appear on Olive’s creamy, freckled skin. “Tell me why! Why did you say that to her?”

  What am I supposed to tell her? It’s one thing for Mom to hurt me. I can take it. I look at Gramps, lost.

  He does his best. “Olive, you know she has her gallery show next week. Even if—”

  Olive doesn’t want to hear it. “She would have come back. All you had to do”—she points an accusatory finger at me—“was ask her, and she would have come back. Everyone comes running for you.”

  She’s so loud. How is someone that small so loud? The other sounds are creeping in. Gunshots. Screaming. Sirens. Last gasps for air.

  I raise my voice, too, trying to block it all out. “What do you want me to say? Sorry I didn’t use emotional blackmail to get Mom to come home?”

  “It’s your fault she left in the first place!” Tears glint in Olive’s eyes. “She couldn’t stand being around you! This is what you do. You ruin everything, and I have to deal with it.”

  Gramps stands. “Olive! That’s enough. Apologize to your sister.”

  We ignore him.

  It’s all stuff I’ve said myself. Still, those words from my little sister’s mouth unleash something hot and vicious inside me.

  I stare right into Olive’s eyes. “Mom left because she’s a crappy mother. She’d rather run away from her kids than deal with their problems. Why do you even want her back?”

  Gramps turns on me. “Flora, you’re not helping. Both of you need to calm down. Your mother has made choices I don’t agree with, but—”

  Olive steamrolls right over him. “Of course I want her back!” Her words come out gulpy and wet. “She’s Mom. And it’s only your problems she couldn’t deal with. I never have problems because everyone’s so busy worrying about you. Meanwhile, you don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

  My last bit of control snaps. “If you want her back so badly, why don’t you ask her? Guess it’s easier to blame me, instead of admitting that Mom didn’t love us enough to stay. A girl is dead. Someone I knew. I’m not going to sit around crying for my mommy when I could help.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” She sniffles, such a childish sound, but the look on her face is pure, black-eyed malice. “You act like you’re helping people, but it’s just an excuse so you can avoid actually dealing with anything. You only ever make things worse.”

  I open my mouth, but the fight has left me. She’s right. That’s the thing about sisters: they’re living embodiments of the awful, whispering voice in the back of your head.

  Olive turns and walks away. Her back stays rigid until she’s out of sight, but her footsteps pound up the stairs like she’s trying to make it to her room before the tears start falling for real. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

  My grandfather watches me, but I can’t look at him. He won’t say anything, but it will all be there in his eyes. The pity. The sorrow. His own confusion about how to parent two very damaged kids who are not his own. I don’t want to see it.

  I knew two other girls, once. Two girls like me, or Olive, or Cass, more or less. With homework, summer jobs, family dinners. Two girls who turned into bloody, ruined bodies right in front of my eyes. That’s when I learned something Cass and Olive can never really understand: none of us are safe.

  Whatever Olive thinks, I do care. I care about both of them, all of us, so much. But it only leaves me raw and aching and terrified.

  Each breath comes sharper, more panicked. No matter what Cass says, I’m going to lose them. All of them. No matter how hard I try, I will push everyone I love away from me.

  “Flora,” my grandfather says, but he doesn’t go anywhere with it. Maybe, like me, he doesn’t know how.

  I bolt from the room.

  I take the stairs two at a time. The desperate stench of my own fear has me more and more furio
us with each step. By the time I slam into my bedroom, rage rolls off me in shimmering waves like heat rising from asphalt in July. My skin itches, pulled too tight around my bones. My vision pulses black and red. I am glass about to shatter into a thousand million cutting shards.

  I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to hold myself in before I sob, or scream until my throat bleeds raw, or smash my fist through my window, or light a match and burn my bed to ash, or laugh and laugh until I make everyone scared I might never stop, until stinging tears roll down my cheeks, until I’m sick with the stomach-cramping absurdity of it all.

  It builds in me, higher and higher, and if I don’t do something it’ll come booming out of me, blacking out my whole existence.

  I can’t lose it. I’ll only prove Olive right.

  I pull the rest of Ava’s papers from my floorboard safe. There’s still a bunch I haven’t sorted through. I sift through page after page. The cool, flat feeling of paper on my overheated hands calms my breathing.

  I turn over the next page on the pile—a half-filled-out job application for counselor at Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls—and a small, folded-up piece of paper falls out of the stack. The paper is cream-colored, like it came from a Moleskine notebook.

  The lost diary page.

  All of the pain and screaming inside my head goes instantly, mercifully silent.

  The page is folded up so small, it must have gotten stuck behind another sheet. My hands shake as I try to unfold it.

  I hold it close to my face. Too close. I lean back, trying to focus my eyes and also not hyperventilate.

  My eyes track back and forth across the page. Mostly doodles. Eyes. Lips. A few flowers. Saturn. An egg in a frying pan. There are bullet points squished into the empty space between drawings: a note about buying extra cups for the Human Rights Club, a date circled in purple pen (November 30). Lainie said Ava came to her house crying right after Thanksgiving—maybe that’s related?

  And then my eyes land on the top right corner, where Ava wrote 4044 West Grace St.

  My heart flatlines.

  West Grace. Wes Grays.

  In fast-forward, I relive Friday night. Ava’s limp, heavy body. My pathetic sweatshirt tourniquet around her waist. Blood on the knees of my jeans. The cool, efficient voice of the 911 operator. The wild dread of death in Ava’s eyes.

  Wes Grays. West Grace. Wes Grays. West Grace. My heart picks up again, each pump keeping time with the syllables.

  It’s an address: 4044 West Grace Street.

  My hands are shaking so hard I drop my phone. A quick search reveals the address is in Whitley, about two miles from where I found Ava’s body. That’s it. No business website or apartment photos. Street View shows a desolate city road and a huge gray building, but there are no obvious signs. It has a large parking lot, bigger than a typical office building, but hardly any cars.

  I’m off my bed with my boots in hand before I’ve even consciously decided I’m leaving.

  Olive’s blotchy red fury snares in my mind. The worried crease between Cass’s brows.

  I promised. Different this time. Better.

  Cass answers after one ring. Her mom chatters away in the background, apparently not caring that Cass is on the phone.

  “I found something,” I tell her.

  “Hold on.” Her mom’s voice recedes. “Okay, what do you have?” Cass’s cool practicality eases my ragged breathing.

  I tell her about the diary page. “I want to scope it out,” I finish.

  “Yeah, definitely.” She hesitates. “Tomorrow, though, okay? My audition’s at lunch, so we can go first thing after school.”

  The gaping maw of my panic opens wide again. “Cass—”

  “Listen, I can’t get away tonight. She’s being all intense about this bonding stuff. Wants to do a Gilmore Girls marathon. Please wait for me?” Her voice goes up higher than usual on the question.

  Don’t shut me out.

  I hate myself a little for the frustrated, desperate tears that scratch at my throat. The idea of sitting still in my room all night makes me want to scream, but that doesn’t make Cass’s problems with her mom any less real. And it’s not like it makes an actual difference to the case if we check the place out now or tomorrow afternoon.

  “Yeah, okay. Tomorrow. I promise,” I say.

  “Thank you.” She exhales, and I can practically see her shoulders unclench.

  “How were the buffalo wings?” I ask, glad for even a tiny distraction.

  “We haven’t eaten yet,” she groans. “Mom forgot, like, half the ingredients, so we ordered Indian food. I’m officially starving.”

  I force a laugh. There’s a muffled clatter on the other end.

  “Cassidy!” Constance Yang singsongs in the background. “Baby, can you come back in here?”

  “I have to go,” Cass says. “Tomorrow, right? We’ll scope out the address?”

  It physically hurts, but I say it anyway. “You got it. Good luck.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  A fresh wave of guilt crashes over me. “Of course.”

  After we hang up, I go through all of Ava’s papers twice, but there’s nothing else there. I shower. I brush my hair. I make tea. I get into bed early. Maybe tonight I’ll actually get some sleep.

  I want to keep my promise to Cass.

  Midnight rolls around. I doze, but then Olive’s voice drifts through my head.

  This is what you do. You ruin everything.

  Too hot. I kick the covers off my legs.

  I close my eyes, but Ava waits for me in the dark.

  The frantic look in her eyes as I held her bleeding body. No moment of peace. No acceptance. She died scared.

  I pull the covers back up to my chin. I stare at the ceiling.

  Don’t shut me out.

  I could call Cass again, but I can’t expect her to fix me every time I have a panic attack. Stuff with her mom is complicated enough without me screwing things up tonight. And it’s late. She already put off her audition once for me.

  I roll over and watch the shadows of tree branches bend and sway against my window.

  Phone in hand, I watch as 12:16 rolls, slow as sap, into 12:17. 12:18.

  At 12:19, I get out of bed. By 12:27, I’m lacing up my combat boots in the dark.

  I leave a scribbled note for Gramps on my pillow. The one promise I won’t break tonight.

  At 12:31, I climb out my window.

  4044 West Grace Street looks the same in person as it did in the Street View photos. The building is nondescript. Rows and rows of identical windows, but not a single one illuminated. It’s like the building the city forgot.

  But it was important enough that Ava used her last words to tell me about it.

  The rain from earlier has stopped, and the whole world is icy fresh. I chain up my bike in the mostly empty parking lot and prowl around. The only sound is the dull rush of the highway to the west. The bitter light of a half-moon glints on broken glass, and the slap of my footsteps echoes off the wet pavement. My brain is almost quiet.

  Except seventy-two hours ago I was out in the free night air, too. That night ended with Ava dead.

  I pull my jacket tighter around me. On the north side of the building, there’s a large set of double doors. Faded letters above the doorway read CEDAR GROVE HOSPITAL. The sign was taken down who knows how long ago, leaving only a shadow of the words behind.

  I continue my perimeter search. On the back side of the building, farthest from the street, a swath of light cuts across the parking lot. It’s coming from a propped-open door. I slow, easing closer on cautious feet. A stairwell, leading down to a basement. I crane my neck, trying to see where it leads. There’s a tunnel down there, but from this angle I can’t see more than a few feet past the bottom of the stairs.

  It’s like a taunt: Come and see…

  My pulse kicks up again. Fear, or exhilaration? I can’t always tell the difference.

  I roc
k on my heels. Moment of truth. I could go home. I could get back in bed. I could tell Cass I came, I saw, I decided to come back tomorrow with her. Even I don’t love the thought of wandering around a creepy-ass murder tunnel by myself at night.

  A streetlight pops and gutters, and the sudden sound makes every muscle in my body pull tight.

  Olive’s face flashes through my mind. That look of disgust, the corona of blazing hair flying free around her face. A thirteen-year-old Valkyrie of rage.

  You ruin everything.

  I keep my steps light as I descend the stairs. In the tunnel below, industrial emergency lights are mounted at intervals along the walls, but there are long stretches of dark shadow in between.

  I take a closer look at one of the lights. They’re battery-powered LEDs. Newish. Someone took the time to light this place so that they wouldn’t need to run on the building’s electricity, if it even has any.

  The tunnel stretches back into the shadows. There’s a steady dripping sound from some unidentifiable source. Every wet plink makes my heart jump. I take a step forward, then another.

  My pulse pounds in my ears, seeming to echo against all the concrete. It sounds almost like footsteps, but no matter how many times I look, there’s no one behind me.

  The tunnel branches. The left path is completely dark. To the right, more lights on the walls. I go right.

  Follow the bread-crumb trail of lights. Right. Left. Right. Right.

  And with every step, I wait for the crack of a gunshot. For a rough hand to reach out and grab me by the shoulder, drag me into the shadows.

  Left. Left. Right.

  The harsh glare of the lights distorts my vision. Dark corners swell and bulge at the edges. My throat closes up tight and dry.

  My foot snags on something, and for a moment, I am weightless, suspended in the air. I scream before I can stop myself.

  The scream goes on and on, echoing through the tunnels like the screams of a thousand girls.

  I catch myself against the wall and go completely still. If there’s anyone in this tunnel, they for sure know I’m here now. My ears throb from listening, but there are no footsteps. No one’s coming for me.