You’re Next

by Kylie Schachte

  “Molly Sawyer definitely rings a bell, but no one with that name goes here. Hold on.” Cass pulls up a search of Molly’s name. Millions of hits pop up.

  “Try ‘Molly Sawyer Whitley,’” I suggest. It’s a long shot, but if she’s connected with the Basement in some way, she must live nearby, and we already know she doesn’t go to Hartsdale.

  Cass types it in. The first link: GIRL IN COMA AFTER ROBBERY TURNS VIOLENT. There’s a whole bunch of other articles with similar headlines. MOLLY SAWYER, 17, ASSAULTED IN WHITLEY. NO LEADS IN BRUTAL ATTACK ON LOCAL GIRL.

  “Where?” I ask. “Where did it happen?”

  Cass skims one of the articles. “She was found in an alley off Vaughn Avenue.” She looks up the intersection. It’s about three blocks from where Ava was killed. Cass grabs my arm, digging her nails in, but I can barely feel it. I’m right there with her.

  The article was published December 1. There’s a ringing in my ears. Ava’s diary page had a date circled in the top corner. November 30. And Lainie said Ava came over to her house crying one night, not long after Thanksgiving.

  In my mind, the puzzle pieces slide into place with a satisfying click. Two violent crimes committed against two different girls in practically the same location, only a few months apart. Both with the same explanation: mugging gone wrong.

  How likely does that seem?

  “Hi there, I have a flower delivery for Molly Sawyer. Any chance you could give me her room number?” Cass asks the front desk nurse at Park Memorial. She’s holding the giant pink and white floral arrangement we picked out at the grocery store. This is the third hospital we’ve tried, and some of the roses are looking a little sad around the edges.

  We entered separately, and now I’m standing a few feet away, trying to listen while pretending to read a poster about flu shots. I really want this to be the one. There are five hospitals within Whitley city limits, and eight more just over the border in the surrounding towns. It’s not like any of those news articles about Molly helpfully included which one she was being treated at. Most hospitals will just give out room numbers to anyone who asks, but not all do, and Molly’s the only lead we have right now. I can’t risk getting stonewalled by a nurse before we can track her down. Thus, the Forgetful Florist subterfuge Cass is playing right now.

  The guy behind the desk gives her a skeptical look. “Don’t you have that already?”

  “I should, but the card got smudged and I can’t read it.” She holds the card out so he can see the ink we smeared ourselves. “I’ve been calling and calling the sender, but I can’t get ahold of them, and I have like twelve other arrangements to deliver before my shift ends. My boss will kill me if I get the van back late again.” Her voice cracks with the stress of it all.

  The nurse takes pity on her. “Let me look it up for you, hang on.” He types something on the computer. “Okay, she’s on the third floor. Room 317.”

  My heart leaps. She’s here. Molly Sawyer, our mystery girl, is in this building.

  “Thank you! Seriously, you are an angel.” Cass grabs her flowers and scurries off, looking harried. I wait until the nurse turns his attention back to the computer, then follow.

  Once we’re on the elevator, I grin at Cass. “A breathtaking performance, truly.”

  “Just doing my job,” she says with faux modesty.

  When the elevator doors open onto the third floor, I am immediately assaulted by the cheerless sounds and smells of a hospital. The powdery scent of latex gloves. Kids crying over broken, germ-riddled toys in the waiting room. Phones ringing endlessly. Doctors paged over the intercom.

  In room 317, a girl lies still in the bed. Molly Sawyer, I assume.

  I freeze in the doorway. She looks dead. Her skin is gray and paper-thin. Her arms lie straight at her sides like a fairy-tale princess in her glass coffin.

  The steady pulse-beep of monitors reminds me: she’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive. But she looks so pale, so lifeless, that for a moment I am paralyzed, reliving that moment when I turned on my flashlight and saw Ava sprawled on the concrete in a pool of her own blood.

  Molly’s chest rises and falls, lifting her hospital sheets ever so slightly. I unfreeze.

  Molly is seventeen, a year older than me, but she looks impossibly young in her hospital bed. She has no visitors. The TV isn’t on. Her heart rate is slow but regular. If there were any signs she was beat up, they’ve long since faded in the months she’s spent here.

  Cass crosses the room quietly, practically tiptoeing, as though trying not to wake Molly. She sets our flowers down on the bedside table, carefully turning the vase so that the prettiest blooms face the bed.

  “Who would do this to her?” she asks quietly.

  “I don’t know,” I murmur. A couple of hours ago, I felt in my gut that it was Dorsey. The way he called Ava an opportunity, like she meant nothing beyond what she could do for him. But I also saw the hatred in Austin’s eyes as he loomed over Paige. I say to Cass, “Every time I think I have an idea, it all gets screwed up in my head again like a minute later.”

  Whoever it is, I’m not going to let them leave any more girls to die in an alleyway.

  “Excuse me, who are you?” someone says behind me.

  A nurse wearing purple scrubs looks Cass and me up and down.

  “We’re friends of Molly’s,” Cass explains in her best nice-young-lady voice.

  The nurse is immune to Cass’s charms. She grips her clipboard tighter. “I’m very sorry, but you can’t be here. This patient is no-visitors. Family only.”

  That’s weird. I guess they might limit visitors if they thought Molly was still in danger, but everyone thinks her attack was a mugging, like Ava’s. It’s not like the guy would come back and finish the job.

  “Please,” Cass asks, “can we just stay for a few minutes?” She looks back at Molly, and I know the sickened horror in her eyes isn’t an act at all. “Molly’s been in here for so long. We don’t want her to think she’s been forgotten.”

  The nurse’s expression softens. “I’m sorry, it’s hospital policy. We’ll take good care of your friend, I promise, but you girls need to leave.” She pivots to the side and gestures for us to pass her.

  I think about arguing, but here’s the thing I know about nurses: don’t fuck with them. If Cass can’t get her to bend the rules, I doubt my brand of persuasion is going to be any more effective.

  As we leave, I pause in the doorway and take one last look at Molly. The slightly crushed flowers we left at her bedside are the sole personal touch in the room, but they only make the whole place seem more lonely.

  Halfway down the hall, Cass says, “So Molly and Paige must have something to do with the Basement, right?”

  I nod. “Not that I can picture either one of them fighting, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Molly’s story is so similar to Ava’s, the two incidents have to be related. So did Dorsey hurt them both? Was he trying to cover something up? Or maybe he’s more like Matt Caine, and he just likes hurting girls.

  “Austin and Paige obviously know something,” I say, “but no one’s talking.” I have that leaden feeling again, the one that always seems to follow the lottery-win high of a big discovery.

  “You could ask that guy. VT?” Cass says.

  I feel a spiky thorn of irritation. I choose not to answer her.

  Cass won’t drop it. “I still haven’t heard exactly what happened with him earlier.”

  I don’t want to remember the way Valentine stood so close to me in the dim light under the bleachers. It’s too much. I don’t want to remember, but I can’t stop.

  “He’s… a question mark,” is all I say.

  “Uh-huh.”

  We walk out into the weak late-winter sunshine.

  Cass can’t stay quiet for long. “Look, obviously he’s not a model citizen or anything, but he didn’t have to come clean. Maybe he really does want to partner up, fight the good fight.”

/>   My phone vibrates in my pocket. A text. The message makes me stop walking. Chill fingers rake down my spine.

  Rows and rows of cars surround me on all sides. Not a person in sight, but someone could be watching from inside any one of those cars right now. The hospital’s twelve floors of windows loom overhead. Are they above us? Looking down on me right now as I panic in the middle of the parking lot? Do they have their camera lens trained on Cass right now, or worse—the barrel of a gun?

  A car door slams in another aisle. I whip my head around with such force that my neck cracks.

  Cass realizes I’m not following her. “What is it?”

  I hesitate, then hand her the phone without a word.

  She reads it and looks at me with pure horror.

  Stay away from Molly Sawyer, or you and your friend will both regret it

  “Okay, who can tell me how many radians we have here?” Ms. Hernandez, our calc teacher, points to the diagram of today’s challenge problem on the board. I have this class with Paige, and I was half hoping I could get another crack at questioning her, but she’s absent.

  After receiving that text in the parking lot, I could feel eyes on the back of my neck the entire ride home. Watching us.

  Someone knew we were at the hospital.

  Cass’s knuckles were white on the wheel. I couldn’t stop checking the rearview mirror.

  A white van stayed exactly two cars behind us the whole way back to Hartsdale, but it turned off a few streets before mine. Maybe I was only being paranoid. There are millions of white vans in the world.

  It’s hard to pretend that text didn’t scare me, especially after the photos the other day. But those pictures were only of me. Now this person is after Cass as well.

  But whoever sent it is obviously scared, too. We’re scaring them. Which means we’re on the right track.

  “Flora?” Ms. Hernandez calls me back to the present. She taps the problem on the board. “Any ideas?”

  My notes are missing the last three steps, courtesy of my space out, and the whole problem’s lost to me now.

  “Sorry, I’m stuck.” I shrug.

  Ms. Hernandez narrows her eyes. In her class, if you don’t know the answer, you’re supposed to have questions prepared. I watch her take in the blue circles under my eyes, my unwashed hair. She calls on someone else.

  Math is usually my best class, when I’m not wrapped up in a murder investigation.

  Back at my place, Cass and I took a closer look at the text. Instead of a regular phone number, it just had a jumbled string of letters, symbols, and numbers. Neither of us had any idea what that meant, and eventually Cass had to go to rehearsal.

  “I’m fine,” she tried to assure me before she left. “If someone wants to scare us, they’re going to have to do a little better than some cheesy threat, right? What, did they get that from an episode of Law & Order?”

  She had a point. You’ll regret it isn’t exactly the most original. Then again, Cass doesn’t know about the photos. Those felt real.

  For all her assurances, Cass couldn’t quite meet my eyes as she walked out the door, and I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her just how serious things actually are. Not when she had to go play music and not look like an idiot in front of her crush.

  After she left, I tried to research Molly some more. Nothing new came up. Before she got hurt, she lived in Whitley and went to Roosevelt High. One article mentioned that she was on the honor roll and the dance team, but that’s it for personal details. It’s like she didn’t exist before this terrible thing happened to her. Just like Ava, in a way. When you’re alive, you get to be a three-dimensional human being, and then when you die everything about you gets erased and flattened until your memory is just a cardboard cutout of who you used to be.

  Only Molly’s not dead.

  All the articles were published the first week of December. After that, the press lost interest. It was just a random robbery. Sad, but mundane. In a city like Whitley, who thinks twice about that kind of thing? Months have passed, and the police are no closer to figuring out who hurt Molly. So far, it doesn’t look like Ava’s case is going to be any different.

  If the same person is behind both of these crimes, Molly would have been almost like practice for Ava’s murder. The killer knew exactly where and how to dump the body so that the police would forget about it and move on, just like they did before. And have there been others? How many kids have been dumped in Whitley alleyways to be forgotten?

  My math class has fallen silent around me. Everyone is staring at the doorway.

  Paige Thomas has finally showed up for class. Her arm is in a sling, and her shoulders and neck are rigid with pain. But that’s not what everyone is looking at.

  The entire right side of Paige’s face is a swollen mass of purples and reds. Her skin is stretched tight and shiny like overripe fruit. Her eye is barely more than a slit.

  Looking at Paige’s wrecked face, I am suddenly back on that trail in the ninth grade, staring with uncomprehending eyes at the heap of blood and bone and black flies that couldn’t possibly be a human body, let alone a girl I knew.

  I blink, and I’m back in math class.

  Ms. Hernandez snaps out of her stunned silence. “Oh, dear. Paige, are you all right?” She realizes what an absurd question it is and collects herself. “Maybe it would be better if you went home to rest?”

  Paige looks around the room, her eyes passing over every face. The accusation in her gaze is undeniable.

  You did this to me.

  For their part, our classmates shift in their seats. They’re no longer staring—now they can’t look at Paige at all.

  Something must have gone horribly wrong in the Basement. Maybe Austin finally snapped, or someone is trying to send a message. Could be the same person who’s been watching me.

  “I’ll be fine, thank you,” Paige says. Her voice is slightly thick. It can’t be easy to talk with her injuries. She takes the only empty seat in the room: the one next to mine.

  Ms. Hernandez tries to pick up where we left off, but she’s flustered. She drops the dry erase marker twice.

  I watch Paige. She’s close enough now that I can see sweat beading at her temple, above her lip. She must be in a ton of pain.

  I lean over in my seat. “What happened to you?”

  Paige keeps her eyes trained on the board. “I fell off my horse this morning. I’ll be fine.”

  “Did your parents actually buy that?”

  Paige doesn’t answer.

  I try again. “I went to see Molly at the hospital.”

  Paige turns to me slowly. Up close, her face is even more horrifying. A diffuse nebula of maroons and indigos and sickly greens. Her one slitted eye gives her a grotesque, carnival-mask look. Her hair is pulled up in another high, tight ballerina bun like yesterday. The contrast of her neat hair and nightmarish face only makes her look more grisly.

  “Flora, look at me,” she says. “If you like your face the way it is, I’d stop asking questions about Molly.”

  Paige doesn’t speak to me again for the rest of class. She darts out as soon as the bell rings.

  Paige’s injuries weren’t just a message to her, or to me. The warning has been made clear to the whole school: keep your mouth shut. No one is going to answer any of my questions now.

  I have another source, though, if I could set my feelings aside for long enough to deal with him.

  I duck into the closest bathroom. Valentine’s phone rings for a long time before he answers.

  “Wasn’t sure I’d hear from you again, Cherry.” He sounds genuinely pleased. I get that tight little zip! in my gut.

  “This isn’t a social call.” I keep my tone flat and businesslike. “Paige Thomas, Molly Sawyer. You know either of them? They’ve got some kind of connection to the Basement.”

  “Don’t know many people’s real names,” he admits.

  “Molly’s white, blond, she’s in a coma?” I try.

>   “Sorry, I got nothing. I can ask around.”

  “Okay, what about Paige—short black girl, kind of quiet? Looks like she got seriously beat up last night.”

  He inhales sharply. “Yeah, her I know. The Ice Queen. Brutal, what they did to her.”

  Ice Queen. That’s what Austin called her. I didn’t realize it was a stage name. So Paige was actually fighting in the Basement, as hard as that is to imagine.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Mismatched her fight. The girl she was up against, they call her the Viking. Must be closing in on six feet, and she wasn’t holding back.”

  I lean against the bathroom sink. “Is that unusual?”

  “’Course it’s unusual,” he scoffs. “Look, it’s good business if the fights seem out of control, but they’re not. At least not for the minors. Can’t have anyone’s parents finding out, right? Any kid gets an injury they can’t easily hide, they get taken off the schedule for three months, minimum. There’s an honor code, of sorts. You don’t fuck with someone else’s face unless you want payback.”

  I chew my thumbnail as I think that over. “Your face is always a mess, and the fight I saw wasn’t very even, either. That guy must have had a hundred pounds on you.”

  “Took him down anyway, didn’t I?” Some of his usual arrogant swagger is back, but he falters. “Besides, not like there’s anyone who’d care if I got hurt.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that.

  “Anyway,” he says, “that girl—the Ice Queen? She’s good. Lot of money gets bet on her fights. After last night, I don’t think she’ll fight again. Whatever she did to piss off the boss, it was bad enough they decided she was expendable.”

  And she wouldn’t even talk to me. How much worse would they do if she had? Would they kill her like Ava?

  Before, I only wanted to find Ava’s killer and make them pay. But the Basement needs to be shut down. None of us will be safe if it’s allowed to continue to exist.

  Valentine says, “There’s another fight tonight, Cherry. Want to play recon, be my date? Can get you behind the velvet rope.”