The Game

by Linsey Miller

  “You took them out?” he asked. He was far too calm for this. Three people were dead, and Lia was sure if she opened her mouth again, nothing but screaming would come out. “Are you sure Cassidy didn’t take you out?”

  This time the picture he put before her was a printout of a single email. Lia had been Cassidy’s target.

  “You take the game pretty seriously. That’s what everyone said when we talked to them after Ben. He was, too, but you were obsessed. You followed everyone you thought would play all last year and made a little journal, didn’t you? You wrote down their schedules, their fears, their friends. You stalked your whole class,” said James. “I don’t get the game. It’s tradition, sure, but that’s more than anyone else. Even the guys out there said they didn’t go that hard. But you did. You wanted to win. You didn’t want to be forgettable, hidden in your older brother’s shadow anymore, did you? Abby, Ben, Cassidy—they were all high achievers. You’re just Lia Prince, and you were jealous.”

  And it was all true and terrible, but Lia shook her head.

  “This game is a way for you to finally get recognized,” he said, “but Abby, Ben, and Cassidy were going to ruin that for you. Three kids with achievements taking away the only thing you had.”

  “No.”

  She wanted to be noticed. God, no one realized how much invisibility hurt. If she were a terrible daughter, at least her parents might pay attention to her, but being mediocre was worse. Too good to need help, too bad to need attention. Her parents, her teachers, her friends—no one ever paid attention to just her.

  “You set up a trip wire for Abby.” James gathered his photos and tucked them away. “You went back to Ben’s and took out your anger on him, and when you found him the next day, you contaminated the scene to explain away anything we might find. Cassidy assassinated you in the game, but you couldn’t let her get away with that.”

  “No,” Lia said again. “And I can prove it.”

  She knew it went against every episode of Law & Order she had ever seen, but she pulled out her phone.

  “Lia!” Her mom grabbed her arm, and Lia shook her off.

  “No, look. I didn’t send any of those messages to Devon. The IP address they came from in my account isn’t my phone. That photo was taken with someone else’s phone.” Lia scrolled through her messages and opened the one from the restricted number. “Even the Council for Assassins knew those emails weren’t me. I wanted to win the game, but they were my friends. I never hurt any of them.”

  Abby Ascher. Ben Barnard. Cassidy Clarke.

  That was a lie. They hadn’t been her friends, but they deserved real justice. All the shows and movies said killers stuck their noses into investigations, but Lia had been tossed into this one.

  “I didn’t hurt any of them,” she said. “I didn’t even have my journal until today. Someone stole it from our biology room.”

  And it had her email address right there on the front page.

  “But you have it now?” James asked, his face hard. “Convenient.”

  People had been doing it for ages. Lia had even copied and pasted the roster directly into the journal and then crossed off the names of those she figured weren’t playing. The list was glued onto the first few pages.

  “I’m not the only one who does it,” she said. “I even—”

  “That’s enough.” Lia’s mom dropped her hand on the table. “We’re done. Are you arresting her?”

  A chill oozed down Lia’s spine.

  “No—” said James, and Lia’s mom interrupted him.

  “Then I’m taking Lia home, where she will stay.” Her fingers found Lia’s arm and pulled her up. “If you wish to speak with her again, please contact our lawyer. My husband has just arrived and should have that information for you should it be necessary. We’re leaving.”

  They did let her go. Lia’s thoughts were jumbled, her ears full of that same rushing again. They weren’t keeping her. They could have kept her, she was pretty sure. They had to know that you could trace the origin of photos. They had to know she didn’t kill Abby, Ben, and Cassidy.

  Devon and Gem had to know that.

  Lia’s mom sat her in the backseat of the car and crawled in there with her. She buckled Lia in. Her fingers shook, and it took four tries before she got the seat belt into the clip. Lia pulled out her phone.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” her mom whispered.

  “I didn’t send those emails,” Lia said. “Even the Council knew it.”

  Her mom shook her head. “Lia, do you even know who you’re taking orders from for this stupid game?”

  She didn’t. The Council was the Council. There was always one, and they were always anonymous.

  Lia scrolled through the list of Assassins participant schedules she kept on her phone. Abby wasn’t even in this version, but she would’ve been first. Instead, Ben was, followed by Eric Bins. Cassidy was third on Lia’s list.

  Her mom said nothing else. Her father didn’t talk to her either. They talked over her on the drive home. They talked about lawyers and costs, Mark potentially coming back and missing out on class, and Lia being suspended from school. Her mom dragged her from the car to her bedroom. Lia sat on her bed.

  “Lia,” she said softly, kneeling in front of her and holding her hands. “I won’t be angry. I just need to know.”

  Lia’s stomach clenched. “You should know.”

  “I should,” her mom said, “so please tell me.”

  “No, I mean you should know me well enough by now.” Lia pulled away. “What do you think happened?”

  “Lia,” her mom said sharply. “I do not want to play one of your games right now.”

  “This isn’t a game. Even if it were, you have never played any of my games. You don’t even know if I’m a murderer? You don’t know me well enough to know the answer to that? You would never even think Mark would kill anyone, but you have to ask me?” Lia tugged at her hair, her sleeves, anything she could hold that wouldn’t put up a fight. “I heard him say it. Mark’s your favorite. Of course he is. The words made all those little things real, and now this.”

  “That’s not true. Lia, you are our daughter, and we love you.” Her mom went out into the hall and waved for her father to come. Lia could feel the “but” at the end of that sentence building up in her chest. “We know this Assassins game was important to you, but it’s just a stupid game, and you’re throwing—”

  “It wasn’t a stupid game when Mark almost won!” Lia leapt to her feet. The anger welled up in her so fast and hot that she couldn’t breathe deep enough to speak. There weren’t any words left for what she was feeling. There were too many words she wanted to say. It all burst out of her in a shriek.

  Lia slammed her bedroom door shut and locked it with a trembling hand. She slid to the floor.

  An hour later, when the words came back and her hands stopped shaking too badly for her to write, she slipped a note under the door.

  I didn’t.

  And it hurt that she even had to say it.

  She wasn’t going to school. It was a command passed on through the door of her room. Lia hadn’t expected to even leave the house, and Thursday had gone on so long that the very thought of waking up and facing her classmates made her nauseous. Lia’s potential involvement in the deaths settled over the house like a fine dust all of them were desperate not to disturb, and Lia only left her room to eat when her parents threatened to take the door off of its hinges. It was bound to be worse if she went to school, and she wasn’t even sure she could. Everyone must have known she had been interrogated. Maybe Devon had told more people by now.

  There were a dozen official emails, tweets, and Facebook posts, none of which Lia read. They wouldn’t say more than the gossip. Cassidy’s name hadn’t been released by the police but by the neighbors who posted it online the
moment they saw the cops. Lia couldn’t deal with what they were possibly saying about her.

  But it should’ve been easy to prove she wasn’t the killer. Cop shows did it all the time with phone records and subpoenas for email accounts.

  After dinner, she crawled into bed with her journal and her phone—how long until they took all her things and picked through her life piece by piece? Her phone had been off since they spoke to James.

  Lia powered on her phone and turned it facedown on the bed. It vibrated with notifications for a full minute.

  “Okay,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Okay. Someone is killing my classmates.”

  There was no denying it. As much as Abby’s death had seemed accidental and Ben’s could’ve been a one-off, it was clear all three were connected. Those messages, too, tied Lia to the murders.

  “Why me?” she asked, flipping open her journal. “Why frame me?”

  That was the only reason she could see for those messages. They made her seem obsessed, more than she was, and like she was forgetting major things when she denied sending them. She almost couldn’t blame Devon for being worried.

  Almost.

  The first page of her journal was the class roster. Lia erased the line she had drawn through Abby’s name when she figured Abby wouldn’t play.

  Abby Ascher: covered up as an accident during a run by someone who knew her favorite paths to take.

  Lia checked her phone. Fifty-two missed messages. She opened the only message Gem had sent.

  Don’t check ANYTHING. Call me.

  She called, and the phone rang as she ran down the rest of the list.

  Ben Barnard: attacked at his house and the hand he was tagged out with brutalized.

  “Lia!” Gem’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Are you okay?”

  “So I guess my name is already in everyone’s mouth?” Lia asked.

  Eric Bins: totally fine and not a part of this at all.

  Gem groaned. “Sort of. Mostly because everyone knew you were playing and then someone saw you. How are you?”

  Gem didn’t even pretend to dance around the question of “did you do it?” They knew.

  Lia leaned back against her headboard and pulled her knees up to her chest. “My mom asked me if I killed them.”

  Gem hissed.

  “Devon apparently has been talking to someone pretending to be me,” Lia said. “No clue what to do about that or why or who it is other than it must obviously be the killer because you don’t have two weird things happening at once.

  “I was at the park where they found Cassidy.” Lia pulled her journal onto the top of her knees. “Someone chased me there, and I was on the phone with Devon. Surely that’ll be enough to prove it wasn’t me?”

  Cassidy Clarke: head wound in the park while stalking Lia.

  “I’m the only thing that ties the deaths together.” Lia traced a line around each name—Ascher, Barnard, Clarke. “Cassidy was my assassin.”

  “Jeez,” whispered Gem. “You are the common thread.”

  “So either I’m a serial killer and I forgot all about it,” Lia said while Gem hemmed and hawed over the phone, “or there is a serial killer trying to frame me.”

  “Don’t they usually start with small things, though?” Gem said. “I barely have my life together. Don’t tell me someone in our class has already worked their way up to killing us and being able to frame someone.”

  Lia erased the line she had drawn through Devon’s name, too. “Well, I sure as hell don’t have my life together enough to do all this.”

  The game tied her to each of the dead, and something, like a word on the tip of her tongue, stuck in her mind. She stared at her journal, couldn’t think of it, and tossed the book aside.

  “Get some sleep,” Gem said. “I think you’ve earned it, and maybe it will all have blown over by tomorrow.”

  It did not blow over by the time Lia woke up an hour before noon. She rolled out of bed, shuffling through the house in her pajamas. Her mom was in the kitchen, and her father was at work. Her mom made her eat at the table, and Lia managed a few spoons of cereal before she remembered the blood caught in the pitted cement of the picnic table where Cassidy had died. If she stared long enough at her cereal, they looked the same. She retreated to her room for the rest of the day.

  No one from the football team is here, Gem texted her at lunch. The table they eat at is empty, and Peter yelled at some freshmen when they tried to sit there. Devon’s here, though, and he is out of it. I don’t think he’s heard a word anyone has said.

  Great, Lia texted Gem back. Sad and thinks his not-girlfriend is a serial killer.

  IDK it seems more “everything sucks” than specifically I KISSED A KILLER, you know? He’s been chewing the same bite of his sandwich for like three minutes.

  Gem sent her a picture: Devon at a table with Faith, Georgia, and Mateo. Devon stared off into space, a sandwich in one hand, and Mateo stole his chips. Faith struggled to cut the chicken in her homemade salad with a fork. Georgia reading instead of eating. A few seconds later, Gem called her.

  “Hello?” Lia said. All she could hear was the rumble of the cafeteria.

  “Hey, Devon,” Gem said. “Have you talked to Lia?”

  “I heard the police talked to her yesterday,” said Faith. “Is that true?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Devon said quickly. “I don’t have my phone.”

  God, did he turn it over to the cops, or were his parents just worried?

  “She is super obsessed with Assassins,” said Faith, and there came a sound like her teeth clinking against metal. “I knew playing that game was a bad idea.”

  Devon said nothing, and Georgia snorted.

  “Like not playing would’ve helped,” she said. “It’s Lia. Lia obsesses. It’s what she does. Unless they arrest her, I doubt it was her.”

  Lia sighed. That was comforting at least.

  “Still,” mumbled Faith. “It’s weird.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” Devon said quickly. “Gem, can I talk to you?”

  And Gem hung up. Lia sat on her bed, flipping through her journal and ignoring her phone until another text message came.

  He wants to talk to you, Gem said, but his parents took his phone and he has orchestra tonight. So I don’t think he thinks you’re a murderer.

  Small mercies.

  Lia told her mom she was going to take a nap after an early dinner. Her parents usually left her alone in the evening, and the last twenty-four hours seemed like they would be the same. Her mom didn’t even check on her for the hours after lunch until knocking on her door around five. She said Lia had to eat, and Lia agreed. She played along, and she played nicely. They had to think she was doing what they wanted.

  When she was confident they were distracted by a movie, Lia crawled out her bedroom window. She hated biking, but it would have to do. The school was a thirty-minute ride away, and Lia could wait for someone to leave through that back door, and she could slip in when they did. She was chilled with sweat by the time she got there. Her leggings and hoodie stuck to her skin.

  Across the street, Mr. Jackson was sitting on his porch smoking, and he waved at Lia. Lia raised one hand in return.

  Her plan worked; the moment the door opened, a few kids shoved a rock against the door so they could slip back in. Lia darted up the stairs once the group left. Devon was still in his chair, a bottle of water between his knees and his head thrown back. The people around him were talking amongst themselves in a group a ways off. Lia crept out of the stairwell.

  “Devon?” she half whispered.

  He jerked up. “What?”

  Lia waved and nodded to the stairs.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, glancing around.

  “Gem said you wanted to
talk.” Lia backed up till she was against the door. “I can leave if you want.”

  Devon glanced at the stage where the instructor and security guards were talking. “Okay, sure, yeah. That’s fine.”

  It would’ve been better if he didn’t sound so unsure.

  “Great,” she said, and made her way to the stairwell. “I should probably leave before break is over, but I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t walk here or something equally as dangerous?” he asked, leaning back against the railing.

  They stopped a story above the door, far enough from either to hear it open but not be in the way of anyone coming or going.

  “Does that mean you don’t think I’m a murderer?” she asked.

  “Of course I don’t think you’re a murderer,” Devon said, shaking his head. His hair fell over his eyes. “The emails are still bizarre, but no offense, in no world can I picture you fighting Ben or Cassidy and winning.”

  She could hardly take offense at being called not a killer.

  “Full offense taken at you not believing me about the emails.” Lia leaned against the opposite wall. “I told the cops about them, which was probably a bad move if someone is framing me.”

  “Is someone framing you?” he asked. “Is that not a leap?”

  “If not, it’s the deadliest string of coincidences ever.” She knocked his knee with hers. “You looked scared when I left your house, and you didn’t say anything after that.”

  He scowled. “Detective James called my parents and asked me tons of questions about you. They are panicked.”

  “I’ve made an excellent first impression, then.” Lia sighed. “I should’ve stuck to science fair.” She had never won science fair either, but at least no one died during it.

  “I always liked watching you do science fair.”

  Lia shook her head. “Why? It’s so boring.”

  “Yeah, but you put on a show,” he said. “You spent one whole judging round talking about the etymology of ‘sinister’ when you did that chirality project.”

  Lia flushed and mumbled, “It was a chemistry project, and I got no points that round.”