One of Us Is Next

by McManus, Karen M.

  Before Nate can reply, there’s a sudden flurry of activity around us: Knox returns, Addy pulls a chair over to our table, and a plate of tortilla chips covered with shredded steak, melted cheese, and chimichurri—Café Contigo’s version of nachos—materializes in front of me.

  I look up in the direction they came from to meet a pair of deep-brown eyes. “Game snacks,” Luis Santos says, transferring the towel he used to hold the plate from his hand to his shoulder. Luis is Cooper’s best friend from Bayview High, the catcher to Cooper’s pitcher on the baseball team until they both graduated last year. His parents own Café Contigo, and he works here part-time while taking classes at City College. Ever since I made this corner table my second home, I see more of Luis than I did when we went to school together.

  Knox lunges for the nachos like he didn’t just polish off two servings of empanadas and a plate of cookies five minutes ago. “Careful, it’s hot,” Luis warns, lowering himself into the chair across from me. I immediately think, Yeah you are, because I have an embarrassing weakness for good-looking jocks that brings out my inner twelve-year-old. You’d think I would have learned after my one-sided crush on a basketball player landed me a humiliating post on Simon Kelleher’s About That gossip blog freshman year, but no.

  I’m not really hungry, but I extract a chip from the bottom of the pile anyway. “Thanks, Luis,” I say, sucking the salt from one corner.

  Nate smirks. “What were you saying about repression, Maeve?”

  My face heats, and I can’t think of a better response than to stuff the entire chip into my mouth and chew aggressively in Nate’s general direction. Sometimes I don’t know what my sister sees in him.

  Damn it. My sister. I glance at my phone with a stab of guilt at the string of sad-face emojis from Bronwyn. Just kidding. Nate looks miserable, I reassure her. He doesn’t, because nobody wears the don’t give a crap mask as effortlessly as Nate Macauley, but I’m sure he is.

  Phoebe Lawton, another Café Contigo waitress and a junior in our class, hands around glasses of water before taking a seat at the far edge of the table just as the first batter from the opposing team saunters up to home plate. The camera zooms in on Cooper’s face as he brings up his glove and narrows his eyes. “Come on, Coop,” Luis murmurs, his left hand curling instinctively like it’s in a catcher’s mitt. “Play ball.”

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later, the entire café is filled with an excited buzz after Cooper’s near-flawless performance: eight strikeouts, one walk, one hit, and no runs through seven innings. The Cal State Fullerton Titans are winning by three, but nobody in Bayview cares all that much now that a relief pitcher has taken over for Cooper.

  “I’m so happy for him,” Addy beams. “He deserves this so much after…you know.” Her smile falters. “After everything.”

  Everything. It’s too small a word to cover what happened when Simon Kelleher decided to stage his own death almost eighteen months ago, and frame my sister, Cooper, Addy, and Nate for his murder. The Mikhail Powers Investigates Thanksgiving special rehashed it all in excruciating detail, from Simon’s plot to trap everyone in detention together to the secrets he arranged to leak on About That to make it seem like the other four had reasons for wanting him dead.

  I watched the special with Bronwyn while she was home on break. It brought me right back to the year before, when the story became a national obsession and news vans crowded our driveway every day. The entire country learned that Bronwyn stole tests to get an A in chemistry, that Nate sold drugs while on probation for selling drugs, and that Addy cheated on her boyfriend, Jake—who turned out to be such a controlling trash fire that he agreed to be Simon’s accomplice. And Cooper was falsely accused of using steroids, then outed before he was ready to come out to his family and friends.

  All of which was a nightmare, but not nearly as bad as being suspected of murder.

  The investigation unfolded almost exactly the way Simon planned—except for the part where Bronwyn, Cooper, Addy, and Nate banded together instead of turning on one another. It’s hard to imagine what this night would look like if they hadn’t. I doubt Cooper would’ve almost pitched a no-hitter in his first college game, or that Bronwyn would have made it to Yale. Nate would probably be in jail. And Addy—I don’t like to think about where Addy would be. Mostly because I’m afraid she wouldn’t be here at all.

  I shiver, and Luis catches my eye. He raises his glass with the determined look of a guy who’s not about to let his best friend’s triumph turn sour. “Yeah, well, here’s to karma. And to Coop, for kicking ass in his first college game.”

  “To Cooper,” everyone echoes.

  “We have to plan a road trip to see him!” Addy exclaims. She reaches across the table and taps Nate’s arm as he starts gazing around the room like he’s calculating how soon he can leave. “That includes you. Don’t try to get out of it.”

  “The whole baseball team will want to go,” Luis says. Nate grimaces in a resigned sort of way, because Addy is a force of nature when she’s determined to make him socialize.

  Phoebe, who shifted closer to Knox and me as the game wore on and other people left, reaches out to pour herself a glass of water. “Bayview is so different without Simon, but it also…isn’t. You know?” she murmurs, so quietly that only Knox and I can hear. “It’s not like people got any nicer once the shock wore off. We just don’t have About That to keep tabs on who’s being horrible from one week to the next.”

  “Not from lack of effort,” Knox mutters.

  About That copycats were everywhere for a while after Simon died. Most of them fizzled out within days, although one site, Simon Says, stayed up nearly a month last fall before the school got involved and shut it down. But nobody took it seriously, because the site’s creator—one of those quiet kids hardly anyone knows—never posted a single piece of gossip that everyone hadn’t already heard.

  That was the thing about Simon Kelleher: he knew secrets most people couldn’t even have guessed. He was patient, willing to wait until he could wring the maximum amount of drama and pain from any given situation. And he was good at hiding how much he hated everyone at Bayview High; the only place he let it out was on the revenge forum I’d found when I was looking for clues to his death. Reading Simon’s posts back then made me sick to my stomach. It still chills me, sometimes, to think how little any of us understood what it meant to go up against a mind like Simon’s.

  Everything could have turned out so differently.

  “Hey.” Knox nudges me back to the present, and I blink until his face comes into focus. It’s still just the three of us locked into our side conversation; I don’t think last year’s seniors ever let themselves dwell on Simon for too long. “Don’t look so serious. The past is past, right?”

  “Right,” I say, then twist in my seat as a loud groan goes up from the Café Contigo crowd. It takes a minute for me to understand what’s going on, and when I do, my heart sinks: Cooper’s replacement loaded the bases in the bottom of the ninth inning, got pulled, and the new pitcher just gave up a grand slam. All of a sudden, Cal State’s three-run lead has turned into a walk-off, one-run loss. The other team mobs the hitter at home base, piling on top of him until they collapse in a joyful heap. Cooper, despite pitching like a dream, didn’t get his win.

  “Nooooo,” Luis moans, burying his head in his hands. He sounds like he’s in physical pain. “That is bullshit.”

  Phoebe winces. “Ooh, tough luck. Not Cooper’s fault, though.”

  My eyes find the only person at the table I can always count on for an unfiltered reaction: Nate. He looks from my tense face to the salt still scattered across our table and shakes his head like he knows the superstitious bet I made with myself. I can read the gesture as plainly as if he spoke: It doesn’t mean anything, Maeve. It’s just a game.

  I’m sure he’s
right. But still. I really wish Cooper had won.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Phoebe

  Tuesday, February 18

  The logical part of my brain knows my mother isn’t playing with dolls. But it’s early, I’m tired, and I’m not wearing my contacts yet. So instead of squinting harder, I lean against the kitchen counter and ask, “What’s with the dolls?”

  “They’re wedding cake toppers,” Mom says, yanking one away from my twelve-year-old brother, Owen, and handing it to me. I look down to see a white-clad bride with her legs wrapped around the groom’s waist. Some underappreciated artist has managed to pack a lot of lust into their tiny plastic faces.

  “Classy,” I say. I should have guessed it was wedding-related. Last week the kitchen table was covered with stationery samples, and before that it was do-it-yourself floral centerpieces.

  “That’s the only one like that,” she says with a hint of defensiveness. “I suppose you have to account for all kinds of tastes. Could you put it in the box?” She juts her chin toward a cardboard box half-full of foam peanuts on the counter.

  I drop the happy couple inside and pull a glass from the cabinet next to our sink, filling it from the tap and finishing the whole thing in two long, greedy gulps. “Cake toppers, huh?” I ask. “Do people still use those?”

  “They’re just samples from Golden Rings,” Mom says. Ever since she joined the local wedding planners’ organization, boxes full of stuff like this show up at our apartment every couple of weeks. Mom takes pictures, makes notes of what she likes, and then packs it back up to send along to the next wedding planner in the group. “Some of them are cute, though.” She holds up one of a bride and groom waltzing in silhouette. “What do you think?”

  There’s an open box of Eggo waffles on the counter. I pull out the last two and pop them into the toaster. “I think plastic people on top of a cake isn’t really Ashton and Eli’s style. Aren’t they trying to keep things simple?”

  “Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it,” Mom says brightly. “Part of my job is opening their eyes to what’s out there.”

  Poor Ashton. Addy’s older sister has been a dream neighbor ever since we moved into the apartment across from them last summer—giving takeout recommendations, showing us which washing machines never eat your quarters, and sharing concert tickets from her job as a graphic designer with the California Center for the Arts. She had no idea what she was getting into when she agreed to help Mom launch a side business in wedding planning by coordinating “a few details” of her upcoming wedding to Eli Kleinfelter.

  Mom’s gone a little overboard. She wants to make a good impression, especially since Eli is something of a local celebrity. He’s the lawyer who defended Nate Macauley when Nate was framed for killing Simon Kelleher, and now he’s always being interviewed about some big case or another. The press loves the fact that he’s marrying the sister of one of the Bayview Four, so they reference his upcoming wedding a lot. That means free publicity for Mom, including a mention in the San Diego Tribune and an in-depth profile last December in the Bayview Blade. Which has turned into a total gossip rag since covering the Simon story, so of course they took the most dramatic angle possible: “After Heartbreaking Loss, Area Widow Launches a Business Based on Joy.”

  We all could’ve done without that reminder.

  Still, Mom has put more energy into this wedding than just about anything else over the past few years, so I should be grateful for Ashton and Eli’s endless patience.

  “Your waffles are burning,” Owen says placidly, stuffing a forkful of syrup-soaked squares into his mouth.

  “Shit!” I yank my Eggos out with a whimper of pain as my fingers graze hot metal. “Mom, can we please buy a new toaster? This one has gotten completely useless. It goes from zero to scalding in thirty seconds.”

  Mom’s eyebrows come together with the worried look she always gets when any of us talks about spending money. “I noticed that. But we should probably try cleaning it before we replace it. There must be ten years’ worth of bread crumbs built up in there.”

  “I’ll do it,” Owen volunteers, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll take it apart. I bet I can fix it.”

  I smile absently at him. “No doubt, brainiac. I should’ve thought of that first.”

  “I don’t want you playing around with anything electrical, Owen,” Mom objects.

  He looks affronted. “It wouldn’t be playing.”

  A door clicks as my older sister, Emma, leaves our bedroom and heads for the kitchen. That’s something I’ll never get used to about apartment living—how being on a single floor makes you acutely aware of where everyone is, all the time. There’s nowhere to hide. Nothing like our old house, where not only did we all have our own bedrooms, but we had a family room, an office that eventually turned into a game room for Owen, and Dad’s basement workroom.

  Plus, we had Dad.

  My throat tightens as Emma runs her eyes over the piles of formally clad plastic people on our kitchen table. “Do people still use cake toppers?”

  “Your sister asked the exact same thing,” Mom says. She’s always doing that—pointing out threads of similarity between Emma and me, as though acknowledging them will somehow knit us back into the tight sisterly unit we were as kids.

  Emma makes a hmm noise, and I stay focused on my waffle as she steps closer. “Could you move?” she asks politely. “I need the blender.”

  I shift to one side as Owen picks up a cake topper featuring a bride with dark red hair. “This one looks like you, Emma,” he says.

  All of us Lawton kids are some version of redhead—Emma’s hair is a deep auburn, mine is a coppery bronze, and Owen’s strawberry blond—but it was our father who really stood out in a crowd, with hair so orange that his high school nickname was Cheeto. One time when we were at the Bayview Mall food court, Dad went to the bathroom and came back to see an older couple surreptitiously checking out my dark-haired, olive-skinned mother and her three pale, redheaded kids. Dad plopped down next to Mom and put an arm around her shoulders, flashing a grin at the couple. “See, now we make sense,” he said.

  And now, three years after he died? We don’t.

  * * *

  —

  If I had to pinpoint Emma’s least favorite part of the day…I’d be hard-pressed, because there doesn’t seem to be a lot that Emma enjoys lately. But having to pick my friend Jules up on the way to school easily ranks in the top three.

  “Oh my God,” Jules says breathlessly when she climbs into the backseat of our ten-year-old Corolla, shoving her backpack ahead of her. I turn in my seat, and she whips off her sunglasses to fasten me with a death stare. “Phoebe. I cannot stand you.”

  “What? Why?” I ask, confused. I shift in my seat, smoothing my skirt when it rides up on my thighs. After years of trial and error I’ve finally found the wardrobe that works best for my body type: a short, flouncy skirt, preferably in a bold pattern; a brightly colored V-neck or scoop-neck top; and some kind of stack-heeled bootie.

  “Seat belt, please,” Emma says.

  Jules clips her belt, still glaring at me. “You know why.”

  “I seriously do not,” I protest. Emma pulls away from the curb in front of Jules’s modest split-level house, which is just one street away from where we used to live. Our old neighborhood isn’t Bayview’s wealthiest by a long shot, but the young couple Mom sold our house to was still thrilled to get a starter home here.

  Jules’s green eyes, striking against her brown skin and dark hair, pop for dramatic effect. “Nate Macauley was at Café Contigo last night and you didn’t text me!”

  “Oh well…” I turn up the radio so my mumbled response will get lost in Taylor Swift’s latest. Jules has always had a thing for Nate—she’s a total sucker for the dark, handsome bad-boy type—but
she never considered him boyfriend material until Bronwyn Rojas did. Now she circles like a vulture every time they break up. Which has caused divided loyalties since I started working at Café Contigo and became friendly with Addy, who, obviously, is firmly on Team Bronwyn.

  “And he never goes out,” Jules moans. “That was such a missed opportunity. Major friend failure, Phoebe Jeebies. Not cool.” She pulls out a tube of wine-colored lip gloss and leans forward so she can see herself in the rearview mirror as she applies a fresh coat. “How did he seem? Do you think he’s over Bronwyn?”

  “I mean. It’s hard to tell,” I say. “He didn’t really talk to anyone except Maeve and Addy. Mostly Addy.”

  Jules smacks her lips together, an expression of mild panic crossing her face. “Oh my God. Do you think they’re together now?”

  “No. Definitely not. They’re friends. Not everyone finds him irresistible, Jules.”

  Jules drops the lip gloss back into her bag and leans her head against the window with a sigh. “Says you. He’s so hot, I could die.”

  Emma pauses at a red light and rubs her eyes, then reaches for the volume button on the radio. “I need to turn this down,” she says. “My head is pounding.”

  “Are you getting sick?” I ask.

  “Just tired. My tutoring session with Sean Murdock went too long last night.”

  “No surprise there,” I mutter. If you’re searching for signs of intelligent life in the Bayview High junior class, Sean Murdock isn’t where you’ll find it. But his parents have money, and they’ll happily throw it at Emma for the chance that either her work ethic or her grades might rub off on Sean.

  “I should hire you, Emma,” Jules says. “Chemistry is going to be a nightmare this semester unless I get some help. Or pull a Bronwyn Rojas and steal the tests.”

  “Bronwyn made up that class,” I remind her, and Jules kicks my seat.