by Vera Kurian
“Maybe I’m helping you out of the kindness of my own heart.”
The waiter came over and Chloe ordered a slice of death by chocolate. “Do me another favor, then. I want that video.” She held up her hands when she saw the skeptical look taking over his face. “I’m not asking for anything big—just give me a heads-up if you know he’ll be out for the night so I can search his house.”
“I might be willing to do that,” he replied. Might as well get on her good side if she was dangerous. While having information gave him power over her, it also made him a target.
The waiter returned with her slice of cake, holding the little card reader that students used to charge their food. “Do you mind?” she asked Charles.
Smiling ruefully, he swiped his card to pay. “May I ask, what were you doing yesterday afternoon?”
She shrugged, taking a bite. “Classes. Yessica and I went to yogalates.”
“I’m sure you heard about the student who was killed on the sixth? The day before my party.”
“Yeah,” she said, her face registering nothing more than interest in idle gossip. “I heard it was a robbery?”
“It wasn’t,” Charles said. “And did you know that someone died yesterday? Guy named Kellen?”
“Yesterday?”
“Did you know that both the people killed were in our program?”
Chloe paused with a forkful of cake halfway to her mouth, then put it down. “What?” The look on her face was genuine surprise, or at least something that looked like it. She had already proved herself a good actress.
“The first was stabbed to death in one of the experiment rooms in the psych department. The second, I don’t know—basically someone injected him with metal and it got ripped out of him in the MRI machine.”
“What? They were both in our program?” He stared at her. A slow realization dawned on Chloe’s face. She leaned forward, indignant. “You think I had something to do with it?”
“Did you?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
“No. Ever occur to you that I’ve been busy?”
“Busy with what exactly?”
“But why would I...? I don’t even know who the other people in the program are!”
“I don’t know what you know,” Charles said.
She seemed upset, but her reaction struck him as strange. More disappointed than angry at the accusation. She looked down at her plate. “I swear to you, I had nothing to do with it.”
“Considering I saw you brain my fraternity brother with a geode, you lack credibility.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I liked that geode—I got it in Switzerland.”
Chloe put her fork down and met his gaze. The look on her face, in her eyes, was different. Less guarded—ostensibly. Oh, she was good—very good. He could easily picture her getting out of tickets when cops pulled her over, pleading to turn in papers late for class. “Okay. I’ll level with you,” she said. “I came to Adams for Will. The only reason I know you is because I had to get in with your frat to get close to Will—it’s all I care about.”
“Did he rape you?”
Her eyes hardened. “That’s private. But if you’re going to be morally outraged about anything I do, you should be more careful about the company you keep.”
He tried a different tact, smiling, leaning forward, tasting the frosting of her cake with his index finger. “Chloe, I’m not going to tell on you if you snuffed some guy in an MRI. I just want to know. Because if two people in the program are dead and it’s not you, someone could very well be hunting down all of us. Me, for example.”
“I’m not like that,” Chloe said, wide-eyed. “I’m like a good psychopath.”
“And I’m supposed to take your word on that?”
She reached across the table—he restrained himself from pulling back—and put one of her hands over his. “I swear to you.” She turned back to her cake. “Besides,” she said, now cheerful. “For all I know you did it.”
“Shouldn’t you be more worried?” The wound on his forehead itched—without thinking he reached to touch it and cringed involuntarily. Her eyes flicked to his hairline with interest. Shit. He had carefully arranged his hair to cover the small bump and the livid red line on it, but he was always touching his hair without thinking about it.
Her eyes flicked back to his and she smiled. “Hmm,” Chloe said, licking the back of her fork. “Nobody is hunting us. That stuff only happens in movies.”
If she were doing this, killing people in the program, wouldn’t she be putting on a big show about being scared? Talking about how they should find who did it? Or would her calculus include thinking about how he would think she would act? He frowned. “Chloe, I think you should take this seriously. I’m the one who found the second body—me and Elena. They used a fucking MRI.”
She snorted. “If someone is actually capable of hunting and killing me, they deserve a genius award. I can look out for myself.” The look on her face became crafty. “And if you’re nice to me, I’ll look out for you, too.”
21
Day 38
I had to face it: Charles Portmont was becoming a problem. He knew far, far too much. At this point, I was sure he knew exactly what the video was. Enough so that if Will was found dead, he could tell the police I had a good motive. And this bizarre accusation that I was killing people in the program! What was that, a veiled threat? I quickly checked the news—yes, there had been two students killed on campus within the space of two weeks. That was pretty bizarre, but what proof did I even have that either of them were actually in the program? For all I know, Charles was lying, playing some messed-up game with me.
I absolutely could not have Charles stand in the way of my plan, which included a smooth endgame of not getting caught. I had to consider the worst-case scenario—killing him if I thought he would blab about Will. The problem with this was twofold, no, threefold: for one, he’s really hot and what a waste. Also, the Will project had been strictly limited to those who had been involved that night. I was righting a wrong, which makes me right. And lastly, I got the feeling that if Charlie Bear went missing, his billionaire parents would stop at nothing to find the culprit.
Maybe there was an easier way out: I could ensnare him. Games aside, he was halfway there already—I could tell from the way he looked at me at the guesthouse. While a normie might run straight to the police if they thought someone killed Will, Charles was a psychopath like me. There’s no telling what he would do—it would depend entirely on what suited him. This would be my way out.
Everyone in the dorm was talking about the murders, but more so the second one. The MRI-as-murder-weapon was just too juicy a story to resist. All we heard from the college officially was that these were tragic events, blah blah blah, thoughts and prayers, we are cooperating with the investigation.
“You guys, I’m legit scared,” said my friend Apoorva. We were sitting in a circle on her dorm room floor drinking triple sec because it was the only thing we could get our hands on. “So now on top of mass shootings, everyone being rape-y, and the world ending, we have to be worried about a serial killer.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” Yessica admitted.
My mouth puckered as I scrolled through news results on my laptop. Molly was rubbing a hot oil treatment into my hair. “Two people isn’t a serial killer. I think you need three to qualify,” she said. I felt a tiny bud of an idea appear.
I looked at the coverage of the murders in the Daily Owl. One op-ed blamed it on Greek life, saying that the second guy, Kellen, had probably died in a hazing incident—what other reason could there be for him swallowing a bunch of buckshot? The most recent op-ed, the one that came out today, refuted this.
“This was a tragic, horrifying thing that happened,” said Chad Harrity, President of both the Interfraternity Council at A
dams and SAE. “But it has nothing to do with Greek life. Kellen wasn’t in a fraternity and it wasn’t a hazing. Fraternities have been the cause of some bad behavior over the years, but this generation is trying to change that.”
Suddenly it hit me like a geode. I didn’t think that someone was actually trying to kill all the panel students. I think I would know if someone were trying to kill me. So, I would keep an eye out—and how is that different than everyday life worried that Will would catch me alone? Maybe the same person killed Michael and Kellen, maybe not. What mattered was that people thought it was a serial killer targeting Adams students. What better way to deflect attention from myself! I could dispose of Will and pin it on our mystery hunter. If there actually was a serial killer, they had done me a huge favor.
* * *
Charles must have believed me when I said the video was my endgame, because two days later he texted me that SAE was having a pledge event, which meant that Will’s house would be unoccupied. I donned my cat burglar outfit: black running tights and a matching top, tight ponytail, a small knapsack worn close to my body. I had a knife tucked into a holster above my right boot. Will and his roommate wouldn’t be there, but I had to be prepared if either came home early and found me.
I walked to Will’s house looking like I was heading to yoga and didn’t don my gloves until I was in his carport. After a quick look around, I climbed up the drainpipe I had spotted before and got up on the flat roof. From there, I was able to edge my body over to examine the second-floor window with the tips of my fingers. It was half latched, open a couple centimeters. I jiggled it repeatedly with focused patience. It took about ten minutes, but slowly the latch moved and then I was able to get the window open. I climbed down.
I was in.
I perked my ears. I snuck through the house, stepping over piles of clothes and lacrosse junk to make sure it was empty. Which bedroom was Will’s? Both had lacrosse stuff, and neither had family photos. I had no time to waste, and I wanted the search to be extensive. They each had a PC tower in their rooms. With my small tool set, I opened each tower and removed the hard drives. Now for the phone. If he was smart to begin with, he would have just destroyed his old phone or deleted the video, but if Charles saw him looking for it, maybe he still hadn’t found it. I rifled through drawers, looked under the mattresses. I poked through closets and behind furniture. I turned up a jockstrap, a melted candy bar, and an old phone charger, but no old iPhone. Nuts. At least I had the hard drives.
I checked my watch. How long would a pledge event be? There was also the basement, but I wasn’t sure if Will and Cordy actually had access to it. Many basements in DC are English basements—independent apartments separate from the rest of the house that people often rented out. Unless I was missing it, there was no way into the basement from inside of the house. I climbed back out and down the drainpipe. I checked the street carefully, then crouched at the back door to the English basement. Lock-picking involves jimmying around slim pieces of metal—it takes patience, which is not one of my many virtues. I worked diligently for what felt like an eternity but finally something clicked into place and I creaked the door open.
The basement was pitch-black, but I was prepared. I kept the door half open to provide some light and pulled out my miniheadlamp. The lamp shone in a bubble of light across the cramped space. I felt my heart sink. There was so much stuff—how could I possibly have enough time to search it? There were bureaus and boxes of crap. I might have to break in here more than once to do a thorough job. I saw what looked like a water-damaged grandfather clock. It smelled musty—the basement had definitely flooded at some point and it felt damp under my feet. I wedged my way between stacks of boxes and wondered where to start.
I opened a cardboard box and pulled up some musty clothes. A gingham dress. Women’s clothes. Water dripped in the darkness. I opened another box and found books. Were they books that college students would read? Upon closer inspection they appeared to be in Cyrillic.
I turned, easing my body around an overfilled coatrack, and came face-to-face with bright eyes and a maniacal grin. My fist clenched—but it was only a toy. A clown sitting on a metal shelf with some other toys. Wait a minute, toys? I examined that shelf more closely: there were dolls, dusty board games I had never heard of, one of those plastic cars that toddlers pedal around in. No way this was Will and Cordy’s stuff—it probably belonged to the people who owned the house.
Even though I didn’t find the phone, I was relieved—searching this entire basement would have been a time suck. I maneuvered around the coatrack again and started to head toward the door, the light from my headlamp illuminating it in the dark. Then I froze. The door was shut, and I definitely hadn’t shut it. I stood so still I think my heart stopped beating.
Then I heard it. A very soft sound—like the sound of brushing against cardboard.
I snapped off the headlamp. There was someone in the basement with me. Unless they had night-vision goggles or something, using the headlamp made me a sitting duck. Slowly, I reached down and freed my knife from its holster. I needed to leave the spot where they had last seen me. Crouching, I felt with my hands for empty space, moving so slowly and carefully to make as little sound as possible.
I heard a muted noise—they had knocked something over. Where had the sound been? Behind me, to the left, moving closer. How far had I moved from my original spot—three feet, four? Did they know where I was? This cannot end this way. This cannot end with Will coming home early from some frat party, drunk, killing me in a basement. Then I remembered: I had shoved the lock-picking kit in my pocket rather than returning it to my knapsack. But the stupid kit had a flap that closed with Velcro.
Will didn’t move. He was waiting to hear where I moved first.
Using both hands, I held the flap of the lock-picking kit and, with excruciating slowness, began to pull the Velcro apart, muting the sound by pressing my thumb into the space where the fuzzy and hooked parts of the Velcro met. I felt sweat move down my neck, tickling me, and ignored it. Patience. Come on. One hook at a time. If this takes a hundred years, I will not let Will win.
Finally, I had four or five of the metal lock-picking tools in my hand. I flung them as hard as I could against the wall farthest from me, the metal pinging off various objects. There was a roar of noise as something moved with violent speed in that direction, crashing into things and knocking them over. I vaulted toward the door, bumping into objects, feeling something scrape painfully against my leg but not stopping or crying out. My hand was six inches from the door when I felt someone grab me by the knapsack.
Fights are not the way you see them on TV, men taking turns. Real fights are ugly, scrabbling messes. I jerked back my elbow, knocking into something hard—someone’s head? I heard someone taking a breath, then something heavy hit the side of my head and my shoulder. I refused to scream, instead gritting my teeth and lashing out with the knife. I clawed blindly, then felt something slam into me, almost knocking the air out of me and sending out a shock of pain as the doorknob jammed into my back. I stabbed again—this time hearing a grunt of pain.
I have never moved quicker—I turned, grabbed the doorknob, jumped up the stairs, and ran like hell because my life depended on it. My back was aching, my lungs screaming for breath, but I had practiced for things like this—high-intensity interval training and all those self-defense classes. Run hard. Don’t stop. Don’t trip like the dumb girls in movies. Get somewhere public. I didn’t feel safe until I was five blocks away where there were a ton of people in the street. Three rowhouses were throwing a joint party, blasting hip-hop. I felt blood in my mouth.
The computers! Not caring how crazy I looked, I groped at my own back, confirming that the knapsack was still there. Had it torn? I unslung it, and shoved my hands inside for the hard drives.
Thank God.
Thank God they were still there.
It was then t
hat it hit me. How much pain I was in. My back hurt the worst. My shoulder and face already felt bruised. My legs burned from running. Suddenly an older girl stood right in front of me. “Hey, are you okay?”
God, I must look like shit. I forced a smile but didn’t show my teeth, afraid there would be blood. “Oh, just karate class.” I waved her off and jogged away as if I wasn’t in pain. It seemed to take forever to get back to my dorm. I didn’t want anyone to see me, so I snuck up the fire escape. My window was so old that the lock had been painted over a dozen times. I slid it open, cringing, and crawled inside, not resting until I found something that was the right size to jam between the top of the closed window and the window frame, forming a makeshift lock. One of the slats from the bed did the job just fine, but I almost cried out in pain from the effort it took to move the mattress.
I opened the door to my room and stared at Yessica’s closed door. I could hear her talking inside in Spanish, probably to her mother. I wanted to go over there and say, Look at me, look what happened to me. Look at my injuries. I wanted the look of shocked concern on her face, the tending to my wounds, the embrace of her skinny arms. But there would be so many questions. And even if I lied and said I was mugged, there would be an expectation that I report it. I stared woefully at her door, then closed mine. I took half a dozen Advil and crawled into bed.
Every time I started to doze off, reaching for the reparative sleep I knew my body needed, I kept seeing the smirk on Will’s face when I confronted him at the cafeteria. I didn’t want to think about it, but the image kept coming back. But I would regroup in the morning. I would heal—I always did.
22
Day 37
I awoke to a cloud of pain. I stared at the ceiling, not quite believing all that happened yesterday. I jerked my head to the left—feeling a sharp protest in my back—then with relief saw that my knapsack was still there. My makeshift window lock was still in place. Yessica was blasting music.
