Never Saw Me Coming

by Vera Kurian

  I grabbed my book bag and headed to the SAC to get the final piece of my home security system. The school bookstore was located on the first floor of the SAC and you could buy anything from textbooks to snacks to bedding there. You could also buy a wireless webcam. I took three, figuring I could set up one pointing at the window in my bedroom, then two more for our common area. They were small enough that you probably wouldn’t see them unless you were specifically looking for them. They were also innocuous enough that no one noticed me walking out the store without paying for them.

  Just as I left the store and approached the campus post office, I saw two figures. Charles—I felt a little jump when I saw him—faced me and was talking to some guy whose back was to me. The other guy was massive, his broad, overly muscular shoulders and back pressing against his T-shirt. He had brown tousled hair and was nodding at whatever Charles was saying. As I moved closer, Charles’s eyes flicked toward me—I got the immediate impression that he did not like whoever he was talking to. “Hello,” I said.

  The stranger turned around. He was handsome in a generic sort of way, and his blindingly white smile blazed at me. “Chloe!” he said.

  “Have we met?”

  Charles smiled like a Cheshire cat.

  “At Charles’s party,” he said, not noticing Charles’s facial expression.

  “You must have made an impression,” Charles said wryly. “This is Chad. SAE’s president.”

  I smiled and extended my hand. Chad—the guy who had verified Will’s location that night. His large, warm hand encompassed mine, and I held on a second longer than I normally would have. It was then I saw he had the same smartwatch as me. My eyes shot over to Charles, who looked back at me impassively.

  “Shame I didn’t get to talk to you more that night,” Chad said.

  “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

  “Maybe if you gave me your number,” he said, grinning. I was seriously thinking of doing it just to annoy Charles, who I thought was acting cool toward me despite our outing, but Chad got a phone call. “Excuse me, it’s my grandma.” He walked away with his phone to his ear, trying to get better reception. Good—I needed a private moment to fill Charles in about Andre.

  “It appears our dear president has taken a liking to you,” Charles remarked.

  “Is he one of us?” I whispered.

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  “Huh? Is he or isn’t he?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  “What? Weren’t you the one warning me? If there’s anyone I should be on the lookout for it’s the other people in the program.”

  “Maybe. I’m not going to tell you who they are.”

  “Do you know them all?” I pressed.

  “No.”

  “Just tell me the ones you do know, then.”

  “Why?”

  “You still don’t trust me? After—” I made a gesture to my back. And here I was about to tell him about me finding Andre and narrowing down our suspect list by one!

  “It occurred to me later that I took you to get a deadly weapon based off what? A story and bruises you could have faked? I just believed you when you told me there was blood in your urine.”

  “There was!” I said between my teeth. The way he said the word believed—as if he was disgusted at himself for trusting me.

  Charles examined me. No one ever says “piercing green eyes,” as if blue has a monopoly on piercing-ness, but his eyes were definitely piercing as he examined me, as if looking for cracks in my soul. He leaned forward, his face close to mine. “You think this is fun, don’t you?” he whispered. “You’re playing some mind game with me that somehow has to do with Will.”

  “Shut up about him,” I whispered. Just when I thought he was within my grasp, he was turning on me.

  “Just face it, we’re never going to trust each other.”

  I softened the look in my eyes. “While you’ve been busy thinking the worst of me, I’ve been making progress on the case. Getting all the names of the people in the program.”

  “So you can make a kill list?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He straightened the cuffs of his jacket. “You know I have a gun, right?” he said, barely looking in my direction.

  “Good for you!” Down the hallway, Chad paced as he talked on the phone, just out of earshot. “At least tell me if he’s one of us.”

  Charles shrugged, a hint of amusement in his eyes. “I’m not sure if I should be warning you about Chad, or Chad about you.”

  “Do I detect a hint of jealousy?”

  “Why would I be jealous?”

  “I haven’t gotten laid in a while and he’s kind of hot,” I lied. Chad was objectively attractive, but too much of a Crossfit bro.

  Charles wrinkled his nose. “If you’re into that, good luck.”

  I stepped closer to him—maybe an inch too close for him to be comfortable. “Maybe I’m into something else,” I said.

  “Because I’m so interested in a crazy freshman with impulse issues.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I have a girlfriend,” he said.

  “You think she’ll ever understand you?”

  “I’ve election stuff to do,” he said, annoyed.

  I did give Chad my number when he got off the phone. If Charles wasn’t going to be helpful, I would work with Andre. And Chad was increasingly starting to look like a good source of information on multiple fronts.

  I was just coming up the stairs of the SAC basement when I got a barrage of notifications. Cell reception never worked down there for me. Two memes from Yessica, and someone had tagged me on Instagram. Curious, I paused on the sidewalk and tapped. The person who had tagged me was Pinprick52, an account I didn’t recognize, but I often had random people follow me or guys trying to slide into my DMs. When Pinprick52’s account loaded, the header picture was an extreme close-up of an animal’s eye. Their pictures were stupid: the outside of a building. A not-particularly-well-composed picture of a bunch of students walking to class—no filter or anything. I tapped to get the picture I had been tagged in.

  It was a picture of me. I was sitting in class. Whoever had taken it must have been standing outside the window, looking in. It was my French Lit class—I could make out the words on the whiteboard. But there I was, idly twirling my hair while the person who was stalking me was standing less than fifteen feet away. I stood still on the sidewalk, holding my phone to my chest as I looked around at the other students walking down the street, at the windows of the academic buildings peering down on me, and all the little places someone could be hiding. Were they watching me even now? I gave the middle finger just in case they were—come and get it, asshole.

  27

  “Come in,” Leonard said, moving from behind his big desk to take one of the leather chairs in the front of his office. Andre came in and took the chair opposite him, slouching. “I’m glad we had an appointment today. These past few weeks have been incredibly stressful, I can imagine.” Andre hadn’t been forthcoming in the emergency therapy session Leonard and Elena scheduled for him right after the incident with Michael. It was hard to tell the difference between someone who had been stunned and someone who was indifferent to something dramatic. At least in person it was—Andre’s mood logs since then had shown him to be stable, preoccupied by other things.

  Andre shrugged. “I just want the police to leave me alone.”

  “You haven’t been able to identify the man you saw?”

  Andre shook his head.

  “We didn’t really get a chance to talk about it last time, because I wanted to process the trauma, but I wanted to say that I’m really impressed with your behavior that night. In a potentially dangerous situation, you ran to aid someone who was in need.”

  A thoughtful look came over Andre’s face. “I gue
ss I was thinking if I saved that guy’s life I’d be like a hero and the story would go viral and stuff. I didn’t realize he would die and I would never get my sweatshirt back. And now the police could be thinking it was me!”

  “I told them not to worry about you. Still, I wanted to commend your behavior, regardless of why you did it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Another interesting thing—I saw from your mood logs that you’ve had a lot of political activity recently. Have you been going down to the protests?”

  Andre seemed wary. Leonard had seen that look before—a common one from psychopathic patients. They had to figure out why someone else was seeking information under the assumption that it would inevitably be used to manipulate them. Because that’s what they would do. “I went to some. One a couple days ago, one the week before that. They’re happening all the time now.”

  “Takes me back to the old days of the Vietnam protests and Watergate. I was here then, too.”

  “You protested?”

  “Oh, yes, it was a turbulent time. I was there with my sign and my beads and my long hair, if you can picture it.”

  A hint of a smile, a tiny curl, appeared on Andre’s lips, making his dimples appear. But then the smile disappeared and Andre simply stared back at him.

  “Do you consider yourself an activist?” Leonard asked.

  Andre shoved his hands into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt and shook his head. “No, I just think it’s interesting. Basically that’s what Black folk are into now—being woke. You want to be cool, you walk the walk and talk about Audre Lorde or whatever. It’s fun, I guess. My friends are cool.”

  “But the causes—what was the one last week, Black Lives Matter?”

  Now Andre grinned, dimples in full effect. “My Life Matters. I’m just there to record things.”

  “To be a witness to history?”

  Andre frowned. “No, to literally record things. I’ve been submitting pictures to the Daily Owl. It’ll look good for internships.”

  “Why does journalism interest you?” Leonard asked. Andre had mentioned it in their first session as a possible major, then paused and suggested business or economics.

  Andre hesitated, gazing at a paperweight on the table in front of them. “Information is power.”

  “And that appeals to you?” Andre nodded. “What topics would you like to cover?”

  “Whatever gets the most clicks.”

  Leonard flipped through his notes, opting to shift gears. “Last time we talked, we chatted a little about that period of time when you were thirteen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your grades indicate you were doing pretty well until that time.”

  “School can be boring.”

  “And you started getting into trouble?”

  “Everyone was getting into trouble. Kids running around. It’s what you did.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “My brother. His friends. All my friends.” Andre stopped talking, but Leonard waited him out. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just felt like people were bored and would start tearing shit up.”

  “Is tearing shit up what got you in trouble with the police?”

  “They sent me to the school counselor and she said I’ve got Conduct Disorder.” Leonard didn’t say anything. Andre tapped his foot. Looked at his smartwatch.

  “Can you tell me about your family?”

  “I don’t want to talk about them.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “About this program. Does it even work?”

  Naturally, he wasn’t the first patient to question the validity of the program or its methods. Leonard had had more than one patient who felt like lecturing him on his own field of expertise. It was just a test, but for someone like Andre it might have even been a youthful cover for vulnerability—the fear of not being able to improve. “I would say we’ve had some significant success.”

  “How long as it been around?”

  “Oh, close to ten years, if you count the time when I was getting grants. I’m happy to talk more about the research behind the behavioral modifications if you’d like—”

  “Can we really change? Do people get better every year?”

  “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think people could change. And I wouldn’t say it’s a straight line upward, but with hard work comes improvement.”

  “But do people fail out of the program?”

  “No, I’ve never kicked anyone out of the program. It’s a hard population to work with, so you have to be willing to work against a lot of resistance.”

  Andre was staring at his shoes. “Don’t you think there are some people who are just irredeemable, though?”

  Leonard hesitated. “That question is why I started the program.” Andre’s head snapped up—something had clearly caught his interest. “Some people are certainly called ‘irredeemable’ and I think of such situations with profound sadness. I think of all the forks in the road where that person’s life could have gone in one direction, but it went in the other, and the things society could have done to help them make the right choice. I think the field of psychology has failed people like this.”

  “You feel sorry for them?”

  “On a good day.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for people like that. Like whoever stabbed that guy.”

  “You know, Andre.” Leonard put his notebook down. “What you were witness to two weeks ago was traumatic and what you did was a form of altruism. I don’t think it was entirely about you wanting to be seen as a hero.”

  “No, it’s not about that at all.”

  “Is it about your sister? Being somewhere in time to save someone?”

  Andre fell silent.

  Leonard made a note of this. He had already refused discussion of his family at their first meeting. At this rate, it could take months to build rapport, and the traumatic event with Michael had probably set them back. After Andre had been diagnosed with Conduct Disorder when he was thirteen, it hadn’t appeared that he had received substantial treatment. Andre’s behaviors and problems at school continued for another two years, until they started to peter out. Something had straightened him out, made him graduate with not stellar but decent grades. It made him a particularly interesting case because it showed his capacity for self-control. Whatever it was, Leonard was going to find out, eventually.

  28

  The triumvirate is meeting. Meet @ Charles’s in one hour, said Chloe’s text, including a dropped pin showing the location. Andre shoved his phone into his pocket. Around him, his friends were sitting on the floor in Dee’s dorm room, Sean reenacting how he had fallen down the escalator stairs at the Metro to hysterical laughter. They had been drinking rum and Coke, listening to music. He would have to leave soon, Andre knew, realizing that he both did and didn’t want to go. Half of him wanted to sit here with his friends and mess around. This was the same half that felt guilty that he was lying to his roommate and all his friends about who he fundamentally was, how he had gotten into Adams, and what he was doing there. Telling Sean that half-truth of his interest in the case had only made it harder—Sean understood his interest, but not the stakes. He had to sit here and pretend he wasn’t terrified of being hunted by some deranged killer, and he couldn’t even tell his friends about it—what kind of person does that? The same kind of person who had that other half—the half who was going to get up and leave in forty minutes rather than hang out with a girl he was interested in. They got to sit here and have a normal college life—he didn’t. Andre begged off, responding good-naturedly to the teasing that he either had a hot date or was going to take a shit.

  Once he got into the cool night air, Andre frowned and zipped up his coat. It was nine, which wasn’t even that late, and students were still in the streets. He wanted to pull up his ho
od, because it made him feel strangely protected, but he didn’t because it also blocked his peripheral vision. Ever since Chloe had told him about the murders being connected, Andre had done his best to never walk anywhere alone. This wasn’t hard because Sean was codependent, and there was always someone around that wanted to eat a meal or go do something. Even as he tried to study for classes or interact with people at discussion sections, he wondered if someone in the room was watching him, waiting. Somehow they had known Michael would be alone in that experiment room that night. They had known when and where Kellen would have an MRI appointment. Did this same person know where Andre lived? Or that he was walking alone right now?

  Andre spotted a horde of sorority girls a third of a block away from him heading the same direction, all dressed exactly the same. Good, safety in numbers. He picked up his pace a little to catch up with them, then like a gaggle of geese they surrounded him, soothing his anxiety a little with their chatter about hair straighteners. Chloe looks exactly like these girls, he reminded himself, then felt the muscles of his back tighten. A psychopath, it turned out, did not look like some person with crazed googly eyes. He had found her social media accounts, and they looked the same as any girl her age (okay, maybe twenty percent more selfies).

  He found himself going over his reasoning again for why he could trust Chloe. She couldn’t be the killer because she could have easily killed him the night they met. She was also dead serious about doing the work to figure out whoever it was—he had half expected her to not stay on the landing taking pictures the first time they did a stakeout. But she had. He had to trust her and it concerned him how easy it was to forget what she was. He had almost gotten comfortable working with her, but now she wanted him to walk straight into the lion’s den, to meet some other psychopath that she straight out said she didn’t trust.

  Andre watched in dismay as the sorority girls turned away at a stoplight—one of them waved and made a kissy face at him. He hurried the last block by himself, relieved when he saw Chloe waiting by the callbox of a building. Charles’s apartment was in one of those taller buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows, the ubiquitous luxury apartments that were multiplying across DC like rabbits. Chloe was dressed in workout clothes, her bullet journal tucked under her arm. “Be ready,” she said, “don’t believe a word he says, and I want to get an assessment from you later on what you think of him.” The door made a buzzing noise and they went in. The concierge sitting behind a desk in front of the elevators eyed him, but Chloe smiled at him, disarming.