by Vera Kurian
As I headed home, it occurred to me with sudden clarity—the sad thing about poor, beautiful Terrible Charlie Bear. Once I took care of Will, I would take care of Charles, and this time I wasn’t going to have any blinders on.
38
Charles opened his eyes in the dim light, making out the fuzzy hexagonal pattern of the tile in Kristen’s bathroom. His vision was terrible without his contacts, but he knew that the white pill lying at the base of the toilet was an Excedrin. The last thing he remembered was Kristen curling up beside him as they fell asleep, then waking up a few hours later with terrible waves of migraine pain.
He got up and moved toward the bedroom, still feeling dull pain in the back of his head. But then he froze. Was he seeing things, or was there a dark figure in the bedroom? Sometimes the migraines affected his sight, but this typically took the form of tunnel vision. The bedroom was too dark to see clearly, but there—wasn’t there something even darker at the center? Standing, hovering over the bed as if peering down. Right over Kristen.
Fuck. His gun was in the nightstand—all of two feet away from the intruder and halfway across the room. Charles reached out half-blindly, his hand finding a vase. I might hit her, he warned himself, but there was no time to waste—the shadow, the thing, was now leaning over his girlfriend. Charles launched the vase across the room—then came a thud, a grunt, glass breaking, a scream. The figure moved toward the window, and Charles darted to the nightstand as Kristen screamed again. He could barely make out the dark shape crawling out the window but he fired the Glock anyway, each pull of the trigger providing a flash of light. He could just make out the shape of an arm right before it disappeared. He moved closer to the window, then fired out of it through the broken glass, firing somewhat blindly into the street. Kristen was still screaming but he blocked her out, then used the butt of the gun to break the rest of the glass out of the window so he could stick his head out. Why did his vision have to be so bad? He could make out no shape moving away; there was no one out on the street, just a taxicab heading north.
He leaned back, realizing that he was holding his breath. His ears were ringing. He turned the lights on and fumbled for his glasses on the nightstand. Kristen was hugging her knees to her chest, her eyes huge, blankets pulled up around her protectively. “Charles, there was something here.”
He examined the wall surrounding the window. Luckily, he hadn’t shot the wall. “I’m calling 911. When they come, don’t tell them I fired a gun. It’s my dad’s, it’s legal, but I could get in trouble.” The myriad gun laws in the city were hard to follow, in between gun control legislation that got passed and various court cases and acts of Congress that prevented that legislation from actually being enacted because of DC’s lack of local sovereignty. He dialed 911, then with the phone to his ear gathered all the spent shells, then washed his hands.
He sat on the bed with Kristen as they waited—she was still shaking—and held her. He felt a heat of hatred so intense he couldn’t hear anything. Even with all the fallout from what had happened last year with Daisy, Charles’s cyberattacker had never figured out where Kristen lived. Kristen’s family, like many wealthy people, valued privacy, and when they did things like buy houses for their daughters, they did it through companies that could shield the owner from public records. Last year, the harassment had never come to physical violence. One thing he did not know was if that shadowy figure had been looking for Kristen, or for him.
The police arrived and took statements. Charles couldn’t wait for them to leave. Only then did Kristen call her parents as Charles searched for some plastic and tape to seal the window. It didn’t keep the cold air out and certainly wouldn’t keep a person out. “Thank God Charles was here—I’m so freaked out,” Kristen said into the phone. “A burglar, I don’t know. It’s just, with those murders here...”
She handed him the phone and, sounding as calmly as he could, he reassured her parents, who were justifiably alarmed. Perfect boyfriend needed to be reliable and steady, an asset rather than a liability to their daughter. He disconnected, then took her head in his hands. “Listen. I’m never going to let anyone do anything to you.”
“I don’t even feel safe in my own house!”
“Let’s go to my place—it’s on the sixth floor and security’s good.” She looked doubtful. “We can always stay at Fort Hunt—no one can get you there. The driver can take us back and forth.” He helped her pack—Kristen was not the sort of person that was good at waking up in the middle of the night. He opened the medicine cabinet to get his Excedrin and her prescription, then found himself staring at the little orange bottle. It was a new one, the one he had picked up for her a couple days ago on his way to meet Andre and Chloe at the library. He hadn’t thought of it at the time, but it now seemed salient. The prescription bottle—with her address printed on it—had been in his messenger bag, and he had left it behind for an hour. Plenty of time for Chloe to snoop through.
39
Day 11
My smashed-up webcams were in the garbage, which meant that I could safely dress for my “date.” It was 10 p.m., and Will was expecting a blonde girl named Daniella who wears patent leather pants and has a low bar for men. I was not wearing patent leather pants, but jeans with a deep enough pocket to hold my switchblade. I had specifically picked our meeting place, a pseudo dive bar called Ivy and Coney because it was sparsely populated on Thursday nights.
I stood in the entrance, taking in the disinterested hipster bartender and two guys enamored with their beers in the corner. Will sat alone at a high-top watching basketball, chewing with his mouth open. I slipped onto one of the stools next to him, withdrawing my knife but hiding it beneath the flowy sleeve of my batwing shirt. I pressed the blade into his inner thigh, the metal digging into his jeans but not cutting through.
His eyes went huge. I could see the realization that he had been tricked flow onto his stupid face.
“Let’s stop playing hide-and-seek. You have until October 23 to give me the video. I know you have it.”
“You’re a fucking psycho.” He swallowed. His mouth must have been dry because I could hear it.
“Yes.” I withdrew the knife a little, taking my phone out with my other hand.
He leaned forward and whispered, “I could punch your little head across this room.”
“You could. Will you, though? In front of everyone? Do you know what’s going to happen to you if I don’t get it on the twenty-third?” I held up my phone where Snapchat was open.
“Why the fuck are you obsessed with the twenty-third?” I ignored him, but once he saw my phone, he frowned, clearly thrown off. I flicked my finger down the screen so he could see the hundreds of lines of messages. The heart emojis and the xoxo I love you’s. “You’ve...you’ve been talking to my brother?”
“Davey’s not very savvy for a ninth grader. Davey is in love with a girl he met online. See how easy it is? Do you know what’s going to happen to little Davey on the twenty-third if I don’t have my video?” His eyes got huge. I stared back at him without blinking.
“He’s just a kid. He’s my kid brother. What are you—?”
“Did you think I forgot Brett?” There was an involuntary jerk as Will realized what I was saying. Brett, the all-American friend who held Will’s phone that night and filmed when he could have been saving me. Here’s the sad, cold truth, Friends and Neighbors. No one is ever going to save you. “Poor Brett—too parochial to go anywhere but Rutgers. But convenient for me, him being a local and all.” I tilted my head. “Tragic thing, that car accident over Thanksgiving weekend. Was he driving drunk? Well, you can’t perform an autopsy on a body that burned. He was one crispy critter.”
“You’re. Fucking. Insane.”
“I accept myself for who I am.” I grabbed his chin gently with my thumb and forefinger. “October 23. Do. You. Understand?”
He blinked. “Yes.”
40
How much do you feel each of the following emotions? Charles’s watch asked him as he jogged down the street. Kristen was safely at Fort Hunt and the driver had taken him back to campus as soon as she felt okay with him leaving. Blindly angry was all he felt.
Chloe had gotten into Kristen’s house. The point of her home invasion, he had no idea. He had been too distracted with ridiculous theories about a cyberattacker when Chloe had likely been the culprit all along. Chloe had probably made up everything about Will—maybe what Charles had walked in on was a murder in progress. He had never bothered to ask Will his side of the story.
He skipped the mood log, knowing that if he responded there would be some record of him behaving badly. He knew from two years of therapy with Wyman that when he got into moods like this, the best thing for him to do was to go somewhere quiet and sit on his hands. To bite back that part of himself that was too impulsive to be reasonable.
Instead, his pace to Will’s house was rapid. But he stood at the doorstep knocking for five minutes before he realized Will wasn’t home. He headed for the SAE house, but there no one had seen him. After a quick and fruitless search, Charles flopped on the couch, completely ignoring the other brothers but taking advantage of their bong. Calm down, he told himself. He couldn’t think straight when he got like this. Chad stood in the doorway of the kitchen, eating Icelandic yogurt, talking to someone on the phone. What would Chad do? Charles wondered.
Chad, he imagined, did not get tangled into situations like this because he probably had an internal default that told him what to do, the right thing to do. He didn’t get distracted by hot girls and their lies and games.
Will came in about ten minutes later, looking flushed. He headed to the kitchen—probably to get a beer—but Charles made a come-over-here gesture that did not make a response seem optional, and he pulled Will into one of the filthy bedrooms.
Charles wasted no time. “What do you know about Chloe?”
“Chloe?” The bovine way Will had said it. Thick with the lie of pretending the name was unfamiliar. Underneath was a hint of alarm.
“Chloe Sevre.”
“Uh...”
“Has she been harassing you?”
Will gave a dumb little laugh. “Harassing?”
“Someone broke into Kristen’s house last night—I think it was her.” Will’s eyes got wide. “What’s the video she’s looking for?” he tried. “I already know about it, so stop pretending,” Charles said impatiently.
“Okay, this bitch is crazy. She’s totally stalking me. She broke into my locker and did something to my phone—she broke into my house. I should go to the police!”
“What’s on the video?” Charles repeated.
“We, you know, hooked up and stuff and she wanted to make a video so we did. She’s batshit!”
“Then why’s she stalking you?”
“Because I dumped her! She’s crazy and now she won’t leave me alone!”
“You met her at Adams?”
“No, we went to high school together, but I was a couple years ahead of her. I’m starting to think she followed me here or something—you know how fucked up that is?”
Charles felt a sinking sensation. “So you were, what, a senior and she was a sophomore?”
A muscle by Will’s mouth twitched. “Yeah.”
He’s lying, Charles realized, the thought freezing the rush of angry emotions. Merrifield Teacher Accused of Sex with Students—Charles remembered the title of the article. Will didn’t go to the same high school. Charles knew because his freshman year Will talked constantly about how his high school lacrosse team—at Cloverfield—had gone to state. The indignation on his face was entirely different from the look on Chloe’s face when she had swung that geode—raw rage. Chloe’s emotion had been visceral, Will’s defensive.
If he was innocent, Will had every right to go to the police if someone broke into his house—just as Charles had. But what would make him not want to? He did it, Charles realized. He totally did it. “So now she’s...?”
“I don’t know,” Will said, running a hand through his unruly hair. “She thinks I have the sex tape or something, and she’s totally obsessed with me. The thing is, I don’t even have that phone anymore—I can’t find it.”
A sex tape. He thought it was a sex tape. Charles was glad that his face wasn’t particularly expressive. “You’d better find the video. I don’t think she’s going to stop till she gets it.”
Will shrank back. Charles abandoned him to pace around the front yard of the house, wondering how many guys just like Will he had looked in the face without even realizing it. If the video existed, Charles understood why Chloe would want to be in sole possession of it—any idiot could. And even with Will and the specter of his video hovering over her, Chloe with all her PowerPoints and whatnot had certainly done more than Charles had to track down the killer. Meanwhile, he had been withholding information that might have helped just because he didn’t trust her. And while he was dicking around, the killer had gotten close enough to him to get into Kristen’s bedroom. I need to talk to her, he realized, and we can sort this all out together.
41
Day 10
I peered through my peephole when someone knocked, seeing a distorted image of Charles wearing a hunter-green sweater. What was he doing here? And for fuck’s sake, no one in this dorm takes security seriously! Or maybe he charmed his way in. I had just finished switching all my passwords over to a new—and expensive—password manager and had been working on finalizing my plans for Phase Four. I hadn’t yet decided exactly how I was going to dispose of Charles, only that I didn’t want to handle him and Will at the same time. Both were fit and bigger than me. But I knew one thing for sure—I needed Charles out of my way for the next two weeks.
He knocked again, but this time I was ready. I swung the door open and zapped him with the stun gun. He gave a cry and fell. People were doing power hour down the hallway, so no one noticed, not even when I grabbed him by the belt and shirt and dragged his still-shaking body inside my room. I nudged the door shut with my foot and locked it. Yessica wouldn’t be home for another three hours. He was incapacitated for now, and we were alone.
Should I just get rid of him now? I could drag him to the window and push him out—the fall down would probably kill him. Then again, actually getting his body out the window might be hard. Maybe if I shocked him over and over with the stun gun he would die? I knew he got migraines—maybe I could just tell people he came over and had a seizure or something. I contemplated the baseball bat I had gotten from a sidewalk sale.
“Ch-Chloe!”
“Shut up! I know who you are.” I put the stun gun in his face and made it emit its satisfying snapping noise. “You’ve done a good job making it seem like it was never you, but I’ve had an awakening. You just happened to be the person with Elena who found Kellen’s body? You were probably waiting for her to show up so you could gloat!”
“G-gloat? No, I—”
“Party’s over.” I tapped the ground with the baseball bat. “It’d be a shame wrecking that beautiful face of yours.”
“Wait—”
“I know everything about you—”
“Wait, wait. Do whatever you want to me, just let me ask you a question.” I made an impatient gesture. “Where did you go to high school?”
“Merrifield High. Why?”
“Will went to Merrifield, right?”
“No, he went to Cloverfield.”
“Was there a scandal with you being involved with a teacher?”
“Alexei, yes.”
He closed his eyes and breathed more slowly. I wondered if I had seriously injured him, but then he looked straight into my eyes with a look I couldn’t read, something soft around the edges for the first time. “You never lied to me once, have you?” he aske
d, sounding amazed.
“I’m not a liar like you! I know everything now, about Daisy and how you killed her.”
He looked alarmed, trying to sit up, but apparently it still hurt where I shocked him. “That’s not what happened. I didn’t kill her.”
I gently tapped his forehead with the baseball bat. “I got into your files from Wyman’s office. I know exactly how perverted your brain is.”
“And the file said I killed Daisy?” he seemed genuinely puzzled rather than alarmed.
“More or less.”
“Can I see it?”
This torture session wasn’t going how I planned. I was annoyed—he should have been afraid of me. I opened the file and handed him my laptop, hovering near him with my weapons. His eyes moved quickly down the page, his mouth open. Suddenly he hissed like the snake he was. “Chloe, did you read all of this?”
“I skimmed. Pretty sickening stuff.”
He looked at me, exasperated. “Here, under Sexual proclivities. ‘Subject possesses a wide variety of perverse, disturbing sexual drives, both in behavior and in the pornography he watches for several hours a day. He admits to indulging in sexual acts with animals on his family’s estate growing up. The list included the family dog, stray cats, sheep, even hermit crabs.’ Really, Chloe?”
“Hermit crabs!”
“We’ve never had a dog. My dad hates them.” He closed the laptop, looking at me thoughtfully. “Where did you get this file?” I remained silent. “Was it from someone who’s really good with computers?”
“Someone. He’s looking out for me.”
“He’s in the program,” Charles said, tapping the laptop.
How could he possibly have figured this out with so little information? Charles raised his eyebrows. “Am I wrong?” He struggled to get into a sitting position. “I met Daisy last year in the music department. She was a really pretty girl. She mentioned once that sometimes a guy would creep on her Instagram and like all her pictures and see secret messages directed at him. You know, if she takes a picture of a latte with a heart in it, it’s really a message to him.”
