As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  * * *

  —

  Flipped her laptop over. Panicked fingers, almost dropped it. A screwdriver from her dad’s tool kit. Pip could remove the hard drive, she knew exactly how, put it in the microwave and watch it explode. If they got a warrant and took her computer, they couldn’t see that she’d been looking into Green Scene before Jason died, or Andie’s second email account, or any connection to Jason or the DT Killer. The time of death was nine-thirty to midnight and she had an alibi, she had an alibi, the headphones were just circumstantial and she had an alibi.

  She got one screw out before she realized the truth, before it crashed into her, solid and indisputable, stuck through the middle of her chest. She was in denial but the voice at the back of her mind knew, guided her out, slowly, slowly.

  It was over.

  Pip dropped everything and cried into her hands. But her alibi—the plan had worked, one last part of her protested. No, no. She couldn’t think like that anymore, she couldn’t fight, she couldn’t see this through to the end. She could have, if it were just her, but she wasn’t the only one at risk here. Ravi, and Cara and Naomi, and Jamie and Connor and Nat. They’d helped her because she’d asked, because they loved her and she loved them.

  And there it was. She loved them, a simple and powerful truth. Pip loved them all and she couldn’t let them fall when she did.

  That was the promise.

  And if this was it, the beginning of the end, there was only one way Pip knew to protect them all now. She had to make sure they were removed from the narrative before it was uncovered. She had to create a new one, a new story, a new plan.

  It hurt to even think of it, to know what it meant for her and the life she’d never live.

  She had to confess.

  “No, you’re fucking not,” Ravi said to her, his voice cracking down the line, his breath fast and panicked.

  Pip gripped the phone too hard against her ear. One of her burner phones; she didn’t trust her real phone for this conversation. All those traces, those ties to Ravi.

  “I have to,” she said, picturing the look in his eyes, staring off into that middle space as the world fell down around them.

  “I asked you multiple times,” he said, a flash of anger now, crackling in his voice. “I said, ‘Did you check you had everything in your bag?’ I said that, Pip! I said did you check!”

  “I know, I’m sorry, I thought I did.” She blinked, tears pooling at the crack in her mouth, her gut twisting to hear him like this. “I forgot about them. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. That’s why I have to confess, so it’s only me—”

  “But you have an alibi,” he said, and he was trying not to cry now, Pip could tell. “The pathologist thinks Jason died between nine-thirty and twelve and you’re covered for that whole time. It’s not over, Pip. The headphones are circumstantial, we can think of something.”

  “It’s a direct link between me and Jason,” she said.

  “We can think of something,” Ravi said louder, speaking over her. “Come up with a new plan. That’s what you do, what we do.”

  “Hawkins caught me in a lie, Ravi. He caught me in a lie and that and the headphones give him probable cause. That means they can probably get a warrant to collect my DNA, if they want to. And if we accidentally left any hairs, anything behind at the scene, then it’s over. The plan only worked if there was never a connection to me, only indirectly through my call to Epps that night, and the podcast. It’s over.”

  “It isn’t over!” he shouted, and he was scared, Pip could feel it through the phone, catching her too, burrowing under her skin like a living thing. “You’re giving up.”

  “I know,” she said, closing her eyes. “I am giving up. Because I can’t have you go down with me. Or the Reynoldses or the Wards or Nat. That was the deal. If it went wrong, I was the only one who would take the fall. It went wrong, Ravi. I’m sorry.”

  “It hasn’t gone wrong.” She heard shuffling down the line, the sound of his fist punching against a pillow. “It worked. It fucking worked and you have an alibi. How can you confess when you were somewhere else at the time?”

  “I’ll tell them what I did with the car AC, the same trick, it just didn’t work as well. Your alibi covers you from eight-fifteen that night, so maybe I tell them I killed him at around eight; that leaves you totally in the clear. I put him in the car and I went to fake my alibi with Cara and Naomi. They didn’t know anything. They’re innocent.” Pip wiped her eyes. “They’ll stop looking if I do this. A confession is the single most prejudicial piece of evidence—we know that from Billy Karras. They won’t need to keep looking. I’ll tell Hawkins who Jason was, what he was going to do to me. I don’t think they’ll believe me, unless there’s any evidence Jason was DT, but maybe there is, somewhere. There are the trophies. Self-defense is out the window, especially with the whole elaborate scheme to cover it up, but maybe a good lawyer would be able to argue the charge down from murder to voluntary manslaughter and I ca—”

  “No!” Ravi said, desperate and angry. “You’ll be in prison for decades, maybe your whole life. I won’t let that happen. Max killed Jason, not you. There is so much more evidence that points to him than you. We can do this, Pip. It can still be OK.”

  It hurt too much to hear him like this. How was she going to be able to say goodbye when he was actually right there in front of her? Her ribs closed in on her heart, squeezing until it gave out, thinking about not being able to see him every day ever again, only twice-a-month visits across a cold metal table, guards watching to make sure they didn’t touch. That wasn’t a life, not one she wanted for herself or for him.

  Pip didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t fix this.

  “I don’t want you to,” Ravi said quietly. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “If it’s a choice between me and you, I choose you,” Pip whispered.

  “But I choose you too,” Ravi said.

  “I’ll come over to say goodbye before I go.” She sniffed. “I’m going to go downstairs and have one last normal family dinner. Say goodbye to them, even though they won’t know. Just one last bit of normal. And then I’ll come say goodbye to you. Then I go.”

  Silence.

  “OK,” Ravi finally said, his voice thicker now, and something else in it that Pip didn’t recognize.

  “I love you,” she said.

  The phone clicked off, dead tone ringing in her ears.

  “Joshua, eat your peas.”

  Pip smiled as she watched her dad speaking in his mock-warning voice, opening his eyes comically wide.

  “I just don’t like them today,” Josh complained, pushing them around his plate, kicking his feet out against Pip’s knees under the table. Normally she’d tell him to stop, but this time she didn’t mind. This time was the last, in an hour full of lasts, and Pip wouldn’t take any of them for granted. Study them, sear them into her brain to make the memories last decades. She’d need them in there.

  “That’s because I made them,” her mom said, “and I don’t add a pound of butter,” with a sharp look across at her dad.

  “You know,” Pip said to Josh, ignoring her own plate, “peas are meant to make you better at soccer.”

  “No, they aren’t,” Josh said in his I’m ten not stupid voice.

  “I don’t know, Josh,” her dad said thoughtfully. “Remember how your sister knows everything. And I mean everything.”

  “Hmm.” Josh glanced at the ceiling, considering that. Shifted his gaze to Pip, studying her just as hard back, for very different reasons. “She does know quite a lot of things, I’ll give you that, Dad.”

  Well, she thought she did, from useless facts to how to get away with murder. But she’d been wrong, and one small mistake had brought it all crashing down. Pip wondered how her family would talk about her years from now. Would her dad stil
l brag about her, tell everyone there’s nothing his pickle doesn’t know? Or would she become a hushed-up topic, one that didn’t carry beyond these four walls? A shameful secret, locked up as a ghost bound to the house? Would Josh make up excuses when they were visiting her, so he wouldn’t have to tell his friends what she was? Maybe he’d even pretend he never had a sister. Pip wouldn’t blame him, if that’s what he had to do.

  “But it still doesn’t mean I like these peas,” Josh carried on.

  Pip’s mom smiled with exasperation, sharing a look across the table at Pip, one that clearly said just: Boys, hey?

  Pip blinked back at her. Tell me about it.

  “Pip’s going to miss my cooking anyway, won’t you?” her mom asked. “When she goes off to college.”

  “Yep.” Pip nodded, fighting the lump in her throat. “I’ll miss a lot of things.”

  “But you’ll miss your fabulous daddy the most, won’t you?” her dad said, winking across the table.

  Pip smiled, and she could feel her eyes prickling, glazing. “He is very fabulous,” she said, picking up her fork and glancing down to hide her eyes.

  A normal, family dinner, except it wasn’t. But none of them knew it was really a goodbye. Pip had been so lucky. Why hadn’t she stopped to think about that before? She should have thought it every single day. And now she had to give it all up. All of them. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want this. She wanted to fight against this, rage against this. It wasn’t fair. But it was the right thing to do. Pip didn’t know any more about good or bad or right or wrong; those words were meaningless and empty, but she knew this was what she had to do. Max Hastings would still be free, but so would everyone else she cared about. A compromise, a trade.

  Pip’s mom was busy listing off all the things they had to get sorted before this Sunday, all the things they still needed to buy.

  “You still haven’t bought new bedsheets.”

  “I can take old bedsheets, it’s fine,” Pip said. She didn’t like this conversation, planning for a future that would never happen.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t started packing, that’s all,” she said. “Normally you’re so organized.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Pip said, and now she was the one pushing peas around her plate.

  “With this new podcast?” her dad asked. “Terrible, isn’t it, what happened to Jason.”

  “Yeah, it’s terrible,” Pip said quietly.

  “What exactly happened to him?” Josh’s ears perked up.

  “Nothing,” Pip’s mom said pointedly, and that was it, it was over; her mom was picking up the empty and near-empty plates and carrying them off to the counter. Dishwasher sighing as it was opened.

  Pip stood up and she wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to hug them close to her and cry, but she couldn’t because then she’d have to tell them, tell them the terrible thing she’d done. But how could she leave, how could she say goodbye without that? Maybe just one, maybe just Josh.

  She caught him as he climbed down from his chair, wrapping him in a quick hug, disguised as a wrestle, carrying him through and chucking him onto the sofa.

  “Get off me,” he giggled, kicking out at her.

  Pip grabbed her jacket, forcing herself to walk away from them, otherwise she might just never go. She headed toward the front door. Was this the last time she’d ever walk through it? Would she be a woman in her forties, her fifties, the next time she was here? The lines on her face all from that one night, etched into her forever. Or would she never come home again?

  “Bye,” she called, her voice catching in her throat, a black hole in her chest that might never go away.

  “Where are you off to?” Her mom poked her head out of the kitchen. “A podcast thing?”

  “Yeah.” Pip shrugged, sliding her feet into her shoes, not looking back at her mom because it hurt too much.

  She dragged herself toward the door. Don’t look back, don’t look back. She opened it.

  “I love you all,” she shouted, loud, louder than she meant to because it covered the cracks in her voice. She shut the door behind her, the slam cutting her off, severing her from them. Just in time too, because she was crying now, heaving sobs that made it hard to breathe as she unlocked her car and sat inside.

  She bawled into her hands. For a count of three. Just a count of three. And then she had to go. To Ravi. She was broken now, but this next goodbye would shatter her.

  She started the car and she drove, thinking of all the people she couldn’t say goodbye to: Cara, Nat, the Reynolds brothers, Naomi. But they’d understand, they’d understand why she couldn’t.

  Pip drove down Main Street, veering off the road down Gravelly Way, toward Ravi. Toward the goodbye she’d never wanted to make. She pulled up outside the Singhs’ house, remembering that naive girl who’d knocked on this door so long ago, introducing herself by telling Ravi she didn’t think his brother was a killer. So different from the person standing here now, and yet they’d always share one thing: Ravi. He was her best thing, this girl and the one before.

  But something was wrong, Pip could tell already. There were no cars in the drive. Not Ravi’s, not his parents’ cars. She knocked anyway. Putting her ear to the glass to listen. Nothing. She knocked again, and again, ramming her fist against the wood until it hurt, invisible blood dripping from her knuckles.

  She held open the mail slot and called his name. Reaching for him, in every corner and crack. He wasn’t here. She’d told him she was coming; why wasn’t he here?

  Had that been it, on the phone? No last goodbye, face-to-face, eye-to-eye? No tucking her face into that place where his neck met his shoulder, her home. No holding on to him and refusing to let go, to disappear.

  Pip needed that. She needed that moment to keep her going. But maybe Ravi didn’t. He was angry at her. And the last she would hear of him before all their conversations were from a prepaid prison phone was that strange “OK,” and the final click as he’d let her go. Ravi was ready, and so she had to be too.

  It couldn’t wait. She had to tell Hawkins tonight, now, before they dug too far and found any link to those who had helped Pip that night. A confession was how she saved them from her, how she saved Ravi, even if he hated her for it.

  “Bye,” Pip said to the empty house, leaving it behind her, her chest shuddering as she climbed back into her car. Peeling away, both the car and her.

  She turned back on Main Street, driving south toward the police station, leaving Fairview, her part of Fairview, behind her in the rearview mirror, and part of her wanted to go back and stay there forever with her people, the ones she could count on her fingers, and the other part wanted to burn it down behind her. Watch it die in flames.

  She felt numb inside now and she thanked that black hole in her chest for taking the pain too, letting the numbness spread as she drove toward the police station and the bad, bad place. She was just this journey, she didn’t think about what came after, she was just this car and these two yellow headlights, carving up the darkening sky.

  Pip followed the road, over the bridge, dark trees pressing in around her as she focused on the turn up ahead, the road that would lead her to the station, to the end. Headlights were coming toward her, on the other side of the road, passing by with a small shush. There was another set, down the road, but something was wrong. They were flashing quickly at her, flickering in her eyes so the world disappeared in between. The car was getting closer, closer. A horn pressed in a three-part pattern: long-short-long.

  Ravi.

  That was Ravi’s car, Pip realized as it passed her and she scanned the last three numbers of the license plate in her mirror.

  He was slowing down behind her, swinging dangerously across the road to turn.

  What was he doing? What was he doing here?

  Pip turned on her signal and
pulled off the road, onto a drive that led up to a locked gate, blocking her from the old half-torn-down gas station. Her headlights lit up red, dripping graffiti against the dilapidated white building as she pulled open the door and stepped out.

  Ravi’s car was pulling in behind her now. Pip held her sleeve up to her eyes against the glare of his headlights, to wipe her rubbed-red eyes.

  He had barely stopped the car before he jumped out.

  It was just the two of them, no one else around except the shushing of a passing car, too fast to pay them any mind. Just them and the moon, and the run-down building behind. Face to face, eye to eye.

  “What are you doing?” Pip shouted across the dark wind.

  “What are you doing?” Ravi shouted back.

  “I’m going to the police station,” she said, confused as Ravi started shaking his head, stepping toward her.

  “No, you’re not,” he said, his voice deep, taking on the wind.

  The hairs rose up Pip’s arms.

  “Yes, I am,” she said, and she was pleading, that’s what that sound was. Please, this was already the hardest thing. Although at least now she had seen him before.

  “No, you’re not,” Ravi said, louder now, still shaking his head. “I’ve just come from there.”

  Pip froze, trying to understand his face.

  “What do you mean, you’ve just come from there?”

  “I’ve just been at the station, talking to Hawkins,” he said, yelling over the sound of another passing car.

  “What?!” Pip stared at him, and the black hole in her chest gave everything back: the panic, the terror, the dread, the pain, the shiver up her back. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s going to be OK,” Ravi said to her. “You’re not confessing. You didn’t kill Jason.” He swallowed. “I’ve fixed it.”

  “You what?!”

  The gun went off in her chest six times.

  “I fixed it,” he said. “I told Hawkins it was me—the headphones.”