by Jessie Rosen
“Wait. Why not?” Charlie said. “What day is it?”
“December 23. That’s the night Sarah Castro-Tanner died, right?”
December 14
Charlie
Almost two weeks passed before Charlie’s first day back at Englewood, and he was happy that it fell only four days before winter break. Walking through the double-steel doors that led from the student parking lot into the back entrance of the school was ten times scarier than stepping foot in Laura’s house for her Friendsgiving party. Despite that, Charlie had the same plan for this moment as he had then: he would keep his head down and not respond to any comments from anyone. But the moment he walked into the building all his nerves were eased. Laura was standing directly inside the doorframe, casually waiting for him.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “I thought I might find you here…and that it might be helpful for you to find me.”
Charlie wanted to wrap her in a giant hug, but they’d both agreed to take things slow, so he didn’t make any more moves than necessary. His return was enough to get everyone in school talking. The fact that he might be getting back together with Laura would make them explode.
“You’re the best,” Charlie said as they walked toward English together.
“I know,” she said with a nudge of his arm and a smile.
They had started talking and texting again right after her Thanksgiving party and hanging out soon after. So far they had mostly hung out and watched movies at her house when her parents weren’t home, but over the weekend before this Monday back at school, they ventured out to Clover for sandwiches. They didn’t see anyone who would have taken issue with them hanging out, and they also didn’t hear any choice words from random Englewood people who were still anti-Charlie. It was a welcome change. The next step would be to ease back into school, then hopefully spend more time with Laura there and in public.
“You can come meet me in the newspaper office for lunch,” Laura said as they sat down in English. “I talked to Becca about it, and she’s okay.”
“But after what you told me about her, Becca must hate me more than anybody.”
Now that they were trying to be together again, Laura had insisted on a policy of not keeping any secrets. She told him that she snooped on Becca because she thought the pranks might be coming from her, but ultimately learned about Becca’s past with Lexi Castro-Tanner. It inspired him to confess that he had been thinking about killing himself that night on the bridge when she found him. It felt good to get that out, even if he still hadn’t told Laura everything. He wanted to, and he was building up the courage to say as much as he could without confessing to the actual crime itself. Charlie planned to tell Laura everything when they were away together at her grandmother’s cabin. .
The timing of this little getaway turned out to be perfect, despite the strangeness of it falling on the anniversary of Sarah’s death. December 23 was a half day at school and it happened to be a night that his mom had a double shift at the call center. That meant she went in to work at mid-afternoon on the twenty-second and didn’t come home until almost 4:00 p.m. on the twenty-third. It was a deal she’d made with a coworker so that she could spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Charlie this year. Typically she missed one or the other, but she said that she thought it was important for them to be together for both after everything that had happened this fall. Charlie felt slightly guilty spending the night with Laura and not telling his mom, but he knew it was a harmless lie and that she’d have no way of finding out.
In eight short days they would be together up north, away from it all. Right now all Charlie needed to focus on was getting through eight hours of school, five times. He had already lined up lunch with Laura in the old Chronicle office to make thirty minutes of that time more bearable. He was going to survive.
Gym was the period that came right before lunch, and it would be Charlie’s chance to interact with Amanda, Kit, and Miller. They were all in the same section and currently all assigned to the same unit: volleyball.
“Good to have you back,” Miller said as they threw their backpacks into their lockers and took out their shorts and T-shirts. “Is it good to be back?”
“It’s weird,” Charlie confessed. “But I’m hanging in.”
“Have you seen Stanley yet?” Miller asked.
“Not today, but we had a meeting before I came back, and it’s…pretty much all good between us.”
“Cool,” Miller said, then he leaned closer to Charlie. “Do you think maybe it’s all over now?” he asked.
Charlie knew what he meant. He’d wondered the same thing at least a dozen times a day. It had now been four full weeks since Sarah’s suicide note was found, and none of them had heard a peep from the cops, Sasha, or CO. Charlie didn’t like to admit it to himself because it felt like jinxing the whole thing, but he truly felt like the worst had passed.
“I don’t know,” he said to Miller, “but I hope so.”
Miller nodded, agreeing, then slammed Charlie on the back as lovingly as possible. Both guys finished changing and went to close their gym locker doors. But just before they did so, there was a familiar ping, one from each of their backpacks. It was the sound of an incoming email.
“Should we—?”
“No. We’ll check it later.”
“But what if—?”
“No, Charlie. Let it go.”
Charlie knew that Miller was right, but couldn’t stop himself. The old paranoia came right back, and he grabbed his phone out of the front pocket of his backpack and flipped the screen on. He felt his face go completely blank.
“No…” Miller said.
Charlie couldn’t talk. He just turned the phone and held it up to Miller’s face. On the screen was a single email from Sasha. The subject line: It’s time for a little get-together.
Sasha
Sasha couldn’t be 100 percent sure that all four of them would show up after receiving her invite, but she was pretty confident. If she had received an email like the one she’d sent, she certainly would have done whatever the person asked.
Dear friends of Sarah Castro-Tanner,
Since you four were with her on the night she died, I thought it would be a nice idea for you to join me as we remember Sarah Castro-Tanner on December 23 at approximately 10:00 p.m. in the cemetery where she’s buried. I’ll be there in person with protection just in case you try to scare me like you did Sarah. And if you don’t show, I’ll start another chain of communication with the Englewood PD. Sarah’s death may have technically been a suicide, but we all know it wouldn’t have happened like it did if not for your little game. And I know that for a fact. So, do this one last thing for me, and I promise I’ll call it quits. Don’t, and I can’t promise anything.
Sasha
Sasha told two lies within that one simple paragraph, but she didn’t care. The first was that she would continue to torture them if they didn’t show up. She knew that there wasn’t much further she could go in threatening Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean. Her parents had confirmed with the EPD that they didn’t want to press bullying charges, so unless one of the four confessed to actually killing Sarah, the case would stay closed. Sasha didn’t think a confession was likely, so she had decided that this would be her last act with the whole ordeal.
The second lie was that she would be there in person to meet them. She had gone back and forth on that issue, but ultimately decided it was safer to stay back. She would watch everything go down from a safe distance. Finding some “security” she could bring into the fold felt like an unnecessary risk and she couldn’t trust herself not to lunge at one of the four of them if they were alone. Sasha also couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t hurt her in some way, especially because at least two of them would recognize her immediately—Amanda because she’d been working in her home for the past three months and Charlie because they had met that one day in the Hunters’ entryway.
Just to be safe, Sasha had quit the job with Amanda
’s sisters the week prior. She couldn’t imagine which laws she’d broken by taking the job in the first place, but it didn’t feel like a good idea to stay connected. The entire time she was at the Hunters’ she was Lexi Hara—her mother’s maiden name—so they were none the wiser. It seemed best for it to stay that way.
Sad as Sasha was to never confront the four people who saw her sister last with some kind of furious rant, she decided it was time for her to move on. Plus, what she planned for the little cemetery in honor of Sarah would serve as plenty of revenge even if she wasn’t there in person.
The idea came to Sasha after she sat down to watch the home videos of Sarah as a child. The creepy periodic table discovery left her feeling totally unsettled that night, and she thought some time with happy memories of her sister might help. It didn’t ease her tensions around the potential CO connection—the idea that Sarah might somehow be alive—but it did give her the idea for how to leave Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean with another memory they would never forget. She was going to make them see Sarah as an innocent, loving, happy child, and then she was going to leave them with a message from “Sarah” that would haunt them until the day they, too, died.
Sasha would set up a TV at Sarah’s gravesite and program it to start running the tapes when the group approached. It could all be done remotely, and it required very little setup. Yes, maybe they would run away the second they saw what was happening, but she had a feeling that they wouldn’t be able to turn away from the sound of what they thought was Sarah’s real voice with a few words for all of them. Sasha knew that she could sound enough like her sister to be convincing, and since it was now proven that Sarah had taken her own life—even if she did it during whatever game Amanda arranged—then she might have recorded something for them all to hear and left it with her little sister for safe keeping. Sasha wasn’t too concerned with those details. She knew that the recording would speak for itself.
It took Sasha a few tries to get Sarah’s voice just right, but she knew she’d finally nailed it when she listened back to the recording and felt chills run all over her body. She imagined that would be the least of what Charlie and his friends would feel.
“Hello Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean. It’s me, Sarah. Before you totally lose your minds, don’t worry. I’m not back from the dead to haunt you, technically. I made this recording before I died and gave it to someone I trust just in case you needed to hear it in the future—when I’m gone. If you’re hearing it now, then that means more details came out about my death, and you four still didn’t get in trouble.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen when I’m gone, and I can’t control that, but I want to make sure you know that someone else in the world knows exactly what happened between us all. They were watching. They have proof, and they’ll use that proof just when you least expect it to ruin your lives just like you ruined mine. Maybe they already have. If you’re hearing this message, then they probably have. I have to leave that part to them, but I wanted to make sure that I got to say one more thing to all of you.
“I forgive you. I know that you didn’t mean to do what you did, but that you couldn’t stop yourselves because you are weak, terrified, power-hungry people. You believe that you are more important than anything else in the world. You have no real souls. I guess it’s a good thing you found each other. But, unfortunately, the world is a much worse place with you four in it. See you on the other side, hopefully sooner rather than later.”
Sasha didn’t care that a lot of the fake message she wrote from Sarah was a lie, but they would never find out that she didn’t know all the details “Sarah” claimed. This would either make them scared enough to confess everything themselves or leave them crippled with fear for the rest of their lives. Either was fine with Sasha. She was finally ready to move on. There was just one final detail to figure out.
After this whole anniversary plan developed in her mind, Sasha came up with one more element to try to close the last confusing part of the case: she would invite CO, too. CO received a different email with a different lure, but it was equally enticing. If it was an old friend of Sarah’s, he or she would definitely show. If it was one of Charlie and his crew, there was a built-in way for Sasha to find out which—she had told CO to wear a specific color. And then there was option number three. Sasha had forced the last possibility out of her mind the minute she saw the back of the paper with that periodic table, but it kept popping back up when she least expected, haunting her. Sarah could not possibly be alive, she thought.
Sasha had wasted hours and hours of her time praying for Sarah to be alive after she went missing. Without a body, there was no real proof that Sarah was dead, despite what every single detective and expert said. They even conducted studies proving how quickly Sarah’s body could rush from the Navesink River into the Atlantic Highlands inlet and then out to the ocean where, apparently, a stronger-than-typical undertow could carry it out to sea within minutes. It had happened before, they said. There was no way of finding her, they said. It would cost thousands and thousands of dollars if the Castro-Tanners insisted, they explained. That was all her parents needed to hear. They did not even pursue a search.
For the first year after Sarah disappeared, Sasha wouldn’t let herself believe she was dead. That’s when she dove into hacking and set up the system to track conversation around Englewood. Someone had to know where Sarah went. Her sister may have had problems, but Sasha hated to think she was suicidal. But now the alternative seemed even more impossible to bear. If Sarah was alive, then why was she hiding from Lexi? After all they had been through together as little girls, why would she abandon her like that? Lexi wondered if she would ever have the answer to that question.
On December 23, she would.
Chapter 16
Laura
Laura was out shopping for the perfect dress to wear to the special dinner she had planned with Charlie over their little Saturday getaway when the email from “Sasha” arrived. She started to read it among the aisles of vintage dresses at her favorite shop but had to rush into one of the dressing rooms so that she could finish in privacy.
Dear CO,
I’m sorry it’s taken me awhile to get back to you. It’s been a crazy time, and I’ve been figuring out exactly what I want to do next. I was really invested in what happened to Sarah, but things have changed on my end, and now I’m ready to move on. But first, I’m planning just one more moment for four very specific people. I’ve decided I’m not going to do more after that, but I won’t feel right if I don’t leave them with one more reminder of what happened. I think that if you’re as interested in the story of Sarah as I am, you might want to see what I have planned. Go to St. Rose of Lima Cemetery on Saturday, December 23, at 10:30 p.m. I’m sure you know the significance of that date and time. Wear something purple anywhere on your body so I know it’s you. Purple was Sarah’s favorite color, but maybe you know that?
You can watch what I’ve put together from afar or, depending on who you really are, join in and do whatever you want with the group that shows up. My work ends after I press “play” that night.
But I’m not sure I believe this is the end for you, CO. I don’t know how or why it could be possible, but I can’t move on without telling you that I wonder if your CO stands for something scientific? Maybe the compound CO: carbon monoxide—the silent killer? If so, then I think that I know who you are and I desperately hope we can see each other soon. If not, then thank you for anything you did for Sarah. She was and remains the most important person in my life. I think of her when I wake up in the morning, when I close my eyes to go to sleep, and a thousand times in between. All I ever wanted was for her to be happy, and for her to know that she was loved very, very much by me.
–Sasha
Laura couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. Could it have been on the night she pretended to die? Plunging into that icy water had been more painful than she could have ever planned for, and it was h
ard to remember, but she thought there might have been tears of agony streaming down her face when she finally stepped out of the water and into the darkness, almost a mile downstream. It wasn’t as she recovered from surgery, even though that was an entirely different pain. By then Laura was too focused on the future to think about what she had decided to endure.
These were different tears, and Laura knew that she hadn’t experienced their variety in years and years. She didn’t like to cry. It seemed like such a waste of energy and time. But right now the thought of what she’d done to Lexi was too much to bear, especially now that she was almost certain Lexi knew she was alive. Laura didn’t know how it was possible or what had given her secret away, but this email made it clear. Lexi had figured out the CO secret. Now, of course, she wanted to see her older sister, and she was trying to tell her that she didn’t need to do what she had done. That was the part that really made Laura’s stomach knot up and her throat tighten.
But Lexi didn’t know that this was not about Sarah running away from her indifferent parents and the bullies that wronged her—it was about stopping the Charlies and Amandas of the world from continuing to use their power to do evil, evil things. She had to make sure that no other person was ever put in her shoes.
Laura couldn’t imagine Lexi understanding or accepting her choices. Even if that was possible, she couldn’t take the risk of anyone else finding out the truth. The plan had always involved cutting ties forever. That was the choice she made on the night she ended the first version of her life. This was more important than what she left behind—even more important than Lexi. She missed her now, but Lexi would be better off in the long run without Sarah, and without Laura.
