by Jessie Rosen
“I don’t know where to start,” he said.
“Well, we have plenty of time.”
Charlie wasn’t sure there was enough time in his life to make it through the list of questions running through his mind. How did you do it? When did you do it? Did it hurt? Who else knows? What was it like to lie to me? What do you want now? Are you certifiably insane? Right now, it felt safer to let her do the talking. From the look on her face she was obviously well prepared for this conversation. But then, she had almost two years to prep herself for this moment. Charlie had two hours.
“Why don’t I just tell you what happens next,” Laura said.
“To me?” Charlie asked. He was still not fully convinced that she wasn’t going to kill him in this cabin. Why else would she have done everything that she did if not to scare him and then end him? If this was a payback plan, then that would technically match what he had done to her, or so he thought.
“Yes,” Laura said, “I have a deal to propose.”
“Okay,” Charlie said.
“Let’s talk about the near future first. You and I will go on exactly as we are right now. You’ll be my boyfriend. We’ll be incredibly happy. I’ll help restore your popularity, and then we’ll bring in Amanda, Kit, and Miller again, because what is Englewood High without its original royal court back on top? Except this time, I’ll be the queen. You’ll make sure that happens by keeping Amanda in check, but I’ll help. I obviously know a thing or two about manipulating people. Bottom line, everything will go on like this weekend never happened. You won’t reveal who I really am.”
“Okay, but—”
“Oh, I’m not anywhere near done yet,” Laura said. “By the end of our senior year, you will confess one of three things to the authorities. Option one, that you killed Sarah Castro-Tanner. You can use all the details of what happened that night, but no one else is involved. Just you. You take the blame for everything and your friends get off the hook.”
“Holy shit Laur—I mean…Sarah…or…whatever. I can’t—” Charlie started. He was pacing even faster now.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “Don’t freak out until you’ve heard option two. You tell the cops that your coach is the one who slept with Amanda and is technically the father of the baby that no one even knows you had. In option two, you tell more of the truth and take less of the blame but you ruin Amanda’s life and her family’s lives and your coach and your soccer career and probably a few more things I can’t think of right now.”
Charlie was trying to take it all in, but his mind was too jumbled to really understand. It seemed to all boil down to one thing. “So in option one I lie and save Amanda and my friends, but in option two I tell the truth and save myself.”
“Excellent!” Laura said. “I was afraid I was going to have to really spell it out for you, but you’ve got it.”
“Why?” Charlie asked.
“It’s tricky,” Laura said, “but the way I see it you have two futures—do you want to be Charlie or do you want to be Amanda’s slave? I know she put you up to all of this, whether she did it openly or brainwashed you into believing you had to do everything you’ve done. I think you became evil, Charlie, but I don’t think you are truly evil inside, and I want to give you the chance to make all of this better and end the cycle of violence you created. You know, I was the victim of a sexual assault when I was almost exactly the same age as Amanda. It’s a terrible thing and it needs to be stopped. This will help.”
“But why not make me confess both things?” he asked.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “That’s option three. Both. Because in the first two scenarios, I’ll be sticking around your life just to check in and see how you’re doing. Maybe we’ll date for a little longer? I’m not sure how I’ll feel after senior year, but I’ll reserve the option to stick around because I’ll still have the ability to blackmail you for the rest of your life; you’ll still have a secret. But if you take the third option, then it’s all out there. I have nothing else to hold over your head. You’ll be free.”
“And locked up for the rest of my life.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But at least you won’t have to wonder anymore. No more VidBits, texts, or emails. No more fear.”
“Wait. Was that all you?!” Charlie asked.
“Mostly. I recorded everything on the night that you killed me, but I had some unexpected help along the way. That will have to stay my secret, though.”
Charlie couldn’t get over how crazy Laura sounded, but at the same time it all made sense. He had a thousand more questions, but he realized that it was all a waste of time. He was at her whim. She owned him. Now the only words running through his mind were you’re trapped, you’re trapped, you’re trapped. Then a realization hit.
“What if I just tell them you’re alive, and crazy?” Charlie asked. Laura raised an eyebrow. She looked surprised by the question. “Yeah,” he continued, gaining confidence. “I’ll tell them you slipped out of my hands. You were suicidal—they already know that from your note—and I found you that night and tried to help you. It’s my word against yours, and you’re a girl who pretended to be dead, then built herself a brand-new face. There’s no way they’ll believe you. Should we call that option four?”
Laura smiled. The brief look of shock on her face was gone, which made the pit in Charlie’s stomach return.
“You’re smart, Charlie,” she said. “It’s such a shame. You would have made a fantastic doctor. I figured that outing me would occur to you, so I came up with a way to protect myself. In the far back corner of your mom’s bedside table is a note from you. It was written on your computer and printed at your house, with your paper. In it you confess to your mom that you killed Sarah Castro-Tanner. And if it’s revealed that your mother had that note when this investigation was reopened—which she did because I put it there over one month ago—then she becomes an accessory to a crime. Reveal my secret, and I’ll make sure she and the police find that note.”
Charlie felt his body heat up. Any fear of Laura was replaced by complete and total rage. She could do this to him—he deserved it—but his mother’s life was not going to be ruined in the process.
“You’re lying,” he shot back. Laura responded by walking over to the couch, reaching into the purse she brought to the restaurant and pulling out a cellphone—his cellphone. Charlie watched as she tapped around. “[email protected] right?” she said. Then without waiting for a response, she started to type. “Hey, Mom. I’m emailing you because this is too hard to talk about in person. I put something in your room that we need to talk about. Can you call me as soon as you get this?” Laura finished then held the phone out so that Charlie could see the screen. Every word she typed was there, including his mom’s email address.
“I’ll tell her it’s a lie! I’ll tell her you’re a freak! She’ll believe me any day over you. She’s my mother!”” Charlie screamed, then all his anger boiled up, his body took control, and he lunged directly at Laura. Charlie didn’t know if he was trying to get the phone away from her or if he wanted to hurt her, but it didn’t matter. Laura broke out of the quick hold he got on her shoulders, and Charlie watched as she pressed “send.”
“Now do you think I’m lying?” Laura asked as she watched Charlie’s body start to heave. He was slipping into another panic attack. “Don’t look so upset,” Laura said. “The way I see it, you have the chance to serve as an example to all the people out there thinking of making the same kind of mistakes you made. Think of the lives you could save. I think about that all the time. It’s the reason why I did what I did to myself.”
Charlie tried to sit down, but he didn’t have enough control over his body. He just fell onto the floor instead. Within seconds he started to heave, throwing up all over the living room floor. Laura grabbed a roll of paper towels off the kitchen counter and dropped it onto the floor next to Charlie. “Think about it. We could both be heroes,” she said before she turned and st
arted to walk off into the back bedroom.
“My mom,” Charlie called out as the room continued to spin.
“Relax,” Laura said, not even bothering to turn around. “I hit unsend on the email while you were writhing around on the floor. You’re safe, for now.”
Sasha
Sasha couldn’t let the note from Sarah go. She wanted to respect her sister’s wishes; clearly she’d put a lot of time and effort into hiding from the entire world for over two years. Whatever Charlie and his friends did to her must have been pretty insane for her to essentially erase herself from life. She did not want to make things any harder for Sarah given everything she’d been through, but she could not help the fact that she was angry.
Why couldn’t Sarah say more, and what more was there to say? Was she in danger? It didn’t seem so from the way she was deliberately stalking Charlie as CO. Did she get hurt and have to go away for some legitimate reason? Sasha couldn’t figure out what might qualify. Maybe she was embarrassed or ashamed of something and trying to protect herself or her family? Again, what would make that true? The only rationale Sasha could come up with was that Sarah had vanished on purpose. She pretended to kill herself, and she did it to get revenge on Charlie and his friends.
That made Sasha livid.
Didn’t Sarah think about how painful it had been for their entire family after she pretended to die? How could she leave Sasha alone with their parents? And what about what this had done to Charlie, Amanda, Kit, and Sean? They were by no means innocent, but their lives were ruined because they thought that they were murderers. Could Sarah be so vengeful that she truly did not care?
Sasha wanted to believe that there were legitimate reasons behind everything that Sarah did, but as long as her sister stayed hidden and silent, there would only be guesses. And she had not spent two years, countless dollars, and every ounce of her energy uncovering the mystery of her sister’s death to have Sarah herself keep the answer a secret. Sasha had come to the conclusion that she didn’t care if Sarah was unwilling to reveal the truth; she was going to find it one way or another.
“I have a totally new project for you,” she typed to Syke on the anniversary of her sister’s fake death. “It involves tracking an old name in a different way. We need to follow the movements of Laura Rivers for the entire year before she arrived at Englewood High.”
Syke typed back after a few seconds. “The girl dating that Charlie guy?” he asked. “Why do we care about her?”
“Can you keep a secret?” Sasha responded.
“That’s what I do for a living,” Syke said.
“It’s because she’s my sister.”
Chapter 18
January 4
Laura
Laura pulled into the EHS senior parking lot just after 8:00 a.m. It was the first day back after winter break, and she was ready to start the second semester of senior year in a very different way.
This time Laura wasn’t the new girl anymore and she welcomed not having to walk in on a clean slate. It was time to focus her energy on the pleasure of being one of, if not the most popular girl in school. Now she could do what she wanted, when she wanted, with whomever she chose. She was the Queen Bee that the meek girls feared, only she wouldn’t be nearly as scary as the Amandas of the world. Laura knew that high school was a tricky series of hoops she had to jump through before she could finally live on her own, and now she was ready to navigate them with complete ease. High school is finally mine, she realized. Now I can make the rules that govern everyone else’s lives.
She stepped out of her convertible and glanced around at the other cars in the student parking lot. This time she didn’t have to look to find the only other topless car in the lot. There was only hers.
“Thanks for the ride,” Charlie said awkwardly as he closed the passenger side door behind him. “See you in English.”
“Aren’t we going to walk in together?” Laura asked.
“I have to run to see Hayden about a student council thing,” Charlie said, clearly lying. It only took one pointed look from her to change his mind. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not trying to avoid being with you or anything.”
“Yes, you are,” Laura said. “This will take some time to get used to, but you will. Starting today.”
Across the parking lot she caught the glance of two girls getting out of a white Toyota Camry. Laura smiled in their direction, and they waved back.
“Welcome back, hot stuff!” one shouted.
“It’s nice to see you two hopping out of the same car!” the other added.
Laura smiled to herself as she remembered a very similar moment almost five months ago. They were the same girls who’d greeted her with that scared look on her first day at Englewood, she now realized. My, how things have changed. This time Laura glanced back at the two gorgeous brunettes as she walked toward the double-steel doors of EHS with Charlie on her arm. Once again, she saw the genuine feeling behind their eyes, only this time it was very, very different. They were jealous.
I have exactly one hundred seventy-eight more days of stares like that to look forward to, she thought as she leaned over and gave Charlie a surprise peck on the cheek, and then I get an even bigger gift: Charlie’s final decision on what he’s going to confess.
Charlie
Charlie was able to pry Laura off his arm long enough to find Amanda, Kit, and Miller for a quick check in before English. They didn’t see each other once over the break. Charlie had finally apologized for disappearing the night they were originally supposed to meet CO. He’d come up with an excuse about his mother that he suspected they didn’t believe, and then made himself unavailable for the next ten days. He was too worried that he wouldn’t be able to be around them without confessing everything that happened in Beacon with Laura. He pretended that he was with his mom on a last-minute ski trip for a chunk of the time, but he was pretty sure that at least Amanda was onto that lie, too. Seeing her in person by Kit’s locker confirmed that he was right.
“You’re alive,” she said. “I wasn’t so sure.”
“Don’t joke about that,” he said.
“Why?” Kit asked. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Nothing,” Charlie said. “It’s just a weird thing to say. Hey, can we please go back to the old lunch table today? I can’t eat in Coach’s office anymore, and I miss watching Miller down two subs in two minutes for absolutely no reason.”
Miller shoved him in the arm. “If you want to spend time with me how ‘bout picking us up for school? What’s this driving with Laura bullshit? You spend all the rest of your time with her, from what Kit says. Let us have the ride. It’s tradition.”
“You know how it is with girls,” Charlie said, trying to divert the conversation away from anything Laura-related. Unfortunately, the tactic didn’t work.
“So it’s true?” Amanda asked. “You’re fully with her?” Charlie nodded. The look on Amanda’s face wasn’t anger or disgust; it was legitimate confusion. “What is it about her, Charlie? It’s like she has some kind of spell over you.”
An awkward, too-loud, nervous laugh escaped from Charlie’s mouth, and all three of his friends looked at him like he was losing his mind. This is going to be impossible, Charlie thought.
“I just really like her,” he finally said. “And I promise you guys will, too, once you get to know her. She’s a really…” Charlie didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
“Hello? Charlie? Really what?” Kit asked after enough silent seconds.
“Um, sorry, I lost my train of thought. Um…she’s a really powerful person.”
There would be hundreds of thousands of lies between now and the end of the six months of misery he had to endure before their high school graduation. If he could tell some version of the truth from time to time, he would.
Minutes later, Charlie walked into semester two of O’Malley’s AP English class.
Charlie looked around the room just like he had on that f
irst day of senior year. This time no one looked directly back at him. He was still climbing his way back from being a total social pariah.
“Mr. Sanders, what are you doing standing in the doorway?” Ms. O’Malley asked, interrupting his frozen moment. “Go sit in your spot behind Miss Rivers.”
The girl the world now knew as Laura Rivers was beaming at him. Charlie wondered if he would ever be able to look at her and not see Sarah’s face. Now that he knew, he couldn’t understand how everyone in the room didn’t see the same thing. It was like he existed inside a completely different universe—the true one. Everyone else was living the lie that Sarah Castro-Tanner created, and now Charlie was like her henchman. He wondered how long he could stand it before he completely snapped. Would he make it the full year and a half? And even if he did, what was the point? It was just delaying the inevitable destruction of confessing one or both of the things Laura had hanging over his head.
Charlie had done the math just that morning. This was day one as the real boyfriend of a completely fake girl. He had exactly one hundred seventy-eight more days to make a decision. Something told him that ten thousand seventy-eight wouldn’t be enough.
Sasha
It had been thirteen days since Sasha started tracking using her brand-new system, but so far there was nothing worth exploring. She still checked in on the feed four times a day, every day. Something was going to pop up, just like it had before. She had worked too hard for it to fail.
Sasha hadn’t been sure of her goal in tracking Sarah’s new persona, but after a week, she and Syke developed a plan: if they could find something out about Laura that Sarah wanted to protect desperately enough, Sasha would make contact again. And if it was a good enough piece of information, Sasha might just be able to get her to meet in person.
They started with the idea of blackmailing Sarah by going through Charlie or one of his friends, but it felt too risky given how closely the cops had been involved with that group just a few weeks prior. Sasha couldn’t be sure that they weren’t still tracking the four. The EPD’s firewall had been improved since she first hacked into their system in October. Now it was too tricky to see what they were working on in regards to the case, if anything.
