You’re Next

by Kylie Schachte

  My arm coils tight with the urge to slap him.

  I step back, away from the mad, violent impulse. “We might as well go if you’re not going to be helpful.”

  “Look at this place.” He gestures back into the alley. “See that?” He points to an opening on the right side, about halfway between the two street entrances. “They’re all interconnected, these little alleys. This one feeds into the next and the next. Prime real estate for pickpockets. People think they’re shortcuts, or they come out here to empty their trash, and some kid in a hoodie can snag their wallet and run off without ever getting spotted on the road. A perfect getaway path, made for criminals.”

  I stare at the opening. I didn’t think much of it before. I take a few steps forward to see where it leads. It’s another alley, nearly identical to the first.

  I keep walking. Down the next alley there’s another turn, and another. They all feed into each other, just like he said.

  Jogging footsteps behind me. “What is it?” VT asks. I ignore him.

  My pace picks up, excitement itching in the soles of my feet, until I’m practically running.

  He’s right. It’s the perfect getaway route.

  I turn left and come up short at a dead end. VT is a few paces behind me, but he keeps his mouth shut.

  The other end of the alley feeds into the street, where cars and taxis blur past. I look out onto the road. We’re fewer than ten blocks from the crime scene, but this is already a more populated part of town. A woman with tall boots and big headphones barely glances my way as she walks by.

  The killer must have come through here. I have no way to know that for sure without a witness, but they’d want to stay off the streets for as long as possible. Which means that just a few nights ago, Ava’s murderer might have been standing in this exact spot.

  There’s a dumpster pushed against one wall. I finger the plastic lid, testing it. It’s not chained.

  VT can’t keep quiet any longer. “Oh, what now?”

  I flip the top up, brace my hands on either side, and jump into the dumpster.

  VT blinks at me. “You know, you are not who I thought you would be.”

  I survey the garbage. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m pissed, and I have to do something. The bags shift beneath my feet, hissing out putrid clouds of trash gas. I teeter on the unsteady surface.

  I start to open one bag, then pause to pull on the black leather gloves I keep in my backpack. It’s unlikely that there’s anything in here, but I don’t want to contaminate any evidence with my prints.

  “Come on, Cherry, get out of there. You’re being ridiculous.” VT extends his hand to help me down. I ignore him.

  Inside the first bag is what looks like the contents of a kitchen trash can, all moldy food and takeout containers. The smell is delightful. I tie the knot off and set it to the side. The next one is more of the same.

  VT keeps up the running commentary as I sort, but the whole world has fallen away now that I have a job. Some unidentifiable orange fluid leaks out of one bag, staining the sleeve of my coat, but I don’t care. I must look like a manic demon, tossing garbage this way and that. My scalp is sweaty and my hair sticks to my face. I am high on trash fumes.

  I open another bag. This one holds a bunch of papers. I reach inside and pull a few out. Xeroxes, all kind of faded and wobbly. The rejects. I flip through. They’re flyers, all the same: DORSEY FOR SENATE.

  My vision sharpens.

  I interrupt VT. “Look out on the street for me. What kinds of businesses are on either side of us?”

  “Why?”

  “Do it!” There’s a serrated edge to my voice that makes him fall quiet. VT walks out to the sidewalk and looks around. There’s a flicker of recognition in his eyes, like he spotted something familiar, but then it’s gone.

  He comes back. “On our right”—he points with his thumb—“we have FedEx and Thai food. And left”—he points in the other direction, toward the wall that the dumpster is pushed up against—“a laundromat and the Dorsey for Senate campaign headquarters.”

  I suck in a breath. Congressman James Dorsey. Elle Dorsey’s dad. He’s the congressional representative for Hartsdale and part of Whitley, but he’s running for a Senate seat this year. I am standing in his dumpster.

  “What is it?” VT steps closer.

  I hand him the stack of flyers without a word.

  He glances through them, and there’s that flicker of familiarity again, but then he tosses the papers back into the dumpster.

  “So what? Some local politician has a campaign office a few blocks from the site of a murder? Yeah, too strange to be a coincidence.”

  He’s right, of course. There’s nothing inherently suspicious about any of this. But didn’t Ava have one of his flyers in her papers? Then again, she used to do that kind of thing all the time—canvass, volunteer at campaign events.

  I look down. There’s garbage juice leaking on my sneakers. What the hell am I doing? It’s a dumpster in the middle of the city. Even assuming the killer did come through here, they what? Paused for a sec to throw out their Big Gulp? I need to get it together.

  I’m ready to not be standing in garbage anymore. I kick the bag under my feet out of the way so I can jump out.

  That’s when I see it: a wallet, tucked underneath all the garbage bags. It’s the long, skinny kind, made of mint-green leather.

  VT peers over the edge. His eyebrows shoot up when he spots the wallet. Standing on my mountain of trash, I tower over him a little, and when we make eye contact there’s something curious in his expression.

  I pick up the wallet. Its gold zipper is tarnished with something purple and sticky. Inside, everything is shoved in haphazardly, wherever it will fit.

  There’s a thick wad of cash. I count it out: nearly a thousand dollars. Who would throw out this much money?

  Frowning, I look through the other contents. A punch card from a local coffee shop. A bus pass.

  A driver’s license.

  I nearly drop everything.

  Ava’s face smiles up at me from her ID photo. It’s a pretty good shot, not sullen and angsty like my own. She clearly dressed up to have her picture taken, red lipstick and all.

  My heart pounds. This is it. My proof that I’m not some crazy, paranoid freak.

  VT’s waiting for answers. I turn the ID so he can see it.

  “That’s the girl,” he says slowly.

  When I can breathe again, I say, “So how come her mugger didn’t care about all this cash?”

  The world is incredibly bright, like the sun came out. I’m standing in a literal dumpster, leftover Thai food pooling around my feet, but I have one of those rare feelings where you know you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. It’s not happiness, but rightness.

  VT looks up at me again. There’s a deep crease between his eyebrows. He nods once to himself like he’s made a decision, only I don’t know what about.

  “How do you feel about meatball subs?” he asks.

  Not where I thought this was going. “Um, good?”

  “Let’s eat. We have some stuff to talk about.”

  This time, I take VT’s offered hand and hop out of the dumpster. My balance wobbles a bit on the landing, and for a second we’re startlingly close.

  He doesn’t let go of my hand. My eyes fall on the perfect Cupid’s bow of his mouth. I am holding my dead ex-almost-girlfriend’s wallet in my other hand. Still, he doesn’t let go.

  Then: “You smell delightful, Cherry.”

  I jerk my hand away. “Well, one of us had to get our hands dirty. If it were up to you, we’d be nowhere with nothing right now.”

  VT leads the way to some sandwich shop he knows. I keep at least a foot of distance between us as we walk.

  I was really starting to doubt myself, thinking maybe the police had it right after all and I was seeing ghosts. Finding Ava’s wallet confirms what I’ve thought all along: someone murdered her, then set
it up to look like she was mugged. So what’s the real reason they killed her?

  Valentine bumps me with his shoulder. “Stop thinking about it. You need food, time to think. It’s not going to make sense yet.”

  It’s like he’s a totally different guy from the one who got in a screaming match with me in the alley.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. “Why are you being all nice now?”

  He slips a chummy arm around my shoulder. “Are you always this suspicious of everyone? Can’t a guy take his girl out for lunch?”

  I poke him in the side hard enough that he’s forced to let go. “Let’s be perfectly clear: this is not a date. You need my permission for this to be a date.” He holds his hands up in defense but backs off. I straighten the collar of my coat where he rumpled it.

  After collecting our sandwiches from some greasy hole-in-the-wall, VT leads me to a park a few blocks over. It’s one of those sunny, early spring afternoons where you can almost convince yourself the warmth is here to stay, even though you know it could snow again tomorrow.

  We sit on the grass near a big tree. As usual, finding a big lead like the wallet has me ravenous, and for a few minutes I can ignore the intense way VT is still staring at me while I scarf down the most delicious meatball parm of my life.

  Until he sets his sandwich down and leans back on his hands. “Tell me why.”

  “Why what?” I ask, but my appetite has disappeared. I put my sandwich down, too.

  “You know what.”

  I pick at a clump of grass. “I thought you knew me so well. ‘Some dark tale of woe,’ remember?”

  He narrows his eyes. “That’s it, then? A friend of yours got hurt? Killed?”

  The leftover taste of marinara sauce turns sour on my tongue. I haven’t talked about Lucy, not really, in about two years. Cass used to try, but I developed this nasty habit of breaking whatever I was holding, and eventually she stopped.

  With everything going on right now, I’m not sure how much longer I can outrun my past. And there’s something about VT. I don’t really know him at all, but I have this weird feeling our demons are a matching set.

  I’m not sure if that makes me trust him more, or less.

  I chew my lip. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

  He takes his time to think it over, like it’s a big decision for him, too. He nods once.

  Okay, then. I guess we’re doing this. It’s a bit like skydiving, not that I’ve ever been. You close your eyes and jump.

  I keep my eyes on the ground. It’s easier if I don’t look at him, but it still takes me a while to make the words come out.

  “I used to be a runner. Around two years ago, there was this heat wave. I was doing my runs early, before it got too hot. The sun was barely up, but it must have been ninety degrees that morning.”

  Something dark swirls in my gut, and I swallow a few times. “It was the smell I noticed first. Blood. I came around a bend in the trail, and there was this red thing in the middle of the path.” I close my eyes. I was soaked with sweat, my heart pounding from the run, then from terror. “It took me a minute to realize it was a person. A girl, maybe, but what he’d done to her face…” I breathe through my nose and look at the sky. “I didn’t find out until later, when the police arrived: I knew her. Her name was Lucy MacDonald.”

  Valentine inhales. He remembers the name. Lucy was all over the news for a time.

  I pluck a blade of grass from the ground and tie it into a knot. “You were wrong about one thing—she wasn’t a friend. Lucy was a bully. Everyone hated her. She didn’t deserve what happened to her, though.” My voice cracks.

  I toss my blade of grass aside. “Anyway, maybe you know the rest, but the press turned on Lucy. She’d been dating this rich older guy in New York City. Matt Caine.” I hate that even now, more than two years later, I still tremble saying his name. “Her parents thought she was working as a junior leader at a summer youth program, but she was actually clubbing and taking a bunch of Molly with this guy.

  “Caine’s lawyers painted this picture of Lucy as some unhinged stalker. They leaked these horrible photos of her high and hooking up with him and his friends. It became this whole slut-shaming, ‘Where were the parents?,’ ‘She should have been more careful’ victim-blaming situation. It made me so angry.”

  I never lost it, that rage. I don’t know if I ever will. Even talking about it now, I feel like my bones could shake apart with fury.

  That was the thing about Lucy. The sight of her body changed me forever, but that’s not what broke me. It was the way everyone turned their backs, how easily they could convince themselves that Lucy deserved it, that they would never make such bad decisions.

  I glance up. Valentine’s looking at me like he knows that kind of anger, too.

  My voice is a bit stronger now. “I couldn’t drop it. The more I looked, the more I was convinced about Caine, but then I turned on the news one day and he was walking out of the Whitley police precinct. Smiling.” A nerve pulses in my jaw. “That was when I knew: it didn’t matter that he’d bashed her face in. It didn’t matter that the police had smelled all that blood, too. Nobody was going to do anything about it.”

  I pick at a hangnail until it bleeds. “I didn’t really know what I was doing, though. I got arrested breaking into his apartment.”

  “You what?” Valentine interrupts for the first time.

  “He was supposed to be on vacation. It was stupid. I was stupid.” I keep peeling the strip of skin from my cuticle. The tiny pain is terrible, but it’s not as bad as my memories. “He opened the door right as I was digging through his desk.” I bite down on the inside of my cheek. “He didn’t even seem surprised. I couldn’t move. He was blocking the door, and I kept thinking: Run. Run. Run! But I froze.”

  I feel at once tuned in to the world around me and very far away. I can hear Valentine’s breathing and a truck passing on the road. I can smell Matt Caine’s aftershave.

  I still remember every heartbeat of that moment. Matt Caine walked closer, and I didn’t move. His eyes ran up and down my body. He talked about Lucy. He never came right out and said it, but he wanted me to know that he’d been the one to crush her face like that. He reached out, and I still didn’t move. He patted me on the shoulder. I was wearing a tank top. He touched my bare skin, soft like a caress, and the spell broke. I ran.

  “I got around him,” I tell Valentine. “He didn’t chase me. I could hear him laughing as I ran out the door. I was halfway across the city before I’d even blinked. The cops picked me up somewhere on the Lower East Side. Matt Caine had reported a break-in.”

  Valentine leans toward me, his eyes dark.

  I’m drained. It’s an effort to get the rest out. “It all kind of blew up at that point. I had to go to court. Caine took out a restraining order. All that stuff is going on my college application one day.” I try a laugh, but it comes out flat. “My mom left. It was supposedly a work thing, but we all knew the truth—she just couldn’t handle me anymore. And my grandfather made me drop Lucy’s case. Once I got arrested, he said that was it. If I wanted to do this sort of thing, I couldn’t afford to be a child about it, and it was childish to think I was going to get Caine at that point.

  “But people at school had heard what I did, and they started coming to me with cases.” I pluck another piece of grass from the earth and curl it around my fingertip. “Nothing like this, though. Not since Lucy.”

  I tie my blade of grass in a pretty little bow and toss it aside. Any second now, he’ll tell me I’m crazy, that I need to move on with my life. Learn to deal. That’s what everyone else thinks, after all. That’s what the fear in my grandfather’s eyes was about this morning. Why Cass has been skeptical about my theories. I know they both think I’m reliving Lucy.

  He takes a deep breath and says, “All right, then. What story do you want? The big one?”

  Thank you, weird boy I just met.

  I shrug. “I gave you
mine—seems fair.”

  He looks away. Sighs. Rolls his shoulders back. Clenches and unclenches his jaw. All the classics.

  He lets out a short, bitter laugh. “You know, I really couldn’t believe it when you guessed. I mean, I knew you were good right off the bat. You did your whole Sherlock bit, guessing at my life, half right here, half wrong there, and then you threw it in at the end, like a joke. I almost bit off my own tongue.”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about. I wait.

  He looks straight at me with defiant eyes. “Little over a year ago, I was a freshman at Juilliard. Dance program.”

  I’m stunned. The dancer thing was a joke.

  He leans back on his palms and scowls at the sky. “You were close enough about dear old Dad. I’ll spare you the details. Mean to me, to my sister. Absolutely vicious to my mother. And who was I to defend them? A weakling, like you said.”

  I didn’t say that, not exactly, but my heart aches with guilt anyway.

  He sniffs and picks at a hole in the knee of his jeans. “Annabelle protected me, like a good sister should. She babysat to pay for my dance lessons so he’d never have to know. ’Course he found out and beat us both, but she wouldn’t let me quit. He’d find out and fly into one of his rages. Drink, forget, find out all over again, whale on us.

  “But the look on Annabelle’s face when I got the letter from Juilliard. It was like nothing I’d ever felt, seeing her smile like that. Almost made it worth it. All the bruises. All the broken bones.

  “So I left, and for about a second, I was happy. I was out. Dancing wasn’t this dark, shameful thing anymore. I remember the feeling of leaping onstage. Straight up in the air. It’s joy, you know? To throw yourself into the sky like that. Exultation. People yelling for you. Clapping.” With closed eyes, he tilts his face into the sun, and I can almost see what he must have looked like airborne. Free.

  He opens his eyes. “Didn’t go home much, not even for Annie. He was half dead at that point, but it didn’t matter. Couldn’t bear to go back to that rotting hole. Didn’t think about how hard it was for her. After all he’d done to them, they had to change his sheets, spoon his food, wipe his ass. How that must have killed her. How angry she must have been. I never thought about any of that.