You’re Next

by Kylie Schachte

  My heart rattles at the bars of its cage. “It’s not your fault,” I tell him, even though I know from experience it’s a meaningless thing to say. It never makes you feel better to hear.

  “Know that.” He gives me a bitter smile and stubs out his cigarette on the railing. “Still, makes me think. Been pushing everybody away for so long, but it hasn’t made me any better.”

  That pulling feeling hooks itself around my solar plexus. Like inertia, like physics—undeniable—but I plant my feet against it.

  Valentine must feel it, too, because he takes one step toward me, then another. I’m close enough to see the gold flecks in his brown eyes, the way the light catches on his eyelashes.

  Valentine curves his hand around my cheek. His fingers span my jaw and graze the skin of my neck, the space behind my ear. My eyes drift shut. I am utterly, perfectly still, every atom in my body vibrating with the strain of not touching him.

  He kisses me, and it’s different this time. Less desperate. A slow, liquid slide.

  His body molds around mine until there is no negative space. I slip my hands under the back hem of his shirt and across the bare skin of his back. I can feel the scrape of his goose bumps under the pads of my fingers.

  Valentine groans low in his throat, and my limbs turn to warm honey, lit golden in the fading sun. It is gentle and burning and sweet and ferocious, and maybe this time we don’t have to stop.

  I pull back slightly but don’t let go. Valentine presses his forehead to mine. I can feel the rise and fall of his chest against my own.

  “I can’t,” I say against his cheek. His skin smells like smoke and soap. I want to go back to kissing him. I want to kiss him everywhere.

  He steps back, and there’s a slight resistance, like two magnets being pulled apart.

  The golden afternoon has disappeared, and the whole world has gone the dusty purple-gray of twilight.

  The warm, languid feeling is gone, and I’m freezing cold. “I’m sorry, I care about you—”

  “Don’t.” He cuts me off with a sad smile. “The trust thing, I get it.”

  I want to trust him.

  After a few seconds, Valentine sighs. “C’mon, Cherry. It’s getting dark. Don’t want your old man to worry.” He turns and walks back up the path, but I don’t follow.

  At the mention of my grandfather, it hits me all over again. When I get home, Olive will fill me in on her research. Gramps will make dinner. Cass will call later to talk about her date. My mother left me, but I am not alone.

  Valentine will go back to his dark apartment with one kitchen chair.

  I could invite him home with me. Let him into my life. What I said before was true: I do care about him. But every inch I let him draw closer makes it that much harder to push him away.

  Valentine’s back disappears into the dark. The distance between us is agonizing once more.

  Wanting him has never been the problem. But my trust is such a fragile, brittle thing, and Valentine’s been alone for so long his heart has atrophied, and the combination of the two makes it all impossible.

  Back home, I shed my stuff in my room. My hand stills on the strap of my backpack. I never did anything with those photos. I pull out both sets now.

  Olive, staring out the car window on her way home from ballet.

  She’s in her room right now. I can hear her presence through the wall we share. Computer keys clacking. A drawer opens and shuts.

  I could tell her. I could do it right now.

  Footsteps from Olive’s room. Her bedroom door opens.

  I shove the photos in one of my dresser drawers. I slam it shut as she pops her head in.

  “How’d it go?” she asks.

  “Good! Fine!” I sound a bit breathless.

  “You okay?” She frowns.

  I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “Um, yeah. Weird emotional stuff. Lot to think about. Did you find anything while I was gone?”

  “Nothing important. We’ll keep digging, don’t worry.”

  On an impulse, I pull her into a hug. “You know I love you, right?”

  She laughs and pushes at my shoulder. “Yeah, but, like, don’t be weird about it.”

  She goes back to her room, leaving me alone again. I stare at my dresser drawer.

  I’ll tell them. I will. I have to.

  Not tonight.

  The front entrance to the school looms overhead like a gaping cinder-block mouth. I don’t want to be here on pretty much any given day, but that’s especially true today. Those photos have me jumpy, looking over my shoulder so often my neck is starting to crick. Last night, after everyone else went to bed, I checked the cameras I installed around the house after I received the newspaper clippings, but there was nothing. The photos must have been taken before I set them up.

  As we walk up the steps, Cass continues the recap of her meetup with Elliot last night, down to every facial expression and ambiguous punctuation usage.

  I try to focus. “What did he think of the song you wrote?”

  “He was so nice. I mean, I barely know what I’m doing, and he’s been writing music for ages, so I was really nervous.”

  “Your writing is good,” I insist. “It doesn’t matter that it’s new.”

  She smiles. “That’s what he said. He was so encouraging and supportive, and he had all these really good suggestions, but it wasn’t, like, patronizing or mansplainy or anything, you know? Ugh, he’s perfect.”

  “How annoying is that?”

  “Seriously, how dare he?”

  I have never seen Cass this hopeful and excited. She’s the type of person who forms instant crushes on half the people she meets—the checkout guy at the grocery store, the kid in her math class who sometimes wears a FUTURE IS FEMALE T-shirt, the hot mailman. But I can tell she’s really into this guy.

  As we push through the front doors to the school, my phone buzzes. It’s a number I don’t recognize: Bathroom by the auditorium, 3rd stall. Come alone—E

  Cass raises her eyebrows. “Wow, Elle’s really gotten into this whole covert ops thing, hasn’t she?”

  I laugh. “Maybe we should get her one of those funny glasses-and-mustache disguises.”

  “As long as it’s made by Dior,” Cass agrees. “You want me to come with you?”

  “Nah, I think I can handle Elle Dorsey. I don’t want to spook her.”

  “Okay, see you in English.” We part ways.

  There’s an OUT OF ORDER sign pasted to the door of the bathroom. Cass wasn’t kidding. Elle really does fancy herself a baby spy.

  She’s waiting for me inside. One hand clutches the strap of her oversize cream-colored purse like there’s something important inside.

  “Took you long enough,” she says, even though she texted me less than two minutes ago. It’s like she rehearsed how this scene would go after watching too many noir films.

  “What do you have?”

  She chews her glossy pink lip. “I went through my dad’s office last night,” she explains. “I didn’t know what to look for, but I found this.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a sheaf of papers. She hesitates for a fraction of a second before she hands them over to me.

  I flick through them quickly. Bank statements. Lots of them.

  “I don’t know if it’s useful,” she says, “but I figured you wouldn’t be able to get this kind of stuff from anyone else.”

  “No, this is good,” I tell her without looking up. The transaction amounts are all large, thousands of dollars apiece.

  My eyes land on the account holder’s name at the top of the page, and the back of my neck tingles. James Dorsey is not the name associated with this account. It’s registered to EVAH LLC.

  The same company that was on the Progress Together documents.

  I point to the weird combination of letters. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Her mouth tightens. “Yes, unfortunately. They’re initials. Mine and my mother’s: Elle Victoria and Andre
a Helene. That asshole is totally embezzling money or something, and he has the balls to put my name on it.”

  Elle looks away, and I could swear she’s blinking back tears.

  “I thought there was something wrong with me,” she says. She wraps her arms around herself, like she’s trying to hold it all in. “I’ve worked so hard to impress him, and it’s never been enough. But apparently, all this time I’ve been trying to get the approval of a murderer.”

  She turns back to me, and now there’s no doubt about the tears glistening in her dark eyes. “Do you want to know the really fucked up thing, Flora? There’s a part of me that still wants it. He’s my dad, you know? I could take these documents to him and tell him that I figured it out. That I know what he’s up to. And wouldn’t he think I was so fucking clever? Wouldn’t he finally have to respect me then?” She shakes her head with disgust, the sadness in her eyes evaporating until all that’s left is fiery rage. “Do me a favor, Flora? Nail him. Make sure he rots in prison. I’m done being his daughter.”

  I don’t like Elle. But her life would be so much easier if she had chosen to stay oblivious. I have to respect her for making this choice.

  “Thank you,” I tell her sincerely. “This could make a huge difference. Can I be in touch if I have any follow-up questions?”

  “Text me. I don’t want anyone to see me talking to you.”

  Just when I was starting to not hate her.

  Elle exits the stall. She checks herself once in the mirror before she leaves the bathroom. For a second, I see another tiny glimmer of vulnerability in her expression, but then she runs a finger under her bottom lip, fixing her lip gloss, and she’s Ruthless Elle again. Her boots click on the tile as she walks out the bathroom door.

  I look at the documents again. Dorsey is using an anonymous LLC to make contributions to his own campaign. That’s big. Didn’t Cass say something about this? That if he wanted to launder the money from the Basement into his campaign accounts, this is how he would do it? We still have to prove that that’s where the money came from, though.

  I text pictures of the bank statements to Gramps and Olive: EVAH LLC is Dorsey’s. Is there a way to figure out where the money originates?

  Olive texts me back within seconds: Computer lab next period, I’ll look into it

  Gramps follows right after: I will get in touch with my sources.

  God, I love them both.

  I haven’t totally figured it out. I don’t want to put anyone in danger, but I also remember what Valentine said about being alone so long he’s forgotten how not to be. I don’t want that for me.

  If this is who I am, if this is going to be my life, I’d rather have them fighting alongside me than do this alone.

  In English, I want to tell Cass everything about Elle, but Mr. Kelly keeps doing this annoying thing where he wants to teach us stuff. Every time he turns away, Cass and I lean our heads together.

  “You know”—Cass keeps one eye trained on Mr. Kelly as he writes on the board—“here’s Molly, with this horrible reason why she needs to fight. I guess I can kind of understand why Austin was so upset. I mean, no one deserves to be in a coma, but Molly’s life was so hard already.”

  Mr. Kelly turns back toward the class. Cass and I separate.

  “All right, folks, so what do we think about the repetition of the phrase ‘So it goes’?” He calls on Ben Zadeh, on the other side of the room, who spouts off something he almost certainly read on the internet.

  Mr. Kelly taps his whiteboard marker against his chin as he listens.

  Cass resumes whispering. “You know who we never asked about the threats?”

  Ben Zadeh finishes his SparkNotes-fueled ramble, and Mr. Kelly turns to jot down something on the board.

  I lean back to Cass. “Who?”

  She faces front but whispers out of the side of her mouth. “Paige.”

  She’s right. Oh, my God, she’s right. I just assumed Paige couldn’t have been behind them, especially after she got hurt, but she obviously wanted Molly to stay a secret, too.

  During lunch, Cass and I make it our mission to find Paige, but she’s not in the cafeteria. Cass asks some of her friends where she is, but they all shrug and avert their eyes.

  I get it. They’re not her friends anymore. It may have started with Molly—seems like a lot of people were angry with Paige for that—but her beating last week was a message to the whole school: This girl is toxic, stay away.

  “I know where she is,” I tell Cass.

  As I suspected, Paige is sitting at a table by herself in the library. She has a textbook open in front of her and a Tupperware of salad.

  It’s only in movies that friendless kids eat lunch in bathroom stalls. Those of us who actually have no friends eat in the library, where we can pretend to be too busy with work to bother with trifling concerns like human contact. It’s where I go whenever Cass isn’t around during lunch.

  We sit down across the table from Paige. The swelling in her eye has gone down a bit, but her face is still a ruin.

  She barely looks up. “I don’t want to talk to you.” She turns the page in her textbook and takes a bite of her salad.

  Paige has good reason to be afraid, but I can’t let her stonewall me anymore. “I already got the full story from Austin. I have enough to go to the police. Once the cops start looking around, there’s a lot of angry people who’d love to tell them how you put Molly in a coma.”

  Never mind that the police wouldn’t listen to me. Paige doesn’t need to know that.

  Her fork pauses. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her posture is completely rigid, except for the tiniest tremor in her chin.

  “It’s all going to come out,” Cass says gently. “You know it can’t stay secret forever.”

  Paige looks at her, then me.

  She folds in on herself, face in her hands. Her shoulders shake as she cries, and I know she’s fighting to stay as quiet as possible in the empty stillness of the library.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she chokes out. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Cass urges.

  Paige wipes her eyes. “I can’t. They’ll kill me if they find out I’m talking to you again.”

  “We’re going to get the Basement shut down for good,” I promise. “They’re not going to be able to hurt you, or Molly, or anyone else.”

  Paige trembles as she tries to get her tears under control.

  “Tell us what happened after Molly fell,” Cass says. “Who set it up to look like she’d been mugged?”

  Paige picks up her pen and positions it at a perfect right angle to the edge of the table. “This guy, he’s kind of like the manager?”

  “Boyd?” I prompt.

  She nods. “He told me not to worry, he’d make sure Molly got to the hospital. I followed up,” she adds defensively. “She got checked in and everything. I didn’t see what else I could do. I can’t make her wake up. We all signed up to fight. We knew it wasn’t safe, and Molly chose it anyway. No one forced her.”

  I frown. Molly was being exploited. That’s not the same thing as a choice.

  “Did you know why she was fighting?” I ask.

  Paige keeps playing with her pen. “Yeah, I knew her story. Makes it easy for everyone to hate me. Molly was like this wholesome little white girl with a tragic past, and everyone thinks I’m a stuck-up black bitch.”

  A vision of Paige standing in the center of a roiling, hateful crowd. Someone’s drink trickling down her broken face. Austin looming over her as she scrambled to get in her locker. He was fighting, too. What happened to Paige could just as easily have happened to him.

  All that rage and hatred when they were just as complicit. She’s right. It’s not fair.

  “So why do you put up with it?” I ask. “Why fight?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” She gives a frustrated shake of her head. “My whole life is like this regimente
d thing. I have perfect grades. I got a 1560 on the SAT. I go to galas with my parents and make pointless conversation with their business associates so that they’ll pull my mom aside and tell her she did a wonderful job raising such a charming and ‘articulate’ daughter.” She looks between Cass and me, her expression earnest. “I know I’m super-privileged, but sometimes I feel like I’m going to shrivel up and die from trying to be so perfect all the time.

  “This girl Ainsley from the country club was the one who first brought me to the Basement. She just wanted to get drunk and party, but I was completely obsessed. The lights, the blood, the crowd… it was about as far away from my regular life as I could get. I went back five more times before Ava approached me and asked if I wanted to fight. I turned out to be pretty good. People bet on me, cheered for me. I liked it. I started going to the gym to practice on the weekends. And I thought maybe I could tolerate the other stuff if I at least had one thing of my own, something I was good at that I did just because I liked it, and not because it would look good on my college applications.”

  Paige and I are different in a lot of ways, but I kind of get it. How it feels to be good at something, to enjoy it, even when everyone else thinks it’s fucked up.

  She takes a deep breath and straightens the collar on her starched white button-down. “Like I said, it makes me an easy villain. Everyone felt so bad for Molly, and I didn’t even need the money.”

  I lean across the table. “None of them came forward, either. They have no right to judge you. But you could tell the truth. Come to the police with us. We can bring that place down.”

  She leans back, away from me. “No. Even if Boyd doesn’t have me killed, don’t you see how this would play out?” She does an exaggerated newscaster voice: “Angry black girl beats up white people for sport, leaves one girl in tragic coma.” She shakes her head. “It’ll be the end of my life. College. Career. All gone. It won’t matter that I’ve been perfect, poised Paige all my life. They’ll find the angriest, thuggiest picture of me to put up next to one of Molly hugging a puppy. I know how this goes. I told Ava the same thing.”