by Lucy Auburn
It's more use than I thought I'd get out of the rogue senator's son, given his typical penchant for not giving a shit or knowing anything worthwhile.
"Alright, so we just have to get enough evidence to prove Hass is who he is—an unrepentant asshole who probably had something to do with what almost happened to me tonight—and we can get the District Attorney to put him in prison ASAP. Right?"
Tanner shrugs. "That's the idea I guess."
Fabulous. I'm putting my greatest hope in the hands of a teenage boy who couldn't care less. Let's hope the combined intelligence of Lukas and Blake manages to make up for Tanner's complete bullshit.
Which leaves one.
I dare to look at Cole.
He smirks at me, a trap I'm about to fall into, one I can see and somehow can't step around.
"Let's do this thing, then. Get in a circle and put your hands together, everybody—the Scooby Doo gang is on the job."
If he lives to the end of the semester, it'll be a miracle. Even my small hands would fit around that throat well enough to strangle him to death.
"It's a deal, then." I take a deep breath, wondering if this is what it feels like to bargain your soul away to the devil himself. "You four will help me put Hass away for good, and I'll leave Coleridge. Forever."
We don't shake on it, but we don't need to. After everything that's happened, all the terrible things we've done to each other and said to each other, a handshake would be meaningless.
Instead we share a kind of understanding: that we're all fucked-up liars, and we're going to see this thing through to the end.
Because it's the only way for them to get rid of me—and vice versa.
Chapter 5
Mothers should be comforting. Like lighthouses that sit on shore and guide boats home, or a net that catches people jumping out of burning buildings. They're the arms that comfort and guide, the anchor in a ferocious storm.
At least in an ideal world.
In this world, my mother doesn't comfort me.
I comfort her.
"It'll be okay." My voice is muffled by her hair as she presses against me, my hands flat against her shoulder blades. "I'm fine, Mom. Nothing... nothing really happened."
"How can you say that?" Sobs escape her mouth between each word. "I almost lost you too."
Too. Just like Silas. She doesn't even know yet that it was the same men—I haven't told her that, and neither have the police, I imagine. I don't think she would survive knowing.
Our mother has never been the strongest woman. It's been months since I last saw her, but already her body feels frailer against me, her bones closer to the surface of her skin, every breath slightly hitched. I know she's been working two minimum wage jobs trying to make ends meet, neither of which give her health insurance, and I worry.
But there's no room in our relationship for me to be the one worrying about her. Not when she needs my comfort to keep herself together.
So I press my cheek against her dry hair and murmur, "It'll all be okay."
When her cries and sobs have settled into sniffles, she moves back and I turn to Wally. He's waiting in the corner of the room, hands in his pockets, shoulders rounded and slouched. I find myself glad that the Elites left before Mom and Wally showed up, and I don't know if it's because I would be embarrassed of my new enemies or my old family.
"Jade wanted to come," Wally says, shuffling over to me to share a casual hug, one that gives me comfort instead of taking it. "She has finals, though, and you know how her mom is."
"Shouldn't that mean you have finals too?"
He waves my concerns away. "I'll take the tests late. Principal Snyder said it was okay. Besides, this is more important." Clearing his throat, he says in a haunted voice, "You almost died."
I did. It hits me all over again as I meet his eyes and see the genuine concern there for my life and safety. I was kidnapped, drugged, put in a trunk, and about to be murdered. I still don't understand what stopped it from happening or why, but I can feel the phantom pull of a rope around my neck when I closed my eyes.
Maybe twins are fated to die the same way, and this was fate's way of trying to pull me down into the earth next to my brother, to rest with him for eternity.
"I'm still alive, though," I tell Wally and the universe alike. "See? Heart's still beating and everything."
"I'm just glad the police found you." Wally doesn't know about Hass and he doesn't need to. "Do they know yet why they did this? What's the deal?"
My heart twists as I consider every variation of the truth, and the lies, I could tell them. "They haven't told me much yet. I tried to give a description of the men, but it's all a little fuzzy. I think... I think they were organized crime. That's all I know, really."
"Oh, sweetie." Mom squeezes my hand. "Did they... hurt you?"
She wants to know if they sexually assaulted me. Dragging that sort of information out seems like a bad idea, but thankfully for both of us nothing of the sort happened. "No. They just knocked me out and put me in the trunk of their car." I find myself cracking a yawn, and realize with a start that I'm tired. "It was a cramped fit."
"I'm just glad you're with us now." Mom reaches out to smooth my hair back from my face, and I lean in to the gesture, trying to take comfort from it. Another yawn leaves me involuntarily. "You should get some sleep, baby."
"Don't want to." I force down a third yawn, ignoring Wally's bemused smile. "I was out for so long. I want to just... stay awake."
Wally points out, "That wasn't sleep, Brenna. You should get some real rest. I'm sure the professionals around here would agree."
"No." I shake my head, looking over at Mom. "I can leave soon, I'm sure. There's no reason for me to be admitted."
It takes her a moment to realize what I'm worried about. "Oh, sweetie, don't try to stay awake on my account. Your Aunt Cheryl has agreed to pitch in what she can to help pay your bills, and the church will help with the rest. If you need to sleep at the hospital, that's what's going to happen."
"Also," Wally adds, "I'm pretty sure you're not the one who gets to decide whether or not you'll be admitted. They have doctors for that."
He has a point. And if it's not going to be an impossible burden for Mom, then there's no reason for me to turn down a little bit of sleep.
"Let me just stay up for a bit longer," I tell them. "It's been so long since we got to see each other. And it's almost Christmas. I don't want to miss out."
A while later I find myself passing out, head on the pillow, barely aware of my surroundings.
I dream of sweet-smelling clothes that pull me down into an open grave, where my brother's body waits, his skin cold and clammy, his eyes open and staring back at me.
In the dream, I don't scream.
Fear feels so far away from me now.
Instead I just close my eyes and let the coffin build itself around me one plank at a time.
I'm woken by a gentle light streaming in through the curtains of the window near my bed. My mom is sleeping on a bench cushion beneath the window, while Wally must be out somewhere, because he's tucked his jacket around Mom's shoulders and is nowhere to be found.
Turning onto my other side to get away from the sunlight, I find myself staring at Silas's laptop. My heart races as I realize that I almost forgot about it; once I sent that lawyer after it I let it leave my mind and tried not to worry about it.
But here it is, right in front of me, only inches away.
"Some man brought it while you were asleep." Mom has somehow woken along with me; it must be those extra senses only mothers get that jerked her awake just as I woke too. "He wanted to stick around, said he was your lawyer, but I told him I'm your mother. His number is over there—when did you get a lawyer? Nevermind, I don't want to know. Just tell me what homework you can possibly have that's so important you had a very well dressed man fetch your brother's laptop while you were convalescing in a hospital bed."
It's so many words at once. I d
on't know how anyone can keep up with my mother when she gets in an anxious mood like this one. She looks, and sounds, like she guzzled a whole liter of caffeine, then fell asleep anyway. But I'm just glad she's back to nagging me instead of crying into my shoulder and making me feel like I'm the parent instead of her.
"It's not homework that I wanted to do," I tell her, before realizing my mistake too late; now she'll have follow up questions. I don't want her to know all of Silas's secrets. Just the accusations that came out about him that weren't true were enough to almost send her to an early grave of despair and heartache. Scrambling to come up with something plausible, I tell her, "There's a game on here. And some... some emails."
Mom raises her brows. "Oh? Any boy in particular?"
Four of them, I find myself thinking, only to immediately discard the thought. The Elites aren't boys that I'm interested in or might date. They're four predatory wolves I made the mistake of kissing, and the sooner my deal with them is done and they're out of my life forever, the better.
"There are no boys," I tell Mom, hating that it feels like another lie. "Just friends and stuff. You know us Gen Xers and our social media. Can't get enough of the stuff."
"Speaking of!" Mom reaches across me and pulls something off the table next to my bed. "I plugged your phone in with my charger. It was dead, you know. We called you on the way here and you never picked up."
"Thanks." I take the phone from her as she turns it on, afraid there might be something on it—though what, I don't know. "I should let my friends know that I'm doing better. I'm sure everyone is worried about me."
Another lie. My friends—Sasha, Tricia, Hector, even Chrissy, who I know now was never the victim she pretended to be—probably don't give a shit that I'm in the hospital at all. They saw Georgia's presentation exposing my lies, after all. When I ran out of the Blind Ball they didn't even try to follow me.
It was only the wolves who followed me: Cole, Lukas, Tanner, and Blake. Four boys who cared even less than my supposed friends, but were the first to visit me here in the hospital. The first to see me when I was down.
The first to kick me while I was there, too.
Still, it strikes me as a sick, horrible kind of joke the universe is playing on me. Of course a snake like me, bitter and full of fire inside, would find herself with no friends and no one to care for her except the woman who birthed me, the one friend who has no idea who I really am, and four terrible boys who have some of the same dark secrets and darker tendencies as me.
I must be broken inside. The only ones who can care about me anymore are just as broken.
Now, as soon as my mother's back is turned, I have a truth to discover: if my brother was broken too, dark and twisted inside, and what it was that he was killed over.
Chapter 6
The partition on Silas's laptop hard drive is, of course, encrypted. At least I think it is—when I get to the portion of the storage system that looks like it could be what Lukas was talking about, based on the gigs of memory it's taken hold of, I try to open it up, but all I get is an error message.
If I were smarter, like my brother, I would know what secret it takes to open it up and find out what's inside.
But he was always the clever one, at least when it came to languages, history, and other hard facts. I was the street wise one, despite outward appearances—the one who pulled him back from the riverbank when he almost slipped in, the girl with a fist at her side in second grade when the bullies came for him. Silas was going to make something of himself, and I was always destined to be pulled along in his shadow. Even the shadow of his grave.
Frustrated, I try a dozen different things, but there aren't many guides on the internet on how to hack your own computer. I guess it's probably something out there in some dark forum on the dark web, or maybe just inside a computer science textbook—I wouldn't even know where to look, much less understand the words.
I need help figuring this out.
The only person I can think of who can help me is the last one who will want to.
But desperate times, and desperate girls, call for pulling out my cracked phone and staring at the lit-up screen. Checking to make sure that my mom is snoozing nearby, and Wally is still gone, I unlock the phone and scroll through the waiting alerts.
There are things I'm tagged in on social media that I don't want to look at. No doubt it's all Georgia’s doing after the ball last night where she revealed my elaborate lies. I have a few concerned messages from Sasha and Hector, but none from anyone else—including Chrissy, whose friendship I'm unsure I even want back.
One text message sends a shock through me, followed by a tiny flicker of hope that I can barely admit to feeling.
Holly sent me a text.
It's dated sometime last night, when I was yelling at the boys in the storm, or just after I got kidnapped. After I ran out of the party.
I'm sorry Georgia did that. It was never my intention to hurt you. Even though you hurt me.
A message that stings as much as it comforts. Even though you hurt me. Can I really deny that I did? After I betrayed her, the one nice girl at this school, who lives in the upper echelon but treats all the others like human beings. I repaid her by stealing from her—then worse, last night I kissed her ex-boyfriend.
Her ex-boyfriend who she never would've broken up with if not for my exposé on him that revealed his covered-up DUI.
I really showed Holly what a terrible friend I am.
As I sit with the phone in my hand, reading and re-reading the message, trying to decide if there's anything I can say in return that won't make me look like an asshole, another message came through. Along with many others. My phone is catching up to what it missed out on while it was dead and waterlogged in the trunk of a car, right next to my prone body.
I swipe up on all the other notifications so I can see what Holly wrote. Brenna, are you okay? Sasha called but you didn't pick up. Lukas said he last saw you in the parking lot running away, but no one can find you. If you're safe please let us know!
Surely she knows by now what happened. Great Falls is a small city, and Coleridge is known for its gossip network. If Lukas didn't tell her—and he probably did, if he told her I was missing—then someone else did.
So she doesn't need to hear from me.
But the open invitation to contact her sits on my screen, unmoving yet somehow tempting me. I can't seem to stop myself from probing the wound that is our severed friendship, desperate to cauterize it even if it will never fully heal.
Part of me wants to pour my heart out directly into her message inbox, tell her how sorry I am, how much I regret what I did, how thankful I've become for our friendship. I want to explain to her that I'm broken inside, that my brother held a piece of my heart in his hand and it was buried with him the day that he died. My chest has a cavity full of grave dirt in it.
Burdening Holly with everything would be wrong, though, I realize. Especially if it might make her feel obligated to forgive me even though she's not ready yet. So I decide to stick to a simple response, one that doesn't invite anything more.
I'm safe. Thank you for worrying about me. After a long moment of staring at the text box, the cursor blinking at the end, I add, I'm sorry.
Then I press send and page away, scrolling through all my other messages and calls. I drop a quick line to Jade, who has been updated by Wally but made it clear in her texts that she was impatiently waiting for me to charge my phone and respond to her too.
Taking a deep breath, I do what I've been putting off since I unlocked the phone: I open up an old message window, one filled with texts back and forth about study dates and times, and type a fresh message to Lukas.
I need your help with something. Can you head back here? Alone this time.
His response bubbles up faster than I expected, making my heart do a little gymnastics routine against my rib cage.
Sure. Are you in any danger?
Am I? I don't know. There's
an officer standing outside in the hallway—not Officer Lopez this time—to make sure the men don't come back. And presumably once I'm back at Coleridge, security will keep me safe. But I don't know why those men were after me—or who they were. For all I know the cop in the hallway would be nothing for them to get by.
Still, Lukas deserves an answer that isn't speculation. As far as I know I'm fine. And there's an officer here. I just need you to do something for me.
Got it. On my way.
There's something comforting about knowing that he's headed my direction. Even though it stung that he wanted to get me away from Coleridge—still does, in fact—I'm starting to understand that it's because he worries about my safety, not because he hates me.
I just wish I knew what I'm in danger from. Maybe Silas's laptop will help with that. It's certainly got something on it worth killing over.
Mom stirs as a knock comes at the door. My heart leaps—Lukas must not have left the building if he's back so soon—but it's not him. Instead it's Wally, two takeout bags in his hand. I can smell the French fries and burger patties from here. My mouth waters, and I realize belatedly that I haven't had much of anything—the little tray of food they tried bringing me after I was admitted just made me nauseous, so the nurse patted me on the knee and told me food could wait until more of the chloroform was out of my system. I'm hungry now, though, so that's a good sign that I might get to leave this place soon.
"Brought these for you." Mom thanks him sleepily, and Wally smiles at her. "Didn't want you going hungry. You either, Brenna. Though I may have stolen a few of your fries."