by Hester Young
But something is wrong. I feel it in my gut as I step into the fridge. It’s too cold in here. Much too cold. I know even before I see her, see her flimsy tank top and the delicate slope of her bare shoulder. The face that greets me is pale and bloodless, the limbs gray and frosted. On the side of her head, beneath the long black hair, I see a gash, red and sparkling with ice crystals.
This is not a refrigerator, I realize, but a freezer. Lise is dead. Has been dead for a long time.
I turn back toward Jocelyn. She stands in the doorway of the freezer, and though her face is flushed, still very much alive, the resemblance remains uncanny. She and Lise look the same, even now.
“Jocelyn,” I whisper. “What did you do?”
The pitch of her voice rises to that of a bitter child. “I helped her,” she says. “I protected her. But she had to be Miss Popular, didn’t she? She couldn’t stand to think there was someone out there who liked me better. That for once, someone picked me, not her.” Only then do I see the screwdriver in her hand. “She had to go and fuck things up, like always.”
She raises the screwdriver and I duck instinctively behind a box, no longer sure what this girl is capable of. Yet instead of advancing on me, Jocelyn steps backward, out of the freezer. “Sorry,” she says, and gives the door a quick, decisive shove.
I leap forward and throw my body against the door. Too late. The metal latch catches. The light blinks off.
I am with Lise now, in the cold, in the darkness.
twenty-eight
The darkness is absolute. No shaft of light beneath the freezer door, no windows—this place is sealed tight. I grope around for the door handle, jiggle it up and down, throw my weight against it over and over to no avail. Something’s blocking me from the outside. The padlock? Something jammed into the locking mechanism? I remember the screwdriver in her hand, and my heart sinks.
There’s no getting out of here.
I dig my phone from my pocket. No service. I dial 911 anyway. Nothing. Even my texts fail to send. And my battery has dipped below 10 percent, triggering a rush of LOW BATTERY warnings.
I flick on my phone’s flashlight, trying not to panic at the thought of all the power it’s draining. Casting the beam along the walls, I search for a light switch. Find only empty shelving.
I hold the phone above my head and peer up at the lightbulb in the center of the freezer. There has to be some way to turn it on, something other than opening the door. It looks as though there was a pull chain once, but the chain must’ve broken off at the base, leaving no way to trigger the switch. I grab a cardboard box filled with soup and climb atop it to get a better look, careful to keep the beam of my flashlight off Lise’s body.
A careful examination of the lightbulb reveals nothing good. I poke at the hole where the chain used to be. Not even pliers could fix this. I’m really, truly screwed.
As I dismount from the box, my foot slips, sending me sideways into a shelf. Metal punches at my hip, but the pain means nothing. Or everything.
Pain means I can still feel. Pain is good. It’s the inevitable numbness I must worry about. I’ve read about people freezing to death. Weariness and apathy—those are more dangerous than pain.
Over and over, as if on repeat, my mind keeps asking the same question: How long?
How long until my battery runs out and I’m plunged again into darkness?
How long can I survive here in subfreezing temperatures?
How long until someone finds me?
Rae will look for me, of course, but last she knew I was at Kai’s. It could take hours for her to start worrying about my absence. If she and David and Thom are drinking together, she might not get to wondering until morning. And there’s no reason she’d come looking for me here.
I should’ve told Rae what I was up to, should’ve included her, the way she’s always asked to be included. For years, I’ve been trying to shield Rae from my abilities. I told myself I was protecting her, but Rae’s not a child. She’s an adult, fully capable of making her own choices—and given the choice, she would’ve been here with me tonight.
We should’ve faced Jocelyn together. She couldn’t have taken the two of us. If I hadn’t tried to go it alone, fallen into my old pattern of shutting people out, Rae and I would’ve had her.
Marvel’s my only hope. She was the last to see me. She knows I wanted to get a peek inside the restaurant, and she’s expecting me here at noon tomorrow. But if I don’t show up, will she enter the building at all? It could be ages before she finds me—she obviously hasn’t seen the inside of her freezer in a while.
More than anger toward Jocelyn, I feel anger toward myself. I should’ve seen what this girl was. Instead, I saw ambition. I saw a Strong Young Woman. I saw myself.
She had to be Miss Popular, didn’t she? Jocelyn said of her sister. Maybe, in the end, their differences really were that simple. Lise Nakagawa wanted to be liked. She was fine with ceding the academic spotlight to her twin. She didn’t need to please their parents with personal achievements the way Jocelyn did. And yet Lise was just as competitive as all the other Nakagawas. She was the fun one, the cool one, the one with all the friends. Surely that identity meant something to her.
But there was one thing Jocelyn had that her sister didn’t, a status symbol Lise couldn’t quite match.
She couldn’t stand to think there was someone out there who liked me better. That for once, someone picked me, not her.
Kai.
If popularity was her chief aim, then of course Lise would be jealous. No matter how much she loved Elijah, she had to know how he appeared to the outside world. It must have stung to see a guy like Kai going for her sister, attracted, at least initially, to the dedication and drive that ordinarily made Jocelyn such a square. Lise couldn’t let her have that one. Cute boys—that was her realm. She had to assert her power.
No wonder Kai was in tears when we spoke about Lise yesterday. All his meetings in the woods over the summer, all his sneaking around—it wasn’t with Jocelyn. If I’d used my head, I would’ve realized that. Raph Yoon said he saw Lise naked out there, not her sister, and Jocelyn never did strike me as the type willing to brave mosquitoes for a hookup.
The Watching Guy in the woods, the visions I’ve been having?
That was him. Kai’s eyes, Kai’s thoughts.
For the first time, I consider the possibility that the encounter I’ve been seeing wasn’t a rape or assault or some other violent act. Maybe it was just a hormonal teenage boy going after the girl he knew he wasn’t supposed to have. All his lusty thoughts, his secret longings, the things that seemed so incriminating when I was inside his head . . . maybe these were, as Frankie said, the pervy thoughts of every guy.
I drop to a squat, arms and knees huddled against my chest in a vain attempt to conserve my warmth. Kai knew Lise met up with Elijah in those woods. Maybe he waited for her. Hid in the bushes, made sure her boyfriend didn’t turn up. And then he made his move.
You’ll regret this, she told him. You’re going to hurt a lot of people. But she didn’t tell him no, didn’t remind him of Jocelyn or Elijah. What if Lise wanted it? What if that encounter, and the many that followed, were consensual—two selfish teenagers giving in to their desires? I thought my visions were showing me the crime, the perpetrator, but what if they were showing me motive?
My body begins to shiver violently. Lise is gone now, I tell myself. Focus on you. I rub my arms, hoping the friction will give me a couple of degrees, however fleeting. Why oh why didn’t I grab a sweatshirt when I went out tonight? Another layer would buy me time, slow the rapid loss of heat. But it’s cold, so damn cold, and my phone battery is down to 3 percent. Its precious light can’t last.
I pull open boxes, frantic now, looking for something I can use to get the hell out of here. Packages of soup. Frozen loaves of bread. A lump of ham, hard as a rock.
I throw the ham at the door. It makes a resounding thump but doesn’t leave a dent. I hurl my body against the door a few more times for good measure and then slump to the floor. Fold myself into a ball again and feel the heat drain from me. Thoughts of Tasha and Micky and Noah race through my head. How can I leave them behind? How can my love for them amount to so little in the end?
What a pointless way to die.
My brain continues running in desperate circles like a mouse on a wheel, searching for ideas. A bomb to blow the door off? A fire to keep me warm? I’m not MacGyver. I can’t turn my cell phone into an explosive device, and even if I could, that freezer door is pretty thick. I’d probably just be hastening my own demise.
I glance into the dark rear of the freezer. Lise is there, stiff and cold, still waiting.
“You were alone, weren’t you?” I whisper. “Working to get this place up and ready, thinking about your future. And then she showed up. Confronted you.”
I approach Lise gingerly, no longer able to ignore her. The gash in her head seems to glitter when I shine the flashlight over it, but I bite back my fear. This was a girl once, a kid, and I can’t lose sight of that.
I’ll never know if the act was premeditated on Jocelyn’s part or just an argument that spun out of control. If Lise was dead or, God forbid, simply unconscious when Jocelyn dragged her in here. Either way, Jocelyn did a solid job of covering her tracks. Whatever she hit Lise with, she was smart enough to remove the weapon. And she cleaned up pretty thoroughly. The front of the restaurant looks a bit dusty but shows no signs of a crime, nothing that would’ve alerted Marvel the few times she popped in.
I let my flashlight play across Lise’s body. She’s propped up against some boxes, legs bent, arms frozen at her sides. Her eyes are open but empty, the pupils fully dilated in death. She wears a black sleeveless shirt and cutoff jeans. I can make out a bump in the right pocket of her shorts. A lighter maybe? She seems like the kind who might smoke. Hand quaking, I reach inside.
No lighter and no phone—if she had one, Jocelyn must have taken it. Just a black wallet with pink trim. Not much in it. Six dollars. A debit card and a student ID with the same unsmiling photo I’ve seen in newspaper articles. Lise Nakagawa, the ID reads. The School for Free Thought. Class of 2017. A reminder of the future she’ll never have.
I place the wallet on her thigh, shuddering.
“Why?” I ask her. “Did you love him, or was it just to hurt her?”
I grew up an only child. I’ll never understand what it means to have a sister. But I can’t imagine this is what Jocelyn wanted. She told me she loved Lise, and in her strange, self-centered way, I bet she did.
I doubt Jocelyn expected her sister to go undiscovered this long. She probably assumed Marvel would find the girl within days. And then? There were other suspects, other people who would take the hit for Lise’s murder. Elijah was the obvious choice. But not Jocelyn. Even if her DNA turned up on the body, she had nothing to worry about—it was identical to Lise’s, after all.
As I turn back toward the freezer door, my light sweeps across Lise’s bare shoulders.
“The sweatshirt,” I realize. “She took your sweatshirt.”
That explains how it ended up in the girls’ bedroom: Jocelyn pretended to be Lise that night. She ran into Elijah and let him walk her home, conveniently throwing off the timeline of her sister’s movements. Broke up with him, to establish motive. Entered her house, still pretending to be Lise. Greeted her mother, even.
Sue didn’t hear Lise come home that night. She heard Jocelyn. Twice.
A wave of sadness washes over me. Sadness for my family and for Rae, yes, but for the Nakagawas, too. They love their daughters, just like I love mine. To lose one at the hands of the other is unthinkable.
“You had a whole life to live,” I tell Lise, my teeth beginning to chatter. “And now you’re here.”
Around me, the freezer hums, pumps its deadly cool air into the small, enclosed space. I glance down at my phone. The battery icon shows 1 percent remaining. I rise to my feet, cross back over to the door. Half-heartedly study its hinges, test the handle, run my finger around the edge, feeling for cracks. There has to be a way out.
I let out a long, ear-piercing shriek, bang on the walls, the door, scream for help over and over as if there might be someone outside who could hear me.
Nothing.
My phone blinks off, finally dead, hurling me back into darkness.
Despair sets in. I can no longer feel my fingers or toes. I regret every choice that led me to this moment, my decision to come to this island most of all. I came because I was a coward. Because I couldn’t face other people’s judgments of me. But I shouldn’t have fled the scene like an embarrassed teenager, shouldn’t have let a handful of aggressive journalists define me. I should’ve grown a spine. Now it’s too late. Fuzziness has already set in. My scattered thoughts are slowing. The facts as they stand are simple. I will not last the night.
“Just you and me now,” I tell Lise, and from somewhere in the dark I hear a reply, almost like an echo.
Just you and me, she says.
twenty-nine
Something buzzes overhead. The lightbulb crackles on, bright and then dark, before settling to a dull orange glow. I glance into the rear of the freezer, wondering if I have lost consciousness. Maybe I am dreaming. Maybe hallucinations are common amongst people freezing to death.
“Lise?”
Her frozen body remains propped up against the boxes, not a hair out of place, obviously dead. And yet I sense that she’s with me. Not in the frosted mass she once inhabited, but in the air, buzzing against my skin, humming in the filament above me. As I lose sensation in my body, she’s the spark that remains, the one thing I can feel.
This is my fault, she says, and her voice is inside me, not just words and sound, but a kind of knowing. You shouldn’t be here.
“Get me out,” I beg. “Please. I have to get back to my children.”
I can’t. I’m sorry. The lights, that’s all I can do.
I curl up on the floor, my hands now wooden, insensate. Better to die seeing my surroundings than in total darkness, I suppose. But not much better.
There’s a pressure on my shoulder, as if someone were kneeling beside me, comforting me. My arm goes pleasantly numb. My violent shivering stops. Is this how dying feels? No pain, just nothingness.
“I’ve been trying to find you,” I say, although it seems so silly now. “I thought maybe I could help you.”
You did help. You helped Elijah.
“Elijah?”
You got him away from his mom. Raph and Adam, too. I was too scared to do it. But not you.
“Yes, but . . . Elijah?” After everything I’ve done, all the leads I’ve pursued to uncover Lise’s whereabouts—was it really about Elijah all along? That floppy-haired fifteen-year-old who gave me attitude out in the woods last night? “No,” I mumble. “No. That can’t be right.”
If my whole mission was to help the Yoon boys, then there was no need for me to show up at the restaurant tonight, no reason to put myself at risk. My death will be entirely senseless.
I love Elijah, Lise says, as if that might make me feel better. I’ll love him forever.
But that’s not good enough. There are people I love, too, people who need me. I struggle to my feet, anger cutting through my foggy thoughts.
“If you love him so much, then what was going on with you and Kai?”
Lise doesn’t answer, which only ignites my fury.
“That’s how you got here, isn’t it? You and Kai.” I kick at a box of soup. “That’s what set Jocelyn off.”
Still no answer.
“I’m not saying you deserved to die. You didn’t. But of all the guys you could’ve chosen, why Jocelyn’s?”
When at last it comes, her reply is madden
ingly simple. He made me feel . . . special.
And then she shows me. Shows me that night in the woods, not through his eyes, but through her own. Kai emerging from a bush, startling her. That strange jolt of power when she realized why he was there, how much he wanted her. The intoxicating knowledge that, despite all the ugly consequences he might face, he had chosen her. Risked everything.
There are a blur of other encounters, breathless and forbidden, too exciting to resist. Not about love—not for Lise—but the thrill of winning over and over again. Yet there are softer moments, too, complicated feelings she can’t name. Swinging in the hammock side by side, bare legs entwined, bodies sticky with humidity. Kai stroking her head, kissing her ear.
You’re so hot, he says, but she only laughs.
You realize any compliment about my looks also applies to your girlfriend?
Kai turns toward her, flustered. I didn’t mean how you look. I meant how you are. You two are different. I don’t see you as the same.
Whatever. She’s laughing again, prodding him with a teasing finger. I know you get off on it, the whole twin thing. It’s like a real-life porno for you or something.
It’s not like that at all, Kai insists, wounded. I don’t like you because of her.
Okay, then, why do you like me?
Because of you, he says in a voice so husky it would give anyone shivers. I like you.
The woods melt away as Lise releases me from her gaze. Now I find myself standing by the empty tables of Ono Place. The scene is largely indistinct, a half-faded memory except for one detail. On the floor beneath the counter, bloodstains.
I didn’t know, Lise says, and somehow she’s beside me, a teenage girl in a black skull sweatshirt. I didn’t know it would end up like this.
“Of course you didn’t.”
Look, I’m not a bad person. I used to flirt with Kai when Joss wasn’t around, so what? I didn’t think he would do anything. I thought we were just playing. Then he showed up that night. He said he couldn’t stop thinking about me. He was so cute, so into me . . .