If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  Sheila asked if she could stay for dinner, and Amy said yes. Of course she did.

  CONNOR DIDN’T KNOW how he would have gotten through the rest of the day without Noah. And even with Noah by his side throughout all his classes telling him nothing was wrong, that people were just acting weird since Liam’s death, that was all, Connor felt strange. Paranoid, as though the whole rest of the school were in on some awful secret—even the teachers—and it was printed out in a bubble above his head. That was the way everyone was looking at him, anyway. And as much as Noah tried to tell him otherwise, he knew he wasn’t imagining it.

  He was riding home on his bike when he saw Liam’s shrine, so big and bright now it was noticeable from blocks away. Connor’s impulse was to avoid it, but where did that impulse come from? He could hear Mason Marx in his mind again, back in the cafeteria, the skin-crawl of Mason’s breath in his ear. Your brother’s a murderer. And even as he pedaled, his knees felt weak. What if it was true? he wondered. No, it can’t be true. No way is Wade what Mason says he is. Stop thinking that way.

  Stop thinking.

  As he neared the shrine, Connor saw Jordan Hayes standing on the street corner, taking pictures of it with his phone. His heart sank. He’d seen Jordan a few times today—in math class, gym. He’d also passed him in the hallway. And each time, Jordan had responded to him in the same bizarre way—looking directly at him, and then through him, as though he wasn’t there at all. Jordan had even said hi to Noah once, without giving Connor so much as a nod.

  Once he was within a block of the shrine, Connor’s plan was to turn up Flower and take the back roads to his house, to do it before Jordan put down his phone and saw him coming. But his legs kept pumping the pedals, handlebars aimed straight ahead, his brain telling him to face the music, whatever that was supposed to mean. But still. Confronting Jordan had to feel better than the way he was feeling right now. At least he’d have answers, right?

  “Hey,” he called out.

  Jordan didn’t say anything, didn’t even turn to Connor until he was inches away and there was no avoiding him and even then, the look he gave him, it was as if Connor was something his dog had just thrown up.

  “What the hell is your deal, Jordan?”

  Jordan started to get back on his bike, but Connor grabbed the handlebar. “This isn’t fair,” he said. “We’re friends. Why are you acting so weird?”

  Jordan exhaled hard. He glanced up and down the street. “You know why,” he said. “You’ve got to know why.”

  “Is it because of what Mason Marx is saying? He’s full of crap. You know that.”

  “I don’t care about Mason Marx.” He started to get on his bike again, but Connor wouldn’t let go of the handlebar. “Get away from me.”

  Connor’s heart pounded. “Just tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Please.”

  Jordan peered at him. “You seriously don’t know,” he said. “You’re not just shitting me?”

  “Don’t know what?”

  Jordan whispered something under his breath, something Connor couldn’t quite hear, but he didn’t want to ask him to repeat it. “Don’t know what?” Connor said again, his voice more pleading than he wanted it to be.

  Jordan started messing with his phone. “If I show you, will you leave me alone?”

  “Show me what?”

  “You have to promise.”

  “Fine,” Connor said. “Whatever. Fine.”

  Jordan handed him the phone: a screenshot glowered at him. A series of direct messages on Tamara Hayes’s Instagram. “My sister sent these to me and my parents and all her friends,” Jordan said as Connor stared at the screen. “Everybody’s seen it now. He’s in trouble. Wade. She’s blocked him and reported him and she’s never gonna unblock him. No matter what you say.”

  Connor scrolled down the screen, his eyes dry and itchy from not blinking. Message after message after message. All from Wade’s Instagram. Each one of them in all caps. Angrier and angrier, and yet Tamara hadn’t answered a single one, and so it wasn’t her fault. Nothing could have caused it other than Wade’s own anger, building on itself until it turned to rage. HATE YOU . . . THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM . . . GET WHAT YOU DESERVE . . . DIE.

  Connor could feel Jordan watching him as he read. None of this sounds like him, he wanted to say. These couldn’t have been sent by Wade. But he didn’t know that, not anymore. He tried to let the words blur, the ugliness of them, focusing instead on the times the messages had been sent. But in many ways, that was even worse. All had been sent around noontime, a minute apart at the most. SHOW THAT SHIT TO PEOPLE AND THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH IT YOU FUCKING BITCH . . .

  “Someone trashed your brother’s car,” Jordan said. “He took it out on Tamara.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s batshit.”

  Connor’s head was swimming. He couldn’t think. This all felt like a weird dream he was stuck in, one of those dreams he used to have when he was little where he was trapped in a room with a monster—that razor-toothed, drooling alien from the movie Wade had let him watch without Mom knowing—and the teeth were edging closer, snapping open and shut and Connor couldn’t move a muscle.

  “Tamara was the one who always stuck up for Wade with Liam and Ryan and those guys,” Jordan said. “She told them all they should give Wade a chance, because I was friends with you.”

  “Was?”

  “When Liam got killed, all her friends were saying Wade Reed did it. He must have done it. And she said no way. Both she and I said no way would Wade do that. He’s weird but not in a dangerous way and he isn’t a murderer. That’s what both of us were telling everybody.”

  “They were all saying that?”

  “Why do you think I was doing that whole investigation thing, Connor? Why do you think I was at the scene of the crime in the freezing cold and listening in to the cops and trying to find evidence against . . . gangstas or what’s-her-face with the weird hair or anybody but Wade? For extra credit? For my freakin’ health?”

  Connor stared at him.

  “Give me back my phone.”

  Connor did. “Do you think he did it? You really think Wade killed Liam?”

  Jordan looked away. He got on his bike. “My mom says I can’t be friends with you anymore.”

  What does somebody say to that? There’s nothing anybody can say.

  “Why did Wade have to go and do that?” Jordan said, very quietly. “Why did he have to be so mean to my sister?” And then he rode away.

  CONNOR PEDALED THE rest of the way home, his mind numb, the cold air the only thing keeping his legs moving, that movement the only thing keeping him upright. He thought of the phone in the plastic bag again, and Wade in his room late at night, wet from the storm. He thought of Wade’s car stopped outside Liam’s house just yesterday and the way he’d stared it down—staring down a bunch of mourners, revving his engine at them—and how very strange Wade had become in the past few months especially. He tried to think about last night and the night before, the nice, normal dinner conversations he and Mom had been having with Wade, but that didn’t prove anything. It just made him feel worse.

  Sometimes when he finished his homework but Mom thought he was still working on it, Connor would go onto Reddit and read the crime threads. He’d read one once about a serial killer called John Wayne Gacy, who had a job and a family and dressed as a clown at kids’ birthday parties. Someone had posted an article on the thread. It was all about sociopaths, how many people knew them as personable and kind, but that was only because they were so adept at mimicking that behavior. They were like robots, really, able to program themselves to act a certain way, but without the emotions to back up those actions. Without a conscience.

  By the time he reached his home, his head was throbbing and he wanted to throw up. His mom’s car wasn’t outside and neither was Wade’s, and he felt a moment of relief—at least he’d be alone. Until he remembered that of course Wade’s car wasn’t there. It
had been trashed by someone who blamed him for Liam’s death.

  Connor got off his bike and started to wheel it toward the front door, feeling more alone than he’d ever felt in his life. His only friend now was Noah, and Noah would only stay his friend if he didn’t talk about Wade.

  He took out his phone and debated texting Noah anyway, asking him if he wanted to play video games, but then he wondered if maybe Jordan had shown Noah those direct messages too. What the hell were you thinking, Wade? If you’re going to be a sociopath, why can’t you be a good one?

  Anger and fear battled it out in Connor’s mind as he headed up the walkway, and then he heard a car pull up on the road behind him, a man’s voice calling out his name. Connor turned and saw a police car and fear won. Big time.

  “Hey there, young man. Is your name Connor?” The officer said it through his open window, a smile on his face that did nothing to calm his nerves. He was young and strong-looking. Like a college football player or something, only in a uniform. All Connor could think of was the cop who had shown up at their front door on Saturday morning. The gun in his holster.

  Connor wished his mom was home. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Great,” said the cop, his smile growing so wide, Connor could see all his teeth. “I’m Officer Udel with the Havenkill Police. Can I talk to you for a few minutes, please?”

  Nineteen

  From the Facebook page of Liam Miller.

  Ryan Grant ► Liam Miller

  October 22 at 3:00 AM

  You were just in my dream. We were in Rhinecliff at the train station because we were going to go to the city, and all of a sudden you jumped onto the tracks and started running. I said, “Liam, don’t do that. You’ll die.” But you just laughed. “I can’t die,” you said. And you just kept running. I saw the train rushing at you and I tried to yell, to warn you, but no sound came out. I was frozen.

  And then the train turned into a giant shark and it opened its big toothy mouth and swallowed you whole. I yelled myself awake. Well, barely awake. I’m still half asleep and I feel like I’m trapped in the dream. Because I am. There are some things you never wake up from.

  If I die tonight, will I see you, Liam? Will you be waiting in a shaft of light, like in the movies, telling me not to be afraid, telling me how death is some special place where you can be young forever—and how this is fair, what happened to you, that there is meaning and a reason? Or am I just typing words on a screen that don’t mean anything at all? I’m scared that’s true. I’m so scared, Liam.

  PS Right before I woke up, the shark’s eye turned back into a train window. I saw the face of the conductor.

  This post was deleted fifty seconds later. Though he’d posted on social media that he planned on going to the assembly in the morning, Ryan Grant was marked absent from school that day.

  Twenty

  Pearl was at Club Halifax, halfway through her first Scotch, when her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen: S’up? Paul. She smiled a little, the alcohol warming her cheeks, unwinding the knots at the back of her neck. Most persistent one-night stand ever. But really her mind was elsewhere. Leaving the station at the end of her shift, she’d met Liam Miller’s closest friends.

  There had been three of them standing in the front room with Udel—two big, strapping boys obviously from the football team and a leaner, class-president type, all of them with shaved heads, like soldiers from the same regiment. “They did it after school,” Udel had explained. “In memory of Liam. A lot of the senior guys did.”

  Udel had rested a hand on the class president’s shoulder, but Pearl hadn’t recognized him as his cousin until he introduced him. Ryan Grant looked so different at the station than he had that night at the pool, and it wasn’t just for the lack of his dark, wavy hair. “It was Ryan’s idea,” he said, his cousin cringing at the attention. “Tonsure. Shaving the head as a sign of mourning. It’s a Hindu thing. He learned about it in AP religion class, right, buddy?”

  “Yeah.” Ryan didn’t seem to recognize Pearl either, and so Pearl had just left it that way and said nice to meet you—a do-over of sorts.

  “What were you guys here for?” she’d asked.

  Again, it had been Udel who’d spoken for all three of them. “Questioning,” he had said. “They came in to talk with the detectives. They want to do anything they can to help Liam. It was their idea.”

  There had been something in his tone Pearl didn’t like—a spiked-up, coercive quality that made her miss the lazy Bobby Udel of yore. If it was their idea, she had wanted to ask, why are you doing all the talking?

  A wind kicked up outside the bar, which reminded Pearl of the gusts that had hit the station when she was shaking hands with the boys, a sudden barrage of wind like back talk from the sky, the thin walls whistling from it. She glanced at Paul’s text again. Maybe another storm was starting. She should get home before it became too tough to drive. Get home and in bed.

  She thought about texting Paul back. What harm could it do, really, when he’d offered her nothing but douchy S’up texts since he’d left her apartment? Maybe the specialness of their postcoital conversation had all been in her mind, with Pearl projecting depth into it because she hardly ever had decent conversations with anyone. She could barely remember what he’d said to her anyway. It couldn’t have been as good as the sex.

  She typed: Hey. Sent it.

  Back at the station, Ryan Grant’s eyes had been tear-bruised and vacant, his jaw slack, the rosiness drained out of his cheeks. Such a handsome kid and obviously popular, but his most noticeable feature had been his sadness. In that way, he may as well have been Wade Reed. Pearl finished the rest of her whiskey, hanging on to the burn of it. Joy sauntered over with the bottle. “Thinking cop thoughts?”

  “Kind of,” said Pearl, who had never told Joy she was a cop. Apparently, she hadn’t needed to.

  Joy said, “You want a refill?”

  Pearl glanced at her texts. Paul hadn’t answered yet. He’d most likely moved on. “Yeah, thanks so much.” She said it as though she were a guest in Joy’s house and didn’t have to pay for the drink. She really needed to find herself some actual friends.

  Joy poured Pearl a long one and peered up and down the bar needlessly. Again, the place was practically empty. A trio of middle-aged Hudson Valley good ol’ boys in hunting jackets sat at one end of the bar, a hipster couple at the other, all five of them nursing draft beers. How did this place even stay open?

  Joy said, “You’re from Havenkill, aren’t you?”

  Pearl looked at her. “How did you know that?”

  “Aimee En,” she said. “I follow local news on social media, and she and that poor kid have been all over my Twitter feed since this morning.”

  “She’s famous again,” Pearl said.

  “Tons of pictures of her from back in the day, right next to the ones where they’re dragging her car out of the Kill and she’s crying.” Joy smirked. “She’s bigger than the Psychedelic Furs cover band now.”

  “I don’t think this is the kind of publicity she was hoping for.”

  “You didn’t see her set,” she said. “The woman is thirsty.”

  Pearl looked at her.

  “So did she run over that boy and lie about it?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “You’re a cop. You know.”

  Pearl raised the glass to her lips. “I’m a uniformed cop from Havenkill. I get cats out of trees.” She took a long swallow.

  “You were asking me about her,” Joy said, “and that boy who was at her show. Obviously, you were investigating.”

  “Your memory is too good.”

  “It happened last night. And I wasn’t drunk.”

  “I really don’t know anything,” Pearl said. It was the truth. Pearl thought of Wade, how close to certain she’d been that he’d staked out Amy’s car and followed her. But after meeting him in person, she wasn’t so sure anymore. It was hard to explain. The boy Amy described had b
een actively looking for trouble, but Wade Reed wasn’t that type of boy. He was someone whom trouble found and pounced on without his asking for it. Pearl was certain of that, because when it comes to being that type of unfortunate person, it takes one to know one.

  “I used to work in Poughkeepsie,” Pearl said. “A lot more challenging there for a uniformed cop.”

  “Is that why you moved to Havenkill?”

  It was the obvious question. After all, who wouldn’t prefer rescuing cats from trees to patrolling a town with a population of just thirty thousand yet one of the highest crime rates in the country? Still, Pearl found it irritating, not just because it supposed something of her that wasn’t true, but also because it made her remember a whole bunch of things she didn’t want to: The stares in the women’s locker room. The way her partner went completely silent on her, even during long stakeouts, as though he were on strike. The envelope taped to her locker, containing a Mother’s Day card and a bullet. Good investigators in Poughkeepsie, she’d give them that, though whoever had spread the news had gotten her age wrong at the time of the murder. When her partner finally confronted her about it, he was convinced she’d been a teen and had shot her mother dead because she wouldn’t allow her to date an older man. Juicier story, she supposed.

  “No,” Pearl said. “That wasn’t why I moved.”

  Joy nodded slowly. She was a good enough bartender to stop asking questions.

  One of the hipsters asked her for a refill, and so Joy headed over to the end of the bar, leaving Pearl alone. She checked her phone. Still nothing from Paul. She was disappointed, and she hated herself for that. Later, she’d go onto her hookup app and look for another douchebag—hopefully one who had no ability to speak.

  She took another swallow of her drink, and then Joy was back. “Somebody tweeted that you guys are getting close to making an arrest.”

  Pearl shook her head, thinking, We’d better not be. “Whoever tweeted that is wrong.”