She couldn’t see anything but his face, but he was kicked back with his laptop open, jerking off with a fervor that Tree found both impressive and a little nauseating. She felt totally gross spying on him, but there was something wildly titillating about watching a guy do something so intimate. The dudes she’d had sex with always tried to act like porn stars. It was rare that anybody was interested in pleasing her as much as they were into getting off themselves. What Tim was doing seemed so vulnerable. He wasn’t putting on a show for anybody, and—
Bang, bang, bang.
Tim froze. Somebody was knocking on his door. Tree jumped in the darkened driveway like she was the one who’d been caught with her pants down. Tim yelled, “Hang on a sec!” and scrambled to put on underwear and shorts. It looked sort of painful as he crammed everything into his underwear and cracked open the door. Tree had to put a hand over her mouth to stifle her own laughter.
She crouched down under the windowpane for a bit. She didn’t want anybody at the door to be able to see her. When she heard Tim close the door again, she slowly peeked up over the sill. Tim was at the sink in his room washing up, but that wasn’t the thing that made her mouth fall open.
The screen of his laptop was facing the window now. He must have batted it in that direction as he’d scrambled for the door so nobody could see it from the hall. The porn he’d been watching was still playing, and now Tree could cross one more thing off her bucket list: watching two military men have sex.
Seeing gay porn on Tim’s computer was like having the lights turned on in a dark room.
Tim had one of the best bodies in the school. He was smart, handsome as hell, had great hair, perfect eyebrows, wore T-shirts that actually fit him, and smelled nice. With all those things in place, Tree had been totally stumped as to why he seemed to have zero game with girls.
She thought of how offended she’d been that he’d taken her to Subway.
“What kind of place is that to take a first date?” she’d asked Danielle, who had collapsed in a puddle of laughter across Tree’s bed.
Why wouldn’t he take her there? It wasn’t a date at all.
She felt a little wave of embarrassment that she existed in a world where she just assumed that everyone was straight. Of course they weren’t. She’d seen movies from the ’80s where being gay was this big shameful secret and coming out was a horrible ordeal. Even in the reruns of Dawson’s Creek she’d loved as a kid, after poor Jack came out all he seemed to do was cry about it. But things had changed. There were kids in her class back in junior high who had come out, and nobody seemed to care. She certainly didn’t, so she’d never considered that it might still be a difficult thing. Tree understood all at once, no questions asked, that it would be a huge deal for Tim. Sure, marriage equality was the law of the land now, but for a guy coming out to his fraternity brothers at Bayfield University? That was not an easy conversation.
The thought crossed her mind that just because Tim was watching gay porn didn’t mean he was for sure gay, but…well, he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself, and it definitely made some puzzle pieces fit. Everything about their “date” was illuminated in different colors now—as if someone had applied an Instagram filter to the entire night and now she could see the whole picture.
When Tim had hugged her good night after they’d gotten back to campus, she’d actually been offended. Because he didn’t try to make out with her, she assumed he was saying something was wrong with her. She’d tossed and turned half the night, imagining the shit he was saying about her to other guys. But it hadn’t had anything to do with her. Was she so stuck on her place as the center of the universe that it had never crossed her mind that their lack of chemistry might mean something other than Tim thinks I’m ugly?
No wonder their conversation had been so stilted and lame while she’d watched him eat a meatball sub. He’d seemed so nervous—like he wasn’t talking about anything he really wanted to be talking about. Now Tree understood why he hadn’t.
Instead of actually talking to him like a human, she’d sat there sullen, pissed that she was on a date at a Subway. The more he tried, the more she shut him down until finally he was a stuttering pile of mush and disappointment. He couldn’t have come out to her then. Nobody wants to divulge something personal to a total asshole. She was no different from the meatheads in his frat house.
Tim wasn’t her killer. He wasn’t mad because she’d been making out with somebody else. He wasn’t texting her because he wanted to take her out again or try to get in her pants. The guy just needed a friend. Somebody who wouldn’t blow his cover just yet but that he could trust with his secret. Maybe he’d just wanted to go drink rosé and cruise guys together at the mall while they hunted for bargains at Barneys.
Along with a twinge of guilt that she’d bungled the whole thing so badly, Tree actually felt some small blush of pride that she was the one Tim had tried to tell. Maybe she wasn’t such a bitch on wheels after all.
Her smile didn’t last long. As she took a step forward, a dark figure in the Bayfield Baby mask stepped out of the shadows and rammed a knife up to the hilt in her abdomen. She didn’t even have time to scream.
Tree stumbled backward and coughed once, spraying the mask with a mist of her own blood. The killer stood there with his permanent one-toothed grin, watching as she slid down the brick wall beneath Tim’s window, then turned and disappeared into the shadows.
The pain was a bright, hot fire in her stomach, but it wouldn’t be long now. Tim turned up the music in his room, and she smiled. As the darkness closed in, she heard Carly Rae Jepsen singing “Let’s Get Lost” and Tim singing right along with her.
At some point, the music changed, morphing into the ringtone she now hated more than any sound in the world.
Tree reached over and grabbed her phone off Carter’s nightstand as he stood up from under the desk. Without saying a word, she pitched the phone directly into his trash can, then rolled over and tried to get a little more sleep.
15
Later that afternoon, Tree decided it was time for a makeover. She’d always been secretly jealous of girls who dressed and styled themselves for their own pleasure as opposed to anyone else’s. Tree had always wanted to try a different hairstyle, but everyone always fawned over how great her hair was. She was a natural blonde, after all, and most of the girls she knew would have killed her in cold blood by carving her heart out with a spoon on a street corner in broad daylight if they thought they could have her hair.
The idea was that guys loved long hair and especially preferred blondes like her, but Tree saw all kinds of girls all over campus who seemed to get plenty of attention from guys and had all sorts of different looks. Maybe, she thought, the problem is the kind of guys I’m trying to please.
On the way back from Carter’s dorm room, she made a quick detour to the beauty supply store. An hour later found her grinning into the mirror in her bathroom at the Kappa house. She went to work with a pair of scissors and a jar of bright pink Manic Panic. The result was the chunky, uneven punk layers she’d always wanted to try, strategic swaths of fuchsia layered around her face. Danielle was mortified when she stopped by the room to ask what time she was coming to the party, and a crowd gathered at her door to gasp and laugh as Danielle begged her to at least wear a hat when she showed up later.
Tree told her to get bent. “If I want to try something new, I will. I don’t owe anybody anything.” As Danielle stormed off, Tree added, “And don’t get anything on my top!” to laughter and a smattering of applause from the assembled sisterhood. One of the girls from down the hall had smiled and said, “See you tonight.”
“Only if you’re lucky,” Tree said. Then she pulled on an all-black outfit and grabbed the night-vision goggles she’d picked up at the army surplus store after she’d left Sally’s Beauty.
Tonight was Operation Stephanie, and
Tree was going full military mode. She painted her face in greens and blacks and sneaked out the back stairwell of the house on her way to the hot teacher’s mansion.
Gregory was a teacher but also a doctor, and Stephanie clearly came from family money. The good doctor would be at the hospital tonight, so Tree parked several blocks away and crept through the hedges of the neighbor’s backyard.
She stationed herself at one of the two enormous fountains that flanked the circular drive at Chez Butler. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be there or what exactly she was looking for. She didn’t have to wait. Dressed to the nines in a designer dress and cape, Stephanie descended the front stairs to the car that had arrived. She paused briefly, turning back to the house, then dug a phone out of her clutch. Something about her demeanor suggested to Tree a woman who thought she was being watched—or perhaps was watching someone else.
Regardless, there wasn’t much more to see. Stephanie ducked into the car and was carried out of sight, probably to a fund-raiser where she’d donate the cash for the wing of a building or a shelter for at-risk youth.
Tree groaned and pulled off the goggles as Stephanie’s car turned out of the drive. This was a total bust. She turned around and walked down the two steps ringing the fountain’s shallow pool, steeling herself for the scratchy journey back through the neighbor’s hedge. She wondered if there were another way back to her car.
The answer presented itself in the form of her killer, who burst out of the hedge at that precise moment. She screamed because that damn baby mask scared the shit out of her every single time. The killer flew at her across the short yard and tackled her directly into the fountain. Strong arms closed around her throat as she kicked and thrashed in the two-foot pool beneath the tinkling Gothic spray. As she choked on the water that flooded her lungs, she remembered her mom saying once that babies could drown in six inches of water. Turns out babies can also drown someone in two feet of water. She might even have laughed if she hadn’t been dying.
She came to, with long, blond hair once again, coughing, gagging, and heaving in Carter’s bed.
“Oh, hey. You’re up!” was all Carter got out before she vomited a torrent of fountain water all over his floor.
While they mopped up the mess with every towel that he owned, she explained to him that it was not tequila, and why. It took a while for him to get it, which was fine. It was a big mess.
This was the shape of her days now, it seemed. Or, well, her day. She’d spend a few hours with Carter, explaining what was happening to her and convincing him it was real. She’d tell him that the idea to figure out who the killer was had been his, and she’d fill him in on her progress with the suspect list.
She hated the part where it was time for her to go find the next suspect. Each time she left, she carried with her new memories of Carter—his likes and dislikes; the lines from movies he liked to quote; the things she said that had made him laugh—but knew that if she woke up here again tomorrow, he’d only remember her as the drunk Kappa Pi from the bar last night.
In the midst of days that all ended the same, over and over, Carter was the one constant Tree had come to rely upon. It was a revelation to her to meet a guy “for the first time” without having to employ any of the defenses she’d developed over the years. She didn’t have to worry that he might be a jerk, or a dummy, or take advantage of her in any way. Each time he pulled his head out from underneath that desk, doing whatever he was doing under there, she already knew that she wouldn’t later have to tell him to pull his head out of his ass. She realized somewhere along the way that this lack of fear—this lack of being forever on guard—changed the way she related to him.
She didn’t have to fear that he’d treat her like an infant or an idiot (like a great number of her dates). She didn’t have to fear for her physical safety (as she had on more dates than she cared to count).
Instead, she was able to relate to him in a way she’d rarely related to any man in her life: as an equal.
It was magical.
Tree began to wonder what the world would be like if every girl on campus could have the experience of knowing that the guy she was meeting for the first time would treat her with respect and do her no harm.
What might the world look like then? How would that change her relationship with other women?
Tree already knew it had started to change her relationship with herself.
She helped Carter haul the wet towels down to the laundry room on her way out.
“Thanks for the help,” he said, then offered to walk her back to the Kappa house like he did every day.
She told him she’d be fine and that she’d see him tomorrow.
He frowned. “Not if it works.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you kill the killer, then tomorrow will be tomorrow, not today, and you won’t wake up in my bed.”
She smiled. “Carter, I know where you live.”
He did that thing where he stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at his sneakers.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Good luck out there tonight.”
16
Danielle was the next name on the list of possible suspects, and Tree’s attempt to determine if the president of Kappa was more enemy than friend left her feeling as muddled as their relationship.
After the house meeting on the patio, she walked with Danielle back to the house. Danielle was speaking exhaustively about how exhausting something was, and Tree let her mind wander. There had been a time when she’d hung on every word Danielle had to offer, but now she seemed to find less and less of interest in things that Danielle found endlessly fascinating.
As they walked, a basketball player Tree recognized passed by and bumped into Danielle, who dropped every single book she was carrying. He kept walking, even after Danielle yelled, “Asshole!” at him. Or maybe, Tree thought, because she yelled, “Asshole!” at him.
Regardless, Tree bent down to gather up the textbooks, folders, and notebooks that Danielle insisted on carrying to class in her arms instead of a backpack.
Danielle’s disdain for book bags of any kind was well known. “I will not have the straps of a JanSport ruin the line of my top.” And so she carried her books against her chest like Sandy in Grease!—waiting, no doubt, for her Danny Zuko. Or, more likely, Tree thought, her Kenickie.
As Tree gathered up the books, a black envelope fell out of one of them. It didn’t yet have Tree’s name scrawled on the front in red crayon, but otherwise, it was exactly the same card she’d found on her desk three days ago. Or, on this same day, three times ago. Oh, fuck it. Tree stood up with the card in her hand and grabbed Danielle’s hair.
“You bitch!” she shouted.
Danielle screamed as Tree started punching her in the face. Danielle grabbed Tree’s hair, too, and both of them ended up on the ground. Tree wasn’t sure what had come over her except perhaps the rage of someone who was face-to-face with her killer.
She and Danielle tumbled into the grass by the sidewalk, trading wild blows. Tree rolled to the curb, and as Danielle scrambled to keep a grip on her, both of them fell out into the street.
“I knew it was you!” Tree straddled Danielle and hit her in the nose.
Danielle grabbed Tree’s hair to hold her there and screamed back, “I’m going to kill you!”
Which was when they both heard the horn blaring and looked up to see the blue city bus speeding toward them.
The horn blaring in her ears was quickly replaced by the toll of a bell, and Tree let loose with a full-body spasm of rage. Carter leaped from his place under the desk and arrived at his bed to find Tree screaming into a pillow.
Tree was furious with this process. She had so little to go on. Was that the same card she’d found on her desk? Did Danielle scrawl her name across it later and leave it for her? Or was that what th
e invites to the surprise party looked like? Had everyone gotten one of those?
Does it even matter if I find the killer?
But there was no guarantee that identifying and killing her killer in the Bayfield Baby mask would free her from this day. What if she was doomed to live this day on repeat for the rest of time, regardless of what she did about her killer? What if that person would always be stuck in this loop, too?
Chances were high that it didn’t matter at all.
Maybe nothing did.
While Carter did that charming thing where he tried to find her Tylenol, Tree pulled off the T-shirt he had loaned her. But this time, her own interior existential crisis took over, and she didn’t put on her own shirt. Instead, she kept stripping clothes off. As Carter stood there with his back to her, being chivalrous and offering her privacy, she unhooked her bra, took off her underwear, and flung open the door to the freshman with the bleached-blond hair who was now both paralyzed and, for the first time, speechless. She spoke for him:
“Check out my fine vagine for yourself, dickhead.”
She smiled sweetly and walked down the hall to an electric guitar only she could hear.
Pushing through the front door of Williams Hall in her birthday suit, on her actual birthday, was one of the most liberating things she’d ever experienced. As she walked naked across campus, Tree understood that she could live a life where there were no consequences. She could do anything that came into her head. What if the campus police came running over and arrested her right now? Hell, she could be put in a maximum-security federal penitentiary, and the killer would still come for her, mask and all. There was no stopping it. Tomorrow morning would always be another version of today, and she’d find herself right back in Carter’s bed at 9:00 a.m.
As she marched up the Kappa stairs, Danielle, alive and well again, appeared behind her and gasped. Tree turned around on the stairs and stood there, letting the Kappa president drink it all in. For a few moments, Danielle was completely speechless. Finally, she managed to utter the words, “What are you doing?”
Happy Death Day & Happy Death Day 2U Page 8