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Fade in.
Parking lot.
The middle of night.
The middle of nowhere.
Beginning at the end, like a great film noir. Bill Holden dead in the swimming pool. Fred MacMurray giving his last confession.
Going full circle. Like a noose.
There’s a car, a diner, a neon sign in the parking lot fading to streaks in the rearview mirror as the car speeds away. Inside are two people—a young woman in the passenger seat and a man behind the wheel. Both stare through the windshield to the road ahead, uncertain.
About who they are.
About where they’re going.
About how they got here, to this precise moment in time. Just before midnight. The final seconds of Tuesday, November 19, 1991.
But Charlie knows what brought them to the cusp of this uncertain new day. As the situation unfolds frame by frame, like film through a projector, she knows exactly how it all happened.
She knows because this isn’t a movie.
It’s the here and now.
She’s the girl in the car.
The man behind the wheel is a killer.
And Charlie understands, with the certainty of someone who’s seen this kind of movie a hundred times before, that only one of them will live to see the dawn.
NINEP.M.
INT. DORM ROOM—DAY
Staying isn’t an option.
That’s why Charlie has agreed to get into a car with a perfect stranger.
She’s promised Robbie—promised herself as well—that she’ll bolt if anything about the situation strikes her as shady. One can’t be too careful. Not these days.
Not after what happened to Maddy.
Charlie has already steeled herself for flight, mentally listing all the scenarios in which she should run. If the car looks battered and/or has tinted windows. If someone else is inside, no matter the excuse. If he seems too eager to depart or, on the flip side, not hurried enough. She’s sworn—to Robbie, to herself, to Maddy, whom she still sometimes talks to even though she’s now two months in the grave—that a single shiver of apprehension will send her running back to the dorm.
She doubts it will come to that. Because he seems nice. Friendly. Definitely not the type of guy who’d do the things that had been done to Maddy and the others.
Besides, he’s not a stranger. Not completely. They’d met once before, in front of the ride board in the campus commons, dwarfed by that wall of flyers from students desperate to get home and those eager to drive them there in exchange for gas money. Charlie had just put up her own flyer—carefully printed, her phone number placed on each meticulously cut tab—when he appeared at her side.
“You’re going to Youngstown?” he said, his gaze flicking from her to the flyer and back again.
Charlie hesitated before responding. A post-Maddy habit. She never willingly engaged with people she didn’t know. Not until she had a grasp on their intentions. He could have been making small talk. Or trying to pick her up. Unlikely, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility. It was how she met Robbie, after all. She’d been pretty once, before guilt and grief had sunk their claws into her.
“Yeah,” she eventually said, after his gaze returned to the ride board, making her decide he was there for the same reason she was. “That where you’re heading?”
“Akron,” he said.
Hearing that made Charlie stand at attention. Not quite Youngstown, but close enough. A quick stop on the way to his final destination.