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Charlie thinks it means she’s dying. And wouldn’t that be a relief? Surely better than having to endurethis.
Yet she remains alive, her heart still gone but her head spinning and a stark ache in her gut that feels like the inside of her body trying to gnaw its way outside.
The nausea, when it comes, is too fast to stop. The bile rushes up and out, and soon Charlie is bent forward, vomit dripping off the steering wheel.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, “Why?”
Charlie says it softly. Barely a mumble. So soft she’s not sure Robbie even heard her. So she says it again, shouting this time, the word smacking off the window and echoing through the entire car.
“Why?”
Robbie says nothing. He simply stares into the open glove compartment, looking at something else inside that Charlie had missed until that moment.
A pair of pliers.
Dried blood stains their tip.
Seeing it conjures an image of that night outside the bar. Robbie approaching Maddy, who smiles because she recognizes a friendly face. He comes in close, his head lowered, hand cupped around her lighter. Seeing it is so terrible Charlie has to close her eyes and shake her head to make it go away.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know it was you,” she says, still shocked and nauseous and waiting for her missing heart to finally stop its stubborn beating. “Did you know I was there? That I saw you?”
“Not until later,” Robbie says, as if that will make it easier for her to bear. “But by then I knew that you also hadn’t really seen me. That something else was going on in that head of yours.”
Charlie drops the teeth back into jewelry box and snaps the lid shut, unable to look at them any longer. The box itself slips from her hands as she wails, “Why Maddy?”
“Because she was too brash,” Robbie says, spitting out the last word like it’s a curse. “Always loud. Always demanding attention.”
“Is that why you killed the others, too?” she says. “Because they were too loud? Too brash?”
“No. Because they thought they were special. They thought they deserved the attention they were constantly begging for. And they’re not special, Charlie. I’ve been waiting a year for you to figure it out. Most people are stupid and useless and pathetic. Andthose deluded enough to think they aren’t deserve whatever punishment they get.”
Charlie recoils against the driver’s-side door, terrified. “You’re sick.”
“No,” Robbie says. “I truly am special. As are you. Remember the night we met? In the library?”
Of course Charlie remembers. It was her own personal romantic comedy, which means it was likely different from how she remembers it. Now she looks at Robbie, trying to see if she recognizes any part of the man she encountered that night.
She can’t.
He’s a complete stranger to her now.
“I thought I was going to kill you that night,” Robbie says. “Sitting with you at the library, then the diner, then walking you home. The whole time I kept thinking about what it was going to feel like to kill you.”
The matter-of-fact way he says it feels like a punch to Charlie’s solar plexus. For a few seconds, she can barely breathe.
“Why didn’t you?” she says.
“Because there was something about you I was drawn to. You were so—”
“Innocent?”
Robbie shakes his head. “Clueless. You watch your movies and you think that makes you smart. Like you know the way the world works. But all it’s done is warp your brain. You have no idea what the world is like.”
He’s wrong about that.
Charlie knows what the world is like.
Parents leave in the morning and never come back.