Page 12

Twelve

Now

The entire car shakes with the impact of the Bronco.

My seatbelt tugs tight across my chest, snapping me back against the seat, and I lose my grip on the steering wheel. The Subaru slides over the white line and I scramble to correct the steering, slamming my foot down on the gas as we straighten out.

The speedometer climbs to seventy.

Eighty-two.

Ninety miles an hour.

The Bronco stays right on my tail.

Jena lets loose a string of swears, yanking on her seatbelt until it loosens. She turns in her seat to flip them off through the back window. “Road-raging son of a bitch!”

But I don’t think that’s what this is. I didn’t cut him off. I didn’t slow him down. I didn’t take his parking spot. We had no interaction on the road whatsoever before he pulled up behind us, and he went out of his way to get behind me again after I took the turn to Devil’s Lake.

Garnering the attention of both a phone stalker and a road rage enthusiast seems unlikely. No Caller ID must be in that Bronco. I just don’t know who they are or why they’re doing this.

“I should have stayed home,” I mumble, glancing again at my speed.

Ninety-one miles an hour.

We’re going too fast. Every groove in the pavement, every bend or incline feels twice as sharp at this speed. If we hit a pothole, I might lose total control, but I have no choice.

I check the mirror, to clock the distance between their bumper and mine one more time. They can’t be more than a few feet behind me. I can feel my blood pressure rising.

“I don’t know what to do,” I say.

“ What ? We call for help, that’s what we do,” she says, reaching for my phone.

A surge of panic goes through my entire body. “Let me—” I say, trying to grab it first.

She snatches it off the magnetic holder. “No way. You’re going like a hundred miles an hour. You drive. I’ll call.”

“Really, Jena. Wait a minute. Maybe I can lose them,” I say, but she’s already staring at the screen with a confused furrow between her eyes.

“Why the hell is your phone on airplane mode?” she asks, flashing the screen at me.

I don’t know what to say. Every possible response flees my brain. “I um… It’s…”

She narrows her eyes at me and swipes through my passcode.

No. “Jena, don’t.”

The second my phone regains its bars, it starts ringing. The call goes through the Bluetooth, and the dash screen lights up with what I’ve been hiding for the last three months.

INCOMING CALL FROM NO CALLER ID

Jena looks at the screen, then back at me. “I’m going to ask you one last time: What the hell is going on?”

Of course they’re calling right the fuck now. “Don’t worry about it.” I hit the decline button on the steering wheel and try to swipe the phone back from her without careening the car off the road. She holds it to her chest. “Jena, seriously. Call for help before we lose service, okay?”

“Why is someone calling you from a blocked number? Is this why you’ve been on edge all day?”

My hands clench on the wheel. “Give me my phone.”

“Who’s No Caller ID?”

“I don’t know!”

“Then why do you look so terrified?”

We hit a bump where old pavement turns to new pavement and my ass lifts about an inch off the seat before I plop back down. My eyes fly to the rearview. The Bronco swerves for a second and we gain a few feet on them.

“Brooke!”

I force myself to look at her again. “It’s nothing, really. Let it go.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked you to!” I practically scream at her.

I grab for the phone again, but she holds it over by the window and starts scrolling through my call log.

“Jena, stop it! I mean it. I want my phone back right now.”

She ignores me entirely. “Why the fuck do you have twelve voicemails from this blocked number? How long have they been calling you?”

Twelve ? Why are they suddenly leaving me so many messages? I can’t make sense of it, but I know letting Jena listen to them is not a good idea. There’s no telling what they might say.

Damage control time.

I readjust my grip on the steering wheel and take a second to focus on the road and calm my voice. I need to be flippant, not panicky. The Bronco is the problem, not the calls. If I can get her to refocus, I can salvage this. “It’s a stupid prank, absolutely nothing to worry about. Can you please just call the police? I think we have bigger fish to fry.”

As if on cue, the Bronco taps my back bumper again and surprises us both. They’ve made up the distance between us and I can’t even see their headlights anymore. They’re too close.

My headlights catch on a pothole ahead. I swerve into the oncoming lane and press the gas pedal to the floor. Thank god the road is still empty. As soon as we’re past the pothole, I swerve back into the right lane.

I hold out my hand again. “Come on, Jena. We have to call for help before we lose service. Either dial or give me my phone.”

She hesitates, and I think she’s going to cave—until the phone starts ringing again.

INCOMING CALL FROM NO CALLER ID

She levels me with a long, slow stare, then glances behind us again. I can almost see the moment she puts two and two together. Before I can protest, she hits accept and the call connects through the speakers.

“It’s rude to ignore someone’s calls, Brooke,” the robotic voice says.

I can’t breathe. It feels like the car is closing in around me.

“Who the hell is this?” Jena demands.

“I didn’t call for you,” the voice says. “I called for Brooke.”

“Yeah, well, you got me . Congratulations. Now who the fuck is this?”

The voice doesn’t respond, but the Bronco does. Their front bumper nudges the back of my car a third time. This one is harder than the last two, and the front of the Subaru swerves left, and then back to the right. I grip the steering wheel with both hands and fight to get us straightened out and back in the middle of the lane. I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears.

This was not part of driver’s ed.

“Fuck!” Jena screams. “Are you behind us?”

“Well, I’m certainly not at Walmart.”

Jena looks about three seconds from climbing through my sunroof and tackling the Bronco with her bare hands. I catch her eye and shake my head. I hope it says, Please don’t make this worse, or better yet, Don’t anger the psychotic driver behind us, because I choose life.

Jena takes a breath. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to Brooke Goodwin.”

“Why, exactly?”

“I think it’s time she paid for what she did. Don’t you?”

Jena mouths, What does that mean?

I shrug and whisper, “I have no idea.”

“Don’t be shy , Brookie,” the voice says. “We’re practically BFFs by now, aren’t we? You’re a terrible friend though—you never call, never write. Look what I had to resort to. Do I finally have your attention?”

There’s a lump in my throat the size of a car tire, but I do my best to speak around it and not sound like my entire body is shaking with fear. It absolutely is, but I don’t want him to know that. “What do you want?”

“We’ve been over that already; pay attention. We’re running out of time. When we lose service, I’ll have to resort to plan B.”

I stare at the road ahead and realize we’re about to make the turn that’ll spit us more inland, where we’ll leave the coastal highway and plunge into forty miles of farmland with no cell service.

No. We have to turn around. We have to call my dad or the cops or the goddamned National Guard if this asshole doesn’t back off.

Forty miles without reception is forty miles too long to be at the mercy of a much larger car with no way to stop, no way to call for help, and once we hit the farmland, no place left to hide.

“I’m tired of waiting, Brooke,” the automated voice says. “I’ve been trying to convince you to do the right thing for months, but you’ve ignored all my hints and now I’m done waiting for you to do the right thing.”

“What do you mean hints ?” Jena asks.

“Uh oh, someone’s been keeping secrets from the best friend.”

Jena looks sharply at me, and I pretend to focus on the road.

The voice continues, “Honestly, the bumper stickers and the fliers would have been annoying at best, but you didn’t even crack when I slashed your tires. If I wasn’t so disgusted by you, I’d be impressed.” The voice starts laughing and that mechanical sound is too much.

I hit the end call button on the steering wheel. My hand is shaking.

“What the actual fuck?” Jena yells. “This dickhead slashed your tires and you didn’t tell me? How long has this been going on?”

The phone starts ringing through the Bluetooth again, and I ignore her completely. We only have a few minutes before we lose service, and I don’t want to spend them listening to any more of his garbage or giving Jena the sordid details of No Caller ID’s harassment. So I avoid both.

I reject the call again.

The Bronco slams into us and this time we almost fishtail off the road. The console lights with a third call and Jena still has my phone in her hand. She stabs the answer button before I can reject it a third time.

“Stop it!” she screams.

“You’re trying my patience, Brooke,” the voice says, ignoring Jena completely. “But we’re out of time, so I better cut to the chase. The rules of the game are quite simple: you have the rest of this drive to confess to the proper channels—”

“Confess to what?” I yell, some mix of panic and anger tightening the muscles in my chest until it’s hard to breathe. I barely choke out the words. “I have nothing to confess to!”

“Don’t interrupt, Brooke. That’s not very polite.”

I see full red. The combination of today’s events and the cumulative intimidation over the last three months stretches out in front of me like a string and every word out of his mouth pulls it tighter until it’s ready to snap. I have to keep some kind of control, or this is going to go from terrifying to deadly real fast .

The robotic asshole clears his throat. “As I was saying… confess what you did to the proper channels, and you live. It’s as simple as that. When we reach service again, if you haven’t come clean…well…let’s not find out. Hmmm?”

The fucker starts laughing again.

I want to burst into tears. I want to tell him that I won’t confess to something I didn’t do. I want to scream that he’s a fucking idiot for asking me to do this on a stretch of road where I’ll have no service, but there’s no time for any of this.

The long straightaway we’ve been on starts turning inland. We’re going so fast that we eat up the rest of the turn in seconds. The line crackles and disconnects on him midlaugh.

The cell service bars in the upper right corner of the dash screen blink off.

NO SERVICE

I start to hyperventilate. The second the call is disconnected, my downloaded coffeeshop playlist springs back to life, filling the car with calming guitar that needs to read the damn room.

We’re stuck on this empty highway, being tailed by some bitter loser in a shitty car, with no way to call for help for the better part of an hour. It won’t take him that long to run us off the road. Half the highway is cut into hills with thousand-foot drops on the other side of a guardrail.

There’s no way to stop.

There’s no way to call for help.

We’re going to die out here.