Page 14

Fourteen

Now

Threat now delivered, the Bronco backs off—not enough for me to feel safe, but enough to not hyperventilate off the road. My entire body is covered in sweat, and these damn seat heaters are making it worse. I reach down and shut them both off, wishing I could chuck Dylan’s sweatshirt into the backseat without crashing. My palms are slick on the steering wheel.

I can’t breathe .

“What do we do now?” Jena asks, staring at the slowly receding headlights behind us.

“I don’t know yet. Let me think.”

“Babe, we don’t have time to think.” She presses pause on my phone and drops it into a cup holder. The coffeeshop playlist abruptly cuts off and the car fills with the sounds of our tires on the highway instead. “We have to lose him somehow. Can you pull off on another side road?”

“How am I supposed to do that? They’re right behind us. How could I possibly turn off fast enough to lose them without flipping the damn car?”

“You did it before!”

My hands clench on the steering wheel. “I made the turn at Devil’s Lake when they were a hundred feet behind me, and we were only going forty miles an hour. He’s got me up to ninety; there’s no way.”

“Then slow down!”

I don’t want to argue with her, but she’s going to keep insisting on her plan until I prove it’s stupid. I let off the gas. The Bronco comes up fast, not braking until they’re basically on top of us. I have two choices: hit the gas or let him hit me.

“Okay, okay! Go, go, go, I take it back,” she screeches.

I hit the gas again and the speedometer climbs back to ninety. The Bronco backs the hell off again. It seems like he only stays away when I’m going too fast for my own good, forcing us to stay in constant danger.

Jena grips her head with both her hands. “Shit, shit, shit. What do we do? We need a plan.”

“I said I’m working on it,” I snap.

I imagine the rest of the drive. Winding highway, cliffside roads, potholes the size of small children… I can’t think of a single place to stop or pull off before we hit service again. If I can stay ahead of him the whole drive, I might have a chance of finding a farmhouse once we reach the outskirts of the next town. We might be able to scream for help and attract attention before he’s on top of us. But it’s a long shot. Especially because the threat was clear: truth or die.

Which is another problem. Even if I had some truth to tell, how am I supposed to do that with no service? My head starts to hurt trying to understand his plan and make one of my own simultaneously.

“Okay, we need to…think. We need to think ,” Jena repeats, like I’m not already doing that. “If we can’t get away from him, then we have to do what he says, right? What could you possibly have to confess?”

A low hanging branch grazes the top of the Subaru. In my rearview mirror, I watch it snap across the top of the Bronco’s windshield a second later. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The road dips and the whole car lurches into the air. I don’t think I could grip the steering wheel any tighter. I drop the speed to eighty-five, but the headlights behind us loom the second I slow down.

Fuck.

“Come on. Help me. What’s your first guess?”

“Jena, I don’t know. He must be out of his fucking mind if he’s threatening the daughter of a soon-to-be-judge. Not to mention his plan makes zero sense: we’re trapped on a highway with no service. How does he expect me to reach the proper channels ? Send up a smoke signal?”

“Shit. That’s a good point.”

“Upside, he’s an idiot, which means we have a solid chance of outsmarting him.”

The highway curves sharply to the right, then back to the left around a stand of massive trees. I slam on the brakes, and luckily so does the Bronco. Still, I take the turn faster than I should to get a little distance between us, and it works. He slips back and his headlights stop glaring in my rearview mirrors.

“Downside,” she says, “his fucking car is twice the size of ours and we’re going ninety miles an hour.”

“Only eighty-five now.”

She huffs at me. “The point still stands. We need to figure out what he wants so we can find a way out of this.”

“I told you—I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’d love to confess and live , but I’m not going to make shit up to placate a bad driver with an anger problem.”

Jena brushes her braids over her shoulder and twists to put her back against the door, tucking one velvet knee under the other. “Let’s brainstorm this. Maybe if we can figure out what they think you did, we can figure out who it is. When did the calls and slashed tires start?”

I pretend to think about it for a second, but I don’t need to. I remember the first call down to the minute: January 7th, 3:20 p.m., just as school ended. I answered it on the way to my locker and regretted it instantly. I still remember the way the heavy breathing made every person who happened to look at me as I made my way down the hall feel threatening.

“Um, January sometime,” I offer, instead.

Jena anxiously picks at the edge of her shiny chrome manicure on her thumb. “The day the results of the special investigation were reported?”

“Yup.”

“It has to be about that party, then, right? You’ve been volunteering with your parents and living like a hermit ever since, and none of this was happening before senior year started, so what else could it be?”

I give her a sharp look. “What are you implying? That I had something to do with what happened at the lake?”

“What? No, I—”

I clench my teeth so hard my jaw hurts. I force my muscles to unlock and take a breath. “What happened to Claire was awful—but it was an accident . And one that she caused. That’s it.”

For a moment, the hum of the engine and highway fill the space between us.

“Did anything else happen that night?” Jena asks, slightly quieter than before. “Anything the stalker robot might know about?”

“Like what? You were there. Anything I know, so do you. Why aren’t you the one getting these calls? If anything, you were more involved in what happened that night than I was.”

“I have no idea. Maybe they blame you for throwing the party in the first place. Or they think something else happened on the boat.”

The road straightens out and I take the opportunity to glare at her. “I wasn’t even on the boat.”

She looks away, grabbing a chunk of her braids and winding them together over her shoulder. “Don’t get snippy with me. I know that. I’m saying maybe they don’t. I’m on your side here.”

“Are you? I thought you were, especially after everything that went down at the party, but now it seems like all it took was one threat from some loser in a shit SUV and suddenly—”

It’s like a light bulb goes on in my mind.

“Oh my god. I know who it is.” I squint into the rearview mirror, trying to see the Bronco better. “It’s Brandon. Claire’s brother.”

Jena looks back too. “Brandon Heck?”

“Yeah, think about it. He was already at the coast. He crashed the Ivy party screaming his head off, and suddenly someone’s trying to threaten me into some kind of confession? Of course it’s him. He’s the only one who hasn’t accepted what happened. This must be his way of creating a version of events that make sense to him. Because Claire drowning in an accident she caused isn’t something he can accept.”

“I don’t know, Brooke. This seems like a lot for someone like Brandon to pull off. If he was behind this, he’d just straight-up run you off a cliff.”

Headlights blind me through the rearview mirror again. The Bronco zooms up as a passing lane splits off ahead of me. I swerve to the left to avoid another bumper tap as something jumps over the guardrail from the other side of the road. I see a flash of antlers and spindly legs before I register what it is.

A deer jumps across the road, straight into oncoming traffic.

I hit the brakes, not thinking about how close the Bronco is to the back of my car, and they slam into us. All I hear is metal crunching, and I lose control of the car.

Jena screams, and we fishtail across the empty highway.