Page 32

Thirty-Two

Now

The Subaru comes to a grinding stop, but everything still spins. Little pieces of my surroundings pop into my awareness but not the whole picture.

We’re on all four tires again.

We landed straight up.

Something is hissing under the hood of the car.

Glass is on my lap, but I don’t know which window it came from.

The seatbelt strap is pulled so tight across my chest that I can already feel the bruise across my body.

Something smells vaguely like smoke.

There are canned goods everywhere.

I blink, trying to clear my vision, but I think the spinning is inside my head, a by-product of being rolled end over end half a dozen times. Maybe more. Everything stopped processing once we hit the air.

I feel my feet on the floorboards and flex them. Pain shoots down my calf, and a stinging sensation tells me I might have a cut there, but everything moves. I lift my arms and involuntarily scream when my left one throbs with more pain than I’ve ever felt in my life. When I look down, a piece of my bone is visible in the moonlight. It’s sticking straight out of my arm. I gag and look away before I puke into the wound.

I take a few steadying breaths. I’m in one piece. My neck is fine, my head is fine, and my lap is filled with the deflated airbag. I move my elbow back as far as I can and jab the button to release my seatbelt. It unlatches and the pressure on my chest loosens.

I think I’m okay.

Thankfully, I had my seatbelt on.

The top half of Jena’s body is stretched across the dash, and her head rests against the spiderwebbed windshield. Her maroon braids trail down her face. Blood drips from her nose and a dozen cuts across her cheek.

She doesn’t move.

My first instinct is to help her. To find something from the mess around me to stop the bleeding. But that can’t be how this ends. I have a plan to see through, same as I did on the lake. Like that night, I don’t have a choice.

The protection of the Goodwin name always comes first. At all costs.

I lean close to my former best friend’s face and brush the braids from her eyes. I hate that it came to this. I hate that our friendship had to end this way. Losing Jena won’t be like losing Claire, because Claire’s loss was a victory. A triumph. Jena’s loss will be a conflicted pain. A deep gouge in my heart, half grief and half betrayal.

But more than anything, she’s a hard-learned lesson: trust no one.

I cup her face, trying to steer clear of the blood. “I’m sorry. No hard feelings, okay?”

I sit back, and a low groan comes from deep in her throat. I shriek in surprise. The fingers of her left hand curl over the broken glass. She’s waking up…

I sag against my seat. I was hoping to avoid this.

I spot my phone lit up on the floor of the passenger side. I wrench my battered door open with my good arm and use my knee to pry it open enough for me to slip out. I stagger into the field, holding my broken arm close to my chest. Out here, freshly kicked-up dust is heavy in the air. The moon is caught behind clouds.

I make my way around the front of the car. One headlight is smashed; the other shoots a beacon of light into the field. The back passenger door is almost folded in half, but Jena’s is mostly intact. I yank it open, and she slides off the dash in a shower of broken glass. She lands on her back in the dirt, her legs still in the car. From this angle, I can see her other eye is really fucked up, and there’s blood pouring from the cuts on her face to her neck, seeping into the halter neck of my jumpsuit.

She probably won’t last very long. Not with all that blood. But I can’t risk her living long enough to whisper anything to the first responders. I’ll have to find a rock or something in case she happens to still have a pulse by the time someone discovers the crash.

I’ll only bash in her head if I have to. I’d much rather let her bleed out than have to do it myself. Despite everything she’s done, Jena was still the best friend I’ve ever had. I just can’t risk her telling anyone what I admitted in the car.

I’m still kicking myself for falling for her stupid plan. If my dad finds out about this, he’s going to disown me. The instructions were clear as day: never speak of what happened at the lake ever again. The truth is what we made it.

Jena groans again, shifting in the dirt.

This time, it’s my turn to clean it up.

I lean over her to snatch my phone off the floor by her feet and then stagger off in search of a rock. The ground is freshly tilled in long horizontal rows of dirt. I sift through the soil, but several mounds later I’ve found exactly zero rocks larger than a golf ball. I keep moving through the rows, listing to the left and right, so my footprints look like I wandered in a shock for a while—in case anyone wonders why I didn’t call for help right away.

After I’ve picked my way through several more rows, I let out a frustrated groan. Still no rocks big enough. A darkened cluster of trees hugs the edges of the field, but I don’t want to walk that far to find a suitable weapon. It’ll take way too long. And I can’t exactly strangle her with my bare hands, or the seatbelt because, one, it’ll look like a murder—if I end her, it has to look like an injury sustained in the crash or I will have totaled the Subaru for nothing—and, two, I’m limited to only one arm.

I sigh, and halfway to the road, I turn back to survey the crash.

Deep grooves are cut into the earth from every one of our flips. I left tire marks on the pavement where we went off the road. The back half of my car is smashed in from our previous rear-end collisions. The police officer from earlier will give a statement about what we said when she stopped us. It’ll look like my stalker crashed into her and then continued on to run us off the road.

And my secrets will die here. With Jena.

With her gone, her accomplices will either be tracked down and arrested for their part in tonight, or they’ll have no choice but to back off after their little plan cost Jena her life.

As soon as I find a goddamned rock. Seriously, it shouldn’t be this hard. I look around, weighing my options. Maybe there’s something in the car I can use. Or I could smash her head against the door until she’s out… That sounds really unpleasant though.

Oh! I have a car full of canned goods. I start back toward the Subaru.

That food drive is saving my ass over and over tonight.

That one lone headlight blinds me until I’m on the other side of the car, but when I come around Jena’s door, she’s no longer lying on the ground.

Panic slices through me and I duck to look inside. It’s empty.

“Jena?” I yell, spinning in a circle to look behind me. My voice echoes again and again across the open field.

Where the fuck did she go?

I spin around, walking faster now, circling the back of the car. “Jena!”

I look from the road to the car, to the trees at the back and side of the field. She’s nowhere out in the open, but I can’t fathom how she would have been able to make it all the way to the trees so fast. It doesn’t make any sense, but there’s nowhere else she could be.

My phone beeps in my hand.

Jena’s name appears on the screen.

I frown, totally confused. First of all, how the hell is she texting me when her phone is lost at the beach somewhere? Second of all, what is this, a game ? I don’t have fucking time for this.

When I tap open the thread, the remnants of our friendship fill the screen. Our texts from earlier today take on a new, more sinister meaning now.

12:19 p.m.

Did you hear about Beau’s party?

Hello?

We should drive together. I don’t think my car will make it.

12:23 p.m.

If you’re ignoring me on purpose, it won’t work. I know where you live. ?

3:02 p.m.

I mean it. We’re going to that party.

?

Wait for me in the parking lot after school!

And there at the bottom:

12:31 a.m.

No hard feelings, okay?

I’m confused and irritated at the same time. Is she trying to be funny? Is this a last laugh situation? And seriously, did she have her phone the whole fucking drive? Is someone else texting me from her number?

My phone pings again.

12:32 a.m.

Link

The fuck is this? I click the link and it takes a few seconds to open. I still only have two bars.

The link redirects to a YouTube video.

The start screen is a still of the inside of a car. My car. Facing the front windshield. The top left corner is obscured by something black. The car is on a dark road, only illuminated by headlights. Two people sit in the front seat.

Dread forms in the deepest parts of my chest. My finger shakes as I press play.

Jena’s face appears on the screen. She’s crouched in my backseat, pushing around piles of junk and angling the camera back and forth before settling it where the corner is cast in shadow. She backs up, nods to herself, and climbs out of the car.

All at once I realize what I’m looking at. The black blob is the corner of the headrest. Jena attached a camera to it in the backseat.

No. Not a camera.

I stumble around the back of the Subaru as fast as I can. The rear window and the back passenger window are both smashed to bits and there it is, wrapped around the base of the headrest. A small black phone grip.

She used her phone to record us.

And now it’s gone.

In the video, Jena runs along the side of the road by Beau’s beach house until she disappears down the driveway. The car is still for a long time.

This video is two hours long.

A chill runs down my back and I robotically skip ahead twenty minutes.

The Subaru is lit up by the gas station lights. My own voice rings out. “About time… It’s not like I have a curfew or anything.”

“Sorry! I couldn’t decide if I wanted something besides water. I debated a vanilla Frappuccino, but don’t want to deal with the caffeine—”

I skip again.

The interior of the car is bathed in high beams. Jena’s profile appears on her side of the car, clear as day. It’s like she’s on a stage. “…Did anything else happen that night? Anything the stalker robot might know about?”

She looks straight back at the camera.

I skip again, my heart rate climbing by the second.

The Subaru is awash with police lights. “…Never mind if they tack on a reckless driving charge too,” I say from the driver’s seat. “You don’t have the benefit of my dad’s get-out-of-jail-free card, so this one’s on me.”

Skip. More red and blue lights, but the car is empty.

In one of those rare moments where I know exactly what’s about to happen, I skip once more. Me and Jena argue about the boat, what she did or didn’t see out on the water, and then…

“I had to kill her. It was the only way to make it stop.”

I pause the video, feeling numb from head to toe.

She pretended to lose her phone, and then secretly recorded our entire drive home. How did I not see this fucking camera when I was back there throwing cans? I think again of her panic when I climbed into the backseat.

The pieces click together one by one. This was never about the Bronco. All that confess to the proper channels stuff was total bullshit. She was trying to get me on video, admitting to what I did. The idiots in the Bronco were just a distraction.

Jena was the real threat, and I didn’t even see it.

My mind scrambles for a plan, a way to mitigate the fallout from this video.

Okay, first, it’s two hours long and it’s the middle of the night. Nobody’s going to see this for a while. All I have to do is find her, finish this, and delete the video from her account. I’ll pry the phone from her cold dead hand if I have to. Nobody has to know about this.

My phone chimes with another notification.

It’s an email. Also from Jena.

My hand curls into an angry fist around my phone. She’s going to make this next part a whole lot easier if she keeps annoying the shit out of me.

I open it and find an identical YouTube video embedded in the email.

I’m confused, until my eyes lock on the recipients list.

I’m not the only person she sent this to.

I scroll and scroll and scroll through hundreds of recipients, growing increasingly more horrified with every new name on the list. They’re all Waldorf email addresses. She sent this to the whole fucking student body?!

And my parents.

And Dylan .

The last email robs the breath from my lungs. She sent my confession to the detective who investigated Claire’s death.

The subject line is the knife twisted in an already gaping wound.

Re: Goodwins don’t get away with murder.

I can’t undo this. There’s no way to bend the truth this time. No way to come out on top, but there has to be a way to get ahead of it at least. Damage control.

Think, Brooke. Think.

I dial my dad. He’ll have a plan. Just like at the lake.

His phone rings three times and then goes to voicemail.

What?

I dial my mom. She doesn’t pick up either.

She was just calling me! There’s no way she’s asleep. Did they see the video already? Are they not answering on purpose? The second time I dial my dad it doesn’t even ring. He sends me straight to voicemail.

I’m alone.

I drop my phone and it clatters to the dirt. I slump to my knees, pain shooting through my body, as sirens wail in the distance.

And I scream.

FA CREATED CHAT

JH JOINED THE CHAT

3–07 5:14 p.m.

JH: Are you sure this thing is secure?

FA: Positive. I did my research

JH: And by that, you mean you Googled it.

FA: Yeah. Like I said, research

FA: It’s a third party group chat. It keeps no record of the conversation after the chat is wiped

JH: You better be right. It makes me nervous having anything in writing.

FA: If we’re going to do this, we need a way to communicate when we’re not together, babe

JH: In person is safer.

3–10 3:40 p.m.

JH: Are we sure we have to do this?

DM JOINED THE CHAT

3–10 4:15 p.m.

DM: What other choice do we have? We’ve tried everything else.

DM: Our anonymous tips opened the special investigation but that went nowhere.

FA: Yeah bc the people investigating are in the Goodwins pockets

FA:

DM: Exactly. What are we supposed to do, call the same police that helped w/ the cover up and tell them we want to chat?

DM: Our phone calls aren’t working. She’s ignoring the threats. If we want her to own up to what she did, we have to do something. Before graduation.

3–10 5:44 p.m.

JH: Fine. When?

FA: Beau’s talking about throwing an Ivy party at the end of the month

JH: She doesn’t go to parties anymore.

DM: Sounds like you have two weeks to figure it out.

JH: And…what happens if she won’t go?

DM: Then we find another opportunity. She has to leave town sometime.

3–12 12:09 p.m.

DM: Jena, do you have the newspapers?

3–12 12:18 p.m.

JH: They’re in Felix’s trunk

3–23 2:12 p.m.

FA: The car is sorted.

DM: Sure it can’t be traced back to us?

FA: Yeah. Found an old Bronco from my uncle’s junkyard. It’s very OJ. It’s not registered. I think the owner used it for off-roading and then ditched it when it started breaking down

JH: Breaking down? Is it even going to make it to the beach?

FA: It’ll make it. You guys need to relax. What’s the worst that could happen?

3–28 8:22 a.m.

JH: Today’s the day. Nobody fuck up.

FA: Encouraging

3–28 3:35 p.m.

JH: I’m outside her house. Still don’t think I can get her to go to this thing.

FA: Dangle Dylan in front of her like the snack he is

DM: Fuck off Felix.

3–28 4:03 p.m.

JH: She got into Yale.

DM: Of course she did.

3–28 4:27 p.m.

JH: She agreed. Party’s on.

JH: (Dangling Dylan totally worked btw. She ate the snack.)

JH: Don’t forget your black clothes. You can’t wear the same thing you’re wearing to the beach.

JH: I can’t believe we’re doing this.

3–28 7:18 p.m.

DM: Game is over. Masks and black clothes are in my duffel bag.

FA: My car or yours?

DM: Mine. Yours smells like Taco Bell.

FA: Does not!

3–28 7:22 p.m.

JH: It really does.

3–28 7:48 p.m.

FA: How’s the party going?

JH: She’s busy talking about herself. As per usual.

JH: She’s watching for you, Dylan. Better put on your flirty face when you get here.

JH:

FA: He’s still driving, but I think this sums up his reaction:

JH: It’s hard work being the bait…

3–28 9:35 p.m.

FA: Ask her to go for a walk with you so we can plant the camera

DM:

3–28 9:42 p.m.

JH: It’s ready, I won’t have my phone until this is over.

JH: Don’t fuck up.

JH: Please be careful.

3–29 12:44 a.m.

DM: Holy shit.

DM: Jena, you did it!

3–29 1:52 a.m.

FA: Jena, what the fuck. Are you okay?

FA: We just drove past the accident. The Subaru looks like a wad of red aluminum foil. Where the hell are you?

3–29 7:52 a.m.

FA: Her mom called

DM: Is she okay?

FA: She’s alive

FA: I can’t see her until she’s stable

DM: Did you watch the whole video?

FA: Yeah. let’s just say it’s a good thing Brooke’s going to jail and leave it at that

3–30 9:33 a.m.

JH: Mom got me a new phone. Took me a half hour to remember my password for this stupid chat room.

3–30 9:40 a.m.

DM: Jesus, Jena. Are you okay?

JH: Just some bumps and bruises.

FA:

FA:

FA: Your mom ratted you out you liar. you broke five ribs, all the bones in your right hand. They had to reinflate one of your lungs. You had two fucking surgeries!!

JH: Yeah but the second surgery was just to set my hand, so that’s pretty much two injuries in one.

FA:

JH: Yeah exactly. Explain yourselves immediately. What the fuck happened in that Bronco?? Are you two out of your minds??

3–30 9:46 a.m.

DM: Talk to Felix.

FA:

FA: Listen, the Bronco had some…issues

JH: You were supposed to lightly tap the bumper a few times and flash your high beams. Not fishtail us across the hwy and smash up a police cruiser you dummy.

FA: Yeah like I meant to do that The power steering kept going out and the brakes were total shittt. I was just going to drive past the cop, and the next thing I know I’m plowing into the back of it

FA: Also the deer wasn’t my fault

JH: YOU TOTALED A COP CAR

DM: He didn’t mean to…

JH: I’m having a vivid memory of you telling us about this car.

FA: It’ll make it. You guys need to relax. What’s the worst that could happen?

JH: Ah yes. There it is.

FA: Listen…

DM: The cop is fine. Promise. We checked on her and made sure help was coming before we took off.

JH: Did she see you?

FA: No, we bailed when we heard sirens. WHILE MY FACE WAS ON FIRE BY THE WAY. Dylan had to drive all the way back thanks to you

JH: What else was I supposed to do? Strangling Brooke wasn’t part of the plan.

FA: I wasn’t strangling anyone. I just picked her up and rattled her around a little. She started screaming her head off but wasn’t in danger

JH: If a giant picked you up and rattled your brains, you’d probably fear for your life too.

FA: But you know the giant! I wouldn’t do that

JH: I heard her screaming and found you standing over her. I stand by the pepper spray.

FA: I’m only letting this go because you got thrown around in a tin can yesterday

JH: Smart.

3–30 10:09 a.m.

JH: What about the rest? Did you guys keep to THAT plan at least?

FA: Yes, you nag. The Bronco’s been crushed back at the junkyard. Masks and clothes are long gone

JH: So…it’s over?

DM: You tell us. Have you talked to the police yet?

3–30 10:20 a.m.

JH: Funny you should ask. They just left my hospital room.

DM: Are they pressing charges?

JH: Not on me.

JH: My mom is getting me a lawyer just in case, but they pretty much told me they’re far more interested in the Goodwin family and Claire’s murder. As long as I testify, I’m in the clear.

3–30 10:24 a.m.

DM: When can you have visitors?

3–30 10:37 a.m.

JH: Tomorrow morning. But don’t both come at the same time. Just in case.

DM: NP

DM: I’m really glad you’re okay.

3–30 11:46 a.m.

JH: Turn on the news! They’re arresting her right now.

FA: DUCK ya

FA: FUCK* damn autocorrect

FA: Can’t wait to see her mugshot

3–30 12:01 p.m.

JH: WOW

FA: Holy shit

DM: I’m at work. What happened?

FA: They showed the arrest live. Both brooke and her dad were taken away in handcuffs

JH: One of the reporters asked Mr. Goodwin if he had a comment and he threw her under the bus entirely.

JH: “I had no idea my own daughter was capable of such disgusting things. I had no part in any of it. She acted alone. I’m as horrified as you are.”

DM: Claire would love this.

3–30 12:29 p.m.

DM: Jesus. There’s no loyalty among Goodwins, I guess.

DM: I’d feel bad for her if she wasn’t such a psychopath.

FA: Seriously. Imagine what it was like to live in that house

DM: I’d rather not.

JH: Someone from Waldorf uploaded the arrest already and set it to “Who Let the Dogs Out” I keep watching it on loop.

FA: That’s fucking hilarious. Bet it was Beau

3–30 12:57 p.m.

FA: Switch to the regular group chat?

JH: God yes. I’m ready to never speak of this or Brooke fucking Goodwin ever again.

DM: I’m right there with you.

FA: Wipe the chat?

DM:

JH:

FA WIPED THE CHAT