Chapter 36 Paper
Paper
Because all of the doors of Jo’s car are locked, the girl who looks like Alessandra pounds on my window. “Hunter!”
“Who’s that?” asks Patricia.
“It’s . . .” I’m so confused right now. “I think it’s my brother’s girlfriend.”
Jo says, “Should we keep on driving?”
“No,” I say.
I look at Oscar. He shrugs. I turn back to the girl. I roll down my window halfway.
“What in the actual fuck, Hunter?!” screams the girl. “How could you stab your own brother?! He could’ve died! Are you some kind of psycho?!”
“What is she talking about?” asks Patricia.
“You’re going to pay for this!” the girl exclaims. “You’re going to pay for everything you’ve done. Everything!”
“I thought . . .” I feel like my brain is collapsing in on itself. “I thought you were dead.”
“What?” says Jo.
The girl rolls her eyes. “Well, obviously not, you idiot. You haven’t figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out?”
Alessandra yanks on the door handle. “Come here.”
“What do you want?” I ask.
“COME HERE.”
Patricia insists, “Don’t get out of the car, Hunter.”
I need an explanation, and I need it now. And something tells me that the only way I’m going to get it is if I get out of this car. So I unlock my door and step out into the parking lot.
By instinct, as if to protect me, Oscar also gets out of the car.
“Guys!” Patricia says.
She touches her door handle, but Jo says, “No, Patricia.”
Patricia and Jo watch.
Alessandra grabs my arm in a violent manner.
“Hey!” I yell.
Oscar moves toward us. “Let him go!”
Alessandra is pretty thin, so I could knock her on her ass easily, but I let her pull on me and lead me a few feet away to the back of her car. Oscar walks right behind us, monitoring the situation. Alessandra ignores him.
She releases her grip on me. She opens up her trunk, reaches inside, and holds up several sheets of paper.
“What’s that?” I ask.
She throws the paper in my face, and the sheets float onto the pavement.
I pick up one of the sheets. Written on it are a bunch of words that seem strangely familiar, organized like it’s some kind of play or film script:
N: Don’t go!
A: Get out of my way!
N: I didn’t post those videos!
A: Move!
N: I’m not chatting with gay dudes!
A: I said move!
N: I’m not gay!
(A pushes N.)
N: What the fuck are you doing?!
A: Leaving!
I pick up another sheet of paper from off the ground:
(N straddles A and starts choking her. A struggles. A dies.)
I look up at Alessandra. “So what I saw . . . on the video . . .”
“None of it’s real,” says Alessandra. “Nash scripted the whole thing. He thinks he’s some kind of brilliant writer or something. I told him I thought his dialogue was dumb, but apparently you bought it.”
“But . . . why?”
“Because!” Alessandra is getting worked up again.
“You’re sick! You’re disgusting! You’re a horrible human being!
I mean, how could you?! Not only did you secretly record your brother masturbating in the shower, but you started a porn business with it.
You chat with gay men to get them to give you money. ”
Oscar, Patricia, and Jo are looking at each other, confused.
Alessandra continues: “By the time my little brother stumbled on those jerk-off videos online, you had already moved the spy cam out of the bathroom, but we knew you had moved it to Nash’s bedroom.
We read everything you wrote to all those gay guys that you were replying to in the comments section.
Things like, ‘Wait ’til you see me fuck my girlfriend,’ and ‘How much would you pay to see me bang my girl?’ So we knew.
We knew you must’ve put the camera in the bedroom, and were recording me and Nash having sex.
You were going to put me on some porn site?
That’s totally fucked up, Hunter. And yes, we confirmed it when we found your spy cam in the smoke alarm.
Then, Nash had a friend of his hack into your computer and erase the file of us looking at the spy cam.
At college, real hackers are everywhere, not like the amateur shit you and your stupid friends are doing. ”
I’m at a loss for words. First of all, Oscar, Patricia, and Jo all know what I did. Everybody does. Secondly, I don’t understand how I got duped.
“So it was all fake,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“But why this? A script? A prank? Why not just confront me about it and get it over with?”
Alessandra smirks. “We wanted to teach you a lesson. We wanted to fuck with your mind. Honestly, we were surprised we pulled it off.”
“How do you even come up with something like this? You call me sick. This is sick. Staging a murder?”
“Nash has always been interested in acting. You remember how great he was in high school. How many compliments he got. So he continued to pursue that in college, on the side. Both of us have. We’ve been in plays, shot some short films. He never told your parents because he knew they would object.
Since they were paying for his college, he had to have a major they approved of.
But Nash wanted to do what he wanted to do.
So he got into acting and a bunch of other stuff that your parents don’t know about.
“Anyway, he wrote out this whole crazy scenario for me and him to act out. And we had another friend of ours, who’s a fight coordinator in theater shows, to help us with everything.
He showed us how to fight with each other so it would look real without either of us actually getting hurt.
He showed me the angle I had to fall so that the camera would make it look like I hit my head against the doorknob.
We rehearsed it all like a million times, and then we erased all those video files of us rehearsing it. ”
My mind is spinning as Alessandra explains the rest of it. The night I watched that video footage, Nash came back home to tell me it was a prank and to scold me for violating his and Alessandra’s privacy—but Oscar and Victor were at my house. So Nash waited for them to leave.
While pacing in the garage, Nash got an idea to take the prank even further, by removing my shoelace and leaving that box sticking out to make sure I would find it. He wanted to trick me into believing that he was going to frame me for murder.
Then, after he was sure that I was sufficiently fooled (because he installed a spy cam in my room), he got his friend to erase all of the video “evidence,” get rid of every video file I had stored on the cloud, and delete my porn account.
“You almost killed Nash tonight,” says Alessandra. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I was gonna die,” I say. “Nikolai was gonna shoot me in the face!”
A voice responds. “No, he wasn’t!”
All of us turn our heads.
It’s Nash. He’s drenched in sweat. A huge dried blood stain covers almost the entire front of his shirt.
“Nash?” Patricia says from inside the car.
“Is everything all right here?” asks Darin. Apparently, he and Henry have abandoned their plans to go home and have caught up to us.
Nash ignores them, and he doesn’t even look at me. He points at Oscar.
“Oscar!” he yells. “You’re coming with me. Nikolai wants to see you.”