Chapter 46
VARDA
The light changes color.
My palms are sweaty and shaky as I shove the phone back into my purse. It’s okay. It’s okay, I think, letting off the brake. You can’t do anything until you get home. That’s the next step. Get home. You don’t have to think or act or even feel anything until you get home.
In my mind, it plays again and again: that three-second clip of Hayden’s Jeep gliding through the darkness past Max’s fence.
But that doesn’t mean anything, right? It just means she left my house the night Lynette and Rocky died.
Maybe she went to pick up more snacks. Maybe she went to hook up with Carter.
But then why has she been catfishing me?
You don’t have to figure it out. You don’t have to understand it. You just have to drive home. I try to focus on the road in front of me, my eyes following my headlights along the lane.
I glance in my rearview mirror, and then feel my blood go cold.
There are headlights behind me. Headlights that have gotten very close, very quickly.
Adrenaline bursts through my blood, my heart picking up speed.
I can’t make out the make or model of the vehicle, or the driver, but they’ve closed the distance between us.
They’re right on my bumper. My eyes dart around, right, left, trying to figure out a place I can pull off to the side and let them around me, but there’s no shoulder to speak of.
My fingers tighten around the steering wheel.
Probably just some shitkicker out for a drive, getting aggressive in his too-big truck.
But then the thought occurs to me. Maybe it’s one of my shitkicker classmates, and they haven’t gotten the word that I’m innocent, and they’re taking justice into their own hands.
Or maybe they just don’t care if I’m innocent or not.
It’s been open season on me for almost three weeks now. If you were the kind of person that wanted to hurt someone just for the sake of hurting someone, I’m a pretty easy target.
I step on the gas then. We’re already going sixty, but I watch the number on my dash climb: sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six.
It’s hilly out here, lots of rises and falls and turns that make it hard to see farther down the road, especially at night, in the darkness.
The wheels growl low against the pavement. Seventy. Seventy-one.
The headlights drop behind for a moment. Then they catch up again, closer than before.
Then they’re right up next to me, horn blaring.
It’s a pickup truck. Black, I think—I’m not sure, though, because it’s all so dark, so fast. It lays on its horn again, inches from my driver’s side door. But it’s not speeding up to go around me. It’s drifting up beside me. Veering so close to me I brace for the sound of metal on metal.
A strangled sob tears through the car. Mine, though it feels almost like someone else’s.
I swerve to the side of the road and hit the brakes.
The truck follows, coming to rest at an angle in front of my car.
There’s no time to react. I’m shaking, my gut sour with fear. The truck’s driver leaps out. Someone else gets out of the passenger side a minute later and crosses to the front of the truck so I can’t see them for a moment.
Then the driver comes up to my window. He’s gesturing, saying something, but I don’t understand. I am frozen in place. Finally, he opens the door. Finally, I can see his face.
It’s Carter. In his right hand, he’s holding a pistol. A moment later his passenger comes out of the shadows, and I can see her face too.
Hayden.
“Move over,” he says. “We’re going for a ride.”