Twenty-Eight
There it is. The whole reason I came here.
The moment I can take this from a personal nightmare to a selfless quest to help Beck find closure for her dead sister.
I have no idea how the phone got all the way out here, but here it is.
My heart slams against my throat as I place the phone on the table in the middle of the room.
“Jesus,” Beck says, more a gasp than anything. “Is that Pais’s phone?”
I swallow, not sure of where to go from here. Is there any chance Beck would just let it be so I could delete the message alone? I know that voice note is in there somewhere. It’d be such an easy in-and-out job.
Beck runs her fingers along the dust encrusted on the screen. “Her killer was definitely here.”
My heart only beats faster as I look at it. We’re truly standing somewhere a monster once stood. History echoes in here like it echoed in the ghost town.
“We have to charge it,” Beck says. “We have to find out what’s on it.”
Heat rises up my neck. I feel like a child getting caught in mischief with Owen with no way out. I rifle through my backpack, sweat pooling under my sweatshirt as I retrieve my portable charger.
I have one chance.
“Let me get it juiced up,” I say. “Then I can start looking.”
Beck nods voraciously.
I plug the phone into the charger. The Apple logo bursts onto the screen.
I can find the voice note, delete it, and no one ever has to know. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t tell them about the witch, I didn’t send them out to the mining town, I didn’t sacrifice them in some ritual and dump their bodies in a ravine.
But I can’t forget Beck’s face when she confronted Ivy and how angry she was when she saw what Ivy’s part in this was.
It doesn’t matter how much we’ve grown to understand each other over the past couple weeks.
It doesn’t matter that she keeps saying she hated Paisley.
There’s no defending me lying to her and withholding even an inkling of information about what happened that night, even if I don’t think it’s useful information. It wasn’t my prerogative to do so.
She’s going to hate me.
I deserve it either way.
But for now, I shove down the guilt and type in Paisley’s passcode.
And there it is.
A single red notification under her texts, probably the last one she received while she still had service. I imagine there would be so, so many more if we connected to a cell signal, but right now it’s just me and her.
It shines until Beck’s fingers wrap around it.
“What’s this?” Beck says, putting the phone to her face.
The lie forms on my tongue, but I can’t speak. Beck taps open the text app and toggles over to my conversation with Paisley.
The voice note is right there, five minutes long.
And Beck presses play.
“Hey Paisley, why don’t you come out here and face me?” My face goes hot as I listen; I don’t even remember sounding that angry and sarcastic. “So funny, it seems you forgot to invite me. And what a trip to do it on, too! As if you can survive in the woods without me.…”
But her eyes widen. “Did you send this the night everyone died?”
I could make an excuse. I could keep lying.
But what use would it be? Why did I put myself through all this? And let’s be honest. I can’t lie to her face.
“I did,” I say. My voice shakes as my throat thickens with tears. This is so pathetic. I sound like a psychopath in that message, and I’m upset at what I think Beck’s reaction will be. “Beck, I need to tell you something.”
Beck lowers herself to the floor, her expression unreadable. But I know it. She thinks I tricked her. She thinks there’s something deeply wrong with me. She’s going to run for the hills, and I wouldn’t blame her. I kneel down, the tiny room feeling smaller and smaller.
“What happened?” Beck asks, her voice edging into something resembling anger. My stomach turns. I look to the front door, my instincts telling me to bolt.
But no. I have to face this. I have to face Beck and what I said about her sister when I thought no one was listening.
“I didn’t stay home that night,” I say. “Once I found out they’d gone without me, I drove out here. I don’t even know what I was thinking, just that I couldn’t stand being helpless and letting them shit all over me and not—” my chest twitches, “not have any consequences.”
She furrows her brow. “What did you do?”
I wipe sweaty palms on my dirty shorts, but it doesn’t help. “I punctured her tire.”
I can’t look at Beck. I can’t even look in her direction anymore. My body’s on fire.
She’s not saying anything. Why isn’t she saying anything?
“I wasn’t trying to hurt them,” I say, the words spilling out.
“I just wanted them to be scared. To regret going on the trip so they couldn’t come back to school and act like they’d had a great time excluding me.
I wanted them to feel what I was feeling.
” I swallow the lump in my throat. “But then I saw this woman in the parking lot. I thought she was just another camper and didn’t—but then I saw her in the road and—I didn’t do anything.
You have to know I didn’t have anything to do with their deaths.
I was as shocked as you were. But the voice note,” I squeeze my burning eyes shut.
“It could be misconstrued. I had to try to find it. Going with you was the only way for…I didn’t want you to go alone either. I wanted you to be safe. I—”
“Emma,” Beck says. “Did you really come here just to try to cover up your stupid mistake? While I’m out here genuinely trying to find out who killed my sister? Your friends?”
I can’t speak.
“Emma?” She touches my shoulder, forcing me to look at her. There’s something wild in her eyes, something I can’t read. Panic? Disappointment? Anger? Fuck, I can’t understand her. Why can I never just read people right? “Just be honest with me. Did you ever really care?”
Mom always said I was a little too honest. That I needed to consider people’s feelings more. I’ve tried so hard to do that my whole life. This voice note was the one time I let loose.
I have no idea if Beck really, really wants me to be honest. But it feels as though the world is hanging by that thread.
My world is hanging by that thread.
“Of course I do,” I say, my voice heavy with growing tears. “How could I not? They were my best friends. But no, I didn’t come out here for a purely selfless reason.” I grit my teeth. “Why should I? When have they ever done anything selfless for me? When have they done anything but torture me?”
I know the answer. Paisley was selfless when she became my friend and stuck with me through all these years.
Paisley was selfless when she encouraged me to open my art commissions.
Harlow was selfless when she would style me before every dance and party.
Opal was selfless when she endured every haunted house and scary movie because she knew I liked them.
They were all mostly bad friends, but they were my friends.
Now that warmth is gone. It’s been gone as long as their bodies have been cold. It died hours before they did.
Why do I have to pretend otherwise?
Tears stream hot down my face. “This is all so futile. Why are we out here trying to find justice for people we hated? They’d never do the same for either of us.”
When I bring my gaze back to Beck, it’s like she’s glitched. She’s looking at me, but also looking beyond me. Processing what I said, but nowhere near able to respond.
It hits me like a ton of bricks.
I just said all that horrible stuff about her dead sister. I told Beck Horne her dead sister wouldn’t have tried to bring her justice if she had died.
Even if all that is true, I can’t be the one to say it. Not now. Not after we just found all her fingernails in a summoning circle. I was too honest.
I feel myself floating out of my body, out of the watchtower, looking down at the dark blanket of forest, thinking of all the souls stuck down there.
Maybe the answer to why Paisley, Harlow, and Opal never really liked me is simple. Maybe they all saw what was wrong with me from the beginning. Maybe they saw that I’d turn into this kind of monster eventually. They cut their losses before I turned on them.
I can’t look at her anymore. I grab my backpack and sling it over my back.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Beck. “I’m so sorry.”
I don’t dare look back to see the devastation and anger on her face.
I exit the watchtower and start climbing down the ladders.
“Emma!”
“I can’t be here. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”
Relief floods me as the crunch of dirt sounds under my feet.
I can’t handle people right now, even if that one person is someone I really care about, who I thought got me.
I put her through too much. I am too much.
I’m doing her a favor by leaving so she can blow off some steam, even if I don’t know how long I’ll actually be gone.
I walk toward the road, leaving Beck and my voice note behind.