CHAPTER 21
“Why would you want to murder me for, anyhow?”
“So I can kill you anytime I want.”
—Not Sweet Home Alabama
The card from the killer and the map are stark white as they stick out of Wes’s back pocket, and I tell myself that I’m focusing on them rather than his ass as he walks away.
If I were the killer, I wouldn’t want to be up against Wes in a dark hallway…
Since I’m me, though, I’d actually love to be up against Wes in a dark hallway.
“God, just jump each other’s bones already,” Laurie mutters when he’s out of earshot, and I turn back to see she’s caught my—okay, not completely—innocent observation of his departure.
With a faux simpering smile, I say, “Haven’t you heard? I’m already taken.”
Laurie shakes her head, eyes still surveying the dark hall. It’s the first time we’ve been able to debrief this whole crazy night with just the two of us, and we fall into the easy pattern of conversation we usually reserve for our failed dates.
“Fucking wild, man,” she mutters, and I shift the first aid kit into my other hand to grab her wrist.
“What. The actual. Fuck, Laurie?” I tug her arm on each word even though I already know we’re both firmly on the same page. “Why me?”
She’s still shaking her head, rapid, jerky movements against the wall that make her hair go staticky.
The bounce of her heels against the carpet reminds me she still needs to pee, and the anxious movement probably has more to do with not wanting to piss herself on top of everything else that’s happened tonight.
Even then, she pulls her gaze from the end of the hall, her voice almost consolatory when she says, “I mean, I think you’re pretty perfect, but God, Jamie…”
She pins me with a serious look we usually reserve for the times either of us need to intervene with the other’s bad life decisions. Like when I was going to laminate my eyebrows, or when she was going to join an MLM.
“You are not worth this,” she says, and I have to stop myself from smacking the wall in agreement.
Thank god somebody said it. You can always count on your best friend to tell you what’s what.
And what’s what is that this is far too much effort to try and acquire the affections of one person. This person.
“Thank you,” I spit. “Thank you. My thoughts exac—”
The bathroom door swings open, cutting me off as I peek around the corner and catch sight of the others walking back down the corridor. John stops when he sees it’s just me and Laurie idling against the wall.
“Where’s Wes?”
Even though I catch the slightest note of annoyance in the question, his voice is still calm as he closes the distance and leans against the wall on the other side of the hallway.
When he tilts his head back and looks across at me, eyebrows raised expectantly, I can’t help but appreciate the way his hair falls into his eyes.
The strands at the back splay in every direction from the panicked pulls of his hands, but it works for him.
So much so I could be tempted to ignore his former MIA status.
Before my appreciation can extend too long, Laurie leans out from behind me, her voice strained.
“We thought we saw Billie, so he went to check.” She turns to me. “If we don’t go now, I will pee myself.”
I catch a glimpse of John’s eyes narrowing, no doubt over the slight hypocrisy of Wes’s disappearance, before Laurie drags me down the hallway. As we pass Jennifer, I manage to hand the first aid kit to her, following Laurie into the bathroom after she barrels through the door.
When the door closes I throw my corkscrew onto the side of the sink before turning to unzip the back of Laurie’s jumpsuit. She bolts into the nearest stall, her sigh of relief echoing out the half-open door a moment later.
It’s only marginally brighter in the bathroom.
The gas lamps have been completely foregone for the same neon strips we saw in the VIP rooms and they make the bandage on my arm glow like it’s under a UV light.
They also make the dark stains of blood on my nails look sickly and brown and unbearable.
Washing my hands has never been such a luxury.
I flick on the faucet and scrub my palms, digging at the space underneath my nails until they’re red from the overhead lighting rather than the mix of too many people’s blood.
It’s not until the water runs clear that I turn off the sink and go pee.
When I come out again, Laurie is washing her hands.
I catch a glimpse of the telltale signs of what we’ve been through etched across my face in the mirrors above the sinks.
It’s not just the downlighting that makes my cheeks look pale and drawn.
My winged eyeliner is smudged into the crease of my eyelids and there’s a dark mark on my cheek.
Another on my chest. Another an inch or so away from my mouth.
At first I think it’s some of my lipstick, but it’s a few shades too dark.
I rub at the stains before I allow myself to debate whether the blood is mine or Curtis’s, and when Laurie hands me a paper towel, I’m able to blot away most of the marks.
I’m even able to remove some of the glitter on my arms—with only one hiss at a misjudged tug to my wound.
But as soon as I think I’ve got them all another one hits the light and I eventually give up on the task.
If the only thing I leave with tonight is a fine-line scar and permanent glitter, then I’ve gotten out relatively unscathed.
I turn from the sink and take in the new design of the restroom.
The formerly brushed metal walls of Cravin’ had borne witness to a lot of heightened emotions, tactical spews, and heated debates about whether it was that bad to send a WYD message to an ex at two a.m. These new red walls seem lighter than the ones outside, but maybe that’s because there’s a false sense of safety being confined in here and away from what is sprayed and strewn and splattered across the hallways in the rest of the club.
I’d take those ugly cries, dry heaves, and drunk texts over whatever the hell is happening tonight.
“You ready?” Laurie asks, and I’m about to nod when my gaze shifts across the wall and I spot it.
My heart jolts up into my throat and something worse than fear, worse than panic, worse than dread floods through me.
Oh my god. I haven’t felt much of it for the last few hours, but it feels, distantly, like hope.
“Laurie?” I whisper.
She mistakes my breathless anticipation for fear and flinches away from the sink, lunging into a defensive position she more likely learned from a body attack class rather than any form of practical self-defense.
“What?” she whispers back.
“Do you see that?”
I jerk my chin up to the space above the tampon machine and she follows my gaze.
A few feet above the dispenser, painted in the same red as the rest of the walls, almost camouflaged if not for the slats that cut horizontal lines of black—no, not black, but a muted darkness that hints to space behind the wall—into the messy, matte-red brushstrokes…
A vent.
Very clear, claustrophobic scenes come to mind: Aliens. Dawn of the Dead. And one of the most iconic Christmas movies of all time: Die Hard.
Her eyes drop back down to mine, and I can tell she’s already come to the same conclusion. The solution to this horrifying maze we’ve been stuck in. She may have dedicated her life to the most boring kind of filmmaking, but at least she’s capable of creative problem-solving.
Her voice is still a whisper, but I don’t miss the tinge of excitement that laces her words.
“We could—”
“I can’t,” I say. Just from looking at it, I can tell it’s too small for me; it’s too small for pretty much anyone.
Except for Laurie. She’s willowy. Waifish.
And she’s not going to be jealous of my bubble butt after this.
That’s why I’m already looking around the bathroom to find a way to get her up there.
“No.”
Maybe if she climbs onto the toilet or—no, we’ll have to use the sink, it’s taller. Then she can use that upper-body strength she’s always lording over me to pull herself into the shaft and—
“Jamie, no.”
I almost think she’s trying to argue I would fit into the vent, but when I look back at her, I realize it’s a more petulant no. Like an “I’m not going if you’re not going” no, which is so damn stupid for someone so smart.
“Don’t even start with that shit, Laurie.”
I push her over to the sink, then bend down to undo the high heels I can’t believe she’s been wearing this whole time.
“No, no, no.” She’s just being hysterical now. “First rule of slasher movies: Don’t. Split. Up.”
That makes me pause with my fingers gripping the buckle of her shoe, and I squint up at her from the ground, the tiles cold against my bare feet.
“Rule number one is don’t have sex,” I say slowly, deliberately, because she would know that if she paid as much attention to the poster on the back of our bathroom door as it deserves.
Moving back to working the strap of her other shoe away from her ankle, I can’t help but feel hurt.
“God, Laurie, it’s like you never listen when I talk—”
“It’s still a rule!” she grits out, but it’s too late, she’s going into that vent if I have to shove her into it like an uncooperative tampon.
I pop back up from the floor and smack my palm against the countertop, using all my first-year-theater elective skills to sound sunny and confident and not shit-scared that I’m about to make my best friend slide into a metal tunnel and Die Hard her way out of this massacre à la John McClane.
“Well then, rule number eleven: take the goddamned escape route when it presents itself to you.”
Her bottom lip starts trembling, tears rimming those pretty eyes I’ve practiced some of the more difficult eye makeup tutorials on and laughed hysterically at the results. I know they won’t fall, though. It would take something truly insane for my girl to cry.
“You made that rule up.”
Her voice is a wisp of her usual cool, confident, measured tone. It makes my throat feel tight when I say, “I did. But I’m the expert on this, remember?”
The grin on my face is so obviously for show I can’t make myself look at her when I push her toward the sink again. Well, it’s more like a shove.
“Air vents connect to outside, so you just have to keep crawling until you come to the end.”
“I will. I will.” She’s on board now, nodding and kicking off her heels. Showing exactly how someone who does YouTube Pilates three times a week can balance and bend, she swings her leg up, plants a foot onto the counter, and pushes up to a stand over the sink.
“Then just get help, okay?”
“Jamie—” She looks down at me, her hands reaching up to the vent cover, her bottom lip shaking. I know what she wants to say.
Stay safe.
I’ll do whatever I can to save you.
Don’t get murdered…
Please, don’t get murdered.
But none of the words come out. She’s never been great with verbalizing her feelings.
She’s the smart one. I’m the dramatic one.
She’s logical. I’m emotional. It’s been that way ever since we met in Intro to Cinema Studies.
Since we stood across from each other in that first tutorial and realized that despite our incompatible aspirations and interests, a mutual distaste for icebreakers was enough to build a friendship on.
One that—so many years and major and minor life events later—has become real and deep and so, so important that if our roles were reversed and I could fit and she couldn’t, I have no doubt she’d already have her shoulder in my ass pushing me through that vent.
And that’s why it’s so easy for me to smile up at her.
It’s genuine this time because I can read every involuntary movement of her facial features.
I know what she wants to say. So, I make myself swallow down the lump in my throat, blink away the tears in my eyes, and say, “I love you, too, baby girl.”