How to survive your murd.., p.2
How to Survive Your Murder, page 2
She was looking at me like she expected me to say something. In fact, she and X were both looking at me.
“What?” I asked, frowning. They stared a little more intently, and I felt a sinking in my gut as understanding hit. “Guys, no.”
“Think of it as a social experiment, like when Jane Goodall went to live with the apes,” said X, flashing me one of his famous, impossibly wide smiles. In addition to a smile that took up most of his face, X had dark eyes and a jawline made for television. The most important thing you needed to understand about him was that everyone liked him. He could talk to literally anyone. If his life were a movie, it would be one where people traveled the world eating all the best food and soaking up the local culture. He had the kind of infectious enthusiasm that made you think, Why not eat a cricket covered in chocolate? Could be tasty! It was almost a shame that he wanted to work behind the camera instead of hosting his own documentary series.
“X,” I said, trying to keep calm. “I get your point, but these are high school boys, not apes. And I thought we were going to watch Black Christmas? Millie hasn’t seen that one yet.” Eli had even said he’d show up after we were done, probably with some amazing baked good he learned to make while watching GBBO. It was the perfect night.
“You know, I think I’ll live,” Millie said. She glanced at X pointedly.
“And Halloween’s on a Friday this year, so there’s always tomorrow,” he hurried to add. “We can watch Black Christmas then.”
Millie said, “I really think our horror-movie night works better on the day after Halloween, anyway.”
“All Saints’ Day,” said X. “That’s still spooky.”
I frowned again. It was becoming increasingly clear that the two of them had rehearsed this conversation ahead of time. Without me. They’d known I wouldn’t be on board, so they’d practiced what to say to convince me. Which meant I wasn’t going to win this one.
“But . . .” I started, then trailed off. I didn’t have a particularly good argument here. Who didn’t want to go to a party?
Me, that’s who. I didn’t want to go. I hated parties, and the dark. And corn mazes. And Halloween, for that matter. I preferred my horror confined to my laptop’s thirteen-inch screen, where I could pause, rewind, and fast-forward to my heart’s content. Where I always knew what was coming next. Movies, even horrible ones, were safe. High school parties, not so much.
I stared back at my friends, working my lip between my teeth as I tried to figure out what to say. Could I claim to be sick? Allergic to corn? Was that a thing?
If this were a horror movie, now would be the perfect time for our first jump scare. I’m not talking about an end-of-the-movie, Jason-grabbing-Alice-from-the-canoe-type jump scare, but an early Act One, Billy-leaping-in-through-Sidney’s-window-type scare. The way I saw it, early Act One scares like that had two purposes: First, they set the tone, reminding the audience that they were indeed watching a scary movie long before the plot had a chance to even get scary.
And second, they prevented characters from having to answer questions they really didn’t want to answer.
Like this one.
I smiled thinly at Millie and X, waiting for a jump scare to save me from this conversation.
Wind pressed against the basement windows. Somewhere in the school above us, someone began to laugh.
Didn’t look like I was going to be so lucky.
“Guys,” I started, thinking, Sick; I was going to have to go with sick. I gave a little fake cough. “You know, I think I—”
“Helloooo?” boomed a voice from the hall. “Anyone down here?”
Millie, X, and I all flinched as my big sister, Claire, leaned into the podcast room.
Here’s everything you need to know about Claire: her makeup was perfect, even though she’d just lived through an entire day of school, and she was the only teen girl I knew who could pull off red hair and still look like straight fire.
The hair was dyed, FYI. Claire was naturally dirty blond, like me. We both had the same small frames and oversize features, but on Claire, the anime-character eyes were balanced by Cupid’s bow lips and a shockingly wide smile.
I, on the other hand, had inherited my dad’s strong Italian nose and my mother’s Resting Bitch Face. Whereas Claire got Dad’s good, glowy Italian skin that made her look like she was constantly on day two of a perfect beach tan, I inherited mom’s Irish paleness that meant I had to slather on sunscreen whenever I even thought about the sun. The big eyes just made me look surprised, like the whole world was a little too much for me. Which was fair.
My movie theory sort of fell apart with Claire. She wasn’t defined by a single genre like the rest of us were. She was the girl people made movies for. She was Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Saoirse Ronan. Pure Oscar bait. Sofia Coppola was probably writing a screenplay for her right now.
“Alley Cat,” she said, aiming her truly ridiculously large eyes at me. “You ready to go?”
“Yes, definitely.” I stood up quickly and started shoving things into my bag before Millie and X could get back to the party convo. Saved by Claire. Wouldn’t be the first time. “I guess I’ll see you guys later.”
“At the party?” Millie said.
“Meet at seven?” added X.
“We’ll see.” I kept my head down so the hair hanging loose from my high ponytail would cover my lying face. “I’ll . . . think about it.” I’d already ordered Black Christmas on streaming, and I had only forty-eight hours to watch it. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but you really need to watch a movie like that twice if you want to catch all the behind-the-scenes stuff, like the fact that some of the snow was fake and a bunch of crew members made cameos. “I’ll text you.”
I threw my backpack over my shoulder and stepped out into the hall, but Claire grabbed my arm, holding me back.
“Wait, you’re thinking about skipping the party?” she said, giving me her patented Claire Look. Picture Amy Adams’s sad eyes and Anne Hathaway’s trembling lower lip.
You’re disappointing me, the Look said. If only the Academy could see her now.
“Claire,” I muttered under my breath. There was a reason I was so obsessed with horror movies: It wasn’t just the jump scares and the fake blood. In horror movies, the girl everyone overlooked, the smart, mousy, virginal girl who had no business in the starring role—let’s face it, the girl like me—got to be the Final Girl. The star.
(And yeah, I know Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt played Final Girls, and they’re both gorgeous, but come on, this is just a theory; it doesn’t account for the fact that Hollywood wouldn’t even think of casting a woman who actually looked like a real person. Try to work with me.)
No other genre would cast the girl who liked science and reading in the leading role. Real life didn’t, either. In real life, girls like me stood on the sidelines and didn’t place in competitions and stayed home on Friday nights.
I knew my role, and I was okay with it. Why wasn’t anyone else?
I stared at my big sister, pleading, needing her to understand that I really didn’t want to do this. Claire frowned, then nodded. Our sisterly bond was working in my favor for once. She felt my inner turmoil. I was sure of it. Relief. I exhaled.
“Alice doesn’t have to think about anything,” Claire said, turning back to my friends. “She’s definitely going to this party. We’ll see you there at seven.”
Two hours and thirty-three minutes to go
“You really shouldn’t have said I would go tonight,” I told Claire.
“Your friends love you and want to party with you; I don’t understand the problem.” Claire gave me a side-eye. “Are you wussing out on me, Alley Cat?”
“I’m the wuss? You couldn’t even make it through the last half of Hush.” Hush, a 2016 slasher about a deaf writer being stalked by a murderous psychopath in the woods. I’d seen it five times.
“Because Hush was boring, not because it was scary. Why would you live in the woods, completely alone, if you were deaf? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Wow, victim blaming much?”
“More like writer blaming.”
I blinked at her. “You did not just insult Mike Flanagan in my—”
“Hush is a movie, Alice,” Claire said, interrupting me. “This is real life.” She started walking backward so I could see her dramatic eye roll. Everything Claire did was dramatic, but the eye roll was truly a work of art.
We’d just exited the high school, and I was trailing down the front steps behind her like a puppy, like always. It was a disgustingly beautiful day for October. Crisp autumn air. Golden light. It was like Halloween in a movie. Perfect weather for the vintage leather jacket I’d found at Scout thrift store last weekend. There was even a slight breeze, just strong enough to rustle our hair.
“The party’s a costume thing, right?” I glanced at Claire. “I don’t have anything to wear.”
Claire pursed her lips, taking a second to look me over. In addition to the jacket, my current look involved ’90s-style vamp lipstick, a white spaghetti strap tank, layered necklaces, and the high ponytail.
“This isn’t a costume?” Claire asked, genuinely confused. “I thought you were dressing like that Dawson’s Creek character from that one movie?”
“Katie Holmes, Disturbing Behavior,” I clarified. “But it’s not really a costume; it’s more of an . . . homage.” Disturbing Behavior was terrible, but I loved it because Katie Holmes seriously stepped out of her preppy tomboy type to play this edgy alternative chick. It was a major fashion moment back in the ’90s. Google it.
When I found the leather jacket—identical to the one Katie wore in the movie—the rest of the outfit just sort of came together.
“Homage, costume, whatever.” Claire flapped a hand. “You look hot. You should roll with it.”
I bit back a grin. Compliments from Claire always meant more than compliments from other people.
We were crossing the street now, heading toward the Mercer College campus instead of the senior parking lot, where Claire’s Jetta was parked.
“Are we going to Dad’s gym?” I asked. Meaning the Mercer College gym, where our dad coached collegiate volleyball and softball. Claire and I had been hanging out there since we were tiny children with pigtails and scabs on our knees.
Well, I had scabs on my knees. Claire would never do something as prosaic as fall.
“Light’s better in the locker room than at home,” Claire explained. “They have those light bulbs that go all the way around the mirror like in old-timey makeup rooms. And Kiehl’s products in the showers.”
I nodded, barely listening. I was already sliding the elastic from my ponytail as casually as I could. “Does my hair look crazy?”
Claire shook her head. “No, it’s really good right now. The great Katie Holmes herself would be jealous.”
“Well, now we both know you’re lying.”
* * *
• • •
The gym was nearly empty. The buzzing fluorescent lights looked dull and artificial after all that glorious October sun, and a stale smell of sweat hung so heavily in the air it was practically visible, mixing with the sharp sting of cleaning products. The temperature inside the gym was always ten degrees past comfortable and strangely humid. I could practically feel my shirt wrinkling as I scanned the room.
Erin Cleary was in the back, huffing away on an elliptical machine. Erin was a senior at Omaha East, but all our school’s varsity athletes worked out at the college gym. Erin was a star volleyball player, so she basically lived here, as far as I could tell. It wasn’t much of a surprise to find her here on a Friday, on Halloween.
I heard a crash of weights on the other side of the room and glanced toward the sound, staring for just long enough to catch sight of wavy brown hair and boy muscles turned all glowy from a thin sheen of sweat. And then, like someone who’d stared into an eclipse and was now worried she was going to go blind, I looked away again, cheeks blazing.
Claire grabbed my arm. “It’s Wesley James Hanson the Third.”
Oh yes. I was aware.
Wesley James Hanson III had moved here from Boston and started showing up at the gym around the beginning of the summer, giving me just around five months to . . . notice him. He went by Wes. Claire and I both knew he went by Wes, but neither of us could bring ourselves to refer to him as anything other than Wesley James Hanson III. He was worthy of all seven syllables.
He was a freshman in college this year, which meant it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that he could be interested in a high school girl. I’d done the math at least once a week.
All summer.
“He’s going to see you staring,” I muttered to Claire. I put a hand on her back and tried to maneuver her in the direction of the locker room. I’d spent a not-insignificant amount of time over the past five months trying to keep my sister away from Wes.
“I’m fascinated by him,” Claire said. Still staring, by the way. Claire wasn’t the kind of girl who’d be bothered if the godlike college freshman caught her staring at him. “I heard that, back in Boston, he was having an affair with a forty-year-old divorcée and her daughter, and that his dad had to pay off the ex-husband-slash-father to hush everything up.”
I chewed my lip, adding this rumor to my collection. Claire wasn’t the only one fascinated by the mystery that was Wesley James Hanson III. Just yesterday Eli told me he’d overheard someone saying that Wes got kicked out of whatever fancy East Coast boarding school he used to go to for running a fight club out of the common room in the dorms. Millie said she’d heard he was in the Irish mob. X told me he was gearing up to try out for the Olympic rowing team.
There was no way to verify any of the rumors. Wes wasn’t on social media. The one and only time I tried to look him up online, I found an entry for a James Wesley Hanson who died in Georgia in 1940 and nothing else.
The mystery made him even more fascinating. He was like no one I’d ever met before. He completely and totally defied the teen-movie-character tropes the rest of us all fit into so neatly. He was well-off, but not into money. An athlete, but not a meathead (to use a term from some of my favorite old movies). Gorgeous, but also . . . sort of dorky. But in a hot way.
I let my eyes settle on him for a moment, watching him lift weights on the other side of the room. From the knees up, he was your standard rich jock: gray Nike gym shorts, white Nike T-shirt, bulging muscles. But I noticed he’d paired his tennis shoes with old-man argyle socks pulled up over his calves.
He was always doing stuff like that. Painting his toenails black. Adding a pearl necklace to an otherwise very standard T-shirt and jeans. Tiny details here and there, just enough to make it clear that he didn’t care about gender norms, that he wouldn’t be boxed in by expectations. God, it was hot.
“I bet he only watches obscure German art films,” Claire said, still staring. “Or maybe he does that thing where he pairs The Wizard of Oz with The Dark Side of the Moon so that the song lyrics match up perfectly.”
“Totally,” I agreed, even though I knew for a fact that Wes liked horror movies, like me. Last month, I was waiting to give Dad a ride home, and I was watching Creep on my laptop. (Underrated 2014 film starring Mark Duplass as this dude who wants to make a movie for his unborn child. Found footage; amazing.) I was almost to the end, and I was getting excited because it was my absolute favorite horror-movie ending of all time, and who should stop by to watch the last two minutes over my shoulder but Wesley James Hanson III.
“You seen the sequel?” he asked when it was over.
“No,” I said, which was weird because I’d seen the sequel like two dozen times, but to be perfectly honest, my brain wasn’t so much working as it was saying the words hot guy over and over and over again, so really I was feeling pretty proud of myself for getting a word out at all.
“The sequel’s rad,” he said. (Rad! my brain screamed.) “You should really check it out.”
I thought I’d noticed his eyes lingering on my legs, but he quickly moved them up to my face when he saw me watching. I didn’t mind. I’d felt good about my look that day. I’m not some sort of weirdo who always dresses like a movie character, but ’90s horror movies got me really into ’90s fashion, and I was wearing this great miniskirt with chunky black combat boots and suspenders, sort of reminiscent of a young Winona Ryder. Claire had told me my legs were goals in that skirt, and if Claire said it, then it was true.
“Nice . . . suspenders,” Wes had said.
“Nice shorts,” I told him. He’d been wearing these insanely short running shorts that day. Really, they were obscene. Only Wesley James Hanson III could make shorts like that look sexy.
I couldn’t believe I’d been bold enough to comment on them.
But Wes had stared back at me like he wanted to say something else, and there was this supercharged moment where we both waited for the other one to speak first. Neither of us did. I couldn’t tell if Wes was trying to play it cool or if he was actually a little shy.
After a long moment, he’d rubbed the back of his neck and said, “See you around, Alice.”
My heart almost stopped right there. Wesley James Hanson III knew my name. Which meant he’d asked around about me.
Was it the suspenders? The fact that I wasn’t sporty like all the athletes at the gym, that I stood out? I had no idea. But when Wes walked away, he left this amazing smell behind him, this kind of musk, mixed with dry grass and suede, like how I imagined a sweaty cowboy must smell. I wanted to make a candle out of it.
After that, it was like we were both acutely aware of each other whenever we were in the gym at the same time. I’d notice his eyes move my way, and I’d feel a little skin prickle whenever he got close. We talked sometimes. If he saw me watching a movie, he’d stop to watch part of it over my shoulder, and then he’d recommend a movie, and then I’d recommend a movie back. I’d started wearing my suspenders-and-miniskirt combo kind of a lot, and I’d noticed that he’d started wearing his short shorts kind of a lot, and oh my God, was this flirting? Were we flirting?
