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Alice sniffs as a sneer of disgust curls her painted lips. Then she’s out of the car and moving around to my side. The door flings open and terror unlike anything I’ve ever felt surges inside my body. She’s going to kill me. Alice truly means to kill me. The realization fuels me just enough to have my body pitchinginto the console—still not enough to escape her though.
But that’s when I see it. Pulled up from the depths of me is a bloodcurdling scream that sears my lungs and scorches my airways. Still, the sound that escapes me is nothing more than a squeak.
Tears leak faster, pouring now.
There is a body in the back seat. A middle-aged woman with blonde hair and cracked, dry maroon painted lips. The blanket that had been tossed over her body must have fallen away when Alice slammed the breaks, the body rolling forward just enough for me to see the blade imbedded in the woman’s belly, the bright red pooling around the creamy white of her sweater now dark, crusty, and dry. Her skin has a pale touch that makes me think she’s been dead for more than a couple hours.
Oh my God. God, please. Please save me.
I pray. I scream my prayer inside my mind, willing my body to fight.
Nothing.
“Oh, I see you’ve met Karen. I don’t know if that’s her name, but she scowled at me like a Karen would when I asked for help last night. All I asked was to borrow her car.”
“Oooki-lled h-er?” I push the words past the sick fear building inside me, coating my tongue, as Alicepulls me from the car roughly. Alice doesn’t answer me.
My legs aren’t working nearly well enough to stand, and I crumble to the pebbly, dust covered ground. Alice lets out a rough groan of annoyance, the toe of her boot connecting with the side of my ribs in frustration.
“Fucking stand up.”
My mind and body are connected by a thin, fraying thread. I can’t react the way I want to. I have no control of my limbs. In my mind, I’m shaking like the last leaf clinging to a barren tree in a cold, frosty wind. On the outside, my body is still and calm—the storm raging entirely unseen.
Alice gives me one more kick to the stomach and has little more than a soft ‘oomph’ tumbling from between my lips before she moves to the back of the car. She’s talking to herself, saying words I don’t understand as she pulls a large blue square from the trunk.
At my side again, she unwraps the blue square and I recognize it as a tarp. For a long moment, my mind rejects the sight of it. She can’t mean to roll me up in a tarp. I’m a human girl—a young woman with my whole life ahead of me.
My only sin—in her eyes—is that I fell for a man she considers another’s. I’ve never even met Alyssa. But people are allowed to fall in and out of love. Peopleare allowed to move on with their life if a relationship isn’t working. How can she think this is okay? How can she think it’s right to end my life because her sister had her heart broken?
Because she’s certifiably insane, whispers the little voice in the back of my mind.
I want to scream, even try as Alice’s hands grip me hard, rolling my body into the tarp. She settles me on my back on the hard pebbly ground, crouching down over me. I want to hit her with everything I have inside me. I want to break her nose and her crazy ass spirit as she looks down at me with that hate in her eyes.
How had I thought this woman was my friend. How had I felt bad for her—so bad I invited her into my home?
I hate her now. Fiercely.
Everything about her looks ugly and hateful to me.
She’s going to kill me.
I want to cry.
Thoughts of Dad assault me more vicious than a blade slicing into my heart. I’m all he has in this whole big world. Me, work, and his cats. He’s going to be so hurt. The little flame he let burn inside him when my mom walked out—for me—will die when I die. I just know it.
Will he have to live the rest of his life wondering what happened to his baby? Will theyfind my body? Will my body give him closure—just enough closure to move on?
Or will I rest forever in an unmarked grave, the memory of me a ghost to haunt the few I had time to love and love me in return?
Alice’s lips part and hateful words spill out. “You should have gone home for Thanksgiving.” I want to claw her eyes from her very skull. Violence and hate fill me like I’ve never felt it—like I thought I could never feel it. I want to do her physical harm for the hurt she’s going to deliver to the people I love by killing me like this.
She continues, “I told you clearly that you never know how long you have. If you’d gone home,” she presses thumb and finger together. “You’d have had just a bit more time. You could have said goodbye to Daddy. Maybe even told him you love him. But you chose to stay here with Cash fucking Jagger.” She sneers with venom. “I can’t wait to see his face when he realizes his little piece is gone forever. More,” she laughs. It’s high and shrill like the cry of a hyena. The sound is like nails scraping over my bone, my entire skeleton quivering beneath my skin. “When he realizes he’s the reason your pretty, sweet little flame is snuffed—oh, that’s going to be good. Truly,” She kisses her fingertips exaggeratedly. “Chef’s kiss.”
Crazy.She’s crazy.
She moves to the head of the tarp, twisting thematerial loudly in her hands before she yanks, pulling me away from the car. “I’m still surprised I didn’t succeed with the arsenic.” She cackles. “Yep, that was me. It was soooo easy to get behind the counter. All I had to do was flirt with that boy just a little, and he let me stay with him while he closed the cafe. It wasn’t hard to sprinkle just a little bit into the stack of cups. Totally random and not enough to kill anyone, or so I thought.” She shrugs. “Must have just been that lady’s time, you know, the one that died? Because the only one that got a lethal dose was you. But you just kept on kicking.”
A large rock hits the base of my spine and my lips part, even as no sound escapes.
