“From behind,” Seth interrupts, “in the dark, late at night. Whoever did it could have been drinking or on something. It’s possible.”
A chill goes through me. “So you think—someone was trying to kill me?”
“I’m not saying that for sure,” he says hastily. “I’m just saying, you said Fiona had no enemies. But what about you?”
I take a deep breath. “You really think Gen hated me enough to try and kill me?”
“Psychopathy is more common than people realize,” Seth says. “Around one percent of the general population. And some are very good at hiding it.”
I look at him sideways. “You get this from all your time on the true crime boards?”
“That’s not the point.” Then he pauses. “Or what if it was her, and she did mean to kill Fiona and frame you for it?”
I frown. “Why would she—or anyone—do that?”
“Well, if she’s smart—and if she pulled this off without being caught, she’s smart—then she would have thought it through. If the goal was to get Reagan to break up with you, killing you might not work.”
Seth’s always called Jeremy by his last name, Reagan. I stare at him. “You are making no sense.”
“I mean, with how obsessed that kid was with you, if you died, he’d probably build some kind of shrine to you and worship at it the rest of his life.” Before I can object to that, he goes on, “But turning you into a person he didn’t recognize? That might do it.”
I shake my head. “Yeah, Gen said some shitty stuff to me, but she’d never try and kill me over Jeremy. Besides, she didn’t need to turn me into a murder suspect to make me look bad.” I stare straight ahead of me. “I did that just fine all by myself.”
A touch on my arm. I look over at Seth.
“How long are you going to punish yourself?” he asks. “Just an estimate.”
I ignore that. “Besides, if Gen—or anyone else—was trying to frame me, like you said, they did a shitty job. Didn’t drop anything that belonged to me near the ravine or anything like that.”
“She could have messed it up,” he offers. “And now she’s trying again. And there’s the missing journal. Did she have a key to your house?”
I go still. “No—but she knows where we keep our spare key. Under the rock by the maple tree in the backyard.”
“Who else knows about that key?”
“Just her and Jeremy, but…I’ve never actually understood that whole thing. Why would anyone have risked coming into our house that night to take Fiona’s journal?”
Suddenly the GPS starts talking to us. Seth looks at it. “It wants me to get off the highway.”
I gesture at the traffic. “Big surprise.”
We stop talking theories then as Seth takes the next exit. It spits us out onto a smaller road somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. But the traffic isn’t great here, either. And the sky overhead has turned a deep, ominous gray.
I’m glad for the distraction, honestly. My first reaction to Gen possibly being the killer is how ridiculous it is. But Seth’s right. People change.
Could Gen have changed that much? So much that she’d try and kill me?
The thought makes me feel ill. I’ve always wondered if I made the right choice. Choosing Jeremy over Gen. When he asked me out, I could have said no. Things could have gone on the way they had been. The three of us best friends.
But he was Jeremy Reagan, the boy everyone wanted, the earnest, wholesome quarterback—it was like just by being with him, it made all my own flaws feel lesser. Made me feel like I was a better person, just because he’d chosen me. My mom left me, Fiona was getting ready to leave me, and I’d wondered, more than once, if there was just something fundamentally unlovable about me. Being with Seth, the way we only kissed when no one was around, the way I was sure he wanted to keep me a secret—that didn’t make me feel great. But every time I looked over at Jeremy and he squeezed my hand or gave me that smile of his—it made me feel like he could see past everything that was wrong with me and love me anyway.
But Gen—Gen was with me through all of that, too. And she wasn’t perfect like Jeremy. She was flawed. She was terrible at school, she had a bad temper that landed her in detention every month, she had acne, and she and her mom never got along. She didn’t know what she wanted to be, either. We understood each other.
Sometimes I wonder if I picked Jeremy over her because I was afraid of how much alike we really were.
Sometimes I wonder how far I would go to get what I want, too.
Who I would be willing to hurt.
“There’s something wrong,” Seth says, interrupting my spiraling thoughts.
“With Gen?” I shake my head. “I just can’t see—”
“No, I mean with the car. It’s making a weird noise. Listen, can you hear that?”
I try. But I don’t even have a car of my own and know next to nothing about them. “Um, no?”
Seth curses. Traffic’s eased slightly, but we’re still on a two-lane back road going past fields and the occasional horse farm. The sky ahead is getting darker. We’re somewhere outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, according to the map, when the skies open up.
Soon it’s raining so hard we can barely see five feet ahead. Seth has his windshield wipers on high, his lights on. “Shit,” he mutters as the rain starts to come down harder. It’s black as night outside, even though it’s only two thirty in the afternoon.
“Stop!” I exclaim when a truck’s taillights appear in front of us. Seth slams on the brakes, sending the back of the car skidding. One of my hands grips the door and the other clutches Fiona’s necklace as we jackknife across the road, finally coming to rest partly on the shoulder, partly sticking out into the right lane.
There’s a honk somewhere behind us as a car goes by, barely missing us, but the rain is coming down so hard it won’t be long until we have another near miss.
I catch my breath. Next to me, Seth looks dazed. “Are you okay?” I ask.
He blinks. “Are you okay?”