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  Corduroy would never look more lethal.

  But Cole was not about to find out. The door opened and the nurse strode to his side. “The doctor’s here. Let’s get you checked out.” Cole let her trundle him off. But Chetley wasn’t done.

  “Do I have a Wikipedia page, Cole? Do you?”

  PainAuChoCOLEat: It was nuts.

  ShesGottaGavIt: back up

  ShesGottaGavIt: chetley thinks i have potential

  ShesGottaGavIt: there may be hope for me yet

  PainAuChoCOLEat: ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION

  PainAuChoCOLEat: CHETLEY KNOWS ABOUT THE WIKIPEDIA PAGES

  ShesGottaGavIt: easy on the caps lock

  PainAuChoCOLEat: ONLY WHEN I AM SATISFIED THAT YOU ARE SUFFICIENTLY CONCERNED ABOUT THE POTENTIAL FOR ARREST AND/OR DANGER

  PainAuChoCOLEat: What if Josh isn’t the killer?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: What if it’s Chetley?

  ShesGottaGavIt: first you thought it was josh

  ShesGottaGavIt: then you thought it was chetley

  ShesGottaGavIt: then you went back to josh

  ShesGottaGavIt: now you’re back on chetley again

  PainAuChoCOLEat: If you’d been there, you’d wonder, too.

  ShesGottaGavIt: him eavesdropping on you is indeed cause for concern

  ShesGottaGavIt: anyone else listening to you would have died of snoredom

  ShesGottaGavIt: has whinny been in touch

  PainAuChoCOLEat: She texted a few times while I was with the doctor.

  ShesGottaGavIt: did she say anything about the wikis

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Nothing.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Either she hasn’t checked out her page or she thinks it’s a joke.

  ShesGottaGavIt: we have that going for us

  ShesGottaGavIt: better that she focuses on winning you back than the prediction of her murder

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I don’t know for sure that she wants me back.

  ShesGottaGavIt: she tried to kiss you

  PainAuChoCOLEat: That could’ve been a momentary lapse of judgment.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Brought on by all of the trauma building up.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Maybe I don’t want to get back together with her anymore.

  WinWin: Hi

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Maybe I want to focus on getting my grades back in shape.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: And put some pep back into my baking.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Oh yeah, and keep out of jail.

  ShesGottaGavIt: glad you have your priorities straight

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong about her.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Hi.

  WinWin: Phew

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Say you have a girlfriend.

  WinWin: I was starting to think you really were ignoring me

  ShesGottaGavIt: i like where you are going with this so far

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Say she goes berserk.

  ShesGottaGavIt: with lust

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Not ignoring you.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m just not sure what to say.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Beyond hi.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Is thought to have killed people.

  WinWin: Well

  WinWin: I’m the one who has things to say

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Are you still pulling down straight As?

  WinWin: You don’t have to do any talking at all

  ShesGottaGavIt: you are holding it against her that she still cares about her future

  ShesGottaGavIt: you of all people

  ShesGottaGavIt: the girl you have been pining for wants you back

  WinWin: If you’ll let me

  WinWin: Come over

  ShesGottaGavIt: and you are going to deny her

  WinWin: Everyone’s out

  WinWin: It’ll just be you and me

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Okay.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m going over there.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Happy?

  WinWin: :)

  ShesGottaGavIt: ecstatic

  WinWin: See you soon

  ShesGottaGavIt: was on pins and needles

 

  ShesGottaGavIt: bit of advice

  ShesGottaGavIt: let her work for it

  WaldaWinchell: Hallo!

 

  WaldaWinchell: How’re you feeling?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Okay.

  WaldaWinchell: Super.

  WaldaWinchell: You’ll need all your strength for the schnitzel ahead of you.

  WaldaWinchell: Should I meet you there? I have a car. I can pick you up.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I can’t go.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m really sorry.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I wouldn’t bail on you if it wasn’t important.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Can we do it another time?

  WaldaWinchell: Are you bailing because of your ex-girlfriend who treats you like dirt?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Well, I don’t have any other ex-girlfriends, but yes.

 

  Cole rode over to Winnie’s after his head cleared, and now dawdled astride his bicycle out front. He waited there for several minutes, working up the nerve to ring the bell, even though she’d invited him over. She’d already taken the pressure off him, told him that she would do the talking. But he’d have to answer her at some point. He’d have to know what he’d say. And in order to know what he’d say, he’d have to know what he wanted. He’d taken the long way over, the better to figure it out. By the time he arrived at her house, he felt dumber than ever.

  He knew only one thing for sure, and that was that he’d just ditched Lila to see his ex-girlfriend. Maybe Winnie was about to apologize and take him back. But then again, maybe she was already regretting almost kissing him. Maybe she was about to humiliate him some more. Maybe she’d gotten back with Josh. Maybe she was hiding him. Maybe they were about to kill him together.

  The paranoia he’d picked up since Drick’s death was almost as heavy a burden as the guilty conscience he was already lugging around.

  Daylight fading fast, he climbed the steps to the porch and rang the doorbell.

  A long moment passed as he rehearsed his opening (“Hi”) and waited, clammy, for the door to open.

  It didn’t.

  He rang again.

  No one greeted him.

  Maybe the long way over was too long for Winnie and she’d gotten tired of waiting for him.

  The lights inside the parlor were on and cast a glow that leant the porch a faint halo. He leaned over the railing, glanced up the driveway, and spotted Winnie’s Toyota parked precisely in front of the garage.

  Cole returned to the front door, pressed his finger against the bell, and held it there. “Winnie? It’s Cole. Sorry it took me so long. Do you still want to talk?”

  No answer.

  He turned to leave, muttering under his breath, “Screw this. Screw her.” She sneaks into the school nurse’s office, sits there next to him waiting for him to wake up, tries to kiss him, and asks him over? When no one else is home? And doesn’t come to the door when he gets there? It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. He refused to stand there like a putz, hoping she’d grant him an audience. He’d go home, call Lila, humble himself, and hope the Blue Danube was still on the table, if she hadn’t already taken someone else.

  No, wait. Screw that. Not Lila. Screw walking away. Winnie didn’t get to jerk him around. She owed him an explanation. She owed him an apology. She owed him the chance to judge her. And he was going to take it.

  He banged on the front door and opened his mouth, ready to raise his voice, only to stop mid-breath. The door had swung open at his touch, slicing the silence inside with a creak.

  “Hello?”

  Cole looked back at the street, unpeopled and still, except for the big maples lining the block, their branches italicized in the wind. Winnie lived in the oldest part of Springfield, where the tree trunks are thickest and most stalwart. But they we
ren’t so wholesome in the gloom. In this light they looked barren and jagged and crooked, the remnants of an old pier long ago washed away by the sea.

  Cole stepped inside the house, wincing as the floorboards protested under his weight.

  Something wasn’t right.

  The house was holding its breath, as though he’d walked in on it while it was up to no good. It watched him, eyes in the framed pictures and the grandfather clock, waiting to see how he would proceed before deciding whether to continue with its secret purpose.

  To the left was the parlor, empty. To his right, a sitting room, dark. Beyond that, a hallway led to the back of the house. There, a powder room, a kitchen, and the dining room where Winnie’s parents once hosted the debate team after winning States. There was a walk-in pantry off the kitchen, where Winnie had pulled Cole by the necktie for a celebratory makeout. Even now on some mornings he’d wake up, sure he’d just been there among the brown sugar and Honeycomb, her fingers grasping his pockets.

  Before him was the staircase. At its foot, Winnie’s bag. Her coat was hung over the newel post.

  Cole looked up the staircase. Ten steps up was a landing. There, it hooked right and continued into shadows. He took out his phone, selected Winnie’s name — still ranked at the top of his favorites, heaven help him if Gavin ever found out — and called.

  A sound twisted down the stairs from some nook high in the level above. Cole couldn’t immediately place the tune but knew it wasn’t “Billionaire,” the song Winnie had assigned his number at the height of their relationship. She’d since replaced his ringtone with something else. Probably the first thing she did after she dumped him.

  Cole let the phone ring as he went up the stairs, following the sound around the landing and into the darkness. The only light at the top seeped from Winnie’s room, its door ajar. He wondered if she still had the yellow comforter he’d gotten to know. He was close enough to make out the last chords of the ringtone before he was rung through to voice mail: “U Can’t Touch This.” He snapped his phone shut in anger.

  “Winnie! It’s Cole. I’m coming in.”

  Her room hadn’t changed. The yellow comforter, the clusters of candles, the stack of Teen Vogues in the corner, camouflaged with a five-year-old copy of the New Yorker atop them. Winnie sat at her desk, her back to him, facing her computer. It was tuned to her screen saver, a picture of herself with Josh from homecoming.

  “Did you not hear me laying on the bell? Hello?”

  He dared to take her arm. “Winnie, I’m talking to you!” He snatched his hand back, snakebit. The house was warm but she was cold. Cole gingerly swiveled the chair toward him. Her arm fell from the rest, her hand dangling limply above the carpet. He took a step back. Winnie wasn’t Winnie anymore.

  Her fingernails were broken at right angles. Her head fell to the side, unsupported, and her tongue hung out, uncorked from her open mouth, distended and blue. Cole’s eyes locked onto hers, lazy slits. The white was gone, painted over with the bright, screaming red of blood burst from capillaries, ruptured by the force of strangulation. Around her neck wrapped three times tightly was the instrument of her death, her own length of hair. A dark bruise blossomed where it touched her skin.

  Bile gushed up his throat. He dropped to his knees and threw up into a wastebasket. As his insides undulated he took weird note of the trash: Winnie still drank diet orange soda and chewed Orbit by the mouthful. No. Not still. Used to.

  He stayed there, perched, waiting out the sick, and then longer. He couldn’t bear the thought of facing Winnie again, the awful shrunkeness of her body minus breath. But he had to call for help. Eyes watering, he lifted his head, careful not to look in her direction. His gaze landed on her computer.

  The screen saver had disappeared when he jostled her body. Open on the display was a Web page. Winnie’s Wikipedia entry. Cole gingerly reached around her corpse and scrolled to the bottom, where Cole and Gavin had added her death, described exactly as he found her.

  Below it were two lines they had not added.

  Winnie Hoffman

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  * * *

  Winnie Hoffman is an American high school student, tennis player, and faithless girlfriend. She is best known for her academic prowess and ability to bring about the ruin of star students with the wink of an eye.1 She might have landed valedictorian and gone on to big things and bigger boyfriends at Harvard, but she was undone by her vanity. Winnie Hoffman died before she could be accepted to any school, her big brain not quite big enough to figure out that her habit for betrayal might catch up to her one day, wrap itself around her neck, and squeeze the life out of her.

  1 See articles on Josh Truffle and Cole Redeker.

  This article about a high school senior who broke hearts and had her own neck broken in return is a stub. You can help Wickedpedia by expanding it.

  Cole didn’t have a Wikipedia page. Not that he knew of, anyway.

  His fingers hovered over the trackpad, poised to click the link. Did he want to see this? No. But he had to. Someone says Don’t think about pink elephants, you think about pink elephants. Cole had no choice. He clicked.

  Seconds later, as he surveyed the contents of the link, there came a chuff chuff of shoes kissing carpet and a new but familiar voice.

  “Winnie?”

  Josh stood in the doorway. Cole saw Winnie’s body shine, reflected in Josh’s crater-big eyes. His fists clenched and unclenched again and again to the silent stroke of a metronome. “You killed her!”

  Cole un-hunched from over the desk. “Josh, wait.”

  Josh didn’t.

  He flung himself at Cole.

  They collided. Cole popped backward, as if jerked by a string. For a split second he felt his feet leave the floor. They pedaled twice in midair as Josh drove his weight forward, their momentum propelling them both right up against Winnie’s picture window.

  And then through it.

  And then down.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  And then out.

  The first thing Cole became aware of was the sound. A beep, intermittent but steady, and fuzzy around the edges. He was warm and snuggly, swaddled in a soft blanket. Cole opened his eyes and took in his unfamiliar but recognizable surroundings. Linoleum floors, a blue-green curtain, and the high adjustable bed in which he was enthroned. Hadn’t he just been here?

  Cole licked his dry lips, found a glob of coagulated spittle at one corner. Also, a flap of something sticky, begging to be peeled off.

  “Don’t futz with your bandages, Scarface.” Gavin sat in a chair at the end of the bed. “You’ve got more stitches on your face than blackheads. Sleep, okay?”

  “Gabbin.” Cole’s jaw blundered one way, and his lips another. “Gabba.”

  “You were closer the first time,” his friend said as he stepped up to Cole’s side, but somehow managed to keep his distance all the same. “How are you feeling?”

  “Cheerful,” Cole oozed. “Like a rainbow.” Yes? Yes. Surely rainbows spent their days feeling as bubbly as he did now.

  “Wow,” Gavin said, tapping an IV channeled into Cole’s arm. “They gave you the good stuff. If there’s any left by the time you’re sprung, smuggle it out with you.”

  “Gavin.” Cole hit the V with an effort. Articulating every syllable demanded parallel parking–level concentration, and to Cole’s knowledge, rainbows didn’t drive.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Am I dead?”

  A second passed as Gavin beheld him, expressionless, and then another, a pause loaded like the moment after you confessed to a girl you like-liked her, and before she made your life or made you lifeless. Finally Gavin smiled. Something about it felt weird to Cole, but then, the rainbow sensation was foreign to him, too. “No, dude. You’ve been knocked out since the ambulance picked you up this afternoon. You got banged up stuntman-style, and thanks to the broken glass you look like your face l
ost a fight with a sack of supremely pissed off woodpeckers. But no. You’re not dead. Your parents are outside, chatting it up with your doctors. If my eavesdropping skills are up to snuff, you’ll be out of the hospital in a few days.”

  Cole squinted, thinking. The room listed to one side and back. He closed his eyes and opened them. “Did I fall?”

  “Right through a window, with Josh clinging to you like you were caught up in some operatic gay suicide pact. Is there something you’ve been keeping from me, Cole?”

  “I fell,” Cole said. Fragments of memories were smushed together in his head with all the clarity of an elementary-school-art-class collage. Winnie’s house. Winnie’s hair. Winnie’s computer. Winnie’s boyfriend. His thoughts clicked. “Josh pushed me. He pushed me and we went out the window!” It sounded like a sitcom punch line, minus the laugh track. “Because of Winnie.”

  “Yeah,” Gavin said, his voice softening. “Because of Winnie. You saw what happened to her?”

  “She’s dead, Gavin.” His face was suddenly wet. A salty tear tipped over his upper lip and into his mouth. “He killed her. Josh killed her.”

  Gavin looked away. Embarrassed at Cole’s display or emotional because of it, Cole couldn’t tell. “I know, buddy. I’m sorry” was all he could say.

  Cole sat straight up. “We have to stop him.”

  “It’s okay, Cole.”

  “You don’t understand. He killed Winnie. He must’ve killed Drick and Scott, too. We have to stop him.”

  “Don’t worry about Josh. He’s not going to kill anyone else.”

  “But he could! We have to find him!”

  “No we don’t,” Gavin said. “I can tell you where he is right now. Two floors down in the ICU.”

  “You’re not making any sense. I see you, too.”

  “The Intensive Care Unit. Trust me. Chances are Josh won’t kill anyone else ever again. His spine shattered when you two hit the ground.”