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  “I’ll say.” She added, “Among other things.”

  This was banter. This was promising. “So? What do you think?”

  “I think you’re crazy not to call the police,” she said slowly. “But I understand why you haven’t. And I do believe I’m honored you called an intrepid reporter instead.”

  Cole took this for agreement. “Did you bring the recorder?”

  Lila removed her hand from her jacket. “I brought two. One for you and one for me.”

  “Perfect. Turn yours on, put it in your pocket, and forget it’s there.” Cole did the same with his, then held out his hand.

  “What’s that for?” Lila asked.

  “I owe you a date, remember?”

  “I don’t hold hands with killers. Much less date them.” But she hadn’t moved.

  “Then you’re safe with me,” said Cole.

  “Actually, I think I’d be a lot safer at home right now.” She held his look for a moment, then took his hand. He wrapped his fingers around hers. Check that out, came an unexpected thought, they fit. He shivered against the wind. “You ready?”

  Lila shrugged. “Not really. Does it matter?”

  It didn’t. There could be no more delay.

  He grasped her hand tighter, led her to the party, and plunged in.

  The light and heat slapped them both at once.

  A rainbow of laser lights zigzagged across the dance floor, intermittently bathing the dancing zombie teenagers in blues, greens, and reds. The only other light came from a powerful, unyielding strobe that transformed the party into a bad stop-motion animation film.

  And the heat.

  It shouldn’t have been so hot inside.

  The restaurant had been empty for years since Cole shut it down, the gas and electricity shut off after disuse. Not even the steam heat of the hundreds of gyrating dancers layered front to back and back to front on the dance floor could have insulated the building against the fast-dropping temperature outside the makeshift dance floor. Lila felt it, too, and pointed at something running along the baseboard.

  Space heaters, hooked up to a portable generator. Cole was amazed not one of them had been knocked over and caught fire.

  “This place is a death trap,” Lila yelled.

  “What?” Cole screamed back. He couldn’t understand her over the din of the speakers and the clatter of the generator. The music was so loud, the beat so potent, that he felt as if it was spreading out from inside him.

  “I said this place is a death trap!”

  Cole shook his head. “I can’t understand you!” Somehow, that didn’t stop him from attempting to communicate by yelling over the noise.

  Lila did her best to mime. Just be careful.

  Cole thought he understood. Keep away from the space heaters.

  “Hang on tight,” he said. “Let’s hit the dance floor.” Lila was mystified. Cole did his best “Single Ladies” impression. Lila went white and backed off. Cole pulled her into the writhing horde anyway, feeling a familiar tightness across his face, a sensation he’d almost forgotten.

  A smile.

  Cole pushed through the scrum, getting up close and personal with a lot of guys and girls who minded, and a lot who didn’t. He pulled Lila along behind him like a wagon, but the deeper they ventured, the thicker, less clothed, and slicker the crowd became, and that much harder to navigate. Cole slid between bodies, redoubling his grip on her slippery fingers. His eyes were peeled for Gavin, and his instincts extended like antennae, sensing for signs of his would-be killer.

  But the restaurant was too dark to see more than one dancer deep. And it was ripe with too much sound and odor and skin to tell where one body ended and the next began.

  Cole began to reconsider the merits of his plan. There were too many people. Too many variables. Too much could go wrong.

  There was a shout from behind him and above.

  Lila dug her fingernails into his wrist and he whirled.

  A football player, a six-feet-tall-and-two-hundred-pound slab of shirtless, hairy offensive line had climbed on top of the restaurant’s bar. Arms of countless dancers below him rose up and stretched out. The one-man demolition derby bent at the knees.

  Oh no, thought Cole.

  The lumpy lineman sprung into the air with impressive grace and gave himself to the mercy of the crowd.

  They had none to give.

  His girth brushed aside the arms that would have held him up as if they were bendy straws. He landed across Cole and Lila’s fingerlock, violently breaking them apart as he pancaked the people between them. Nature abhors a vacuum and so do dancers; immediately more bodies rushed to claim the places of those who were still struggling to get to their feet. Lila was engulfed in the thicket. He lost sight of her.

  Cole tried to head in her direction but met with a wall of bodies. He spun from one direction to the next, heart pounding and sweat pooling, the strobe cutting in and out, throwing him off course.

  He couldn’t see her. But he had to find her. He couldn’t leave her on her own, wrapped up in a mess of his own making, just like he’d done to Winnie. He couldn’t let history repeat itself.

  He wouldn’t.

  Cole pointed himself back in the direction from which he thought he’d come and hurled himself at the first group of dancers standing in his way. They pitched backward. He’d made a hole.

  He revved up to do it again, but froze.

  On the other side of the space he’d created was Gavin, kissing a girl, her back turned to Cole. Cole couldn’t see her face, but he knew who she was.

  Gavin broke from her kiss and leaned down to whisper something in her ear but stopped when he saw Cole staring back.

  The look in Gavin’s eye seemed friendly and welcoming.

  But Cole knew he was as welcome as a fly in a spiderweb.

  Cole’s stomach warped.

  His best friend since T-ball and graham crackers stood just a few feet away. But Cole had never felt so far apart from him. Gavin said something to the girl clinging to his shirt just as another surge of partiers rushed into the space between them, masking Cole’s view. He squished through, popping out onto the other side. Gavin stood there waiting and nodding to the music. The girl was gone.

  “You’re still alive, I see,” Gavin yelled in Cole’s ear. His grin gleamed. “It’s getting close to midnight, too. I think it’s safe to say you’ve survived your Wikipedia entry.”

  There’s still time, Cole thought. “What happened to your friend?

  “What friend?” asked Gavin.

  “The one you were kissing just now.”

  Gavin pursed his lips and shrugged dispassionately, like a player. “She’s not a friend. What’s in the bag?”

  Cole almost forgot he had it. “I made Rice Krispies Treats. But I don’t think anyone’s hungry.”

  Gavin crossed his eyes in mock offense. “Don’t you know me at all?” asked Gavin. It would seem not. Is Gavin really even your name? Cole thought. “I can always eat. Come on, I know a quieter spot.”

  Cole trailed Gavin through the party, ramming dancers out of the way when he had to. He craned his head around and around, skimming the restaurant for a trace of Lila. There was no sign of her. Maybe she’d gone outside for a breather. Maybe.

  He caught up to Gavin behind the bar. More crowd surfers had climbed on top and were launching themselves. “Where are we going?”

  “Through here,” Gavin said, dipping down and disappearing. The outline of a hatch in the floor flickered in the strobe light. Cole hesitated.

  If he went into that hole and things went bad, he might never come back out.

  Winnie was dead. Scott was dead. Drick was dead. Cole owed it to them to keep going. He looked one last time for Lila but she failed to appear. He would just have to live and find her later.

  He stooped, opened the door, and began to carefully climb down a flight of stairs in pitch black.

  “Gavin? Where’d you go?”

&nbs
p; Cole put his hands out and felt the walls of the stairwell on either side. He took a trembling step down. And then another. The noise of the party muffled above him with each step forward, and other sounds came into focus. The stairs creaking beneath him. The rough scratch of sawdust sliding against the soles of his shoes. What he hoped very much were not the bones of small dead rodents.

  “Gavin, come on already —”

  “BOO!” A bright light shot out of the dark, one step below Cole. His feet fell out from under him and he fell backward, sitting back on the stairs. Gavin’s flashlight app was aimed upward at his face from beneath his chin. He laughed like a cartoon Dracula. “Scare ya?”

  Down to his molecules. “Where are we going?”

  Gavin waved. “We’re here.”

  A few more steps and they materialized in a large open basement. Gavin’s phone light threw off enough glow that Cole could identify a dusty walk-in freezer, empty cobwebbed kegs, and high, bare shelves. Stationed around the space were a few worktables equipped with basic tools. A hammer here, a vise there.

  “Better, huh?” Gavin asked.

  “Lots,” said Cole, his eyes adjusting to the murk. “Couldn’t hear myself think up there.”

  “That’s the whole point of a party like this. Give everyone an excuse to stop thinking and shut off our brains for a while,” Gavin said.

  “I wish I could shut mine off,” Cole mused. “It just keeps going. It just keeps asking questions.”

  Gavin snorted. “Better be careful,” he warned in singsong. “That could get you in trouble.” But Cole knew he was already well beyond that point. “So let’s see what you’ve got in there,” Gavin said, gesturing at Cole’s bag. “Papa’s famished.”

  So was Cole. He was hungry for answers and had waited, been lied to and toyed with long enough. “When were you going to tell me, Gavin?”

  Gavin hopped up on a table and swung his feet. Left, right. Left, right. The light from his phone cast misshapen, grotesque shadows all over the room. “Still with the questions? Fine. If that’s the way you want it.” He tsked. His voice was soft and laced with menace. “But you’ll have to be more specific than that. There are so many things to choose from. When was I going to tell you what?”

  Cole had come this far. He would see it through.

  “That you killed Scott. And Drick.” He took another breath. “And Winnie.”

  Gavin stopped swinging his feet. Cole couldn’t see his eyes, hooded in shadow, but his half-moon grin was clear. “Honestly? I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. I wasn’t sure I could. I’ve found that ending a life is surprisingly easy. Once you get the hang of it, at least.” He plucked a piece of lint from his sleeve and flicked it. “But disappointing someone you care about? Someone whose opinion matters to you? That’s hard. I guess I’m a coward that way. But now that it’s happening, I’m glad. This is better.”

  “Better, why?”

  “Because you’re my best friend,” Gavin pledged. It was the ugliest thing he’d ever said to Cole. Then he managed to top himself. He reached inside his jacket. When he removed his hand, he was holding a nasty-looking knife. “And as my best friend, you have the right to know everything. I owe you the truth before I kill you.”

  When did you start to figure it out?” asked Gavin, back to swinging his legs like a hyperactive, homicidal five-year-old.

  Cole was still stuck back on the part about Gavin killing him, and the blade he wielded, glinting in the light of his phone. Cole felt the recorder in his pocket, silently soaking up their conversation. He could take off right now, grab Lila, go to the cops, and play them what Gavin had just said. But would that be enough? Gavin could claim it was all a joke. Cole needed to extract the full story or this would be for nothing.

  “Come on, humor me,” Gavin prodded.

  “Humor you?” Cole sputtered. “You said you’re going to kill me.”

  Gavin cocked his head tenderly. “Are you worried it’ll hurt? I promise to be gentle for my best friend.”

  “Stop saying that,” Cole spat. “You are not my best friend. I don’t know what you are.”

  “A guy who likes to learn from his mistakes, among other things. Are you going to tell me what gave me away? Or should we skip the truth-telling bit and go straight to the good-byes?”

  “Harry Styles. Happy?”

  Gavin raised an eyebrow. “Come again?”

  “Your One Direction love match. You told me so yourself. You took the quiz in the Taylor Swift issue of Teen Vogue. I found a copy of the magazine with your answers circled in Josh’s hospital room. It had a mailing label addressed to Andrea on it.”

  Cole could see Gavin’s tongue swirl around beneath his cheek as he worked it out. “If you don’t mind my saying, that’s pretty thin,” said Gavin, dubious. “What could you have even gotten from that? That Andrea and I were secretly seeing each other? So what?”

  “You were the last piece of the puzzle. Andrea was the first.”

  “Girls,” Gavin clucked. “I’m discovering they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “Well your taste could use some refining.”

  Gavin deflated. “Watch it. If you aren’t nice, I won’t be nice. The same way we weren’t nice to her father.”

  “You killed Mr. Henderson, too?”

  “He never took a shine to me. Can you believe it? Apparently he has something against wit and devilish good looks.”

  “Or maybe he has something against murder,” Cole guessed.

  “He was threatening to send Andrea away to boarding school if she didn’t dump me,” Gavin said. “What were we supposed to do, off ourselves like some modern basic cable adaptation of Romeo and Juliet? Better to kill him than kill ourselves. He had to go around in secret while we came up with the plan to make him our test subject.”

  “That must have been a giant sacrifice,” Cole said.

  “Enough with the comedy. Tell me when you picked up Andrea’s trail?”

  “It was when I saw Josh in the hospital. He let on that she’d been in touch with him while he was hiding from the cops. She made him think he still had a chance with Winnie even though she was already trying to get back together with me. Andrea steered him to Winnie’s house at the exact moment I was there finding her body.”

  “The timing was too coincidental for you?” Gavin gave him a smug look.

  “She gave herself away. I knew she was involved somehow, but I didn’t know how deep it got. I didn’t even know if she’d killed Winnie because I was positive she wasn’t acting alone. She’d been in the hospital when Drick was killed. Recovering from a near-fatal experience with contaminated eyedrops. Just like her Wikipedia entry.”

  “That must’ve been confusing.”

  “That was no bad batch of chronic dry eye medication. And she didn’t do it to herself on purpose. You spiked it, didn’t you?”

  Gavin held a finger to his lips. “She doesn’t need to know that.”

  “How could you blind your own girlfriend?”

  “Let’s be clear. She can still see out of one eye, and she’s not technically blind in the other eye because she doesn’t even have that eye anymore. The acid melted it clean away. Nothing but socket left there. So we’re not even approaching a Helen Keller situation. And I didn’t mean for her to lose her whole eye. I swiped the wrong kind of acid from chemistry. It was Diet-Coke-and-Mentos Day in class and I got a little distracted. Sue me.”

  “But why risk it at all?”

  “Because of how much I respect your deductive capabilities,” Gavin said, ever patient. “You might have found it curious if terrible things happened to all your Wikipedia targets except her. And I couldn’t chance you connecting us.”

  “So you killed Drick yourself.”

  “Had to,” said Gavin. “You were on your way to see him and spill your guts. I knew as soon as you told him what you’d been up to he’d go straight to the cops, like any sensible person would. They’d take one look at the pages
and come knocking on your door.”

  “So? All the pages were made on my computer. You had plausible deniability. Even after I’d deleted the entries, they’d been restored using my log-in and password.”

  “You can thank Chetley for that one. He taught me the finer points of hacking in the early days of Protest Club, when we thought we were anarchists. We brainstormed breaking into the school’s grading files and giving everyone straight As,” said Gavin.

  “But you could’ve sent me up the river right then,” Cole persisted. “Why did you have to kill Winnie?”

  “Because it made for a better story.”

  Cole didn’t understand.

  Gavin sighed. “Allow me to explain. What’s your GPA?”

  Cole wrinkled his brow. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “I don’t know what it is,” he said honestly. “High. High enough to be valedictorian.”

  “So high that you don’t even pay attention,” said Gavin, shaking his head. “That’s luxury. Plus you’ve got all kinds of honors and awards and extracurriculars up the yin-yang. You’ve got it made. You’ll go to any school you want and have a really extraordinary life. While I sit around Springfield flipping burgers.

  “I know, I know,” Gavin admitted. “You don’t have to say it. I screwed up. It’s my own fault. I’d be in an okay position now if I’d applied myself like you did. But I didn’t. I slacked off and mouthed off and didn’t pay attention to what my life would turn out to be like after graduation until senior year arrived and I found out it was too late to get what you’re going to have.

  “At least not by conventional means.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Cole.

  “I lost my chance to fatten up my transcript with grades and distinctions. But I can write a mean essay. Just think of all the schools that’ll beat down my door when I write the story of how I brought to justice my best friend, mass murderer Cole Redeker.”

  Cole felt his ribs buckle.

  “I have a first draft at home,” said Gavin, swelling with pride. “I’m sorry I don’t have a copy with me to read to you, but I’ll boil it down. The second option on the common application prompt goes like this: ‘Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?’