“Uh-oh. I’ve been made.” Parvati arched her eyebrows suggestively. “I’m actually twenty-four, but lucky for you I have a thing for younger men.” She poked me until I cracked a smile. “Actually I saw it in some movie Dad was watching a few months ago.” She opened the driver’s-side door and climbed behind the wheel. I jogged around to the passenger side and got in.
Parvati drove me to my car at the trailhead, and after we were sure no one was around we quickly swapped our plates. She headed home and I headed back to her father’s cabin, flipping up the hood of my sweatshirt as the first drops of rain began to fall.
Back inside, I blotted myself with a towel hanging over the edge of the shower. I went back to browsing through Preston’s hard drive, poring over each of Violet’s pictures, looking for clues. I wished I could get into Pres’s email, but even if I could crack his password there wasn’t any Wi-Fi out in the sticks.
Off in the distance, thunder tore the sky apart. Rain pounded the metal above my head. I hated the thought of Parvati navigating the twisting mountain roads during a storm, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Focus, Max. Find Preston.
I skimmed through the list of other folders, looking for anything that caught my eye. None of the initials were familiar to me except mine and Parvati’s. The PA folder had ten pictures, including a recent one of Parvati in her homecoming dress, a short spangly green thing that I got turned on just looking at. Again, I reminded myself to stay focused. The MC folder had three pictures of me. One of them was a pic of me, Darla, and Ben outside The Triple S. I didn’t even remember Preston taking it.
There was a PM folder that turned out to be pictures of Parvati and me together. There were two of us posed at parties, and even one shot of us scrunched together at the lunch table that Pres had snapped with his phone. I couldn’t believe his phone now had nothing on it except a call record that probably implicated me. Total bullshit. He lived on that thing. It should have been full of files.
Clues.
I flipped to the video folder, but it was empty except for a couple of clips he had taken at the latest Kittens of Mass Destruction concert. That seemed odd. Pres was always shooting videos of people he knew. Maybe he only saved them to his phone, or maybe . . .
I scrolled up to the top of the screen to the View menu. Holding my breath, I selected “view hidden files and directories.” A list of subfolders appeared. There was no VC folder for Violet Cain, but there were folders for Parvati and me. I went to click on the PA folder, but my aim was a little off and I opened the PM folder instead.
Thumbnails appeared, laid out in a nice orderly grid, and my blood screeched to a halt in my veins. Preston had videos of Parvati and me having sex.
EIGHTEEN
WE’D ONLY HOOKED UP AT his house the one time, but he had obviously rigged the guest bedroom with cameras. The videos were shot from above and from the side. I didn’t have to play more than a few seconds of any of the clips to know exactly what I was looking at. My face reddened. Parvati would die (or her parents would murder her) if these videos ever got out.
What the fuck? Did Preston have some sort of creepy voyeuristic fetish? Why had he recorded us?
And how, exactly, was I supposed to break this news to Parvati?
A giant clap of thunder shook the cabin, and the lights flickered out. The laptop went dark with the room, the thumbnails of us winking out of view. I remembered Parvati saying something about her laptop battery not working. Just my luck.
I used the faint glow of my cell phone to make my way back into the cabin’s living room. Did this place have candles? Probably, but I didn’t have anything to light them with. I debated going to Vegas right away, but the rain was really coming down and I’d be soaked to the bone if I walked all the way to my car. The best plan was to crash until morning. I’d head to Vegas as soon as I woke up, with or without Parvati.
I bedded down on the sofa, letting my mind wander back to her lying next to me. Closing my eyes, I listened to the rain pinging against the roof. Parvati’s face slowly disappeared, replaced by Preston’s. You ever feel like you don’t know anyone? Could he have meant me, or Parvati? Is that why he was spying on us? Because he didn’t trust us? No, it’s one thing to spy on people. It’s another thing completely to film them naked. Preston was apparently more screwed up in the head than I had ever known.
Turning over, I buried my face in my pillow. After an hour or two of tossing and turning, my brain faded to black.
But even in my dreams, I couldn’t escape thoughts of Pres and Parvati. They were running through the halls of a school. Not Vista Palisades—some place I had never been before. It looked old, with pillars and high hallways and classroom doors inset with big panes of glass. There was a ringing sound, like maybe someone had pulled the fire alarm, but Pres and Parvati didn’t seem worried. I watched as she used a bobby pin to pick a lock. The two of them ducked inside a classroom, laughing, and then came out with a handful of dusty books. Pres dumped them in his duffel bag and they proceeded down the hall, stopping at a door that had CHEMISTRY LAB stenciled in neat black letters across the glass.
The ringing was louder now. Pres turned toward me as Parvati worked her lock-picking magic again. I ducked into a recessed area of the hallway so he wouldn’t see me. I heard footsteps, people speaking in hushed tones. I peered around the corner, and Pres and Parvati were gone. The corridor was empty, but the voices sounded so close.
And then I heard a creak, and a key in the lock. My body jolted completely awake.
Someone was coming.
I slid off the sofa, grabbed the gun, and headed for the back door, just as Agents McGhee and Gonzalez burst through the front door of the darkened cabin and everything got even more fucked up.
THE END
NINETEEN
December 6th
AND JUST LIKE THAT, MY birthday went from a sleeping dream to a waking nightmare. I barely remember brandishing the gun, running from the feds, leaping from the cliff into the frigid water below.
But I’ve passed the last fifteen minutes or so in the river, mostly beneath the surface. That’s one good thing about surfing. You spend enough time getting sucked under by rogue waves, you get good at holding your breath.
My lungs finally give up the last little bits of air and I pop up into the night, just far enough to suck in a couple more deep breaths. Around me, the roar of the water sounds muffled. My ears are still throbbing from the sound of the gun going off.