“Well, what would someone be doing under the hood? Messing up the engine? Trying to pull some kind of prank?”
Ryan put his hands on his hips. “A prank is locking someone’s keys in their car or putting shaving creaming the windshield.”
“Sugar in the gas tank,” Cooper suggested before bending over the exposed engine, scanning. “Hey, Ryan, do you know anything about cars?”
Ryan shrugged but looked anyway. “I know that you shouldn’t keep tools under the hood.”
Sawyer rushed in and looked where Ryan was pointing, squinting. She reached for the tool and held it up to the light. “What is it?”
Cooper took it out of her hand, eyeing both Sawyer and Ryan. “It’s a tube cutter.”
“What do you use a tube cutter for?” Sawyer wanted to know. “And why would you stash it in someone’s car?”
Ryan shook his head slowly, his eyes wide and focused on the tube cutter in Cooper’s hand. “You wouldn’t stash it in someone’s car,” he said. “But you might drop it there if you were surprised in the middle.”
Sawyer swallowed. “In the middle of what?”
“Of cutting Chloe’s brakes.”
Sawyer’s stomach folded in on itself. “How could…? Someone…Chloe could have died! If she didn’t have brakes, she could have died!” The realization crashed like a cold wave over her and Sawyer was stunned, her breath tightening in her chest.
Ryan swiped a finger across his cell phone and pushed it under the open hood. The blue light from the screen washed over the engine, and he pointed. “Right there.”
Cooper let out a low whistle as he fingered the even cut along a thin metallic tube. “He cut clean through.”
The tears were rolling down Sawyer’s face now, hot tracks burning down her cheeks. “Why would someone do that?”
But she didn’t need to hear an answer because she already knew it: Sawyer’s secret admirer was after her best friend too.
Sawyer’s head felt all at once light and impossibly heavy, and suddenly she felt the cold concrete slap against her back, her head lolling. Her nostrils stung with the smell of dirt and grass, the damp coldness pricking at her head and neck. She blinked when a bright light pierced her eyelid.
“Cooper?” Her lips felt puffy and her head throbbed. “What happened?”
“You passed out.” He helped Sawyer up, and Ryan shoved the penlight he was holding into his back pocket.
“We need to call the police,” Sawyer said.
Cooper shook his head as he led Sawyer into the Rutgers’ living room. It had cleared out considerably. Only a few scattered students remained, wide-eyed and quietly clutching their red party cups. Chloe sat alone on the loveseat, her eyes red rimmed, her cheeks a deep pink. She pulled her knees up against her chest and hugged them.
“Chloe doesn’t want us to.”
Chloe looked up at Sawyer, fresh tear tracks glossy on her cheeks. “My parents don’t know I’m here. They’ll kill me.”
Sawyer sucked in a sigh. “Chloe, this is really dangerous. Someone attacked you, and”—she choked on a sob—“they cut your brake lines. They could have killed you. They—they wanted to hurt you—bad. You have to tell the police.”
Chloe shook her head. “No. I can’t.”
“I’m going to take her home,” Ryan said softly.
“I’ll go with you,” Sawyer said.
“Yeah, I drove Sawyer over here.”
“No problem,” Cooper said, “I can take Sawyer home.”
Sawyer looked from Cooper to Chloe. “I think I should go home with her. Chloe, your parents probably aren’t even home. You shouldn’t be alone.”
“Then how are you going to get home from her house?” Ryan wanted to know. “Here, I’ll take Chloe and hang out with her until her parents come back.”
Sawyer opened her mouth to protest, but Ryan held up his hands. “No argument. You had a hard night too.”
Cooper nodded. “You passed out. You probably should lay down or get an ice pack or something.”
Chloe held out her ice pack. “Room for one more.”
“Chloe.” Sawyer sat down next to her, gingerly touching the dried blood over Chloe’s eye. “Let me at least go with you.”
Chloe leaned in, dropped her voice to a low whisper. “Sawyer, everyone’s looking at me. I’m embarrassed. I don’t care who’s at the house. I just want to go home.”
“But your car—”
“It was probably a stupid prank,” Chloe said, her eyes defiant, “and I caught the guy by surprise.”
“A prank?”
“We’re going to get going,” Ryan said, pulling Chloe from the couch.
“I’ll call you later,” Chloe said, shielding the cut above her eye with her sleeve.
A prank.
The word burned on Sawyer’s tongue. The sliced brake line, Chloe’s black-red blood—both burned into her mind’s eye. If this was a prank, then someone at Hawthorne High had a really bad sense of humor.
FIVE