LT SCHUSTER: What sites have you tried? Our link to your computer isn’t up yet.
B*AND: Tried them all. Nothing. Maybe UR just wrong.
Anger and annoyance simmered low in Bex’s gut. Anger, annoyance, and…joy? If he wasn’t on the site, maybe that proved that he wasn’t guilty…
LT SCHUSTER: Just—
SCREEN NAME B*AND has left this discussion.
She dialed Laney.
“Bex! Still up for a movie?”
Bex rubbed her eyes, yawning. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Is that why you yawned? To demonstrate your interest in the exciting social lives of Kill Devil Hills’ finest?”
“Aren’t a town’s finest supposed to be the police?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, you coming with?”
“You’d better be coming with!” Chelsea chorused in the background. “Unless you’re throwing us off for Trevor, but you’d better not be!”
Bex laughed. “Yeah, I’m coming with, and I would never throw you guys off for a guy.”
“That’s good,” Laney said, “because we’re outside your house.”
“Woooo! The call is coming from outside the house!” Chelsea burst into hysterical laughter. Bex wished all spooky stories could end the same way.
“What were you going to do if I had decided to ditch you guys and go out with Trevor?” she asked, opening the front door.
“We knew you would never do that,” Laney said, following her into the house and hanging up the phone.
“We have intimate faith in you,” Chelsea said.
“Imminent, Chels. The word is imminent.”
“Whatever. Don’t take this the wrong way, Bex, but you look awful.”
Bex was dumbstruck for a half second. Her friends were in her bedroom, less than three feet from her open laptop and the heinous pictures and the throbbing forum of weirdos craving blood. Her two lives were about to crash into each other.
She slammed the laptop shut.
She didn’t hear the ping of a new message alert from the fan site.
She didn’t see the single line in the subject box from GAMECREATOR.
Is it really you, Bethy?
Twenty-Six
“Okay, the movie sucked. Capital S. U. C. K,” Chelsea said as she, Bex, and Laney shuffled out of the Cineplex late that night. “I’m almost sorry I gave you that makeover.”
Bex blinked her heavily made-up eyes and smacked her lips together, tasting the waxy residue Chelsea’s borrowed Bombastic lip color had left. “It may have been a lousy movie, but I looked great watching it.”
“That’s what counts!”
“I bet he liked it.” Laney jutted her chin toward a crowd of kids in front of them, Zach taking up the rear. He turned and looked just as Bex did, their eyes locking, then falling away immediately.
“He left the theater, like, three times,” Laney said.
“Probably to go run and film himself saying that he loved the movie because it was ‘based on actual events.’”
“‘Inspired by,’” Bex corrected. “And I didn’t think it was that bad.”
A sly smile spread across Laney’s face. “Like you even saw the movie! Your eyes were glazed over the whole time in Trevor-loves-me-land.”
“Oh, let her be in love. We all could be serial-killer fodder in five minutes.”
The jovial conversation immediately died. Bex wondered if Laney and Chelsea were thinking about Darla. All she could think about was her father, the screaming headlines, the talking heads on the news.
“Um, we should get to the car,” Bex mumbled.
“Ladies…” A beat-up convertible BMW nearly ran over the girls’ feet as the driver slowed to leer.
“Screw you!” Laney yelled to his taillights.
“Do guys think that actually works?” Bex asked, thankful for the subject change. “Like, how many girls climb into a complete stranger’s car?”
“I don’t know,” Chelsea said, squinting in the direction the car had gone. “If he was cute…”
“Chels! That guy was, like, a hundred.”
“And he doesn’t seem all that picky.” Bex pointed to where the BMW had pulled to the curb, another group of high school girls drifting toward the passenger-side door and giggling.
“I didn’t mean that guy. And besides, if those girls get in that car, they deserve whatever they get. Herpes, scabies, whatever.”
Bex looked away, briefly wondering if the women who had gotten into her father’s car deserved what they got. The thought immediately made her blood run cold. No one deserves that kind of death! she screamed in her head. But then, that horrible voice: They deserved it. You know they did. You think like he does. His blood is yours…
Bex tried to shake the voices from her head.
Chelsea touched her arm. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just spaced for a minute there.”
“Guys?” Laney had stopped in front of them, pointing at her car. It was the only one left on that side of the lot, and it was covered in paper.
“Lane! Someone left you, like, a thousand love letters!” Chelsea started toward the car, but Bex hung back, certain the pages weren’t left for Laney.