Survive the Night by Riley Sager
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie huffs out a breath, blinks her eyes, checks herself in the side mirror, and sees that everything’s in color, because of course it would be. It’s the real world. But for the briefest of moments, Charlie wasn’t living in it. She was somewhere else.
“What just happened there?” Josh says. “You started to answer my question then just stopped.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. You completely zoned out.”
“Sorry,” Charlie says. “I do that sometimes.”
Too embarrassed to face Josh, she looks straight ahead. While she was zoned out, to use his phrase, it started snowing. Big, fat flurries that look fake as they drift to the ground. She thinks of soap flakes on sound stages and It’s a Wonderful Life. Even though the snow isn’t covering the road, enough of it clings to the windshield for Josh to hit the wipers, which yawn to life and flick it away.
“Does it happen a lot?” Josh says.
“Every so often.” Charlie pauses an awkward beat. “Sometimes I, um, see things.”
Josh takes his eyes off the road to give her a look that’s more curious than weirded out. “What kind of things?”
“Movies.” Another pause. “In my mind.”
Charlie doesn’t know why she admits this. If she had to guess, she’d chalk it up to the temporary intimacy of their situation. They’re two people thrown together in a darkened car, barely making eye contact, ready to spend the next six hours in a shared space and then never see each other again. It makes people talk. It makes them reveal things they might not tell their closest friends. Charlie knows such a thing can happen. She’s seen it in the movies.
Maddy was the first person Charlie had told about the movies in her mind. She came clean the third week of their freshman year, when Maddy caught her drifting away for four minutes and twenty-six seconds. She’d timed it. After Charlie told her, Maddy nodded and said, “That’s weird. Not gonna lie. Lucky for you, I’m a fan of weird things.”
“Movies that you’ve seen before?” Josh says now.
“New ones. That only I can see.”
“Like a daydream?”
“Not quite,” Charlie says, knowing that in daydreams the world goes hazy at the edges. This is the opposite. Everything is sharper. Like a movie projected onto the backs of her eyelids. “It’s not The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
“I’m guessing that’s a movie.”
“Starring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, and Boris Karloff,” Charlie says, rattling off the names the same way baseball fans recite player stats. “Loosely based on the short story by James Thurber. It’s about this guy named Walter who has this elaborate fantasy life. What happens to me is . . . different.”
“Different how?” Josh says.
“Instead of what’s really happening, I see a heightened version of the scene. Like my brain is playing tricks on me. I hear conversations that aren’t happening and see things that aren’t really there. It feels like life—”
“Only better?”
Charlie shakes her head. “More manageable.”
She had always thought of it as seeing things in wide-screen. Not everything. Just certain moments. Difficult ones. A Steadicam operator gliding through the rough patches of her life. It wasn’t until she was forced to see the psychiatrist who prescribed the little orange pills that Charlie realized what the movies in her mind really were.
Hallucinations.
That was what the psychiatrist called them.
She said it was like having a mental circuit breaker, triggered when Charlie’s emotions threaten to overwhelm her. In times of grief or stress or fear, a switch flips in Charlie’s brain, replacing reality with something more cinematic and easier to handle.
Charlie knows the one she just experienced was caused by a mix of guilt, sadness, and missing Maddy. One of those emotions would have been enough to handle on her own. She might have even been able to deal with a combination of two of them. But put all three together and—click!—the switch in her brain was flipped and the movie in her mind began.
“You said you hear and see things that might not be there,” Josh says. “Are we talking people?”
“Yes,” Charlie says. “Sometimes people.”
“So you could see something—or someone—that doesn’t really exist?” Josh says, fascinated. “Or have an entire conversation that’s not real?”
“I could. Someone talks to me, I talk to them, and no one else can hear it because it’s all in my head.”
“And this just happens without warning?”
“Yep.”
“You can’t control it?”
“Not really.”
“Doesn’t that worry you a little bit?”
“It worries me a lot,” Charlie says, not daring to say anything more.
The movies in her mind never used to worry her. If anything, she was thankful for them. They made things easier. A balm that soothed the sting of prickly emotions. Besides, they never lasted very long, and they certainly never hurt anyone.
Until one of them did.
Now she’ll never forgive herself.
Now she just wants them to go away.
“What kind of movies are we talking about?” Josh says.
“Anything, really. I’ve seen musicals and dramas and scary movies.”
“And what about a minute ago? What kind of movie was going through your head then?”
Charlie rewinds her mind to that image of her in the side mirror. Wearing Maddy’s red coat and matching lipstick that’s definitely not there in real life, Charlie looked dramatic. But she was no femme fatale. That was always Maddy’s role.
And Josh was the handsome but wary man behind the wheel, possibly with a past. The two of them could have been anyone. Lovers on the lam. Siblings only recently reunited. Strangers in the dark who, for reasons unknown even to them, had set out across the country without a plan.
Which, in a way, is the truth.
“Film noir,” Charlie says. “Not a classic, though. Something the studios churned out on a weekly basis. A solid B movie.”
“That,” Josh says, “is oddly specific.”
Charlie responds with an embarrassed shrug. “I can’t help it. It’s how I’m wired.”
“What if this, right here and right now, were a movie?” Josh says. “Who would play me?”
“You mean, what actor?”
“Yeah.”
“Living or dead?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Charlie leans back and raises her hands, fingers straight and thumbs extended, like a director framing a shot. She takes a moment to study Josh. Not just his face, which is undeniably handsome, but also his physical features. He’s formidable. A heavy, slightly hulking presence that, combined with his good looks, brings to mind only one person.
“Marlon Brando,” she says.
Josh cringes. “Ouch.”
“Young Marlon Brando,” Charlie’s quick to add. “Streetcar Brando. You know, back when he was hot.”
“Oh, so you think I’m hot?” Josh says, puffing out his chest a little bit, pleased.
Charlie blushes. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Too late,” Josh says. “Now that you’ve said it, you can’t take it back. I like being that Brando. He’s kind of fat and crazy now, though, right?”
“Something for you to look forward to.”
“Very funny,” Josh says. “And here I was about to be nice and say who I think should play you in this imaginary movie of yours.”
“Who?”
“Audrey Hepburn.”
Charlie continues to blush. She’s heard this before, but it was from Maddy, who once told her, “You could look like Audrey, if you wanted to. You’ve got that wide-eyed, fragile, deer-tiptoeing-into-a-meadow thing going on that guys love.”
“Deer don’t tiptoe” is what she told Maddy then. What she tells Josh now is, “I’m surprised you know who that is.”
“Give me some credit,” he says. “I’m not a total lunkhead. Oh, and the proper response would have been to thank me.”
“Thank you,” Charlie says, feeling another wave of heat on her cheeks.
“I’m about to ask you a personal question,” Josh warns.
“More personal than me admitting I see movies in my mind?”
“Not that personal,” Josh says. “I’m just curious if you have a boyfriend.”
Charlie goes still, unsure how to react. Josh is clearly flirting with her, probably because he thinks she was flirting with him, even though it wasn’t intentional. She isn’t flirtatious, despite being taught by the best. Marilyn Monroe. Lana Turner. Lauren Bacall. She knows that to whistle, you just put your lips together and blow. What eludes her is why anyone would want to try.
Her problem, according to Maddy, was that she spent too much time obsessing over men in the movies to know how to act around them in the real world. Charlie knows there’s some truth there. She had no problem getting weak in the knees at the sight of a young Paul Newman but froze when meeting someone a fraction that handsome in real life.
Despite the undeniable chemistry they shared upon meeting, her official first date with Robbie was awkward at best. Charlie felt so much pressure to be anything but her weird, usual self because she thought that was what Robbie wanted. So she tried to compliment him—“I, um, like the pattern of that shirt,” she said of the simple, striped oxford he had been wearing—and attempted small talk. She gave up after fifteen minutes. “I think I’m going to go?” she said, phrasing it like a question, seeking his permission to put them both out of their misery.
Robbie surprised her by saying, “Please stay. Listen, I’m bad at this, too.”
In that moment, Charlie realized, despite his good looks, Robbie was just as awkward as she was. He rambled on about equations the same way Charlie did movies. He was quick to smile and even quicker to blush. And his movements were often hesitant, as if he seemed not entirely at ease in his skin. All turned out to be good attributes for a boyfriend to have. Robbie was easygoing in every way. He agreed to whatever movie she wanted to see, never pressured her for sex, and when they did start having it, he always told her it was great, even when she knew it sometimes wasn’t.
If anything bothered Charlie, it was the fact that, deep down, she knew Robbie was out of her league. Dorkiness aside, he was still a golden boy. Handsome. Athletic. Smart. His father was an engineer and his mother a doctor. Both were still alive, which was more than Charlie could say. She felt inferior in every regard. An ugly duckling who would never turn into a swan.
Her insecurity was easier to deal with when Maddy was alive. She’d always made Charlie feel, if not normal, then at least like a fellow outcast. It provided balance. Robbie’s normalcy on one side, Maddy’s Auntie Mame–like eccentricity on the other, and Charlie firmly in the middle. Without Maddy, things no longer worked. And no matter how hard Robbie tried to ease her grief, guilt, and self-hatred, Charlie knew it was only a matter of time before he’d realize she wasn’t worthy of such attention.
When she decided to leave school, Charlie told herself she would be doing Robbie a favor. Deep down, though, she knows she’s also hastening the inevitable: breaking Robbie’s heart before he gets a chance to shatter hers.
“Yes and no,” Charlie says, finally giving the vaguest of answers to Josh’s question. “I mean, yes, I do. Technically. But I also don’t know what the future holds. Or if the two of us even have a future.”
“I’ve been there myself,” Josh says.
“And you?”
“Single as can be.”
“It’s hard meeting people,” Charlie says.
“I’ve found that not to be true,” Josh says. “Meeting people is easy. Keeping them around is the hard part.”
Through the windshield, the snowfall outside looks even bigger and faster in the Grand Am’s headlights. Like stars flying by at warp speed.
“Punch it, Chewie,” Charlie says.
Josh brings the windshield wipers up another notch. “I get that reference.”
“It’s nice to know that you have, indeed, seen at least one movie.”
“I’ve seen plenty of movies.”
“Define ‘plenty.’ ”
“More than you think.” Josh straightens in the driver’s seat and pats the steering wheel. “Hit me with another quote. Bet I can name the movie it’s from.”
Charlie decides to go easy on him at first, tossing out an appropriately accented “I’ll be back.”
“Terminator,” Josh says. “And quit giving me the obvious ones. I’m not as movie illiterate as you think.”
“Fine.” She pauses, thinking. “ ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ ”
“That would be Jaws,” Josh says, adding a smug “I’ve seen that movie twice.”
“Twice?” Charlie says with mock surprise.
“And how many times have you seen it, Siskel and Ebert?”
“Twenty.”
Josh lets out a low whistle. “Why would you watch the same movie twenty times?”
“It’s a masterpiece,” Charlie says. “The real question is why wouldn’t you watch it twenty times?”
“Because life is too short.”
That had been another of Maddy’s favorite phrases, used whenever she needed to cajole Charlie into doing something she didn’t want to do. Life is too short to not go to this party, she’d say. So Charlie would go and Maddy would get lost in the crowd, and more often than not, Charlie would wind up back in their dorm room, watching movies.
“I want to give you a quote,” Josh says.
“I’ll guarantee I’ll guess it.”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” Josh clears his throat. “ ‘We all go a little mad sometimes.’ ”
The way Josh says it hits Charlie like electricity. A tiny zap at the base of her spine. She’s heard that line quoted a thousand times before, and always with too much emphasis, too much over-the-top creepiness. But Josh delivers the line exactly the way Anthony Perkins did—calm, matter-of-fact, like it’s no big deal to admit madness.
“Did I stump you?” Josh says.
“Psycho,” Charlie replies. “Alfred Hitchcock. Nineteen sixty.”
“How many times have you seen that one?”
“Too many to count.”
It had been among Charlie’s favorite Hitchcock films, watched as frequently as Rear Window and Vertigo and North by Northwest. She hasn’t seen it since Maddy’s murder, and might not do so ever again. She’s not sure she can handle the shower scene and its frenzied cuts and screeching violins, even though she knows the blood was chocolate sauce and the stabbing sounds were casaba melons and that Hitch never once showed a blade piercing flesh. None of that matters. Not when she thinks about Maddy’s fate.
“You seem to love your major,” Josh says.
“I do.”
“Then why are you dropping out of school?”
“Who says I’m dropping out?” Charlie says, irritated. At Josh for being so presumptuous. At herself for being so transparent.
“Those suitcases and box in the trunk. No one packs that much just to go home for a short visit. Especially on a Tuesday in the middle of the semester. That tells me there’s a story behind all this.”
“There is,” Charlie says, her irritation growing. “And it’s none of your business.”
“But you are dropping out, right?” Josh says. “I haven’t heard you deny it.”
Charlie slumps in her seat and looks out the window, which has fogged up thanks to the car’s heater and her incessant movie talk. She runs a finger along the glass, creating a clear streak.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “Taking a break, I guess.”
“College life too much for you?”
“No.” Charlie pauses, changes her answer. “Yes.”
Until two months ago, she had loved being at Olyphant. It wasn’t the fanciest school. Certainly not the Ivy League. And not like NYU or Bennington or any of the other places she’d once dreamed of attending. There wasn’t enough money for that, and Charlie hadn’t been a good enough student to earn a scholarship. She’d been awarded some cash, yes. But nothing close to a full ride.
She settled on Olyphant because it was one of the few schools she and Nana Norma could afford. A small liberal arts college in New Jersey. The film department decent, if not notable. She had planned on working hard, keeping her head down, graduating with a degree that would set her up nicely for grad school somewhere bigger, better, and more prestigious. She thought she’d eventually become a professor at a school similar to Olyphant, teaching film studies to the next generation of cinephiles.
What she hadn’t planned on was Madeline Forrester swanning into their dorm room that first day of college on a gust of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5. She was beautiful. That was the first thing Charlie noticed. Pale and blond and voluptuous, with a heart-shaped face that reminded her of Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. Yet she seemed slightly worn around the edges. An intriguing exhaustion. Like a hungover debutante dragging herself home the morning after a cotillion.
Framed in the doorway, teetering on three-inch heels, she surveyed their shared room and declared, “What a dump!”
Charlie got the reference—Maddy was impersonating Liz Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? impersonating Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest—and her whole body fizzed like a jostled bottle of champagne. She’d just met a kindred spirit.
“I think I adore you,” she blurted.
Maddy fanned herself. “As well you should.”
Her style was easy to adore. Maddy talked fast, using a clipped Yankee accent purposefully meant to invoke Katharine Hepburn. Rather than the clothes favored by every other girl on campus—stone-washed jeans, white Keds, GAP sweatshirts under denim jackets—she dressed like a fifties socialite. Pastel cocktail dresses. White gloves. Pillbox hats with delicate veils. She even owned a mink stole, bought secondhand at a yard sale, its fur shabby and matted in spots. At parties, she’d smoke using a cigarette holder, waving it around like Cruella de Vil. Affectations, all. Yet Maddy got away with them because she never took them seriously. There was always a twinkle in her eye that made it clear she knew how ridiculous she could be.
On the surface, they seemed like an odd pair. The glamour girl and her blandly pretty roommate giggling on their way to the dining hall. But Charlie knew they were more alike than it seemed. Maddy grew up in the Poconos, firmly lower middle class, her childhood home a beige ranch house on the outskirts of a small town.
She was extremely close to her grandmother, from whom she claimed to have inherited her wildly dramatic streak. Mee-Maw was what she called her, which Charlie always thought was weird, even though Nana Norma isn’t exactly normal. Maddy spent the first four years of her life being raised by her grandmother as her deadbeat dad roamed the northwest in an endless quest to avoid paying child support and her mother drifted in and out of various rehabs.
Even after her mom got clean, Maddy stayed close to her mee-maw, calling her every Sunday just to check in. Sometimes when she was staggeringly hungover. Other times as she got ready to go out. Charlie noticed because it always made her feel guilty that she rarely called Nana Norma just to check in. She only called when she needed something, and hearing Maddy ask her grandmother how she was doing usually caused Charlie to picture Nana Norma home alone on the couch, lit by the flicker of whatever black-and-white movie was on the TV.
Movies were another thing Maddy and Charlie had in common. They watched hundreds together, with Maddy commenting on the action the same way Nana Norma did.
“God, has there ever been a man more beautiful than Monty Clift?”
Or “I would kill for a body like Rita Hayworth’s.”
Or “Sure, Vincente Minnelli was gay, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he filmed Judy Garland.”
Like Charlie, Maddy thrived on escapism, living in a fantasy world of her making. It was up to others to decide if they wanted to join her there. Charlie went willingly.
“You can tell me what happened, if you want.” Josh gives her a sympathetic look, trying to put her at ease. “I’m not going to tell anyone. And, hell, it’s not like we’re going to be seeing each other after this. There’s no need for secrets in this car.”
Charlie’s tempted to tell him everything. The darkness, the close quarters, the warmth—all of it sustains her confessional mood. Then there’s the fact that she hasn’t really talked about it. She’s said some things, of course. To Robbie. To Nana Norma. To the psychiatrist she was forced to see. But never the whole story.
“You ever do a bad thing?” she says, easing herself into the topic, seeing if it feels right. “Something so bad you know you’ll never, ever forgive yourself?”
“Badness is in the eye of the beholder,” Josh says.
He turns away from the windshield long enough for Charlie to see the look on his face. He’s smiling again. That perfect movie-star grin. Only this time it doesn’t reach his eyes, which are devoid of any mirth. There’s nothing there but darkness.
Charlie knows it’s just a trick of the light. Or lack thereof. She assumes her eyes look equally as black and mysterious. But something about Josh’s dark eyes and bright smile rids her of the urge to confess. It no longer feels right. Not here. Not to this man she doesn’t know.
“What about you?” she says, trying to change the subject. “What’s your story?”
“What makes you think I have one?”
“You’re also leaving in the middle of the semester. Which means you’re also dropping out.”
“I’m not a student,” Josh says.
“I thought you were.”
He’d told her he was a student, hadn’t he? Or maybe she’d inferred that because of the Olyphant sweatshirt he’d been wearing when they met. The same one, Charlie reminds herself, he’s wearing right now.
Josh, apparently sensing her unease, clarifies. “I work at the university. Worked, I guess I should say. I quit today.”
Charlie continues to study him, realizing just how much older than her he really is. Ten years, at least. Maybe fifteen.
“Were you a professor or something?”
“A little less upscale,” Josh says. “I worked in the facilities department. Custodial work, mostly. Just one of those guys mopping the hallways, invisible to the rest of you. You might have seen me and not even realized it.”
Because he seems to expect it, Charlie searches her memory for sightings prior to yesterday, when they met at the ride board. She’s not surprised when she can’t summon one. In the past two months, she hasn’t ventured too far outside the dorm and dining hall.
“How long did you work there?”
“Four years.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“My dad’s not well,” Josh says. “Had a stroke a few days ago.”
“Oh,” Charlie says. “I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Shit happens.”
“He’ll be okay, though? Right?”
“I don’t know,” Josh says, his tone justifiably melancholy. “I hope so. We won’t know for a few weeks. There’s no one else to take care of him, which means it’s back to Toledo for me.”
Charlie’s whole body suddenly tenses.
“Akron,” she says. “You told me you were from Akron.”
“I did?”
“Yes. When we met at the ride board.”
Because it was a possible means of escape, she remembers everything about that moment. And she’s certain Josh specifically told her he was going to Akron. After he learned she needed to get to Youngstown.
She replays that first conversation in her head. Him sidling up beside her, checking her flyer, seeing her destination clearly typed across the page.
Could Josh have lied about where he was going? If so, why?
Charlie can only think of one reason—to get her to agree to get into a car with him.
The thought makes her nervous. Tiny drops of dread spread across her clenched shoulders. It feels like rain. The first few drops before the storm.
“Now I remember,” Josh says, shaking his head, as if he can’t believe his absentmindedness. “I see why you’re confused. I forgot that I told you I’m driving to Akron. That’s where my aunt lives. I’m picking her up and taking her with me to my dad’s place in Toledo.”
It’s a simple enough explanation. On the surface, there’s nothing sinister about it. But the dread doesn’t fully leave Charlie. A small bit remains, wedged like a blade between her ribs.
“I wasn’t trying to be misleading,” Josh says. “I swear. I’m sorry if that’s how it seems.”
He sounds sincere. He looks it, too. When the car passes under the tangerine glow of a streetlight, it illuminates his face, including his eyes. The darkness Charlie saw earlier is gone. In its place is a glint of warmth, of apology, of hurt for being so misunderstood. Seeing it makes her feel guilty for being so suspicious. His dad just had a stroke, for God’s sake, and here she is doubting him.
“It’s fine,” Charlie says. “I was being—”
She struggles for the best description. Unnecessarily worried? Downright paranoid? Both?
She knows it’s not what Josh has said or the way he’s dressed or how he put things in the trunk that’s made her so jumpy. Her nervousness lies in the fact that because something awful happened to Maddy, Charlie thinks it could also happen to her.
Yet there’s more to it than that. The bedrock truth, as Nana Norma would say. A truth that’s beneath the surface, buried deep. A foundation upon which all the lies we tell ourselves is built.
And for Charlie, the bedrock truth is that she thinks she deserves to have something awful happen to her.
But it won’t. Not here, anyway. Not now. Not in a car with someone who seems to be a decent guy and is just trying to make conversation during what would otherwise be a boring drive.
Again, Josh seems to know every single thing she’s thinking, because he says, “I get it, you know. Why you’re so nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” Charlie says.
“You are,” Josh says. “And it’s okay. Listen, I think I know who you are. I thought your name seemed familiar when we met at the ride board, but I didn’t realize why until just now.”
Charlie says nothing, hoping that will somehow make Josh stop talking, that he’ll just get the hint and drop it.
Instead, he shifts his gaze from her to the road, then back again, and says, “You’re that girl, right?”
Charlie sinks back in the passenger seat, the base of her skull against the headrest. A light pain pulses where they connect. The stirrings of a headache. Confession time is here whether she’s ready for it or not.
“I am,” she says. “I’m that girl. The one who let her roommate get murdered.”
