Survive the Night by Riley Sager

INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT

Charlie hadn’t wanted to go out that night. That was her excuse for why she did what she did. Back when she had an excuse. Before she came to understand that her actions were inexcusable.

It was a Thursday night, she had an early film class the next morning, and she in no way, shape, or form wanted to head out to a bar at ten o’clock to see a second-rate Cure cover band. But Maddy insisted she go, even after Charlie had begged off several times.

“It won’t be any fun without you,” she said. “No one else but you gets how much I love them.”

“You are aware it’s not really the Cure, right?” Charlie told her. “It’s just some guys who’ve learned to play ‘Lovesong’ in their parents’ garage.”

“They’re really good. I swear. Please, Charlie, just come. Life’s too short to stay cooped up in here.”

“Fine,” Charlie said, sighing the word. “Even though I’m tired. And you know how irritable I get when I’m tired.”

Maddy playfully threw a pillow across the room at her. “You become an absolute monster.”

The band didn’t take the stage until almost eleven, coming out in Goth garb so over-the-top it bordered on the ridiculous. The front man, aiming for Robert Smith realness, had powdered his face with white pancake makeup. Charlie told Maddy it made him look like Edward Scissorhands.

“Rude,” Maddy said. “But true.”

Three songs into their set, Maddy started dancing with some wannabe Bon Jovi in torn jeans and a black T-shirt. Two songs after that, they were backed against the bar, swapping saliva. And Charlie, who was tired, hungry, and not nearly drunk enough to stay, had had enough.

“Hey, I’m leaving,” she said after tapping Maddy on the shoulder.

“What?” Maddy squeezed out from beneath the random guy kissing her and grabbed Charlie’s arm. “You can’t go!”

“I can,” Charlie said. “And I am.”

Maddy clung to her as she made her way out of the bar, pushing through a dance floor packed with frat boys in baseball caps and sorority girls in belly tees and preppies and stoners and flannel-wearing deadbeats with stringy bleached hair. Unlike Maddy, they didn’t care who was playing. They were just there to get plastered. And Charlie, well, she just wanted to curl up in bed with a movie.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Maddy said once they were outside the bar, huddled together in a back alley that stank of vomit and beer. “We were having fun.”

“You were having fun,” Charlie said. “I was just . . . there.”

Maddy reached into her handbag—a glittery rectangle of silver sequins she’d found at Goodwill—and fumbled for her cigarettes. “That’s all on you, darling.”

Charlie disagreed. By her estimation, this was the hundredth time Maddy had dragged her to a bar or a kegger or a theater department after party only to ditch her as soon as they arrived, leaving Charlie to stand around awkwardly asking her fellow introverts if they’d ever seen The Magnificent Ambersons.

“It wouldn’t be if you’d just let me stay home.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“By ignoring me?”

“By forcing you out of your comfort zone,” Maddy said, giving up the search for a smoke and stuffing the handbag under her arm. “There’s more to life than movies, Charlie. If it weren’t for me or Robbie or the other girls in the dorm, you’d never talk to anyone, like, ever.”

“That’s not true,” Charlie said, even as she began to wonder if maybe it was. She couldn’t remember the last time she exchanged more than cursory small talk with someone outside of class or the insular world of their dorm. Realizing that Maddy was right only made her more angry. “I could talk to a ton of people, if I wanted to.”

“And that’s your problem,” Maddy said. “You don’t want to. Which is why I’m always the one trying to force you into it.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be forced.”

Maddy coughed out a sarcastic laugh. “That’s pretty fucking obvious.”

“Then quit trying,” Charlie said. “Friends are supposed to support each other, not change them.”

God knew she could have tried to change Maddy. The flightiness. The drama. The clothes that were more like costumes. Things so dated and preposterous that sometimes people rolled their eyes when she entered a room. But Charlie didn’t try to change those things. Because she loved them. She loved Maddy. And sometimes—like that night—she questioned if Maddy felt the same way.

“I’m not trying to change you,” Maddy said. “I just want you to live a little.”

“And I want to go the hell home.”

Charlie tried to walk away, but Maddy latched on to her arm again, pleading. “Please don’t go. You’re right. I brought you here, then ditched you, and I’m sorry. Let’s go back inside, have a drink, and dance our asses off. I won’t leave your side. I promise. Just stay.”

Maybe Charlie would have stayed if Maddy hadn’t said what came next. She was ready to forgive and forget as she always did. But then Maddy took a deep breath and said, “You know I don’t like walking home alone.”

Charlie flinched—truly flinched—when she heard it. Because it meant Maddy still made it all about her, like she always did. This wasn’t about her enjoying Charlie’s company or having fun together. She simply wanted someone to walk her drunk ass home when the party was over. It made Charlie think that maybe Robbie was right. Maybe Maddy didn’t think of her as a friend. Maybe she was only an audience member. One of many. One who was enough of a pushover to let Maddy get away with whatever bullshit she decided to pull on any given night.

Except that night.

Charlie refused to let that happen.

“I’m walking home now,” she said. “You can join me or not.”

Maddy pretended to consider it. She took a tentative step in Charlie’s direction, a hand raised ever so slightly, as if reaching out for her. But then someone left the bar and music blasted out the open door into the alley. A rackety version of “Just Like Heaven.” Hearing it, Maddy turned her gaze to the bar, and Charlie knew she’d made her decision.

“You’re an awful friend,” she told Maddy. “I hope you know that.”

Charlie turned and marched away, not even pausing as Maddy called out, “Charlie, wait!”

“Fuck off,” Charlie said.

It ended up being the last thing she ever said to Maddy.

But that wasn’t the worst part of the night.

Far from it.

The worst came twenty steps later, when Charlie turned around, hoping to see that, despite the fight and the “Fuck off,” Maddy was right behind her, struggling to catch up. Instead, Charlie saw her still outside the bar, her cigarettes finally freed from her purse, standing with a man who’d seemingly come out of nowhere.

Charlie couldn’t see him clearly. His back was partly turned to her, and his head was lowered. The only part of his body visible to her was his left hand, which was cupped around the small flame of Maddy’s lighter. Everything else about him was shadow, from his shoes to his hat.

That hat—a basic fedora that all men used to wear until suddenly they didn’t—tipped Charlie off that something about the scene wasn’t right. It was 1991. No one wore a fedora anymore. Also, everything was too stark, too stylized. A single shaft of white light slanted between Maddy and the man in the fedora, splitting them into two distinct halves: Maddy glowing in the light, the man swathed in darkness.

It was, Charlie realized, a movie in her mind, brought about by her fight with Maddy.

Rather than watch the scene return to normal, which is what she should have done, Charlie turned around and kept walking.

She didn’t look back.

When Maddy didn’t return to the dorm that night, Charlie had assumed she’d hooked up with someone from the bar. Fake Bon Jovi, maybe. Or the guy in the fedora. If he existed at all. Charlie had her doubts.

Worry didn’t set in until noon, when Charlie returned from class to find the dorm room still untouched by Maddy’s presence. Charlie couldn’t help but think of the day her parents died. How she had remained unconcerned as time slipped by, oblivious to the fact that she had become an orphan. Refusing to let history repeat itself, Charlie spent the rest of the day going from dorm room to dorm room, asking everyone in the building if they’d seen Maddy. No one had. Charlie’s next move was to call Maddy’s mother and stepfather, asking if they’d heard from her. They hadn’t. Finally, at midnight, exactly twenty-four hours since she’d last seen her, Charlie called the police and reported Maddy missing.

She was found early the next morning.

A cyclist had discovered her on his daily ride, drawn by an unusual sparkle in the middle of a field nine miles outside of town. It was Maddy’s purse, its sequins glinting in the morning sun.

Maddy lay next to it, facedown in the dirt, dead for at least a day.

At first, everyone—the police, the town, the university—had hoped it was a normal murder, as if such a thing existed. Foul play that could easily be solved. A jealous ex-boyfriend. An obsessive classmate. Something that made sense.

But there were the multiple stab wounds to contend with. And the fact that her wrists and ankles had been bound with rope. And the missing tooth, an upper canine that dental records indicated hadn’t been missing before she disappeared.

It was the tooth that led police to conclude the worst: Maddy was another victim of a man who had struck twice before.

The Campus Killer.

Charlie grudgingly admired the authorities’ restraint in the nickname. The Silence of the Lambs had hit theaters seven months earlier, entering Buffalo Bill and Hannibal the Cannibal into the pop cultural lexicon. Instead of going for something in that same morbidly catchy vein, the police opted for simplicity.

He was a killer.

He prowled Olyphant University’s campus.

He snatched women and tied them up and yanked out a tooth after stabbing them to death. That was attention-grabbing enough for most people—and the general public didn’t even know about the missing teeth. Only the victims’ families were told that gruesome detail. Charlie had found out simply because she was the first person the police talked to after finding Maddy’s body, and they needed to know immediately if she’d been missing a tooth. The detectives begged her not to tell anyone else, and she hadn’t. Not even Robbie. She understood it was something the cops needed to keep to themselves to differentiate between a random stabbing and the work of the Campus Killer.

Charlie had learned the nickname the day she arrived at Olyphant. The Campus Killer had struck a month earlier, sending the whole university into a panicked frenzy, even though the victim was a townie and not a student. Her freshman orientation included a lesson in self-defense. Rape whistles were distributed with ID cards. On campus, girls never walked alone. They moved in packs—great, unwieldy groups of nervous giggles and shining hair.

During campus-sponsored mixers or late-night chats in the dorm lounge, the murders were talked about in hushed tones, like urban legends whispered around a campfire. Everyone knew the names of the victims. Everyone claimed to have some tangential connection. A shared class. A friend of a friend. A glimpse on the street two nights before they were killed.

Angela Dunleavy was the first, murdered four years earlier on a rainy night in March. She was a senior who worked part-time at a bar downtown. One of those places that made its waitresses wear tight T-shirts in the hope the college boys would leave bigger tips. She went missing shortly after last call and was found the next morning in a patch of woods on the edge of campus, bearing the then-novel signs of the Campus Killer’s handiwork.

Tied up.

Stabbed.

Tooth pulled.

There were no leads, no suspects. Just a horrific murder that police had stupidly assumed was a onetime thing.

Until the second victim was found a year and a half later. Taylor Morrison. The townie killed a month before Charlie’s freshman year, her body dumped on the side of a maintenance road two miles away. She worked in a bookstore two blocks from Olyphant, which was close enough to campus for her death to be lumped in with Angela Dunleavy’s.

When a year passed without another murder, people started to breathe a little easier. After two years, the rape whistles stopped but the self-defense classes remained. By the start of Charlie’s junior year, no one roamed campus in groups and the Campus Killer was barely mentioned.

Then Maddy was murdered, and the vicious cycle began anew. Only this time Charlie was part of it. A supporting player to Maddy’s morbid starring role. She talked to so many people in the days following the murder. Local detectives. State police. Even two FBI agents. A pair of women dressed nearly identically in silk blouses and black blazers, their hair pulled back in severe ponytails.

Charlie told them everything.

She and Maddy had gone to a bar to hear a cover band. No, she wasn’t yet twenty-one, an admission that caused her not a second’s hesitation. Maddy was dead. Her killer was still out there. No one gave a shit about her fake ID. Yes, she and Maddy had argued outside the bar. Yes, she had walked away even though Maddy had begged her to stay. And, yes, the last two words she uttered to her best friend were indeed “fuck off,” a realization that, when it hit, sent Charlie running to the police station bathroom to throw up in the sink.

It got worse when she returned to those tough-chick FBI agents and learned everything they knew about Maddy’s final moments.

That no one could remember seeing Maddy back in the bar after Charlie left.

That two people exiting the bar five minutes after Charlie saw Maddy leaving the alley with a man, although they didn’t know for sure because he had already rounded a corner, giving only a glimpse of white sneaker.

That based on her time of death, authorities believed the man Maddy followed out of the alley was the same person who killed her.

“I saw him,” Charlie said, stunned by the realization that what she’d seen hadn’t entirely been a movie in her mind.

The FBI agents straightened in their chairs.

“What did he look like?” one of them asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you saw him.”

“I saw someone. But it might not have been the man Maddy left with.”

One of the agents gave her a look hot enough to peel wallpaper. “You either saw someone or you didn’t.”

“I did see someone.” Charlie’s voice was weak. Her head spun. Nausea continued to churn in her stomach. “But I also didn’t.”

She had no idea if the person she saw looked anything like his real-life counterpart. The movies in her mind sometimes warped things until they were no longer recognizable. It was entirely possible that the man she’d seen was cobbled together by her imagination using pieces of a dozen different leading men. Part Mitchum, part Lancaster, part Burton.

Charlie had to spend an hour explaining the movies in her mind. How they worked. When they happened. How very often the things she saw weren’t really there, including men in dark alleys. Even after all that, the agents insisted she sit down with a sketch artist, hoping that describing what she saw would somehow jolt her into remembering what had really been there.

When that didn’t work, they tried hypnosis.

After that, too, failed, Charlie was sent to a psychiatrist.

What followed was reluctant talk about Maddy’s murder, her parents’ deaths, the movies in her mind. Then came the prescription for the little orange pills, which Charlie was told would make them go away.

The psychiatrist stressed that Maddy’s death wasn’t Charlie’s fault. That each person’s brain is different. That it works in unusual ways. It does what it does, and Charlie shouldn’t blame herself for what happened.

Charlie disagreed. She had known that night that what she saw outside the bar was a movie in her mind. She could have waited until it passed, revealing the true picture. Or she could have returned to Maddy, apologized, and demanded they walk home together.

Instead, she simply turned and walked away.

In the process, she both failed to save Maddy’s life and avoided gleaning any identifying details about the man who murdered her.

Looked at from that perspective, all of it was Charlie’s fault.

Time passed.

Days and weeks and months.

Charlie eventually cut herself off from everyone but Robbie and Nana Norma. She didn’t even have the mental strength to attend Maddy’s funeral, a fact that didn’t sit well with everyone else in the dorm, who chartered two buses to shuttle them to Middle-of-Nowhere, Pennsylvania, for the service. Right up to the moment of departure, there’d been needling and disbelief and guilt trips from the girls on her floor.

I can’t believe you’re not going.

She was your best friend.

I know it’ll be hard on you, but this will give you a chance to say goodbye. You’ll regret it if you don’t go.

Only Maddy would have understood her reasons. She knew about Charlie’s parents and the double funeral that had rewired her brain just so she’d be able to cope with it. Maddy wouldn’t have wanted her to go through that again.

So Charlie stayed behind. A decision she definitely doesn’t regret. Her preference was to remember Maddy alive and laughing and being her usual dramatic self. She wanted her memories to be of Maddy dressing like Liza in Cabaret to go to a statistics class. Or of last Halloween, when the two of them went to a costume party as the Gabor sisters and everyone assumed they were Madonna in Dick Tracy, even though both of them spoke with exaggerated Hungarian accents. Charlie certainly didn’t want to remember Maddy as some lifeless shell in a casket, her face tinted orange by too much mortician makeup.

But the bedrock truth is that not attending Maddy’s funeral was an act of cowardice on her part. Quite simply, she couldn’t face Maddy’s family and their justifiable anger. The phone call had been enough—that tear-streaked confrontation with Maddy’s mother, who had lashed out with a vengeance only a grieving woman could possess.

“You saw him. That’s what the police are saying. That you saw the man who killed my daughter but can’t remember what he looked like.”

“I can’t,” Charlie said, sobbing.

“Well, you fucking need to remember,” Maddy’s mother said. “You owe it to us. You owe it to Maddy. You left her behind, Charlie. The two of you were out together, and you left without her. You were her friend. You were supposed to be there for her. But you abandoned her with that man. Now my daughter is dead and you can’t even bring yourself to remember anything about him. What kind of friend does that? What kind of person does that? An awful one. That’s who. You’re truly awful, Charlie.”

Charlie hadn’t voiced anything in her defense. Why bother when everything Mrs. Forrester said was true? She had abandoned Maddy. First in life, when Charlie turned away from her outside the bar, and then again in death, when she couldn’t remember a single identifying feature about the man who killed her. In her mind, Maddy’s mother was right—she truly was an awful person.

So Charlie spent the day of Maddy’s funeral alone watching Disney movies, one right after the after. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. She simply sat on the dorm room floor surrounded by white plastic VHS cases.

Robbie, who did attend the funeral, told Charlie that maybe she should have gone. That it wasn’t so bad. That the casket was closed, a family friend had sung “Somewhere” from West Side Story, and that the only moment of drama happened graveside as Maddy was lowered into the ground. That’s when Maddy’s grandmother, overcome with grief, tilted her head back and screamed into the blue September sky.

“I think it would have helped you,” he said.

Charlie didn’t want or need that kind of help. Besides, she knew that, in time, she’d be okay. A heart can only grieve for so long. That was what Nana Norma told her a few months after her parents died. Charlie knew it to be true. She still missed her parents. Not a day went by when she didn’t think of them. But her grief, which at the time had felt so heavy she thought she’d be crushed by its weight, had transformed into something easier to bear. She had assumed the same would happen with Maddy.

It didn’t. The pain she felt continued to be as heart-shattering as the day she learned Maddy was dead. And she couldn’t take it anymore. Not the grief. Not the guilt. Not the squinty-eyed looks of pity cast her way during the rare occasions she went to class. Which is why she’s leaving Olyphant. Even though she knows fleeing the scene of her crime won’t make her feel any less guilty, Charlie nevertheless hopes being back home with Nana Norma, lost in a haze of old movies and chocolate chip cookies, will somehow make it easier to deal with.

“Yeah, I thought that was you,” Josh says after Charlie’s brutal assessment of herself. “I read about what happened in the paper. Do you want to, I don’t know, talk about it?”

Charlie turns toward the passenger-side window, now fogged up again. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You’re dropping out of college because of it, so, yeah, I think there is.”

Charlie sniffs. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about.”

“I’m going to anyway,” Josh says. “First, I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a horrible thing that happened. And a horrible thing you went through and are still going through. What was your friend’s name again? Tammy?”

“Maddy,” Charlie says. “Short for Madeline.”

“Right. Just like Charlie is short for Charles.”

Josh gives her a look, pleased with himself for steering them back to an earlier joke. Charlie’s stony expression doesn’t change, and Josh moves on.

“They never caught the guy who did it, right?” he says.

“No.”

Charlie shivers slightly at the acknowledgment that, thanks to her, the man who killed Maddy hasn’t been caught, may never be caught, may spend the rest of his fucking life reveling in how he’d gotten away with murder not once but three times.

That the police know of.

So far.

The idea that the Campus Killer could—and most likely will—strike again prompts another fearful shiver.

“Does it worry you that they never caught him?”

“It makes me angry,” Charlie says.

After the initial shock and grief had worn off, Charlie turned to anger pretty quickly. She spent all those sleepless nights seething over the fact that Maddy was dead and her killer wasn’t and how utterly wrong that was. Sometimes she’d spend all night pacing the room, envisioning B-movie scenarios in which she took her revenge. In these mental movies, the Campus Killer was always the dark, human-shaped blank she’d seen outside the bar, onto which she inflicted every act of violence she could think of.

Shooting. Strangling. Beheading.

One night, the movie in her mind had her stabbing the Campus Killer in the chest and plucking out his heart, which glistened on the tip of her knife, still beating. But when she looked down at the body, it wasn’t a human-shaped blank she saw. It was someone she knew all too well.

Herself.

After that one, Charlie started planning her escape.

“I think I’d be worried,” Josh says. “I mean, he’s still out there. Somewhere. He might have seen you, right? He might know who you are and try to come for you next.”

Charlie shivers again, this one more intense than the others. A shudder. One she feels all the way down to her core. Because Josh is right. The Campus Killer probably did see her. Maybe he even knows who she is. And although Charlie saw him, too, she wouldn’t know it was him even if he was sitting right next to her.

“That’s not why I’m leaving school,” she says.

“So it’s a guilty conscience, then.”

Charlie says nothing, allowing Josh to add, “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

“I don’t.”

“But you are. It’s not like it was your fault.”

“I saw him,” Charlie says. “Yet I can’t identify him. Which does make it my fault. Even if I could identify him, there’s still the fact that I abandoned Maddy. If I had stayed with her, none of this would have happened.”

“I don’t blame you for any of that. I’m not judging you. I guess you think others do—”

“I know they do,” Charlie says, thinking about that call with Maddy’s mother, how afterward she’d felt hollow. How she still feels as empty as a football, to quote Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.

“Why? Were people mean to you?”

“No.”

If anything, everyone was suffocatingly kind. All those weepy-eyed girls coming to her door with food and cards and flowers. There were invitations to trade dorm rooms, to go on group outings (“There’s safety in numbers!”), to join a prayer circle. Charlie declined them all. She didn’t want their sympathy. She didn’t deserve it.

“Then maybe you should stop beating yourself up over something you couldn’t control.”

Charlie’s heard it all before, from literally everyone except Maddy’s family. And she’s tired of it. Tired of being told what to feel, that it wasn’t her fault, that she needs to forgive herself. So tired of it all that a lump of anger explodes in her chest like a firecracker—white-hot and shimmering. Fueled by its burn, she whips away from the window and, practically snarling at Josh, yells, “And maybe you should shut the fuck up about something that has nothing to do with you!”

The outburst surprises Josh, who’s so startled he sends the car shuddering off the road for a few jarring seconds. Not surprised is Charlie, who always suspected such an explosion would arrive at some point. She just didn’t think it would be in a car with a man she doesn’t know, her voice booming through the pine-scented interior. Now that it’s happened, she’s left breathless, shaken, and completely ashamed of herself. She slumps back in her seat, suddenly exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was—”

“Holding that in for a long time.” Josh’s voice is a monotone. His expression is blank. Charlie wonders if he’s feeling hurt or angry or frightened. All are justifiable. If their roles were reversed, she’d be wondering what kind of crazy person she’d just let into her car.

“I didn’t mean—”

Josh stops her with a raised hand. “Let’s just not talk about it.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

No one says anything for the next few minutes. Plunged into silence, they both keep their eyes on the road. The snow has stopped. A sudden ceasing. Almost as if her outburst had frightened it away. Charlie knows that’s stupid to think. It was just a brief November squall, here and gone in minutes, yet she feels guilty all the same.

The car is still quiet when they pass a sign indicating that the entrance ramp to Interstate 80 is two miles ahead. Immediately after that is another sign, this one for 7-Eleven.

The last convenience store before they hit the highway.

If the two of them make it that far. After the way she’s acted, Charlie wouldn’t blame Josh for dumping her on the side of the road and speeding away. Instead, he pulls into the empty 7-Eleven lot, parks near the front door, and cuts the engine.

“I’m getting coffee,” he says. “You want some?”

Charlie notes his tone. Cordial but cool.

“Yes,” she says, speaking the same way, as if she’s talking to a professor she doesn’t like. “Please.”

“How do you take it?”

“Milk and two sugars,” Charlie says, reaching for her backpack on the floor.

“This one’s on me,” Josh says. “I’ll be right back.”

He slides out of the car and hurries into the 7-Eleven. Through the store’s giant front window, Charlie sees him nod hello to the cashier—a kid in a flannel shirt and green knit cap. Behind him, a tiny TV near the ceiling broadcasts the news. President Bush is on the screen, doing an interview with Barbara Walters, as his white-haired wife—a second Barbara—sits beside him. Josh gives the TV a passing glance before moving toward the coffee station.

Charlie knows she should go in with him. It would be the polite thing to do. A signal, however meager, that she’s an active, willing part of this journey. But she doesn’t know how to do that. There’s no cinematic frame of reference for her to follow. As far as she knows, there’s not a heralded I-let-my-best-friend-get-murdered-and-now-I-can’t-function-like-a-normal-human-being movie out there that she hasn’t seen yet.

So she remains in the car, the seat belt still strapped tight across her chest as she tries to pull herself together. She worries she’s going to spend the entirety of the trip like this—nervous and flighty, her emotions as prickly as a ball of barbed wire. It makes her question her decision to leave Olyphant. Not the why of it. She’s certain about that part. What she doubts is how she chose to leave. Maybe it would have been better to wait until Robbie could drive her and not ride with a stranger who, if she keeps this up, really might drop her off in the middle of nowhere. Maybe, despite her urgent desire to leave, she’s just not ready to make this journey without someone she knows.

Outside the car, a pay phone sits a few feet from the convenience store’s front door. Charlie starts to search her backpack for loose change, wondering if she should call Robbie and ask him to take her back to campus. She can even try to make light of the situation, using the code he gave her.

Things took a detour.

Yes, they have. In all manner of ways. Now all she wants is for Robbie to take her back to Olyphant. It’s not that far of a drive. Only thirty minutes. And when they get there, she’ll wait—simply wait—until Thanksgiving.

Then she can go home, try to put all this behind her.

Mind made up and armed with change, Charlie unfastens the seat belt, which retracts with a startling click. When she opens the passenger-side door, the car’s interior light flicks on, bathing her in a sickly yellow glow. She starts to slide out of the car but stops herself when another car pulls into the parking lot. A beige Dodge Omni packed with teenagers. Inside, music pulses, muffled by windows rattling to the beat. The car screeches to a stop two spaces away from Josh’s Grand Am, and a girl immediately pops out of the passenger side. Inside the car, someone shouts for her to grab a bag of Corn Nuts. The girl bows and says, “Yes, my darling dearest.”

She’s young—seventeen at most—but drunk. Charlie can tell by the way she shuffles to the curb on high-heeled boots, hampered further by her skintight minidress. Seeing her gives Charlie a painful twinge. Memories of Maddy, also drunk. The girl even looks a bit like her, with her blond hair and pretty face. And while her clothes aren’t remotely similar—Maddy would never have worn something so current—their attitudes seem to match. Bold and messy and loud.

Charlie supposes there’s a Maddy in every town, in every state. A whole army of brash blond girls who get drunk and do sweeping bows in parking lots and serve their best friends birthday breakfasts of champagne and cake, as Maddy used to do for Charlie each March. The thought pleases her—until she realizes there’s now a town without one.

Making it worse is the music spilling out the Omni’s still-open passenger door.

The Cure.

“Just Like Heaven.”

The same song that was thrumming inside the bar when Charlie spoke those horrible last words to Maddy.

You’re an awful friend. I hope you know that.

Followed by the final two, lobbed over her shoulder like a grenade.

Fuck off.

Charlie recoils back into the car and slams the door shut. All desire to return to Olyphant, even if just for the next ten days, is gone. If this was some kind of sign that she should continue moving forward, Charlie’s noticed it loud and clear. So loud that she covers her hands with her ears to muffle the music, removing them only after not-quite-Maddy gets back into the car with an ice-blue Slurpee, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and a bag of Corn Nuts for her friend.

Josh exits the 7-Eleven as the Omni pulls out of the parking lot. He pushes through the door balancing two jumbo coffees, one stacked atop the other. He uses his chin to steady them, his wallet a buffer between it and the plastic lid of the top cup. When he steps off the curb, the cups bobble and his wallet slides out from under his chin. It hits the asphalt with a splat.

This time, Charlie doesn’t need a cinematic example to understand she must get out of the car and help. So she does, chirping “I’ll get it” before Josh can kneel to pick up the wallet.

“Thanks,” he says. “Can you also get the door?”

“Sure.”

Charlie scoops up the wallet and stuffs it in her coat pocket before rushing back to the car and opening the driver’s-side door. Josh then hands her a coffee cup so big she has to hold it with both hands as she slides into the passenger seat. Back inside the car, both of them cradle their steaming cups. Charlie takes a few small, scalding sips to show her appreciation.

“Thank you for the coffee,” she says after another demonstrative sip.

“It was no problem.”

“And I’m sorry about earlier.”

“It’s fine,” Josh says. “We’re both dealing with shit right now. Emotions are a little raw. Everything’s cool. Ready to go?”

Charlie gives the pay phone outside the store a brief, disinterested glance and takes another sip of coffee. “Yeah. Let’s roll.”

It’s not until Josh has started the car and is backing it out of the parking spot that Charlie notices the lump in her coat pocket. Josh’s wallet, all but forgotten. She holds it up and says, “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Just set it on the dashboard for now.”

Charlie does, the wallet sliding a few inches as Josh turns the Grand Am onto the main road. It slides again a few seconds later when they veer to the right, hitting the entrance ramp to the interstate. It keeps on sliding as Josh shifts into second gear—a sudden jolt of speed. The wallet drops off the dashboard and into Charlie’s lap, flapping open like bat wings taking flight.

The first thing she sees are credit cards tucked into individual slats that obscure everything but the tops of Visa and American Express logos. On the other side of the wallet, snug behind a plastic sleeve, is Josh’s driver’s license.

His license photo is enviably good, the shitty DMV camera somehow managing to highlight his best assets. The jawline. The smile. The great hair. The picture on Charlie’s license makes her look like a stoned zombie—a secondary reason she chose not to get it renewed.

Charlie’s about to close the wallet when she notices something strange.

Josh’s driver’s license is issued by the state of Pennsylvania. Not Ohio, which would make sense, considering that’s where he’s from. Even more logical would be a New Jersey license, seeing how Josh told her he’s worked at Olyphant for the past four years.

But Pennsylvania? That just seems wrong. Even if he lived there before moving to Ohio with his father, it would have expired like her own.

Charlie’s gaze darts to the date when the license was issued.

May 1991.

As current as you can get.

Then she sees the name printed at the bottom of the license and all the air leaves her lungs.

It says Jake.

Not Josh or Joshua or any other variation of the name.

Jake Collins.

Charlie snaps the wallet shut and tosses it back on the dashboard. A sinking feeling overwhelms her, as if the car is coming apart and at any second her heels will start scraping asphalt. Her gaze flicks to the road ahead, just in case such a scenario is actually happening and she needs to know what to expect. Ahead of them is a dark ribbon of highway stretching toward the horizon.

They’ve reached Interstate 80.

The road that will take them out of New Jersey, all the way across Pennsylvania, and into Ohio.

And Charlie has no idea who the man driving her there really is.