We were like fire, the four of us. Catching each other’s sparks until the flames grew, spread, raged beyond our control.
They told us this would happen. They said it like a warning rather than a promise.
But we promised. We promised each other.
We made the flame and gave it life. Stoked it. Let it breathe until it became a thing outside ourselves.
And now we watch as the wind lifts it higher, stretching the fire’s orange tongues toward the gray-black sky. The flames destroy everything they touch, snaps and groans piercing the night air, as the walls of the home below grow black and blistered.
The wind shifts and heat caresses my face, tears prickling in my eyes, and the muted wail of sirens grows sharper.
Margot squeezes my hand, and on my other side, Ori shudders.
Nomi is still, quiet. Her hand links to Ori’s, but it may as well be mine.
We’re all waiting for her, to tell us when she’s seen enough. We’ll stay all night, perched on the overlook that frames her former stepfather’s house below. Mosquitos swarming our ankles and creatures rustling in the trees at our backs.
We’ll stay until Nomi’s ready to go. That’s the deal. The promise. The vow we made that night, deep in the woods where crickets chirped and wolves howled.
“Cass.” It’s the first word anyone’s spoken in fifteen minutes, but none of us are surprised to hear Nomi’s voice. “I’m ready.”
Our hands unchain, separate now but no less connected, and the flash of lights paints our faces in blues and reds as we fall back from the fire we made.
Tonight is for Nomi. But there are more nights to come.
They warned us bad things would happen.
They didn’t know we were just getting started.
There was a time I didn’t live by the countdown of days. When each month was just another marker of time—not a terrifying reminder of the night that changed everything.
But this is my “new normal,” according to my therapist.
There’s nothing normal about the pink envelope that’ll be waiting for me later today. Envelopes don’t appear in any of the self-help books I’ve been given to read, the online support chats I’ve searched through, or all the methods I’ve been given to cope.
That doesn’t make the letters any less real. I won’t be imagining it when one appears later. Maybe in my car, my locker, my bedroom.
Of course, my therapist doesn’t know about the envelopes.
No one does.
No one but me, and the man who sends them.
“Adams!”
Coach Pheran screams my name as the volleyball I’m supposed to be spiking sails over my head.
There was a time when I’d have slammed that ball so hard the poor girl on the other side of the net would be afraid to block.
That was before the sound of a ball hitting parquet flooring started to sound like a trunk slamming shut above my prone body.
That means Coach Pheran is just Ms. Pheran to me now—from school-related volleyball and rec-league coach to plain old gym teacher—but some part of me can’t make the transition.
“Cass!” Coach yells again, because I still haven’t responded to the last time. “Do you need to sit out?”
“Yes.” It’s the truth, but she’s not happy to hear it.
She hasn’t been happy with me at all since I quit the team last year, right before the junior national championship game.
Our team was already registered, the entry fee paid after a full year of fundraising. All our travel booked and airfare purchased.
Everyone but me got on the plane.
We lost.
Coach sighs. She’s almost given up on me. “Take five.”
I’m out the door before she changes her mind, breathing in the scent of Pine-Sol that clings to the quiet hallway.
I shudder, because as much as I crave the stillness surrounding me, I need the security of people more. Not people themselves—witnesses. Today is one month since the last envelope. And he’s never late.
Lockers swirl by as I rush toward the exit, the harshness of my breathing the only disruption to the steady hum of the school’s furnace and low murmurs of teachers that drift from half-open doorways.
Cold shocks my lungs and sunlight rails against my eyes the moment I shove through the exit, goose bumps jumping from my skin.
The boys have gym outside today even though it’s October in Michigan. It’s too cold, but none of them seem to notice, probably because they’re all covered in sweat, their footsteps forming a chaotic rhythm as they follow the curve of the track.
I let them pass before I enter the field—I may want witnesses, but I do not want conversation.
The frigid cold of the bleachers soaks into me the second I sit, and I press my elbows into my knees, let my vision go blurry until the boys are a muddled watercolor in motion.
“Care for—”
I scream and jump from the bleacher, except I’m too close to the edge and my back foot hits air instead of metal.
My body tenses for impact, but warm hands wrap around my arms, dragging me back to standing with a surprising amount of strength.
“I’m so sorry,” Tyler says for the third time. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Tyler Thorne belongs on a California coast somewhere instead of this Midwest tundra. He’s all blond hair, blue eyes, tan skin, lean build that belongs in a wet suit and carrying a surfboard.
He seems as out of place as I feel, and there’s something in the way he looks at me that says he knows it too.
He peels his fingers from my arms but hovers inches from my skin, like he’s afraid I might fall again.
I mean, he’s not wrong.
“It’s okay,” I lie. I rub my arms to cover how badly I’m shaking. “Just a little jumpy today.”
“Sorry. I thought—”
“Shouldn’t you be running?”
He breaks into a crooked smile and shoves his swoopy dirty-blond hair from his forehead. “Doctor’s note. On account of my asthma.”
“Do you even have asthma?”
“I did when I was seven.”
The boys run past us, and Noah Rhoades slows his pace to stare at me—and Tyler. I don’t know which of us he’s glaring at, but honestly it could be either.
Tyler is a bit of a social outcast—the leader of his misfit group of friends but an enemy to the socially acceptable contingent of the school. And I’d bet a lot of someone else’s money he was vaping beneath the bleachers a minute ago.
According to rumor, Tyler’s family has plenty of money, but there’s absolutely nothing about him that shows it, which should be a point in his favor.
And me, well, I’m the girl who kissed Noah Rhoades in the school hallway one early evening, promised to call that night, and four hours later retreated from everything.
No one wants to be the guy whose kiss turned a normal girl into a hermit.
Of course, my hermit-dom has nothing to do with Noah, but it’s not like I’ve ever told him the truth.
I’m supposed to be working on that. The hermit-dom. My therapist tells me very logical things like “you can’t go to college if you’re too afraid to go anywhere besides home and school.”
Of course, she doesn’t know that it’s not fear that’s the problem. Not really. I don’t think everyone around me is a threat or that some different stranger might toss me in their trunk.
The problem is this: I don’t like to go anywhere, because I know I’m never alone.
Noah stutters to a stop, standing his ground even as classmates bump into his shoulders. I doubt any of them could knock him over even if they tried.
He’s very … sturdy. I remember that, from the way he held me upright while I tried to melt my entire person into him.
The wind tousles his dark hair, and he opens his mouth in this way that tells me my name is perched there.
There’s a part of me that wants to hear him say it, exactly the way he did the last time we spoke, when he stood only inches away, the height and breadth of him blocking out every part of the world that wasn’t the warm brown of his eyes, the feel of his hand dwarfing mine. But then Coach Bulger yells at him to get his ass moving and he jogs off. But not before shooting one last glare over his shoulder.
“What’s his problem?” The sun catches Tyler’s eyes, and they shade an inhuman sort of blue, the kind that reminds me of glaciers and the sky at the height of afternoon.
“We used to be friends.” My fingers are numb, my body shaking with the cold that’s buried into my bones, but I’m not going back to gym, where everyone’s waiting with their worried glances and the questions I haven’t given them the chance to ask.
Much safer to stay out here. “Safe” being a relative term.
I’m not sure anyone has ever described Tyler as a safe option.
Except me.
Tyler may be the kind of guy my dad’s warned me about since I was eight, but he’s also the guy that sat at my lunch table—opposite sides and a few spaces down—when I quit the team and stopped returning everyone’s calls last year.
He cut off whatever excuse I was about to give and said, “I won’t talk, but you looked like maybe you needed to not be alone.”
Now we do this. Partake in short conversations whenever our paths cross, which seems to be at increasing frequency.
“Not that it’s any of my business, but it seems to me a real friend would’ve maybe said hello. Or waved.”
“Used to be friends. My fault we’re not anymore. I stopped talking to him.”
He leans back, arms spread wide over the bleachers as the boys stampede by again. “Sounds like he deserved it then.”
Except he didn’t. Neither did Margot. None of them did.
I stare into the sun until my eyes burn from the light instead of tears. “Not really.”
“Okay.” He pauses, like he’s weighing his words. Like he knows this is more than I’ve told anyone else. “Then it seems to me that a real friend would’ve tried to find out what happened.”
My voice snaps through the air, even though I know he’s trying to help.
I’m just so tired of lying, to everyone. I’m tired of being afraid. “What happened is none of their business. And none of yours either.”
I jump from the bleachers, my body hot and my breaths uneven, and I ignore every one of the apologies that tumble over my back.
Apologies. Like I didn’t just exhibit an extreme overreaction and attack him, completely unprovoked.
“Adams!” It’s not Tyler’s voice calling me, not Noah’s either. Those I could ignore.
I stop and turn slowly, in time to see Coach Bulger lope into view.
His breaths form tiny clouds that match the sprinkle of gray in his dark hair. “Hey, Cass.”
“Hey, Coach.”
He’s not technically my coach. He’s the school’s conditioning guru though, and Coach Pheran used to use him to kick all our asses in preseason prep.
His favorite saying is that he’ll never push anyone harder than he pushes himself, which is a bullshit form of comfort because he’s in better shape than nearly every student here.
He crosses his arms over the whistle that dangles at his chest. “Coach Pheran know you’re out here?”
“Yes.”
He stares and I stare back and we both know I’m lying.
I wait for him to send me to the office, or give me detention, or worse—send me back to Coach Pheran—but instead he says, “We missed you this summer.”
I blink, too fast, trying to hold back the tears.
This was all much easier over the summer, when I could avoid everything and everyone. School started a month ago and I’m already cracking, already saying things I shouldn’t.
I should’ve known better. I should’ve learned by now that conversations only lead to places I’d rather not visit.
Places I can’t visit, not when the countdown in my head has reached zero.
I don’t look at him when I say, “Yeah, I missed everyone too.”
“Not too late to come back. I’d even throw in a few extra conditioning days for you.”
Despite myself, I laugh. The first day Bulger trained with us, I was so desperate to make a good impression and secure my spot on the team, I sought him out after to tell him I loved it. Then I puked all over my shoes. He’s never let me forget it.
I hug myself tight and mumble, “It’s too late for me,” because that’s exactly how it feels—like everything has passed me by.
The bell rings, saving me, and I barely say goodbye as I rush past him, the trill of his whistle screaming to round up all the boys as I reach the doors.
I storm through the halls, not even feeling my legs, and head straight into the locker room.
I’m still cursing Noah, Tyler, Coach Bulger, and mostly myself when I fling open my locker.
That’s where I find the pink envelope, waiting for me.
I lock myself in a bathroom stall, forehead pressed to cool metal, and let the nausea pass through me.
I run multiplication tables in my head, starting off easy when I’m too panicked to handle more than four times four and nine times nine.
Then it’s thirty-six times thirty-six, sixty-three times sixty-three. Seventy-four times twenty-eight and anything else that makes me focus. Makes my brain concentrate on something that’s not him.
The envelope is like acid in my hands, but I can’t let go. And I tell myself I won’t look—like I promise every time. But I always do.
It’s the not knowing that always undoes me. The wondering if it’s more this time. More threatening. More terrifying. More personal.
I know one thing though, even without opening it, without looking at the front.
I know it’ll be addressed to “The One That Got Away.”
That’s me. Literally. The girl who got away from him. From his trunk and his blindfold and the duct tape around my wrists.
I got away but that doesn’t matter, because he knows who I am. And every month he sends me these notes to remind me.
Sometimes, he sends my own possessions with them.
The bathroom door bangs open, ushering in choked sobs, then the clap of heels on tile floor.
I should probably care more about my fellow student-kind and ask if she’s okay, but really I just want her to leave so I can read my stalker letter in peace.
She growls, “That motherfucker!” and kicks the door open. I’m assuming—but it certainly sounds like a kick, and the metal walls around me shudder.
Her door shuts, the lock slides into place, and then there’s a thud followed by a slow slide as Margot Pennington slips to the floor.
We sit in silence—well, she sits, I stand—until she says, her voice stuffy, “I can see your feet, Cass.”
“Congratulations.”
Margot and I used to be friends too. Then I quit the volleyball team and she moved into my spot.
She sniffles. “Why are you standing in the bathroom?”
“Why are you sitting on the floor of the bathroom? That’s really gross.”
“Cass.” She says my name the way she used to, on a sigh that could be amused or exasperated, her head tilted, her dark artfully messy bun lilting to the side.
If I close my eyes, I can picture it.
Her voice whispers through the quiet. “Are you ever going to tell me?”
I’m out of my stall and nearly past hers when she says, “Cass, wait.”
I pause, even though I should just keep going, right out the door, farther away from Margot’s life.
I press my palm to the door of her stall, as close to reaching out as I’ll allow myself. “What happened?”
“Jared.” She does not say his name the way she used to. “We broke up.”
“I know.” I may not leave the house much, but social media still exists.
“Yeah, well, he’s being an asshole about it. And, like, threatening me, I guess?”
My skin goes hot, my thoughts melted into a mass of white-hot fury. Jared always was an asshole. “Margot, open the door.”
She slides the lock free, and when the door swings open, her eyes are red and puffy, her face splotchy.
Margot is never splotchy or puffy. She’s vintage outfits and effortless style. Pale white skin and bloodred lips. But underneath the aloof art-student facade, she’s a huge marshmallow. I know, because when I started school here last year—recruited even though we didn’t call it that—Margot was the first girl on the team to say hi. The first to sit by me at lunch. The first to ask me to hang out.
My breaths come too quick, because it’s impossible to ignore that I miss her.
And Jared did this to her.
My voice comes out thick. “Threatened you how?”
She looks to the ceiling and blinks once, twice, then gives up and lets the tears fall. “It’s my fault.”
I slide to the floor across from her, even though I’ll have to burn these jeans later and the toilet paper dispenser is wedged against my temple. “I doubt that.”
“There are these pictures. Of me. Picture pictures. And he said he’d post them if we didn’t get back together.”
I will kill him.
That’s what plays in my head. A continuous loop of all the methods by which I could maim or otherwise injure Jared Bedford.
Pictures. He has to know what that would do to Margot.
She’s gorgeous, with pinup model curves. But I don’t know how many times I had to coax her from the locker room because she hated how small the shorts in our uniform were.
I amend my head loop to the methods by which I could maim or otherwise injure Jared Bedford in a way that would lead to a horrible, painful death.
“Margot.” Forty-eight times forty-eight is two thousand three hundred four. “He’s blackmailing you into dating him again?”
“Well, he didn’t exactly say it like that.”
“Who cares how he said it! You—”
“This was a mistake.” She jumps from the floor and I follow, holding my hand over the lock.
“You should report him.” I regret it the second I say it, and Margot sighs like she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
Sometimes reporting things makes it all worse.
Margot would have to admit she took the pictures. The entire school would see them. Those photos would follow her forever—definitely long enough to be seen by college application committees. Her parents would find out. Her mom would lock her in her room and not let her out—except for games, of course.
I let my hand fall. “Okay, don’t report him. But … you can’t get back together with someone who’d do that to you.”
“Yeah. You’re so right. Maybe I’ll, like, stop talking to him, and then everyone else, and pretend my friends don’t exist anymore.”
Her words slam into me, stealing the things I want to say.
Her gaze locks on the envelope clutched in my hand. “What’s in the pretty pink package, Cass?”
I can’t look at her. Can’t do anything but fist the envelope tighter, let its sharp edges bite into my skin.
“That’s what I thought.”
Her heel strikes echo through the room again, fading too fast, and I let myself slip back to the floor.
Knees bent, I drop my head to my arms, and for the first time today, the five-month anniversary of my kidnapping, I let myself cry.
“Hey.”
I jump at the sound of the voice, ramming my head against the toilet paper dispenser. “Umm, hey.”
Nomi Tanaka stands in my open stall doorway, thick black eyeliner smudged around her eyes, combat boots below fishnet tights and a ripped and wrinkled black dress. “I can’t believe you’re sitting on the bathroom floor. That’s fucking disgusting.”
My laugh tumbles out of me without warning, followed by a fresh wave of tears. “I’m not even going to argue.”
She nods, the sharp angles of her glossy black hair shifting. I don’t know where she came from or how much she heard. Or whether we can trust her with it.
Nomi and I aren’t strangers. Once, we were friends. We were both seven, but she was a good person then, and people don’t change. She even tried to keep in touch with me after I moved, as only second graders can. But then I moved again, and again after that—and so did she, and now we’re both here, our lives intersected.
If she tells anyone what she heard, it’ll ruin Margot.
I clear my throat to buy time to figure out how to phrase this. “Listen, I don’t know what you—”
She cuts me off with a quick raise of her hand. “If you need help fucking up Jared Bedford, you let me know.”
She turns and leaves, not waiting for a response, and when I’m finally alone again, fucking up Jared Bedford sounds like the only way I’d like to spend the remainder of my day.
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