Bex’s caseworker in Raleigh had told her that she would love Kill Devil Hills, despite the evil-sounding name. She had gushed about it being a tiny beach town where just about everything, including the high school, was on the beach.
But Kill Devil Hills High wasn’t anywhere near the beach.
The student lot wasn’t full of convertibles, the girls weren’t wearing bikini tops, and no one ran through the halls tossing footballs or beach balls or smelling like suntan lotion and sea air. It was just a regular high school.
Bex held her books tightly against her chest and surreptitiously tried to glance down at the school map. After two wrong turns and a near spin through the boys’ bathroom, she pushed open the first door she saw, praying that she was at least in the vicinity of her homeroom.
Every head snapped to look at her when she stepped through the door, and every muscle in her body tightened. She was ready to run until the door slapped shut behind her.
“Bex Andrews?”
Bex blinked, scanning the room. The kids didn’t look mean or menacing—just curious—and for that, Bex was relieved…almost.
“Bex Andrews?”
There were two empty seats in the front row, bookended on either side by girls with glossy ponytails and Kill Devil Hills High School cheerleading uniforms who had immediately lost interest in Bex and started checking their phones.
“Ms. Andrews? Are you Bex Andrews?”
The voice calling her name finally penetrated and Bex spun, her heart thumping against her chest. “Yes. Bex. Me.”
The man at the front of the room smiled warmly and spread his arms. “I’m your homeroom teacher, Mr. Rhodes. You can call me Mr. Rhodes.” He laughed at his own dumb joke. “Welcome to Kill Devil Hills High. Class, say hello.”
Bex stood, hoping the standard-issue school linoleum would open up and swallow her whole while the class muttered a sad hello. Some students still looked at her, but the majority had moved on to other things. She smiled thinly. “Hey.”
Mr. Rhodes, who was short and possibly nine months pregnant, given the strain of his shirt against his belly, rolled his eyes toward the students. “Don’t mind them. Now, Bex, you can take one of the empty seats.”
One of the cheerleaders glanced up from her phone. “That one,” she said, pointing. “This one is Darla’s. She’s just out sick today.”
Bex nodded and wondered if anyone would notice her dragging the empty desk to the back of the classroom or out into the hall, anywhere but smack in the front of the class.
“Actually, Bex, before you sit, why don’t you tell us something about yourself.” Mr. Rhodes smiled as if he hadn’t just asked Bex to splay her soul open to a group of bored teenagers.
“Um,” she said, feeling her skin burn from her calves to the top of her head. “There really isn’t much to tell.”
Except that my dad is a serial killer.
On the run.
He doesn’t know where I am. He doesn’t know that I’m Bex Andrews now because he hasn’t contacted me in ten years.
“I guess I’m just pretty regular.”
“Where did you transfer from?”
Bex didn’t want to announce that she had been homeschooled since the third grade when kids started coughing things like “socio” or “psycho killer” into their hands whenever she passed. She didn’t want this new class to know that she had never been invited to a birthday party. No one wanted to have anything to do with the serial killer’s kid.
“I went to school in Raleigh, North Carolina,” Bex said, her voice sounding weird and tinny in her own ears.
“And you came here why?” Mr. Rhodes coached her.
Bex’s throat was dry but she tried to swallow anyway, coughing into her hand. “My dad got a new job,” she lied.
“And he is…”
Bex wanted to run. Her entire body thrummed with the overwhelming desire to dart for the door and through the hall, out of the school and out of North Carolina. Where she would go, where she would end up, she had no idea. All she knew was that she didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be Bex Andrews, the foster kid. She didn’t want to be anyone.
“He’s a college professor.”
She slid into her chair and busied herself, pretending to look in her backpack before Mr. Rhodes could continue the trial.
Bex made it through the entire homeroom period staring straight ahead. Every once in a while she could see a flicker out of the corner of her eye as the two cheerleaders gestured to each other around her, but she didn’t dare look. Even if they didn’t know anything about her, she was still the new kid—and if movies and television had taught her anything, it was that cheerleaders were to be avoided at all costs.
So when the homeroom bell rang and the two girls cornered Bex, she knew that her fate was sealed. Images of being shoved into lockers and covered in pig’s blood at prom swam in her head as one of the girls tightened her already-perfect ponytail and the other studied her.
“I’m Laney,” the dark-haired one said. “And this is Chelsea.”
Chelsea, with a sun-gold ponytail and blue eyes that took up half her face, nodded.
Bex said a low hello to each of them while her stomach quivered. She waited for claws or teeth or a biting remark about her hair or her clothes.
“Do you know where you’re going next? It’s easy to get lost around here,” Chelsea said, her ponytail bobbing. “KDH is a pretty big school. Was your old school very big?”
“‘Big’ isn’t really the right word for it,” Bex said, hiking her backpack over one shoulder. “And I have—uh—ethics with Mrs. Chadwick next.”
“Oh, she’s great. Basically you just sit and she reads the paper and asks stuff about what it’s in it. It’s a pretty cool class until she makes you do that stupid newspaper log. Ugh.”
Chelsea rolled her eyes. “That was torture. I had black fingers for weeks.”
Bex’s eyebrows rose. “Black fingers?”
Laney nodded. “Yeah, you have to follow something that has been in the headlines for a month and cut out all the articles and write a bunch of crap about them.”
“But she makes you use real newspapers. The paper kind.” Chelsea looked absolutely mortified. “Chadwick’s weirdly old-fashioned and slightly decrepit.”
“Come on,” Laney said. “I’m going in that direction. I can walk you over there.”
Laney and Bex chatted the whole way, and by the time they entered the junior hall, Bex was breathing normally—laughing even.
“Okay, you’re right there,” Laney said, pointing to a door over Bex’s shoulder. “I’m down there. Find me later. We’ll have lunch.”
Bex pressed open the classroom door without any of the trepidation she’d had before. There were only a few kids already in class, and the teacher—a youngish-looking woman with her dark hair clipped back in a low ponytail—was chatting with a kid in the front row. He was hinged forward, his shaggy, black hair dragging across his eyes as he shook his head against everything she said.
“No, no, no. It’s art.”
Mrs. Chadwick—possibly fifty years old and nowhere near Chelsea’s description of “decrepit”—shook her head but was smiling. “It’s illegal.”
“Oh, jeez, this again? You’d think the guy would give it a rest already.”
Bex spun, stunned, and found herself nearly nose to nose with the kind of guy who showed up in all those California high-school-on-the-beach movies. He had wide, brown eyes and brownish-blond hair that looked like it had been colored by the sun. When he smiled, the entire room brightened and Bex felt her temperature rise at least ten degrees. She was sure she was blushing; probably so much that her eyeballs were red. She took a fumbling step back. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. You must be new, or I must really have been sleeping through this class. I’m Trevor.”
“I’m new.” Another ten degrees. “Not new. I mean, I’m new here but my name is Bex.” She paused and bit her lower lip. “That was really smooth, wasn’t it?”
“Nah, you did great. The name question is a hard one for a lot of people.” He gestured toward two empty desks. “Here.”
“Thanks.” Bex sat next to Trevor, her eyes going over his head to where the student and the teacher were still engaged in heated debate. She jutted her chin in the student’s direction. “So what’s that all about?”
Trevor glanced, then shook his head with a low groan. “That’s Zach. He thinks he’s some big feature filmmaker because he’s the camera guy for the school news channel. He’s really just a huge pain in the ass. Argues about everything.” Trevor held up his hands. “Wait, sorry. Not argue, debate. He likes to debate everything. Probably hoping for an all-out brawl so he can whip out his GoPro and win a Pulitzer or something.”
“That’s journalism.”
“What?”
Bex’s eyes were still on Zach, watching the passionate way he argued, his body poised as though he would hop over the desk to prove his point. “The Pulitzer is for journalism. Not filmmaking. Does he do this all the time?”
Trevor leaned back and kicked his legs forward, resting his feet on the desk in front of him.
“Yeah,” he said with a yawn. “Better get comfortable.”
When the bell finally rang and ethics was over, Zach followed Bex out of the class. She could feel his eyes on the back of her head, studying her, boring into her. She swallowed, wondering if he could read her mind and why, whenever she considered the idea of mind reading, she went directly to her most horrid memory—that night on the driveway when she learned what her father had done.
Zach followed her all the way to her locker.
Bex paused, turning. “Is there something I can help you with?” she asked. She was surprised at the composure in her voice since every inch of her body seemed to be quaking, ready to crumble, certain that Zach was going to pinpoint who she was and then turn around and tell the entire school, heck, the entire town—even Denise and Michael—that her bloodline included a man who the newspapers called “one of the most heinous and depraved serial killers ever.”
Zach blinked at her. “I don’t know. Do you know the combination to my locker?”
Bex stepped back. “What?”
“My locker.” He brushed a hand past her shoulder. “It’s right here.”
“Oh,” Bex said, her mouth suddenly dry. She forced out a small laugh while her bones turned to hot jelly. “I’m sorry. I thought that—”
Zach pulled open his locker, shoved in a book, then turned to her. “You thought that I was the geeky comic relief? The big nerd who falls for the cool girl?”
“Cool girl? What are you talking about?”
He reached into his locker and pulled out a small, fancy camera and held it up to his face. A red light flicked on. “Okay, new girl. Tell the world about yourself. What’s your greatest dream, your deepest, darkest secret?”
Bex’s eyes went wide. “What? What are you—”
“Everyone’s going to find out sooner or later, Beth.”
Beth?