She wasn’t going to school. It was a command passed on through the door of her room. Lia hadn’t expected to even leave the house, and Thursday had gone on so long that the very thought of waking up and facing her classmates made her nauseous. Lia’s potential involvement in the deaths settled over the house like a fine dust all of them were desperate not to disturb, and Lia only left her room to eat when her parents threatened to take the door off of its hinges. It was bound to be worse if she went to school, and she wasn’t even sure she could. Everyone must have known she had been interrogated. Maybe Devon had told more people by now.
There were a dozen official emails, tweets, and Facebook posts, none of which Lia read. They wouldn’t say more than the gossip. Cassidy’s name hadn’t been released by the police but by the neighbors who posted it online the moment they saw the cops. Lia couldn’t deal with what they were possibly saying about her.
But it should’ve been easy to prove she wasn’t the killer. Cop shows did it all the time with phone records and subpoenas for email accounts.
After dinner, she crawled into bed with her journal and her phone—how long until they took all her things and picked through her life piece by piece? Her phone had been off since they spoke to James.
Lia powered on her phone and turned it facedown on the bed. It vibrated with notifications for a full minute.
“Okay,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Okay. Someone is killing my classmates.”
There was no denying it. As much as Abby’s death had seemed accidental and Ben’s could’ve been a one-off, it was clear all three were connected. Those messages, too, tied Lia to the murders.
“Why me?” she asked, flipping open her journal. “Why frame me?”
That was the only reason she could see for those messages. They made her seem obsessed, more than she was, and like she was forgetting major things when she denied sending them. She almost couldn’t blame Devon for being worried.
Almost.
The first page of her journal was the class roster. Lia erased the line she had drawn through Abby’s name when she figured Abby wouldn’t play.
Abby Ascher: covered up as an accident during a run by someone who knew her favorite paths to take.
Lia checked her phone. Fifty-two missed messages. She opened the only message Gem had sent.
She called, and the phone rang as she ran down the rest of the list.
Ben Barnard: attacked at his house and the hand he was tagged out with brutalized.
“Lia!” Gem’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Are you okay?”
“So I guess my name is already in everyone’s mouth?” Lia asked.
Eric Bins: totally fine and not a part of this at all.
Gem groaned. “Sort of. Mostly because everyone knew you were playing and then someone saw you. How are you?”
Gem didn’t even pretend to dance around the question of “did you do it?” They knew.
Lia leaned back against her headboard and pulled her knees up to her chest. “My mom asked me if I killed them.”
Gem hissed.
“Devon apparently has been talking to someone pretending to be me,” Lia said. “No clue what to do about that or why or who it is other than it must obviously be the killer because you don’t have two weird things happening at once.
“I was at the park where they found Cassidy.” Lia pulled her journal onto the top of her knees. “Someone chased me there, and I was on the phone with Devon. Surely that’ll be enough to prove it wasn’t me?”
Cassidy Clarke: head wound in the park while stalking Lia.
“I’m the only thing that ties the deaths together.” Lia traced a line around each name—Ascher, Barnard, Clarke. “Cassidy was my assassin.”
“Jeez,” whispered Gem. “You are the common thread.”
“So either I’m a serial killer and I forgot all about it,” Lia said while Gem hemmed and hawed over the phone, “or there is a serial killer trying to frame me.”
“Don’t they usually start with small things, though?” Gem said. “I barely have my life together. Don’t tell me someone in our class has already worked their way up to killing us and being able to frame someone.”
Lia erased the line she had drawn through Devon’s name, too. “Well, I sure as hell don’t have my life together enough to do all this.”
The game tied her to each of the dead, and something, like a word on the tip of her tongue, stuck in her mind. She stared at her journal, couldn’t think of it, and tossed the book aside.
“Get some sleep,” Gem said. “I think you’ve earned it, and maybe it will all have blown over by tomorrow.”
It did not blow over by the time Lia woke up an hour before noon. She rolled out of bed, shuffling through the house in her pajamas. Her mom was in the kitchen, and her father was at work. Her mom made her eat at the table, and Lia managed a few spoons of cereal before she remembered the blood caught in the pitted cement of the picnic table where Cassidy had died. If she stared long enough at her cereal, they looked the same. She retreated to her room for the rest of the day.
Gem texted her at lunch. The table they eat at is empty, and Peter yelled at some freshmen when they tried to sit there. Devon’s here, though, and he is out of it. I don’t think he’s heard a word anyone has said.
Lia texted Gem back.
IDK it seems more “everything sucks” than specifically I KISSED A KILLER, you know? He’s been chewing the same bite of his sandwich for like three minutes.
Gem sent her a picture: Devon at a table with Faith, Georgia, and Mateo. Devon stared off into space, a sandwich in one hand, and Mateo stole his chips. Faith struggled to cut the chicken in her homemade salad with a fork. Georgia reading instead of eating. A few seconds later, Gem called her.
“Hello?” Lia said. All she could hear was the rumble of the cafeteria.
“Hey, Devon,” Gem said. “Have you talked to Lia?”
“I heard the police talked to her yesterday,” said Faith. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know anything,” Devon said quickly. “I don’t have my phone.”
God, did he turn it over to the cops, or were his parents just worried?
“She is super obsessed with Assassins,” said Faith, and there came a sound like her teeth clinking against metal. “I knew playing that game was a bad idea.”
Devon said nothing, and Georgia snorted.
“Like not playing would’ve helped,” she said. “It’s Lia. Lia obsesses. It’s what she does. Unless they arrest her, I doubt it was her.”
Lia sighed. That was comforting at least.
“Still,” mumbled Faith. “It’s weird.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Devon said quickly. “Gem, can I talk to you?”
And Gem hung up. Lia sat on her bed, flipping through her journal and ignoring her phone until another text message came.
Gem said,
Small mercies.