Dinner was grilled brussels sprouts and chicken piccata. Libby made an effort to eat most of the little charred cabbages with the hope that her mother wouldn’t say anything about the capers she strategically scattered to make it appear as though there were less on her plate than when it had been set in front of her. It’s the texture, mostly. Soft and fleshy; biting into them feels like eyeballs exploding between her teeth. The salty aftertaste doesn’t help.
She did the dishes while her parents made espresso like they do every night. They drank it out of ceramic Wonderland-sized cups. Her dad looked especially ridiculous sipping from his, Libby thought, like he was playing tea party with a child.
She never played tea party—not even when she was small. Rather, she was always outside catching bugs to study them, observing how they moved and whether or not they made a noise when she plucked their legs off.
They never did. At least, she never heard anything. It begs the old adage: if there’s a scream and no one hears it … did it even happen?
Madison Caldwell screamed the other night, but it seems Libby was the only person in the world who heard it. Perhaps everyone in the neighborhood assumed the noise was a rabbit being preyed on by an owl.
Upstairs in her room, now, she watches Reeves Singh in his backyard. He’s hardly more than a silhouette, backlit by the fluorescent light shining from the porch. A sound like a firecracker exploding makes her snap to attention as he skips forward and launches a soccer ball into a net.
There are nine more balls all lined up like a firing squad. With expert footwork, he goes down the line and kicks one after another.
Crack! Whoosh!
Crack! Whoosh!
The net makes a sibilant sound, a surreptitious hush demanding she remain a silent observer. Libby can do that—creep on the neighbor boy who may or may not have killed the girl next door.
The court of public opinion has already convicted him. The allegations are everywhere. You can’t turn on your phone or the TV without being hit with a denunciatory headline.
Killing for Sport: High School Soccer Star Slays Girlfriend
Murder at Monroe Academy: One Student Dead, One Suspect, One Missing
Lovers’ Quarrel Turned Deadly? Inside the Murder of Madison Caldwell
He will never unbury himself from this. Even if he is proven innocent, these accusations will follow him like a shadow quenching his golden light. And while she feels bad for Reeves—really, she does—she cannot help the swift, infinitesimal smirk that twists her mouth. It’s so slight it would be imperceptible to anyone not watching her closely, studying the way her features morph in sync with the thoughts zipping back and forth behind her eyes. Thoughts in the vein of: Oh, how the mighty have fallen …
It isn’t fair for her to think like that, though, she realizes as suddenly, something like nostalgia hits her, and she remembers when they used to walk to school together now and again, not saying much or anything at all. Libby blames herself for that. The first time their paths had converged—her freshman year—Reeves had smiled and said, “So, come here often?”
The joke tickled her just right, not to mention it was so unexpected that Libby laughed, spewing a mess of half-chewed apple. Mortified, she quickened her pace and sped ahead, and never spoke to him again. Which was just as well, because then Madison Caldwell started walking with him and if Libby ever saw that their paths were about to converge, she would stop and tie her shoe so they could walk ahead of her. She didn’t need her day starting off with letting her classmates count her back rolls.
Crack! Whoosh!
The final ball careens into the goal. Just as it does, Reeves looks up toward her window. She ducks as though he’s just aimed an air rifle at her, and falls off her bench seat. Her body crashing to the floor causes a thunder her parents would have to be deaf not to hear.
On cue, her mother calls: “Libby! Everything okay?”
Crawling on hands and knees, Libby makes her way to her bedroom door and cracks it open to shout down the stairwell. “I’m fine! Just … lost my footing when changing into my pajamas!”
“Okay, dear! Love you!”
“Love you, too!”
Her mom is kind of an I-love-you whore. She says it all the time—unsolicited, unexpected, and unconditionally—as long as Libby acts accordingly and goes off to college to become a doctor or a rocket scientist like a proper young lady.
No more taxidermy.
Right …
It seems a year has passed since she was pulled out of Mr. Deschane’s class to talk to Axel and Investigator Riley. But it was only a few hours ago. Her stomach drops when she thinks of what she told them.
No one likes Madison Caldwell. It’s true. But should she have played it safer than that? Or perhaps she should have told them more.
We have reason to believe that the same person who killed Madison Caldwell also took Chloe.
In the end, she gave them nothing. She sat there mute until Axel suggested she return to class and maybe they could pick this back up later, if anything came to mind.
A little fire burns inside her now, tempting her to go next door and tell him how wrong he is.
No one took Chloe.
Chloe left all on her own.
Libby knows this with as much certainty as we know an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.
While no one saw it with their own eyes, there is enough evidence to basically cement the theory as fact.
For Libby, all the proof she needs is the text Chloe sent her after the musical. It was late; Libby was riding home with her parents, sitting in the bucket seat when her phone screen illuminated.
Dead People: 9,997 Chloe: 0
I’m sorry, Libby texted back, remembering the forlorn look on Chloe’s face while she’d been posing for pictures after the play. She recalls having noticed Axel and Rowan sneak out during intermission. They sat at the end of a row, Rowan holding a bouquet of black roses. Should I come over?
Chloe never responded to Libby’s text, though, and less than an hour later, they heard Rowan tearing her voice to shreds as she cried out into the dark.
Crack! Whoosh!
Libby makes her way back to her window, and resting her forearms on the bench seat, slowly pulls herself up to peer out. Reeves’s lineup is reassembled. He kicks the next ball into the goal.
She imagines him sitting in a spartan interrogation room this morning, detectives drilling him with questions as aggressively as he is now drilling those soccer balls. He didn’t show up at school today, and yet, he can’t have given himself away, she reasons. He’s here, not in jail.
Unless they put a bracelet on him. Would they do that? She squints but can’t see for sure.
Chloe wanted Madison dead. That was no secret. At least it wasn’t between them. Libby knows everything about Chloe—her hopes, her dreams, her fears—and vice versa. That’s how you secure a friendship: by telling each other things you’d never want anyone else to know. Because when the wrong people know your secrets, they become weapons of mass destruction. It’s because of the secrets they shared that Libby also knows Chloe is connected to Madison’s murder.
Could Reeves be the boy who had stolen her clandestine friend’s heart? There was someone. Chloe had told her once, when they lay in her bed staring up at the little twirling ghost that she felt, strangely, like she might be a little bit in love.
If Libby didn’t know better, she might think she was jealous of this nameless person who seemed capable of distracting Chloe even when he was nowhere near. It was all Chloe had wanted to talk about in her final days, between bouts of complaining about Madison and Sari.
Reeves makes sense.
Him killing Madison makes sense.
Perhaps Madison had gotten in the way of him and Chloe being together. It also explains why she would have slut-shamed Chloe with those drawings and that awful prank. Jealousy over Chloe getting the part of Lydia in the play was a cover-up for the real reason she turned on her former best friend.
Libby sighs. It always boils down to a boy.
Chloe is small. Although Madison was thin, she was a good head taller. Chloe wouldn’t have been strong enough to take down a girl her size. She would have had help.
Libby’s gaze drifts back to Reeves. She studies him, her focus following the muscles that strain beneath his tight long-sleeve T-shirt. Envisioning his arms stretched out, hands closing around Madison Caldwell’s throat, there’s one more thing she knows about Chloe.
She didn’t act alone.