A relentless beam of sunlight slices across my shoddy old Ikea dresser. I grab my phone from the kitchen-chair-functioning-as-a-nightstand beside my bed and squint at the display. Eight in the morning. My chest thumps as if I just had the worst nightmare of my entire life. Then I remember everything.
“Mom!” I yell as I run out of my bedroom. “Are you awake? Are you okay?”
“Just got up.” She’s in velour yoga pants and a white tank top, waiting for her coffee to brew at the kitchen counter. “Not okay.”
“Any calls or texts?” I ask.
“None. You?”
“None.” We stand there in weighted silence for a few beats until I finally muster up the courage to suggest the inevitable. “Should we turn on the news?”
We flip through all the local channels. Everything is politics, sports, crime of the non-arson variety, and weather, weather, weather. It’s gonna be unseasonably hot and sunny all week. Awesome! So great to know that Luke and I would have had sterling conditions for our spring break staycation.
This is all his fault. If he had never cheated on me then I would have never in a million years suggested that Mom and I go on a crime spree. Even if the whole Richard thing had still happened, even if Mom said she wanted to go on a revenge rampage, I would have been the levelheaded voice of reason. I would have comforted her in all the standard, healthy, non-illegal ways: binge-eating ice cream and watching the Monica Lewinsky documentary and workshopping a Facebook message to send Richard’s wife — you know, one that expertly toes the line between “scorned mistress” and “concerned ally to all women.”
Bzzz.
I almost kick the couch in front of me in response to the sudden vibration in my sweatpants pocket. Speak of the devil asshole. Luke’s calling me.
“Who is it?” Mom asks. Bzzz. She’s standing next to me. For some reason sitting down while we channel-surfed for evidence of our impending demise didn’t feel like an option. “Tell me it’s not —”
“It’s just Luke.” I hit Ignore. He calls back immediately. I hit Ignore again. He calls back immediately again. “He won’t stop!”
“Just let it ring!” She grabs it from me with her free hand. “He’s obviously gonna know you’re ignoring him if it keeps ringing only one time.” Bzzz. Bzzz. She looks down at the screen. “Now he’s texting you.”
“Give it to me!” All I can think about is her pulling up my text history with Luke and seeing the suicidal GPS tag I sent him last night. I snag my phone from her hand before she even has a chance to half-swipe. “Thank you.”
LUKE: I didn’t tell campus security it was you
LUKE: we’re even, ok?
LUKE: I just want to talk about everything
“Uh.” His change of tone since yesterday has completely tripped up the wires in my brain. “His car.”
“Lord. I almost forgot about that. Does he think it was us?”
I give the messages a second read.
Yup. He’s definitely trying to trick me into admitting guilt. What a conniving asshole. I run through possible responses in my head — torn between Go to hell and Eat shit — but my train of thought is interrupted when Mom lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
I peel my eyes off my phone and see her frantically turn the volume up on the TV while a drone camera hovers over what’s left of Richard’s house. There are rows and rows of blackened wooden beams where the roof used to be. The master bedroom is a pile of ashes and soot. Every bone in the top half of the house is exposed and charred. Which happens to be exactly how all of my bones feel right now, too.
Things are slightly less apocalyptic-looking on the bottom half. The front door seems weirdly unaffected. I wonder what the other side of it looks like.
“… the flames broke out overnight at 33 Marble Lane in Short Hills — a home that just went on the market yesterday,” the anchor proclaims in a straightforward tone that totally undermines our panic. This is just another day for her. I’m so jealous I could die. “We’re told the owner is out of town and the home has been vacant for some time, which makes this case all the more perplexing for investigators.” More shots of the house cross the screen. “The damage, as you can see, is significant.” Now she’s doing that reporter-y thing where she emphasizes every other word like a calm yet constipated slam poet. “But it could have been much worse… if it weren’t for a fast-acting neighbor in the right place at the wrong time.”
They cut to a close-up interview with a tired-looking blond woman in a purple Reebok hoodie with a pair of chunky headphones around her neck, and — oh, fuck. It’s the bitch we almost mauled at the crosswalk.
“Oh, fuck,” says Mom. “It’s the bitch we almost mauled at the crosswalk. Remember —”
“I REMEMBER!”
“I’m a total night owl,” Joggy McBitch tells the camera. Her voice sounds more evening gown than athleisure wear — rich, untouchable, self-assured — very Hillary Clinton. As if we didn’t have reason enough to resent her already. “So I’m always going for jogs around the neighborhood at odd hours.” The camera pans across Richard’s idyllic street. “I must have passed that house six, seven times last night before I saw the fire. There was certainly someone there when it started. I saw a strange car in the driveway and the garage door was wide open.” Her annoying voice starts to quiver. “You know, you just can’t imagine something like this would happen in your own neighborhood. Until it does.”
And now the camera is on the reporter. She’s standing in front of the wreckage in a taupe power suit. Speaking of Hillary.
“The witness says the mysterious car was no longer parked in the driveway when she caught sight of the flames.” She cocks her head slightly as the camera angle shifts. “The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office has confirmed that the origin of the fire does appear to be suspicious. Investigators are on the scene in search of clues. The question they are desperate to answer” — she raises an eyebrow and looks straight ahead — “is who did that car belong to?”
Mom clicks the TV off and drops the remote. Her entire body follows as she collapses into a ball on the floor. My knees are also threatening to buckle. I grip the arm of the couch to catch my balance. My mind races back through each step we took last night — desperately recalculating every conclusion I’ve drawn thus far with the new knowledge that the jogger wasn’t just a jogger but a witness. Does she remember when we almost hit her at the crosswalk? Did she see our faces? Does she remember what kind of car we were in? The color? She didn’t say anything about the make or model when she talked about it in her interview.
But even if she does remember. Everyone has a Nissan Altima. Right? Surely she didn’t take down our license plate. Why would she do that? She didn’t know about the fire until after we were long gone. But what if she has a freakishly photographic memory? What if she stopped to take a selfie at some point during her run and inadvertently captured the plate number in the background?
“We need to go to the police,” Mom wails from the floor. “It’s only a matter of time before they put it all together.”
“Go to the police now that we’ve fled the scene and it’s on the news?” I shoot back. “They’ll never believe it was an accident.”
“I wanted to go to them yesterday!”
“If we tell the cops, we’re officially turning ourselves in as criminals.” I grab Mom’s lifeless hand and pull her back up to a standing position. “And then Richard becomes the victim. Fuck that! He’s not a victim. He has the money to buy a new house! Fuck him.”
Mom shoves a tuft of hair out of her face. It’s holding up pretty well considering the night we just had.
“Then we need to go somewhere,” she says. “That jogger saw our faces. We can’t be in Jersey right now. This apartment is a ticking bomb.”
“It sounds like they don’t have any leads yet,” I say. “Hold on.”
I pull out my phone and head to Twitter to scan all the news accounts. Surely Joggy McBitch talked to more than one reporter. Maybe there’s an interview where she says, “I have no idea what kind of car it was or who might have been driving it. Now that I think about it, the whole car thing was probably just a coincidence. I’m sure it was just an electrical problem or something.” Followed by the anchor saying, “The investigators seem to agree with her” — cue dramatic head tilt and constipated-reporter-voice — “they’ve decided to drop the case entirely.”
I type Short Hills fire into the search bar and the first thing that comes up is a picture of the house from when it was actively burning overnight, unruly flames sprouting from the top of it like giant, glowing fall leaves. It has nineteen — wait, it just went up to twenty — retweets.
“Oh, no,” I say. “Look at thi —”
I’m interrupted by a vigorous knock on our front door.
Our rusty silver chain lock jangles with each bang. Suddenly my throat feels like one of those burnt wooden beams where Richard’s roof used to be.
“Shit!” I whisper-scream. “Do you think it’s a cop?”
“Don’t say anything.” Mom wipes a tear from her eye and pulls herself up from the floor. “It was all me. You got that?”
The irony is that I’m sure this was all me. It was the GPS blunder. I know it. I can feel it. Luke’s whole “I’m over it” text was just a mind-fuck to keep me off guard. He saw the news or the tweet or an article and thought to himself, “33 Marble Lane? JOEY TEXTED THAT EXACT LOCATION TO MY PHONE YESTERDAY,” and immediately called the Essex County Prosecutor’s office. He probably cackled as he hung up the phone and pictured me getting arrested. And then he went back to blowing Joshua.
Bang. The knocking continues. Bang. Bang. Jangle.
“Do you understand?” Mom’s hand trembles as she places it on my arm and looks up at me with her hopeless, defeated eyes. “You didn’t do anything.”
She’s clearly ready to go to jail for me — like, for real. This realization creates a freezing lump in my throat. She’s being irrational, just like she was when she wanted to turn herself in last night, but I don’t have any more time to talk sense into her. She’s already making her way toward the door.
“Neither of us did anything wrong,” is the only thing I can manage to whimper in response.
Bang. Bang. Jangle.
Mom looks back at me and mouths I love you before tiptoeing up to look through the peephole. I stay put — basically my only option, given that my limbs are currently stuck in place.
The banging stops.
Total silence.
And then a voice calls out from the other side of the door.
“Gianna? Joseph? Open up!”