Good as Dead(65)

“Are you sure you want to see this?” I asked him as the video started to play. I knew from the concave silhouette of my dad’s face under that napkin that something gruesome was coming. I had tried to bring myself to watch the video at least a dozen times since my trip to the morgue, but so far hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it.

“Are you sure you want to see it?” Logan asked me. It was already playing. Mom and Dad were driving home from somewhere, I recognized the neighborhood, they were close to home. They would be on our street in less than a minute. I thought about asking him to watch it first, or even for me, but I wanted him to be my partner, not my protector. We loved each other, we would do this together.

“Yes,” I said simply. I wanted to show him I was brave, that I could handle it. He reached for my hand and held it tight, and I knew I’d made the right choice.

“If you need to look away, just put your head right here.” He patted the smooth nook between his neck and shoulder, and I nodded. I remembered watching Halloween with my dad when I was a little girl, how I had buried my head in that exact spot during the scary parts. But Logan wasn’t my dad, and I wasn’t a little girl anymore.

“I’ll be OK,” I told him, and believed it—that’s how safe he made me feel. Our eyes were glued to the phone as the Cherokee turned onto my street. Only a matter of seconds now.

The car stopped. My head felt floaty as I held my breath. The dashcam didn’t have a mic, so there was no noise to drown out the thumping of my heart. For several seconds, we stared at the street I once called mine. It was eerily quiet, and for a hopeful second I thought nothing was going to happen, that we’d be spared.

But then there was movement. A man stepped in front of the car. I could see clear as day that it was my dad. He was wearing the shiny Adidas warm-ups we gave him for his birthday. He was rounding the front of the car to open my mom’s door. He always opened the door for her, and she always waited for him. I used to tease her about it, but she insisted she only let him do it so he could feel like her “knight in shining armor,” that he liked it. Maybe if I had teased her more insistently, she would have stopped letting him do it. But I didn’t, and now it was too late.

“Maybe you should look away,” Logan said, and I shook my head no. There was urgency in his voice, like he wanted to protect me from what was about to come. I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt tears slide down my chin and onto my chest. No point wiping them away, there were surely a lot more coming.

My dad was out of frame now. The camera was not positioned to see the side of the car, only the front, so I could only guess what he was doing—opening the door, coaxing my mom out of her seat—she was always slow to get out of the car. She had to unplug her phone, gather her purse, get her water bottle or coffee cup out of the cup holder. The seconds passed like hours. My head felt so light I thought it might fly off.

And then the waiting was over.

The first thing we saw was the image rock, like an earthquake shaking the car.

Then snow was falling as window glass rained down on the hood in an angry blizzard.

Then a car—a black SUV—sped through the left side of the frame like a silent freight train.

I heard myself gasp as a person that must have been my mom bounced off the hood and down out of sight.

Brake lights lit up as the SUV stopped.

A bright-red car door danced and spun on one edge, then skidded to the ground.

A limp body in shiny warm-ups peeled off the front of it and flopped to the pavement.

The SUV was frozen in the distance, brake lights lit, like it knew it should stay.

I stared at the back of the car that killed my dad.

Black SUVs were a staple of Southern California. There were literally thousands of them, and I couldn’t tell a Toyota from a Tesla.

But this car I knew.

Because it was exactly the same as one I had ridden in dozens of times.

“Oh my God, he has the same car as you,” I blurted, the shock of recognition prickling up my spine. I had no idea the danger this innocent admission had just put me in, how I would come to wish I had kept my mouth shut.

The brake lights went out. Sunlight illuminated the back of the SUV like a spotlight. That’s when I saw it, in that split second between the brake lights going dark and the SUV barreling away.

A bumper sticker that said DEVILS.

Except it didn’t say DEVILS. Because it was upside-down. Someone had drawn a vertical line through the upside-down V to make it look like the letter M, spelling the word SLIMED. It was so small in the frame, if it wasn’t so familiar to me, I might not have even noticed it.

But I did. And there was no denying it. That car was one of many, but that sticker was one of a kind.

And they both belonged to Logan.

He clicked off the phone. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. It was impossible that the car in the video was his. But it was more impossible that it wasn’t.

My hand holding Logan’s went limp. I wanted to cry out, but terror had a choke hold on my throat. I should have taken his advice. I should have looked away. I wished I hadn’t seen it. Because now I knew this boy who came out of nowhere to love me had worse secrets than mine.

“Well,” Logan said, “now you’ve seen it.”

I should have looked at him. I should have pretended that I didn’t recognize the car, or the sticker, or the double meaning in his words. I should have acted like I was so overwhelmed by seeing my dad get run over that I couldn’t possibly have noticed anything else.