These Deadly Games(88)
His eyebrows shot up, and he whipped out his phone.
“I don’t get it,” I went on. “How could you plan all this so perfectly, and forget to take down her Facebook profile?”
“If you think this has gone perfectly, you’re the one out of your mind,” he muttered without looking at me, focused on his phone, gritting his teeth. I reached into my front pocket and gripped the knife’s hilt.
I could stab him right now.
But if he was keeping Caelyn somewhere else, I needed him to tell me where.
Plus, I still wasn’t sure I could plunge a knife into another person, no matter how evil they were. Thinking of feeling the blade meet resistance—skin, then muscle, then bone—made bile leap into my throat.
“I don’t see it,” he snarled.
“It’s a private profile. My mom’s still Facebook friends with her.” I snickered. “Foiled by social media, huh? You always did say it ruined everything. Guess you were right.”
His face went all stony, and after a few moments, he kicked the couch. “Dammit!”
I scrambled back toward the door. How the hell had I fallen for this maniac? I’d trusted him. I’d reassured him about getting suspended as he ate that first brownie, acting all vul nerable. I’d told him Zoey had cheated when I hadn’t even told the others—my real friends. I’d let him hold me as I fell asleep—
“Oh.” The realization hit me like a bucket of ice. “The hot chocolate.” The stuff he’d brought over in a thermos. That’s why I’d felt so parched, why my eyelids had felt like lead weights. He’d drugged me. That way, I couldn’t stay up to investigate or strategize. Whenever he’d placed my phone on its charger while I slept, he must’ve also dumped his own hot chocolate back in the thermos.
He tossed his phone next to his laptop. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’re going to want a play-by-play, now, aren’t you?”
I started at his blasé tone. “No. I can guess at enough. I just want to know where Caelyn is.”
He roughly wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, exasperated. “You think I’m going to let you have a happy reunion that easily? You killed my brother.”
I grimaced. “No, it was an accident. A freak accident.” That’s what the police had determined. They’d swept the storage locker for fingerprints, but the only recent ones were Brady’s. Nobody had stuffed him into that locker. At the time, I thought they’d at least trace Zoey’s flashlight back to her—Sanchez found it at the bottom of the locker, switched on, batteries drained—but they didn’t. Zoey had been wearing gloves when she passed out the flashlights. The police assumed it was the Nelsons’, that Brady found it in the locker.
What had driven Brady into the Nelsons’ backyard remained a mystery to everyone but us. At first, we were sure at least one person in the entire neighborhood must’ve spotted us playing in their backyard so late at night or had security cameras pointed at their backyard. We kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But it never did. Until now.
“It wasn’t, though. I saw you,” said Dylan. Andrew. Whoever he was.
My stomach sank. “What?”
“I saw you all outside, in Zoey’s backyard, after midnight. I know you went out to play hide-and-seek.”
“Manhunt,” I automatically corrected.
“Whatever,” he spat. “And I know it was your idea. Brady told me what happened, you know, when he came back for a few minutes. That you convinced everyone to play a game, but none of you wanted him on your team. And then later, as I was drifting off, I heard something outside … It was you all, huddled in the backyard. I opened my window to listen. Zoey tried talking you out of it. Brady complained how cold it was. But you pushed everyone to play your stupid game.”
Shards of ice stabbed my heart. That’s why he’d chosen me to play these deadly games.
Andrew shook his head. “I watched you all split up to find your hiding places. But when it was his turn, you couldn’t find him, could you? And you just gave up on him. You’d always made him feel like a wad of gum stuck on your shoe, like you had no choice but to drag him along. You didn’t give a shit about him.”
I flinched. I’d always tried to include Brady, even though he didn’t fit in. I’d genuinely liked him. But maybe I hadn’t defended him enough when Randall teased him, when Zoey rejected him, when Matty laughed at him, when Akira swatted him away from her LEGO bricks. Maybe that was my fault. Should I blame my eleven-year-old self for that? How far should you go to force a friendship?
“We thought he went home,” I said. “He said he wanted to keep us out looking all night, so we thought he was trying to trick us. How were we supposed to know?”
“You could have checked! You could have asked an adult to help find him.”
“It was one in the morning!”
“Yeah, it was, and it was freezing! And you left him out there all alone to die. And then you lied about it.” I cringed, swallowing hard. He was right about that. “You know, that’s what really got me. None of you broke. Even after it was clear he was missing, none of you panicked. You were so convincing, I almost believed you. I started to doubt myself. I figured, you know what? Brady never would’ve snuck out like that; he was scared of the dark. I figured I’d been dreaming or something. I thought, if you really had all been out there, surely you would’ve said something once the search started. But then after … after…” He recoiled, and I knew we were both picturing Brady, dead. “I knew what I saw. I saw you all out there with my own eyes. How could you lie like that? How?” He screamed the last word, making me jump.