Like, Follow, Kill

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

The One Night Stand – Coming in 2020

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

This book is dedicated to my editor, Charlotte Ledger, and my agent, Katie Shea Boutillier. Thank you both for believing in my stories and making me a better writer.

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except for the cubic centimeters in your skull.

George Orwell, 1984

Prologue (#u02a3787b-5bf4-5ec4-b320-25b6bc340344)

I was born with a scream inside me. Lodged between my heart and throat. Can’t swallow it; can’t choke it down. Can’t spit that motherfucker out. It’s stuck, like me … anchored to the in-between, slowly rotting in the core of me. It festers like a sore, oozing through my bloodstream, sending seeping shocks of silent fury to every nerve ending in my body.

Like an IV, it drip, drip, drips, but there’s never a release.

One of these days, I’ll open my mouth and the world will rumble from the roar.

Chapter 1 (#u02a3787b-5bf4-5ec4-b320-25b6bc340344)

My body is broken.

Arms like dying, desperate fish, they flop on the seat beside me. Hips yanked from their sockets. Red-rose gashes on my chest and neck.

A deep dark hole where my nose once was.

And my teeth … these teeth don’t belong to me. Like broken eggshells, they stab the roof of my mouth, pricking my cheek and gums.

Are they Chris’s teeth?

If so, how did Chris’s pearly white, now-broken teeth end up in my mouth? Did I kiss him?

No, not a kiss.

I can’t remember the last time I kissed him … but I can taste his blood in my mouth.

Chris with the cocoa-colored eyes and hair like silk on my skin. Chris with the lips, soft as falling feathers on a windy day …

Chris: the love of my life.

Chris: who is dead.

One minute we were laughing … or were we shouting? Discussing our plans for the day … although now I’ve forgotten what those plans were.

And the next … the next … we’re upside-down, strapped in our seats like a rollercoaster, only we can’t get off, we’re stuck, suspended in mid-air. The roof of my Buick becomes the sky. I’m mesmerized as it swirls like one of those psychedelic spinning tunnels, like they have at the county fair.

Oh, the fair. That’s where we were going, weren’t we?

Chris promised me a deep-fried Snickers bar.

And I promised him I’d stay sober.

Chris: The Love Of My Life and Chris: The Headless Man On The Seat Beside Me are one and the same.

This is my fault.

Chris is dead.

I did this.

I. Did. This.

***

I stopped answering my phone months ago, but that didn’t stop my sister from calling. Every day, at five past noon—a phantom phone call, followed by a buzzing barrage of texts.

Hannah is calling … read my phone screen.

But Hannah was always calling. And I, her less attractive, less successful, less stable sister, was always ignoring those calls.

As predicted, the texts came next:

Hannah: How are you today? Want to go out to lunch? Need me to stop by?

Translation: Are you alive? When are you going to do normal things again? Don’t tell me I need to come over there and drag you out of bed again.

Me: Busy. Can’t. No.

My sister is more than my sister. She practically raised me after the death of our mother.

I would love nothing more than to answer her calls, to have her beside me—but not this version of her. Not the sister that tiptoes around me like I’m a melting chunk of ice in the center of a deep, black sea.

I’m a sinking ship she wants to save … but she’s too afraid to come aboard. Because, deep down, she knows I’ll suck her into the murky black hole, too, just like I did with Chris.

Wiggling my jaw, I tried to ease the phantom tooth pains as I pulled myself out of my twin-sized bed. The sheets and comforter lay tangled at my feet. Angry red numbers blinked at me from the clock on my bedside table. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, the time when most normal people were working.

Everything hurt: my arms, legs, chest, and back. My teeth.

Traces of the dream still lingered and would stay there for most of the day, the way they always did.

My nightstand was covered in pill bottles. I twisted the caps off, one by one, and swiped out two pills of each. Pain pills. Anxiety meds. Leftover antibiotics. Another med to counter the side-effects of the first two. I washed them down with an ashy can of Mountain Dew. Grimaced.