As Dead As It Gets

“Let him go!” she said.

“I’m trying!” I said. “I can’t!”

Jared was grunting, digging his fingers into my arm, cutting out half-moons of skin with his nails.

“Then let go of the guardrail,” Lydia said, her voice vibrating through my body. “Alexis, I won’t let you fall.”

I looked at Jared, and at the vertical drop below him.

“What are you going to do?” Jared asked, shaking with effort. “Drop me? You think you can live with that? There are search parties down there, Alexis—and they can all see us.…You can’t even look in a mirror without bursting into tears—you think you can live with being a killer?”

“I guess…” I swallowed hard. My jaw was chattering uncontrollably. “I guess I’m going to have to learn to.”

And then, with nothing but a ghost to hold me, I let go of the guardrail and began to pry Jared’s hand off my arm.

Jared’s eyes flashed with a sudden shock of fear and accusation as he realized what I was doing. “No! You can’t do this! I don’t want to be alone!”

But I managed to get my thumb under his thumb, and then it was like his hand just peeled off of my arm.

He slipped and seemed to stretch out over the space so that he was lying on his back, staring up into the sky…just like Laina.

And down, down, down he went.

AT 7:06 A.M. ON MARCH 3, I pushed my ex-boyfriend off a 103-foot cliff. He landed on the rocks below, dead on impact. Jared was right. There were search parties down in the canyon, and the people in the search parties could see the whole thing—my parents included. My name is Alexis Warren. I’m sixteen years old. And I’m a murderer.

I FELT LIKE I WAS EXISTING OUTSIDE OF MY BODY.

At the same time, there were plenty of reminders that I was in the real world: the cuffs on my wrists and ankles. The hard, slightly warped plastic of the chair beneath me. The edge of the table pressing a line in my stomach as I leaned forward, resting my head on my outstretched arms.

My parents were out there somewhere. I’d only gotten to see them for a minute, and all I could focus on was their glazed eyes. They looked at me differently—now that I was a cold-blooded killer. Everyone did. I felt the gazes of the police officers like indelible ink on my skin. I heard their shocked silence like a buzzing in my ears.

Kasey was safe. Carter and Megan were in custody. They were going to be questioned for helping me get away from Harmony Valley.

And Jared was dead.

But that was all I knew.

I hadn’t seen Lydia since I fell backward onto the rock, hitting the back of my head on the guardrail and not realizing until I dragged myself down to the parking lot that I was bleeding all over myself.

I was waiting for my lawyer. I wasn’t supposed to say anything to anyone without my lawyer. But what could I say?

Finally, the door opened.

Agent Hasan came in. I started to stand, but she held out a hand. “Don’t get up.”

As if I’d been doing it out of courtesy and not the desire to run away.

She sat down across from me, arms folded on the table. For a long time, we looked at each other.

“You killed Jared Elkins?” she asked.

“They told me not to talk without my lawyer,” I said.

“Alexis, you killed Jared Elkins,” she said. “He was unarmed. There were two dozen eyewitnesses. So look me in the eye and tell me two things: did you have to kill him?”

“Yes.” I met her gaze. It was an admission, but what was I going to do, deny what I’d done? Jared was dead. His cold, lifeless body was laid out on a table somewhere. At that moment, his dad was probably being driven to the morgue to identify him. If I thought about it for too long, something inside of me started to feel like a tightrope walker without a net. But I had done it.

And I’d do it again if I had to.

She made a mark on one of her papers. “Second question: can you assure me that it’s over?”

“So, you believe me?” I said. “That I wasn’t behind any of it?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s over.”

She looked down at the table. “For the record, I believe you. And for what it’s worth, putting you into Harmony Valley may have been…avoidable.”

I rolled my eyes. “Apology accepted.”

Agent Hasan stared at me for a long time. “You know there’s zero evidence tying Jared to those girls’ deaths.”

“I know,” I said. “And I’ll bet there’s a lot that ties me, right?”

She shifted in her seat. Then she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, which made her shoulders shrug up near her ears. She gave me a long look. “Yeah. There’s a lot.”

“It was self-defense. I have to find a way to make people believe me.”

“You’re not going to find a way, Alexis. You’re the one with probable cause. He’s literally an altar boy with a spotless record. So unless you can come up with a good reason for being at the scene of Ashleen’s and Elliot’s deaths—”

“I can see ghosts in photographs,” I said.

The room was silent. Agent Hasan’s expression betrayed more interest than she would have wanted it to. “Really.”

“You couldn’t find this ghost because it wasn’t a ghost,” I said. “It was a poltergeist. I knew how to find it, so I tried to save Ashleen and Elliot. And Jared could have made it stop, but he was never going to. The thing about a poltergeist—”

But she cut me off by holding up her hand. “Keep your secrets, Alexis. That’s extraneous information at this point.”

Of course. Because as long as there were no mice left in the pantry, she didn’t care why they’d been there in the first place.

It wasn’t like I could tell all that to a lawyer anyway.

“Purely out of curiosity,” she said, looking almost amused, “why are you telling me all of this now, and not a week ago?”

Our eyes met. “I don’t have anything to lose.”

She shrugged, like that was as good a reason as any. “I’ve helped you a lot over the years, Alexis.”

“Not because you wanted to.” My voice was robotic.

I couldn’t help but speak the absolute truth. And why not? What could she do to me? “Because it was your job to cover things up. To take care of them.”

She sat back, adjusting herself in the chair as if my statement had been a jacket that didn’t fit her right.

“What would you have done to me if you’d known?” I asked. “A week ago?”

“What would I have done?” Now she leaned forward so our faces were only a foot apart. “Probably the same thing I’m going to do now.”

I held my breath.

“Offer you a job,” she said.

I was so surprised that I actually laughed, though it came out sounding like someone had punched an unsuspecting cow. “Yeah, well…I’m about to go on trial for murder, so…”

“Now, come on. You know that I can take care of little problems like that.”

Yeah, I knew it.

And she really meant it. She was willing to help me. “But…why?” I asked.

She shrugged, looking a little helpless. “You’re smart. You’re dedicated. You’re relatively fearless. And God knows you’re lucky as hell. So you might actually be useful.”

I sat up. “Useful?”

“Useful. Meaning of use. An extra pair of hands…and eyes.”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re saying no, and I know you mean it,” she said. “But do me a favor before you completely write me off: go back to school.”

I stared up at her.

“Yeah, I said no third chances, but why not. Just make a deal with me. I’ll get this charge lifted. I’ll get everything explained away. I’ll get a gun planted on the scene and Jared’s fingerprints all over it. You’ll be cleared for self-defense.”

It certainly sounded too good to be true. “And what’s my part of the deal?”

“Go back to your life. Try to be normal, now that everyone you know has seen you kill another human being.”