Chasing Shadows

Part Two ~ Chapter One

            I stood there with my mouth wide open. I stumbled for a moment, taken aback that he would dare accuse me of being a liar.

“For crying out loud Matt, can’t you see that Mr. Grey’s just trying to pull us apart? He wants to turn us all against each other until every last secret is out. We all have secrets, Matt. That doesn’t mean we’re bad people.”

            Matt sat down and put his head in his hands. I gingerly put down the note next to him and sat down beside him.

            “I think the biggest thing right now is figuring out why the hell Mr. Grey isn’t dead.”

            “Isn’t that the question of the week,” Matt muttered, not looking at me. I could not believe he actually thought I could be the traitor.

            “You can’t possibly think it’s me, Matt. Not after everything we’ve been through.”

            “I don’t know anything anymore,” he confessed. “I just don’t know.”

            “Fuck,” I swore, getting up to pace the wooden floors. Back and forth, back and forth, but no answers. “This is just perfect, isn’t it? First day back and we’ve already got another mystery that will go unsolved. I have a giant list, you know?” My laugh sounded delirious. “What exactly was Kathryn doing here? Huh? Why did she need to protect us from a man that should be put in jail? Then it was how the hell could we have watched Mr. Grey fall to his death only to see him alive days later? That question really keeps me up at night, you know. But now I have to ask myself who around us is a traitor?”

            “Ames-”

            “You guys are all that I have. This friendship, no matter how twisted it is, it’s the only thing keeping me sane at this moment. And for some reason, I had been starting to get this hope that everything would be alright. We’ve been through so much, yet hope was starting to fill me. Fucking hope, just what I need, right? To bring me up only to tear me right back down again.”

            “Who do you think it is?”

            “What?” Matt’s question threw me off guard.

            “The liar among us.” He watched me intensely. “If it’s not you, then who… is… it?”

            “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I’m not one to immediately turn on my friends at the drop of a hat.”

“Just tell me who you’re thinking.”

 “If I had to guess…” I hesitated.  “Kyle. He’s too smart for his own good, and knowledge without goodness is the most dangerous of them all.”

            “Kyle has goodness.” Matt’s short and blunt sentences were starting to scare me.

            “But do we really know that? Do we even know what state Kyle comes from? How much do we really know about him except that he’s conveniently been there to help us escape death multiple times?”

            “See now you’re skeptical,” Matt shrugged. “Barely took you two minutes.”

            I opened my mouth to protest, but then I realized he was right. In barely a few minutes, I had already began to turn on a dear friend of mine just because Mr. Grey had told us so. He knew just how to drive all of us apart until we didn’t even have each other to keep us sane.

            I covered my face with my hands and peeked out through the slits of my fingers. “What do we do, Matt?” My voice was meek, tiny, I felt vulnerable exposed in the chilly cabin that was beginning to blur as fear overwhelmed me once again. My whole body began to shake.