THIS BOOK WILL KILL YOU

9_nightnight_

"You want food?" she asks, opening the fridge and staring inside. "Not much in there, but there's enough for a sandwich."

"I'm fine," I say. I'm chewing on a question, one I don't really know if I want answered. But my skull's full of cracks and I need to fill them in, so I just ask. "Look, mom, about earlier, about Cara."

"Still?" she says. "Forget about her, it doesn't matter, it wasn't just you that killed her."

"No," I say, feeling a little like she's gutpunched me. "No, not that." I shake my head, half hoping I just heard her wrong. "About what you were telling me, this afternoon, about Cara hurting herself."

"What about it?" says mom.

I'm wishing I hadn't drunk the juice, it's mixing with the rum in my empty stomach and I'm belching battery acid.

"How did you know all that?" I say. "About the cuts and boyfriend and stuff."

She looks at me like I'm an idiot, but that crease still slices her forehead in two. She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again.

"Everybody knew," she says, and the last word rises like a question.

Except Cara's sister from another mister, I think. Her best friend.

"But you didn't even know her," I say. "Who told you those things?"

Her mouth's moving like a fish again. She closes the fridge, moves to the sink, and for an awful second I think she's going to start moving her finger around in there, tracing patterns in blood. But she just rinses her hands, drying them on a towel.

"I just know she's bad news," she says.

"Who told you?" I ask again. Mom turns to me, and I can see the answer bubbling beneath the worry. She doesn't know. She doesn't remember. I hold up my hands. "It doesn't matter. She's bad news, I know."

I wait to see if there's anything else, but she stares me out of the kitchen and I head upstairs. Donnie's coming out of the bathroom, toothpaste smeared over his bottom lip.

"Night, dork," he says.

"Night, dick," I reply, our bedtime routine. He walks into his room and slams the door, and I head into mine. I'm worried it won't actually feel like mine any more, after earlier, but it's just my room, my stuff, my smell. I sit on the bed and wrestle my DMs off, then shuffle up to the headboard and pick up my laptop.

I know, I know, I should leave it well alone. But questions are like a hole in your soul, and right now I feel like I'm leaking out through them, that I'm losing myself. I open it up, wait for it to notice I've woken it. The battery's low, the screen on energy saving mode, so dark I can barely see it. _pinch_ is still there. It feels like a million years since I read the story and I snap the window closed before it creeps into me again. It's the last thing I want in my head before I go to sleep.

I open up a fresh window and load Facebook, tapping out a rhythm on the laptop's shell until I work up the courage to search for Cara Pierce's page again.

She's right where I left her, like nobody's noticed she's dead yet. But it's not her I'm interested in. Her relationship status is listed as It's Complicated, so I click on her friend list instead, searching for Tanner. There are two of them, and one is in his forties and dressed in dad shorts. The other greets me with a too-white smile and perfect hair. He's young, and tanned, and if he doesn't play football and chug beer and dream of following his dad into the stock market then I'll eat this laptop whole. He's not the kind of guy I thought I'd see Cara with, not at all, and I wonder if that's the reason nobody knew about them. Or maybe Tanner didn't want the rest of the team to know he was dating the weird writer chick.

I click on his photo, the curser spinning while my laptop has another mini-stroke. Down the hall I hear a sound like somebody in water, the squeak of flesh on plastic, like mom's still in the bath. But I can hear her coming up the stairs, too, and she walks past my door a second later with a mug of tea in her hand.

"Sleep, child," she says. "That thing will kill you."

"Night mom," I say. "Sleep well."

She stops, framed in the door, says something that I can't hear, something that sounds like "slow". Then she's gone, her door clicking shut behind her.

Tanner's looking at me, his page has loaded. I scroll through his photos, stopping on one with him and Megan. It's after she dyed her hair, so pretty recent, and they're obviously at a party because there's a wall of people behind them. Cara's there too, but all you can see of her over Megan's shoulder is her electric blue hair and one wide, angry eye. I wonder if Megan and Tanner were seeing each other too, or if Megan was just jealous of her friend, wanted to be like her. That would explain the hair, the clothes. Megan's staring at me and I feel suddenly guilty for even thinking it, so I click through the rest of the photos—Tanner running, Tanner smoking a blunt with his buddies, Tanner in his football kit—then scroll down the rest of his page. His posts stop completely on the day that Cara died, but there's one last thing on his page, left there by somebody else two days later.

_Facebook User_ posted a photo on your page:

But there's no photo, no text, no likes, and only one comment.

_Facebook User_ commented on this post:

tubby

Which sparks something in my head, but I can't think what. I scroll back up, stare at his profile picture.

"Tell me about the witch," I say, and this time I know I just imagine the pop of a camera flash in my ear, even though it was loud enough to make my skull buzz. I'm cold all over, I wish I hadn't said it. I close the laptop before realizing I don't want him next to me all night. When I open it again, though, I don't click the window closed, I click the message icon instead.

I need to talk to you, I write.

Then I delete it, and write, Somebody told me to talk to you, about Cara.

I delete that too, and type, Can we meet? and I post it.

I stare at it for a moment, and the Read notification appears beneath my words. He's not replying, though, there's no ellipsis.

Please, I write.

Read.

It's important.

Read.

I wonder if he's looking at my page now, at my photos, seeing all those smiles, the real ones and the fake ones. I wonder if he'll see the links to creeepy.com and put two and two together.

It's about Cara, I write, but when I type Enter the site reloads to an error page. I click refresh, then try to navigate back to Tanner's page.

User not found.

I search for him again, but there's just Dad-Tanner in his shorts, no sign of those white teeth, those dark eyes.

Somebody's watching me, it's like a hammerblow to my heart. I look up to see mom framed in my bedroom door, a mug of steaming tea in her hand, her hair wrapped in a towel.

"Sleep, child," she says. "That thing will kill you."

"You said that already," I say as she shuffles off, her door closing behind her.

I look back to the laptop but the battery has died. There's just a black screen, and another me trapped inside it, hollow-eyed and dark.