Epilogue
One Week Later
E L L I E
I click the website closed, feeling queasy, and set my phone facedown on the wobbly wooden table that's served as my nightstand for as long as I've lived in this house. I shouldn't have gone online. I should have known better... but my curiosity got the better of me.
He died a hero...
Not exactly, TeenHack. I'm the only person alive who knows what really went down atop that rain-drenched cliff—and Emerson Kemp died trying to cover his ass. But I suppose there could be no more fitting obituary. He was all about "augmenting" reality, right to the bitter end.
My cell phone buzzes, and I pick it up. Finally. I've been expecting this call all evening. My heart squeezes as the incoming request fills my screen:
It's weird seeing Maddox's face pictured there. His actual face. No more avatars for either of us... and no more InstaLove for anyone. The app has been down all week, pending investigation into the accidents, but there's no escaping the fact that the InstaQuest functionality led three users to the place where they met their end. I don't see how the company can come back from that—especially without it's CEO.
No, that obituary in TeenHack wasn't just for Emerson. His beloved company died with him.
I hit Accept on my phone, and Maddox greets me with a wave.
"Hey El—"
His face pixelates, and I miss the end of his sentence as the video feed freezes. My wi-fi signal isn't strong enough here in my bedroom. I creep into the hallway and down the stairs, careful not to make much noise. It's after midnight and my parents are already in bed.
Maddox's image springs back to life as I take a seat at the kitchen table. "—Hello? Ellie?"
"Hi," I whisper as loudly as I dare with sleeping parents overhead. "I'm here. Can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear." Maddox flashes a thumbs up. His voice comes through, diminished slightly by the street noise in the background. He always calls me from the fire escape outside his window so he won't disturb his grandmother. His face is half-illuminated by a streetlight, half lost in shadow.
"How are you holding up?" he asks.
Good question. It's only been a week since I hugged Maddox goodbye and headed home in the backseat of my parent's car, but it feels like the longest week of my life. One minute I'm fine—normal Ellie, same as ever—and the next minute I feel like I've aged ten years.
I release a long sigh. "I'm OK. Did you hear from the medical examiner again?"
He nods, and his face goes grave. Something about his expression makes my mouth dry. For both of us, our past few days have been punctuated by phone calls with investigators from the Berkshire County sheriff's office and sessions with the trauma counselor that Winthrop Academy insisted on providing. It's become routine in a way, but something in Maddox's eyes warns me that today was anything but business-as-usual.
"What?" I ask him softly. "Did they find out something new?"
His voice drops lower, and I have to turn up my phone volume to hear him. "There was a journal. Eleanor—" He breaks off for a moment, and I see his adam's apple bob. "They found it in a Dropbox. She'd deleted all the entries, but the forensics people were able to restore most of it."
My pajama top feels tight around my throat. I loosen the top button before I speak again. "And the investigators told you about it?"
"They had me read it. They needed help interpreting. It's not exactly clear who's who with all the nicknames and abbreviations she used."
No kidding. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who found Eleanor Winthrop's communication style somewhat baffling. Maddox pauses, and I can see from his face that he's desperate to tell me whatever the journal revealed. He has a trauma counselor too, and I could tell him to talk to her instead. That would probably be the healthiest thing for me. But I can't resist. More than anything, I want to know the truth. I want to understand what happened—what really happened—and why.
"Go on," I prompt him. "What did it say? Tell me."
He brings the phone close so that his face takes up most of the screen. "It all makes way more sense now... why she kept messing with me, what she was trying to hide." He stops and wets his lips with the tip of his tongue. I hold my breath, waiting for him to continue. "Get this," he says at last. "She and Emerson were together the whole time. Since freshman year!"
I squint, wondering if I heard him wrong. "Freshman year of high school?" He nods, but my confusion only grows. "Wait—but—wasn't...wasn't she with you?"
"That's the point!" he answers. He rakes his fingers through his hair, and his voice rises as he continues. "Don't you get it? She was using me to cover up their relationship. So her parents wouldn't realize she was with him—not until after she left for college in the fall."
His eyes are wide and shining. The look on his face brings me back to a time before—a time that feels like ancient history—that afternoon in the Winthrop library, day two of the program, when Maddox commandeered my laptop and conceptualized the idea for our project. "Don't you get it?" he kept saying, talking a mile a minute as I struggled to catch up. He was two steps ahead of me that day, and this conversation leaves me with the same sensation, like I'm barely keeping my head above water. My mind swims with more questions than I can formulate into words.
I'll stick with the main one. "Why?"
"Because!" The picture shakes and pixelates as he clambers to his feet, and I can hear nothing but the rattle of the metal fire escape beneath him. His face is lost in shadow, and I can barely make out the outlines of his features as he moves his lips. "Because," he says more slowly. "Her parents never liked Emerson. Not since we were kids. He was always in trouble, breaking rules. They thought he was a bad influence."
A bad influence? Talk about the understatement of the year...
Every time I try to close my eyes, I can't help but picture that stone cold look on Emerson's face the last time I saw him alive. Not bad so much as ruthless—a man who would stop at nothing to get exactly what he wants. I shiver, hugging my arm against my body to keep the phone from shaking.
On his end, Maddox shifts again, squatting down so that the streetlamp illuminates his features. His face grows solemn, and he swipes the back of his hand across his eyes. He's a different Maddox now. Not the boy from the library study room that day, brimming with enthusiasm. More like the boy who came to my room the night after Eleanor went missing—sad and scared and haunted by secrets that he doesn't dare to tell.
It's funny. I spent so much time trying to reconcile the Maddox in my room that night with the boy I knew in the weeks before. But I get it now. I understand him so much better. There isn't a real Maddox and a fake one. He's both. All energy and charisma one moment, brooding darkness the next.
Right now he looks exhausted, his eyes shot through with pink.
"I'm sorry, Maddox?" I say softly. "Are you OK?"
He clears his throat. "Yeah," he says, but his voice sounds choked with more than just fatigue. Real or fake, Eleanor was once his girlfriend—and Reese and Emerson were two of his closest friends. I can't imagine how it must feel to lose all three of them at once. My experience at the overlook shook me to the core, but I was an outsider to that Winthrop inner circle. I'm not dealing with the kind of grief that Maddox must be feeling—or the way the entire world as he knew it just ceased to exist.
I'm back home with my parents, back on solid ground, but Maddox's whole future is up in the air. His plans for Senior year have fallen out from under him. Winthrop Academy announced yesterday that it would shutter its wrought-iron gates for the first time since its founding, pending a total overhaul of campus security practices. The entire student body was left scrambling. Maddox has no idea where he'll land.
Somewhere above me, I hear footsteps and a door creak open. It sounds like my mom, coming down the stairs to check on me. The clock on the microwave across from me announces that it's nearly 1 AM.
"My mom's up," I whisper to him. "I should probably go."
A look flashes across his face, impossible to miss—an emotion I know well, but never expected to see reflected back on Maddox's features. Pure loneliness. I feel a pang at the sight of it, even as he covers it up with tight smile. "OK," he says. "Goodnight."
"Maddox," I whisper before he can hang up. "Wait."
"Yeah?"
My mom comes into the kitchen, yawning and blinking against the change in light. "Ellie? Sweetie, what are you doing up after bedtime?"
I meet her eyes and point to the phone. "Talking to Maddox," I tell her calmly, and my next words follow before I have a chance to stop and think. "Mom, I'm inviting him to come visit. I think it's for the best."
"Oh," she answers vaguely, glancing at the face on my phone. Maddox looks surprised, but he doesn't say a word, waiting for my mom's reaction. "We should talk about this in the morning with your father."
"No." I turn in my chair to face her. She doesn't get it yet. She hasn't grown accustomed to this new Ellie—Ellie 2.0, who doesn't have a bedtime. Who has a boy she FaceTimes every night. A boy she cares about. A boy she might someday even kiss... "Maddox needs me," I tell her firmly. "He's coming here, or else I'm going to him. One way or another, we need each other right now."
My mom pauses for a long moment, studying my face like I'm a stranger that she's seeing for the first time in her life.
Maybe she is. Maybe I've always been invisible, even to my parents.
Even to myself.
Invisible... The girl who thought she needed an app to make the world see her for who she really is. Well, world, I have news for you. That's all behind me now. No more scared little rabbits. No more soul-crushing self-doubt.
I'm that girl right over there, pictured in the little FaceTime window in the corner of the screen. Ellie Sandberg. Live and unfiltered. The girl who came within an inch of not existing anymore...
The girl who decided not to waste one more precious second of her life worrying what other people think of her.
I meet my own eyes in the cell phone screen, and I can't help but smile. Looks like maybe I found "instalove" this summer after all. For the first time in my life, I look at my own face reflected back at me... and I absolutely love the girl I see.
THE END
Dear Readers:
The first draft is officially COMPLETED! Please let me know what you think of the ending. Thank you all so much for following along and leaving your VOTES and COMMENTS!
A revised and expanded version of this book is scheduled to release December 3, 2019, with the new title SCARED LITTLE RABBITS!
I have some big changes planned thanks to all the Wattpad reader feedback. Please scroll on to the next story part to find out all the stuff I changed and (hopefully) improved during the editing process!
Thank you all so much for your support! ❤️❤️❤️
Much love,
Viv