Page 29 of False Idols

“Cool, I’ll be by to get you, all right?”

“Sounds good.”

The line goes dead and I’m glad. Talking to Jordan puts me in a shit mood so I already know who I’m looking for when I pick my phone up. Nevaeh. I hit the app and frown. I sent her three messages throughout the night but she never replied. Not after the first couple. I don’t like that she’s left me on fucking read, but she isn’t online either. I start to scroll through my feed for another distraction and the whole thing is filled with students losing their shit over the girl they found. There’s another handful of messages in my inbox too, but I ignore those except for one that sticks out.

It’s from Ali.

Big mixer tonight! I hope you come. Everyone in my dorm is going to be there, but that means that creepy girl Nevaeh will be too. Just wanted to warn you.

That’s all it takes. I know what I’m doing after practice today.

I message Ali asking what time the mixer is and she responds immediately. It’ll be at nine, plenty of time to go in prepared for what’s going to happen. She gives me her dorm name, Morris Hall. It’s Nevaeh’s dorm. She offers to meet me out front, but I don’t reply.

She’s not the one I’m going to be seeing.

12

NEVAEH

“There’s a party tonight in the dorm,” Sunny tells me. We’re walking back from our class, Film Studies, and everything seems normal. Or at least as normal as things can be after a girl was murdered and left in the river. All around us everyone is quiet and walking with their heads down in groups of three or more. There’s safety in numbers and all that. Sunny and I are the only pair I see out.

“A party?”

“Yeah, you want to go?” she asks.

“I’d say no but it sounds like the party is sort of coming to us, right?”

She nods and looks towards our dorm. It’s just up ahead of us. “Is this normal?” she asks.

“Is what normal?”

“People pretending nothing happened?”

People were shocked when I said it was Beau. Before that, it was like the town went into a weird sort of stasis after every murder. It only took a little time before they were going on like nothing happened.

I nod. “Yeah, they just…move past it.”

“How the fuck can anyone move past something like this?”

“It’s been happening since before I was in junior high. I think everyone is just numb to it at this point.” When the cops finally realized the murders were serial, I was ten. Beau would have been fourteen then. They managed to trace back his activity to seven years before that, but who knows how long The Reaper has been killing in Bloom? Even if what I said had been true, it couldn’t have been him. At least not alone. There would have had to have been two killers, but the police didn’t even bother with that. They went after Beau with everything they had, even if he was too young for what the killer had been doing to those girls.

What fourteen year old boy could have pulled that off? And for that long, without being caught? They’d said it was horror movies and violent video games that pushed Beau to experiment and start killing. It hadn’t ever felt right, but I couldn’t tell anyone that the more time passed the less sure I was of anything.

“I don’t get this town. I don’t get this college. It’s all so fucked up, Nev. Everyone is just at class taking notes and making study group plans and planning parties like nothing happened.” Sunny walks closer to me and I can see she’s getting upset.

I put an arm around her shoulders. “We can hide out from the party tonight if you want.”

She leans back and shakes her head. “No fucking way.”

I blink in surprise. “What?”

We stop in front of the dorm and Sunny starts to pace around. It’s something I’ve noticed that she does when she’s anxious. She did it all last night while keeping an eye on the door while the RomCom we had put on played in the background on a loop.

“We are going to that fucking party. I’m not missing it.”

I rock back on my heels and ignore the girls that shoot dirty looks my way on their way past. “Didn’t you just say this whole thing was fucked up though?” I ask. I’m trying to follow Sunny but it’s hard. She’s off one thing and on to the next faster than I realize, but it’s part of what I like about her.

“Yeah, that still totally stands. This whole situation is fucked, but I can’t transfer anywhere else right now and if my grandma thinks I’m going to roll over and let some dude in a robe with a knife kill me she’s wrong. I’m graduating.”

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