Page 45 of Survive the Night

“Hello, darling,” she says.

Charlie watches her cross the room to the sinks, as clear and present and real as the woman in the stone-washed jeans. Maddy’s better dressed, of course. Fuchsia dress, black heels, a strand of pearls double-looped around her neck.

Maddy stands at the sinks, oblivious to the other woman in theroom. Gazing at her reflection in the mirror, she puckers her lips before applying crimson lipstick.

“You look wretched,” she says to Charlie, smacking her lips, now red as blood. “But my coat looks fab on you.”

Charlie fingers the buttons on the coat. Big black ones that make her seem impossibly small. A little girl playing dress-up.

“What are you doing here?”

“Freshening up,” Maddy says, as if that’s a perfectly logical excuse to return from the dead. “Also, I needed to tell you something.”

Charlie doesn’t want to ask what that something is. But she does anyway. She needs to.

“Tell me what?”

“That you shouldn’t have abandoned me,” Maddy says.

Then she grabs Charlie by the hair and slams her face against the edge of the sink.

INT. REST STOP BATHROOM—NIGHT

Charlie jerks back to life, her body spasming, as if her head really had been smashed into the sink’s edge. She can still hear the ghastly sound the impact made. Bone banging off porcelain.

But there was no sound like that.

Not one that could be heard by the other woman in the bathroom. And there is only one other woman here. Maddy’s gone. Where she once stood is just a patch of grimy tile caught in the unremitting flash of the overhead light.

Next to it, the woman in the stone-washed jeans says, “Hey. Are you okay?”

Charlie’s not sure how to answer that one. She just saw her dead best friend in the bathroom of an interstate rest stop. Of course she’s not fucking okay. But the woman didn’t see Maddy. As always, the movie in her mind played to an audience of one.

“No,” Charlie says, conceding the obvious truth.

“Have you been drinking?”

“No.”

Charlie says it the way a drunk person would. Too loud. Tooemphatic. Overcompensating in a way that makes it obviously not true, although in Charlie’s case it is. But she knows that’s not the vibe she’s giving off and tries to course correct.

“I just need to get home.”

Charlie moves to the woman. Quickly. Closing the gap between them in three big strides, which only makes things worse. The woman shrinks away, even though she’s backed all the way up against the sink with nowhere to go.

“I can’t take you.”

“Please.” Charlie reaches out to grab her sleeve, prepared to tug and beg, but thinks better of it. “I know that this is going to sound weird. But that guy out there? I’m not sure I trust him.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a chance that he might have killed people.”

Instead of surprise, the woman gives Charlie a wary look. As if this was exactly what she expected and is now disappointed to be so unsurprised.

“Might?” she says. “You don’t know?”

“I told you it was going to sound weird.”

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