Brooke circled the conversation back around to her current hardships as stage manager, and Haley allowed herself to drift away. She could only hear a third of Brooke’s ranting, anyway. The rest was static.
She stared out the windows and finished her sandwich. The sun hung low on the horizon. It shone through the cornfields, making the brittle stalks appear soft and dull. Her father was still out there. Somewhere. This time of year, he didn’t let a single ray go to waste. The world looked abandoned. It was the opposite of the loud, colorful, enthusiastic group of people she’d left behind at school. She should have stuck it out. She hated the quiet isolation that permeated her house. It was exhausting in its own way.
Haley made sympathetic noises into the phone—though she had no idea what she was sympathizing with—and stood. She walked her plate back to the kitchen, rinsed off the crumbs, and popped open the dishwasher.
The only thing inside it was a dirty butter knife.
Haley glanced at the sink, which was empty. A frown appeared between her brows. She put the plate into the dishwasher and shook her head.
“Even if we can get the sprayer working,” Brooke was saying, their connection suddenly clear, “I’m not sure enough people will even want to sit in the first three rows. I mean, who goes to the theater to wear ponchos and get drenched in blood?”
Haley sensed that her friend needed vocal reassurance. “It’s Halloween weekend. People will buy the tickets. They’ll think it’s fun.” She took a step toward the stairs—toward her bedroom—and her sneaker connected with a small, hard object. It shot across the floor tiles, skidding and rattling and clattering and clanging, until it smacked into the bottom of the pantry.
It was the egg timer.
Haley’s heart stopped. Just for a moment.
An uneasy prickling grew under her skin as she moved toward the pantry door, which one of her parents had left ajar. She pushed it closed with her fingertips and then picked up the timer, slowly. As if it were heavy. She could have sworn she’d set it on the countertop, but she must have dropped it to the floor along with her backpack.
“. . . still listening?”
The voice barely reached her ears. “Sorry?”
“I asked if you were still listening to me.”
“Sorry,” Haley said again. She stared at the timer. “I must be more tired than I thought. I think I’m gonna crash until my mom gets home.”
They hung up, and Haley shoved the phone into the front right pocket of her jeans. She placed the timer back on the countertop. The timer was smooth and white. Innocuous. Haley couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly, but the damn thing unsettled her.
She trekked upstairs and went directly to bed, collapsing in a weary heap, kicking off her sneakers, too drained to unlace them. The phone jabbed at her hip. She pulled it from her pocket and slung it onto her nightstand. The setting sun pierced through her window at a perfect, irritating angle, and she winced and rolled over.
She fell asleep instantly.
Haley startled awake. Her heart was pounding, and the house was dark.
She exhaled—a long, unclenching, diaphragm-deep breath. And that was when her brain processed the noise. The noise that had woken her up.
Ticking.
Haley’s blood chilled. She rolled over to face the nightstand. Her phone was gone, and in its place, right at eye level, was the egg timer.
It went off.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning, the entire school was buzzing about two things: the brutal slaying of Haley Whitehall and Ollie Larsson’s newly pinkened hair.
“You’d think they’d care less about the hair,” Makani said.
“This is Osborne, Nebraska.” Her friend Darby sucked up the last drops of his gas station iced coffee. “Population: twenty-six hundred. A boy with pink hair is as scandalous as the death of a beloved student.”
They stared through Darby’s windshield and across the parking lot to where Ollie was leaning against the brick wall of the front office. He was reading a paperback and pointedly ignoring the whispers—and not-whispers—of the other students.
“I heard her throat was slit in three places.” Makani paused. The car’s windows were down, so she lowered her voice. “Carved up to look like a smiley face.”
The straw dropped from Darby’s mouth. “That’s awful. Who told you that?”
She shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s just what I heard.”
“Oh God. And the day hasn’t even begun.”
A long face with kohl-blackened eyes popped up beside the passenger-side window. “Well, I heard—”
Makani jumped. “Jesus, Alex.”
“—that Ollie is the one who did it. And that he used her blood to dye his hair.”
Makani and Darby stared at her, agape.
“I’m kidding. Obviously.” She opened the back door, tossed in her trumpet case, and slid inside. The car was their morning hangout. “But someone here will say it.”
There was too much truth in her joke. Makani winced.
Alex kicked the back of Makani’s seat with a royal-blue combat boot. An exclamation point. “I don’t believe it. You still have a thing for him, don’t you?”
Unfortunately, yes.
Of course she still had a thing for Ollie.
From the moment Makani Young arrived in Nebraska, she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. He was, without a doubt, the strangest-looking guy at Osborne High. But that also made him the most interesting. Ollie had a skinny frame with hip bones that jutted out in a way that reminded her of sex, and cheekbones so prominent they reminded her of a skull—the illusion of which was enhanced by his blond, invisible eyebrows. He always wore dark jeans and a plain, black T-shirt. A silver ring—a thin hoop in the center of his bottom lip—was his only adornment. He kind of looked like a skeleton.
Makani tilted her head. But maybe less so, now that his white-blond hair was a shocking hot pink.
“I remember when you had a thing for him,” Darby said to Alex.
“Yeah, like, in eighth grade. Until I realized he’s a fulltime loner. He’s not interested in going out with anyone who attends this school.” With a rare and embarrassed afterthought, Alex grimaced. “Sorry, Makani.”
Makani and Ollie had hooked up last summer. Sort of. Thankfully, the only people who knew about it were sitting here in Darby’s car.
“It’s fine,” Makani said, because it was easier than saying it wasn’t.
There were a lot of rumors about Ollie: that he only slept with older women; that he only slept with older men; that he sold opioids stolen from his brother’s police station; that he once almost drowned in the shallow part of the river. That—when he was rescued—he was both blind drunk and buck naked.
Then again, their school was small. There were rumors about everyone.
Makani knew better than to believe any of them outright. Rumors, even the true ones, never told a complete story. She avoided most of her classmates for that very reason. Self-preservation. Recognizing a similarly dismal soul, Darby and Alex had taken her in when she’d been forced to relocate from Hawaii midway through her junior year. Her parents were embattled in an ugly divorce, so they’d shipped her off to live with her grandmother for some normalcy.