23. Elody

23ELODY

Oh my god. Literally, this day is trying to send me over the edge.

“Okay, somebody better start talking,” I say. “Like, right now.”

“I knew we shouldn’t have kept it,” Logan barks. “I told you guys!”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t exactly guess that one of us was going to be a murderer, did you, babe?”

“No one here is a murderer,” Kira says. “Whoever took the gun, just … put it back. You’re not protecting yourself or anyone else.”

“Oh, sure.” I laugh. “Yeah, whoever stole it, just put it back real quick. None of us will be mad. Promise.”

Corinne takes a sharp breath. “We need to go through everyone’s bags.”

“Come on,” I say. “Do you actually think whoever took the gun is dumb enough to keep it in their own stuff?”

“Can we just look through everyone’s bags?” Corinne’s voice wobbles. Losing control. Maybe she’s finally realizing that life isn’t some video game with rules and goals, something you can beat.

But I don’t have the energy to argue with her. And I don’t have any better ideas.

“Fine,” I say. “Whatever you want, babe.”

We start with Aaron and Zane’s room. I turn bags over and dump them all out, even get on my knees and look under mattresses and on the floor, but it’s just like it is with every other thing that goes missing on this island. Like it fully ghosted, disappeared right into the air. Same with Logan and McKayleigh’s room.

When we get to my room, I sit on the bed. “Go crazy.”

While everyone tears through our stuff, Logan stands at the window with this blank look on her face, her hand in the pocket of her jean shorts. God, I really feel bad for her. Like, no matter how much someone hurt you, how much you want to hurt them, it’s a different thing, watching them die for real.

Wait, Logan’s hand in her pocket. My heart starts to beat loud in my chest. Does she have the gun? She’s angry enough. Maybe—

Logan takes her hand out of her pocket, and it’s empty. I breathe out, because duh. She’s wearing jean shorts designed for women. Those pockets can barely hold a phone, forget a gun. I need to pull it together.

Kira closes my suitcase, all frustrated. “It’s not here.”

“Shocker,” I say, but my heart’s not even in it anymore. We only have one more room to look in, the third floor, and I have a pretty good feeling we’re not finding anything there, either.

But we go anyway, marching up the stairs in a single-file line like a bunch of kindergartners. I check behind me, half-worried someone’s going to pull the gun on me right here, but all I see is Max messing with his camera bag.

“You know, babe, you made a really good call with this whole documentary thing,” I tell him, trying to sound calm. “If we get out of here, people are going to eat this up.”

He just looks at the floor, like he didn’t have his tongue in my mouth an hour ago. Like he wasn’t losing his mind at my fingers in his hair. When he looks up again, it’s still not at me. It’s over my shoulder, at Kira, who’s leading the way up the stairs.

No way. No fucking way.

That’s it. I’m done. I’m not going to make myself look like an idiot over a skinny-ass guy whose priorities are clearly screwed the hell up, because I’m so out of his league it’s not even funny.

I’m going to find this stupid gun.

I walk into the room and go straight for Max’s stuff. I dig through his suitcase, tossing everything onto the floor until I get all the way to the bottom. When it’s not there, I unball all of his stupid crew socks one by one: stripes, polka dots, waves, palm trees, ducks. Ugh. Ducks aren’t even, like, island-themed.

The gun isn’t in any of the socks, but whatever. Maybe I just wanted to remind him in front of everyone that he wears really stupid socks. From the embarrassed look on his face as he stands by the door, watching me, I’m pretty sure I did my job.

I’m about to move on to his second bag when I hear Graham.

“Logan, wait.”

She’s unzipping the front of his guitar bag, reaching inside the pocket.

“Stop,” Graham says. “I don’t like anyone touching my—”

Logan pulls something out, her eyes wide.

Graham freezes.

“What is this?” Logan asks.

“What? I don’t…”

She opens her fist and shows us what she’s holding.

A little bottle, the size of a travel hand sanitizer. At first, it looks empty, but then I see the ring of yellowish oil on the bottom.

Holy shit.

Logan moves slowly toward him. “Why is there peanut oil in your stuff, Graham?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“Bullshit,” Aaron says.

Graham backs up. “This is just like the charger in McKayleigh’s bags. Someone’s trying to screw me over!” He points at Logan. “You’re the only one here with an actual reason to kill Zane. You’re telling me that you just found that in my bag?”

“I didn’t kill him,” Logan says.

Max reaches into the guitar bag.

Graham rushes toward him. “What are you—”

“Two choices,” Max says, pulling something out, a little rectangle. “You tell us what you and Zane were talking about out there, or I play it for everyone to hear.”

Wait, oh my god. It’s a recorder. Max Overby, you gorgeous, smart idiot.

Graham’s face crumples like he’s about to cry.

“Which is it?” Max asks.

Graham lunges, but Kira pulls him back. He tries to shake her off, but Graham weighs about a hundred pounds and Kira’s, like, ripped. She holds on until Graham stops fighting.

“What were you and Zane talking about?” Max demands, and god, I hate how hot he looks when he’s being bossy.

“I didn’t kill him,” Graham whimpers.

A buzzing feeling travels up from my toes to my chest. I look at Max, the recorder.

“Play it,” I tell him.

Max presses a button. Sound comes out of the recorder, crackly white noise. Max fast-forwards through a lot of nothing, until there’s voices, squeaky and high like a bunch of chipmunks. He presses another button, and the chipmunks turn into people.

“Someone knows.” Graham.

“Whoa, chill out.” Zane. It makes me shiver, like we’re hearing his ghost. “What’s—”

“I didn’t do anything,” Graham begs in real time, even as the Graham on the recording makes him sound guilty as hell:

“Someone knows what we did to her.”

Everyone’s frozen as the voices on the recording go quiet, long enough that I wonder if it stops there. But then, recording-Zane talks again:

“You need to pull it together, man. No one knows.”

“I don’t think I can do this anymore. We have to tell someone. We can’t just—”

“Pull it together.” It’s a threat, slow and clear. Zane’s voice gets even lower, almost so I can’t even hear it. “There’s cameras all over the place, so if I were you, I’d shut up.”

There’s a few seconds of silence, and then:

“Okay.”

The recorder goes back to white noise. Max stops it.

“What was that about, Graham?” he asks.

Graham jolts, like he’s waking up from a bad dream. “Nothing.”

Aaron laughs. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and call BS.”

“Fine,” Graham snaps. “We were…” He glances over at Logan, and then at the floor. “We were talking about Logan.”

She leans back against the wall, clutching the peanut-oil bottle with a weird, faraway look on her face.

“Wait.” I give Graham a suspicious look. “I thought you said you didn’t know what Zane did to Logan. I’m not a genius, or anything, but doesn’t that make it his fault? Like, why are you talking about what ‘we’ did to her?”

Graham falters. “I—”

“Elody’s right,” Corinne says—which duh, even if I don’t really love how surprised she looks about it. “You said ‘we.’ What did you mean, ‘what we did to her’?”

Graham’s eyes are going back and forth between us and Logan so quickly, I think they might roll out of his head. Just as he takes a breath to say something else, our watches ping with a message:

Things aren’t looking too good for our resident e-boy, are they?

Well, I may be cruel, but I’m not a monster …

I think everyone deserves a fair trial

Seeing the voting link, I almost laugh out loud. Perfect timing, once again.

Graham’s shoulders start to shake, and at first, I think he’s crying, but then I realize he’s laughing silently.

“Vote for me, then.” He throws up his hands. “I’m sure we’ll get a cute little Gossip Girl post with everything you want to hear. In fact, I’ll do it for you.” He taps theatrically on his watch, then flings his wrist out to show the rest of us that he just voted for himself. Another weird laugh comes out of him, this time more like a sob. “I don’t even care anymore. Cancel me. Do whatever you want. My two best friends are dead, and I’m obviously next, so if I’m going to die here…” His eyes go to his guitar case. “Then I’m at least going to finish a song first.”

Graham picks up the guitar, throws the strap over his shoulder, and starts walking to the door.

Aaron blocks his path. “No way. That recording and the bottle are proof. You don’t get to kill a bunch of people and walk away!”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Graham says through clenched teeth. “Zane was my best friend.”

“Sure didn’t seem like it.”

Graham gets up close to him, like a challenge. “Go post about it on your channel, then. I’m sure some premature-hair-loss brand is dying to pay you for an ad.”

Aaron punches him in the face.

Well, he tries. He swings his freckly little arm out, but Graham ducks, and Aaron stumbles forward.

“Pathetic.” Graham walks out of the room, mumbling as he goes. “Fucking pathetic.”

As the door slams, Aaron straightens, fire-truck red. He wipes sweat from his shiny forehead, looking at the rest of us.

“Well? Are we voting for him, or what?”

“He voted for himself.” Logan’s voice drops to a murmur. “I don’t think it even matters anymore.”

Like a confirmation, the timer on my watch hits zero, and nothing happens. I wait a few seconds, and then a few more. Nothing. I close the voting app, because apparently, Logan’s right. There are no rules anymore.

Aaron gives a frustrated grunt. “He obviously killed Zane. We can’t just let him go!”

“He didn’t—” Kira falters. “No one killed Zane.”

“Okay, I’m loving the positivity,” I tell her, “but also, you sound delusional, babe.”

She crosses her arms like she’s about to make me do jump squats, or something. “If we tell ourselves that someone here is doing this, then we’re going to fall apart.”

Corinne shakes her head. “I don’t want to believe it either, but…” She takes a breath, like it’s hard to get the words out. “Three people are gone now. We know they’re watching us. We found the peanut oil. Maybe it was Tilly who slipped it into the wine, or maybe…”

She doesn’t have to say it. We’re all thinking it now, feeling the truth of it like someone breathing down our necks. Maybe it was one of us.

“Either way, this wasn’t an accident,” Corinne says. “And I think we need to accept what’s really happening here.”

A shiver rocks through me, and I cross my arms tight to stop it. The light from the windows seems darker, all of a sudden, and looking closer, I realize why. Big gray storm clouds are rolling in, wind whipping the palm trees. I want to laugh, because it’s so perfect, but I don’t, because I would sound insane. I feel insane.

“It still doesn’t make sense, though.” Max stares at his little recorder like he’s getting an idea. “Why would Graham kill Zane? Whatever they were talking about, it seems like Graham was the one who wanted to come clean. Zane wanted him quiet.” He looks over at Logan. “Do you have any idea what that was about?”

Logan shrugs. “Not sure if anyone’s noticed, but I’m kind of Bounce House public enemy number one these days. I’m not really up to date.”

“Wait, Graham did have a point.” Aaron sizes her up. “You were the one who found the peanut oil in his bag. You could have slipped it in there when no one was looking. Planted it so we thought it was Graham’s.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t. So.”

“You were the only one who was digging around in there,” Aaron argues. “Who else could’ve done it?”

“Max was in there, too,” Kira says. “When he slipped the recorder.”

Max looks at her like she actually just took out a knife and stabbed him in the heart, which would be really entertaining to me, if there wasn’t the whole issue where one of us is probably an actual murderer with a literal gun.

“I didn’t,” Max says. “I swear.”

Logan flings out her arms. “Well, then, we’ve reached a bit of an impasse, haven’t we?”

For a second, we’re all quiet.

Kira looks at Max. “Was the peanut oil already in there when you put the recorder in?”

“No.” He pauses. “I don’t know. Maybe. I just dropped it in when he wasn’t looking. I didn’t have time to feel around in there.”

Thunder cracks outside, and all of our heads snap to the window at the same time.

I can’t keep the laugh in anymore, because once again, the timing is perfect, and of course this is happening. Mom basically predicted it.

When I first hit ten thousand followers, she lit a cigarette and told me, Soak it in while you can, El. You think these people love you now, but they won’t. None of it lasts. Not beauty, and especially not love. Smoke floated around her red mouth, settling into my hair. You want my advice? Never let them see you weak. Because the second you do, she said, her lips curling into a cruel smile, they’ll take that little crack and press until you shatter.

Every milestone after that felt like a win, like spitting in her face. Because they did love me. And sure, there were mean comments, but the ones who wanted me—they weren’t going away, only growing. After so many months of nonstop success, I was sure that Mom was wrong and bitter. Just because you climb high doesn’t mean you have to fall.

But now here it is, the fall she promised: hurtling fast and thrilling to the ground, waiting for the crash. Eyes open. Blood leaking on the terrace stones below.