29. Logan

29LOGAN

The storm is back with a vengeance. Rain slams the roof and wind shakes the windows, whipping the palms around so they scrape the glass like witchy fingernails.

We decide to leave the murder board and make breakfast, because what else is there to do? Not that any of us is hungry. I pass on the eggs that Kira made and go for a Pop-Tart, but even the promise of brown sugar–cinnamon makes my stomach turn.

On my way from the pantry to the dining table, I stop, a fresh panic digging its teeth in as I look at the open seats. It’s like the hell of lunch period at a new school, only so much worse. Because half of the people here think I’m a murderer.

And one of them is trying to kill me.

My heart kicks up as they all look at me. I go for the empty chair next to Kira, who, besides Corinne, is probably the only person here who hasn’t outright called me a killer. The downside of this seat is that Elody is on my left, inching away from me like she might catch poison fumes of death. I try to ignore her as I open the wrapper.

Across from us, Corinne looks through the window and past the terrace, out to the choppy waves.

“It’s getting bad,” she says.

“No shit,” Aaron answers, mouth full.

Lightning flashes outside. When me and Harper were kids, we used to count the seconds between lightning and thunder. There’s some kind of math we did to figure out how far away the storm was, but I’m shit at numbers. Harper’s the smart one.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi …

Thunder booms.

“We could lose power,” Max says nervously.

Kira sets her fork down. “Can we not … you know, speak that into existence?”

“You afraid of the dark, babe?” Elody smiles, but even she can’t keep her cool anymore. I can see the fear in her eyes.

A tree screeches on the window, and Elody drops her fork. “Shit.”

“I don’t see why you don’t just get this over with.” Aaron’s looking right at me. “Just whip out the gun and kill the rest of us, right?”

I shove a piece of Pop-Tart in my mouth. It tastes like dust.

Aaron leans back in his chair with a nasty smile on his face. “Or maybe you’ll pick a different method. What haven’t you tried yet? Strangling? Drowning? Or you could always fall back on an old classic.” He puts his elbows on the table and leans toward me. “I’m not allergic to anything, but good ol’ poison should get the job done.”

I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t. I can’t swallow. My mouth is dry and my throat doesn’t work.

“Logan?” Kira’s voice sounds like it’s underwater. “Are you okay?”

Poison. Someone poisoned me. I don’t know how, because I’m not allergic to peanuts, but my tongue is swelling, my throat closing …

Her hand touches my back. “Can you breathe?”

“No,” I force out.

“You’re breathing,” Kira tells me. “You’re talking.”

She’s right. I’m breathing, but everything’s moving too fast, my heart in my ears, a feeling in my chest like I sucked in helium. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just … I can’t…”

“You’re okay,” Kira says. “You’re having a panic attack.”

A panic attack.I’ve been anxious my whole life, but I’ve never had a full-blown panic attack before. Somehow, naming it calms me down. Makes the breath come easier. It comes back in sobs, hot tears down my cheeks. I’m okay, I’m alive, but only for now.

McKayleigh, Zane, and Graham, all of them falling like dominoes, and I’m next. Because I’m the only one left who knows what we did.

I stand up. I don’t know where I’m going, just that I have to get out of here. My feet take me toward the patio, but then I remember that that’s where we left Zane, so I spin around and go out the front door, to the terrace, straight into the rain. It hits my back like tiny pebbles, and I open my mouth to it, letting it run down my face, my neck.

“Logan.” Kira stands halfway outside. “Come back in.”

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

Kira glances back inside. “Okay. Can we go to the pool house?”

I nod, wiping snot from under my nose like a kid. Kira runs toward the pool house, and I follow her, thinking vaguely that this would be a great way to murder me, getting me alone like this, but I don’t think Kira’s a murderer, and even if she is, I don’t know if I care anymore. It hits me like a shot burning down my throat: if someone wants to kill us all, they will. One by one, they’ll take us down, and we can’t do anything. We can’t escape.

Stepping into the pool house, I close the door, shutting us both in as the rain hammers on the roof. The pillows that Kira and Max slept on are still on the floor, and it makes my throat ache. It’s been so long, but I still remember exactly how it felt when Zane wrapped his arms around me from behind, the way he did sometimes when we watched movies in his bed: pulling me close, making me feel small for once, his warm breath on my neck feeling more intimate than if we’d been doing any of the other things he always said we couldn’t do, not yet, not until the night that everything started to fall apart. The night he decided to break his own boundary.

“Are you okay?” Kira asks me again.

I nod. It’s a lie, but at least I don’t feel like I’m dying anymore.

She sits on the couch and motions for me to come next to her.

I do, wiping my eyes. “I need to get it together.”

“You’re allowed to lose it sometimes.”

Lightning flashes through the window, lighting up her expression, deep and full of something I can’t read.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I whimper. What I really mean—what I don’t say—is that I don’t deserve it.

“I used to get panic attacks all the time,” she says. “Before competitions. They just started randomly happening one day and wouldn’t stop. I’d be fine until I got backstage, but then I’d think about Ms. Tammy and McKayleigh and what everyone would say if I messed up, and then my heart would be pounding and I couldn’t remember the choreo or how to breathe and…” Kira exhales, flexing her hands. “There was a really bad one that they got on camera for Dance It Out. That was when my parents decided to pull me out of the show.”

As she talks, a memory floats into my brain: an episode of Dance It Out where fourteen-year-old Kira was crying, almost hyperventilating backstage while McKayleigh danced a solo for the judges. The way they edited it, it looked like Kira was crying because she was jealous. It was part of this whole dramatic multiepisode storyline leading up to Kira leaving the team. Now, it seems insane to me—grown people doing that, taking a little girl’s fear and turning it into entertainment. Something to consume.

“Do you still get them?” I ask. “The panic attacks?”

“Not really. Leaving the show was good for me. I started therapy, too. That helped. Plus starting my channel, doing my own content … I don’t know. It made me feel like I had control again. Of what I was putting out there. How people were seeing me. And that felt good for a while, until I realized you can’t ever really control that.”

Kira takes a sharp breath, tears welling, and my chest cracks open a little. I know we’re the same age, but right now, all I can see is Harper, the way she tries to stop herself from crying whenever Mom gets in one of her moods or Dad forgets a birthday. So, I do what I would if Kira were my sister: I wrap my arms tightly around her. She leans into me.

“Thanks,” she says. “Sorry. I’m just…”

“Trapped on a murder island and really going through it?”

She laughs. “Yeah.”

Thunder claps, and both of us snap our heads toward the window. Suddenly, I have to tell her. I need to get the words out.

“Graham came to talk to me last night.”

Her eyes get wide. “What? When?”

“A little before eleven, I think.”

“What did you talk about?” Kira asks.

I shake my head, remembering Graham’s haunted look as he stood in my doorway.

Who did you tell?

“He wasn’t making any sense.” I swallow.

Someone here knows. Someone wants to kill us for it. So either you told, or …

“What?”

Or it’s one of us.

I run my thumb over the raw spot on my pointer finger, where I’ve been nervously picking at the cuticle, and suck in a breath.

“He told me that Zane might have killed McKayleigh.”

Kira shakes her head quickly. “But that—”

“Doesn’t make any sense? Yeah, pretty much.” I pull on the skin again, a sharp sting followed by more blood. I wince.

“Why did he think that?”

“He didn’t have any proof. He just…” I press my thumb to my cuticle to stop the bleeding, forcing myself to breathe. “Zane told everyone that he and Graham were together before we found McKayleigh, right? He said they were outside, like, hanging out, and then they went back inside together. But Graham told me that Zane was lying. Graham went inside, but Zane stayed out by himself. As in, Zane was unaccounted for when McKayleigh died.”

A shadow of something passes over Kira’s face, confusion or disbelief. “Why didn’t Graham say something before?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Graham always just went along with whatever Zane said. Zane had this way of making you feel like he was right, even when he wasn’t.”

His voice floats into my memory like a storm on the air: We can fix this.

Kira stands up. “But if Zane killed McKayleigh, then why—that doesn’t—he can’t be dead and be the killer.”

“I know. I think Graham was just losing it.”

“Come on.” She starts for the door. “We need to tell everyone else.”

“Wait.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want them to know that I saw Graham.”

Kira lets out a frustrated breath. “Logan, you just told me that Zane might have killed McKayleigh. I can’t keep that to myself.”

“I know, but I don’t think he did. It doesn’t make sense. Because then who … who did that to Graham?”

I shiver, wrapping my arms around myself as more tears threaten. Graham. I was so mad at him for not backing me up earlier with Zane, but all he wanted was to keep the peace. To mourn our friend. Sometimes, I think Graham was the only one who actually understood me, and now he’s gone. He’ll never finish his stupid songs.

“Logan…”

I choke on another sob. “If you tell them I saw Graham, they won’t even listen. They’ll just think I did it.”

Kira’s expression changes, fear creeping in. She takes a step back, toward the door. “But you didn’t, right?”

“What?” My throat squeezes. “That’s—”

“I’m sorry. I just—if there’s more than one killer, then it has to be two people who would have a reason to work together.”

It hits me like a slap in the face. “So you think it’s me and Zane?”

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to make this make sense.”

“Well, good luck. It doesn’t.”

Kira takes a careful breath. “You had the wine.”

“So?” I blink fast, trying to stop more tears from coming. “You think I was in on this whole murder thing with Zane, and then I turned around and killed him? Why would I team up with him in the first place? After what he did to me, I wouldn’t…”

Kira’s face softens. “I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No. Don’t worry about it.” I push past her and throw open the door, walking into the rain. My feet slap on the storm-slicked terrace, the rain shouting in my ears like a voice saying, See? Even Kira thinks you’re a monster. Even she can see right through you.

“Logan, wait.”

I walk faster, shoving my hands into my hoodie pocket. My fingers brush against something metal, sending an electric feeling all over my skin. I close my fist around it and pull it out.

A black choker, with a silver J hanging from the center.

I shove the necklace back into my pocket, sucking air into my lungs and wiping rain from my eyes. It’s not hers. It can’t be hers. There has to be some reasonable explanation for how this necklace appeared out of thin air and landed in my pocket.

Someone here knows. Someone wants to kill us for it.

Lightning splits the sky, forking down into the violent waves. So many miles of water all around us, churning, getting closer, like the sea wants to suck us all in with the tide.

And maybe it should. Because Kira’s right, and so are the rest of them. I am a monster. And if everyone here is hiding something as big as I am, then maybe we all fucking deserve it.