34. Kira

34KIRA

Max grabs the papers from Logan’s hand. As he reads, the look on his face isn’t fear or confusion or shame at whatever’s there. It’s even more terrifying—behind his glasses, Max’s eyes are totally blank.

“I can explain,” he tries. “Let me just—”

Logan glares at him. “Go ahead. Spin this in a way that makes it not entirely fucked.”

“I was fifteen.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Is someone going to tell us what’s going on right now?” Aaron asks.

“Yeah. I’ll let Max do it, actually.” Logan bunches up the paper and throws it his way. “Since he seems to have an explanation for everything.”

Before he can grab it, I run and pick it up, backing a few paces away from him.

“Kira,” Max says, and there are the eyes I’ve seen before, bright and gentle. I want to believe them. “Please.”

I open the paper, and the air hisses out of my lungs.

It’s a screenshot of a Snapchat group named Da Boyz. The first message is dated around three years ago, from an account called @maxamillion13.

Guys she sent it holy shit

Max had sent a screenshot of an Instagram DM chat. At the top is a picture of a girl from the chin down, mousy brown hair obscuring her face. She’s completely naked. It’s a mirror selfie, so I can see her phone case in the reflection, one of those rubber ones shaped like a pink bunny. In the background is the girl’s bedroom. An oversized teddy bear in the corner, a bright purple backpack spilling school supplies onto her bed.

The photo was sent by an account called @lacey_w to an account called @jake_hardin.

Lacey wrote: only for you.

Jake wrote back: beautiful.

“Okay, seriously, someone tell the rest of us what’s happening right now,” Elody demands.

“Max was a catfish.” I look up at him, something boiling inside me. “That’s what this is, right? ‘Jake Hardin’?”

Max just looks at the floor. “It wasn’t like that.”

Elody makes a face. “That’s it? I mean, it’s a little messed up, but come on. It’s not, like, murder.”

“He got a nude from an underage girl,” Logan says.

Elody’s mouth hangs open.

Aaron claps. “Oh, this is perfect. This is excellent.”

Max shakes his head. “It wasn’t—”

“Read the rest of it.” Logan looks at me. “Out loud.”

I don’t want to, but part of me needs to see Max’s face, needs to watch him hear it, so I read through the rest of the Snapchat conversation with Max and the boys.

CHASE: ahahahahahahah Max is the MVP!!

AUSTIN: dude holy shit I can’t believe she sent a nude

KENNY: me looking for the tits

CHASE: I’m so dead

MAX: lol what can I say? Jake Hardin’s a beast

AUSTIN: “jake hardin” lmao I can’t believe she hasn’t figured out it’s fake yet

When I look up again, Max’s stare hasn’t moved from the floor. He takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes like he’s tired.

“We were all fifteen. So was she. It’s not like…”

“You catfished a girl and made her send a nude that you shared with your friends,” Corinne says, enunciating every word. “And now, your career is based on exposing someone else for doing this exact thing. No part of this looks good for you, Max, so I think you should just stop.”

He swallows. “I know.”

“Lacey,” I realize. “Was that the girl from summer camp? The one from your ‘biggest lie’ who you said you blew off in New York?”

Logan laughs. “Understatement of the fucking year.”

“You don’t understand,” Max says. “Middle school sucked for me. I was the scrawny film nerd who couldn’t even talk in class without feeling like I was going to puke. My parents literally tried to buy me friends by inviting kids to tapings and expensive birthday parties because it was so obvious that none of them wanted to be around me. It was the worst time of my life.”

“I was bullied on national TV for two years,” I tell him, fighting the shake in my voice as I hold up the paper. “I went to therapy. I didn’t turn around and do this to someone else.”

“Kira, I’ve literally been punched in the face before. Like, yeah, McKayleigh was a dick to you, but it’s not the same.”

And there it is. Maybe I could give him the benefit of the doubt, decide that this Lacey thing was three years ago and Max was fifteen. But here he is, still recording people without consent, like he has some divine right to share our secrets with the world. He thinks he’s this beacon of truth and morality, but when I look at him now, all I can see is every guy who ever made a comment about my body or sent the kind of DMs a fifteen-year-old should never have to see. The kind of men who made me wonder if the comments were right. If all I am is something to look at.

“Don’t tell me it’s not the same,” I say. “You don’t know me.”

“Wait, I didn’t—”

“Sorry,” Corinne interjects, “but I’m still not seeing how you getting bullied turns into this.” She gestures at the paper in my hand.

“I know. I know. I just…” Max lets out a desperate breath. “I started a new school freshman year, and when these guys came along and they weren’t trying to kick my ass … I would have done anything to keep it that way. So, when we saw Lacey that day in New York and I blew her off, told the guys that she was stalking me, one of them said maybe Lacey would leave me alone if she just found someone else, and I wanted them to like me, so I just … as a joke, I said…”

“It was your idea.” I want to laugh, but I can’t. “You made the account, right? This was all you.”

“The guys were in on it, too,” Max says, too quickly. He pauses, wincing. “I mean, yeah, I was the one who sent the messages and everything.”

“How long did it go on?” I ask.

“Few months, maybe.”

“Oh my god,” Aaron says, delighted.

“I know,” Max almost begs. “I know. But I was fifteen.”

“So was she,” Corinne says.

It hangs in the air for a few seconds, thick and heavy like the island air, and I have to ask. Because maybe, maybe there’s a chance this tight anger I feel can start to uncurl.

“After all this, what happened? Did you ever reach out to her to apologize? Tell her it was you?”

Max lets out a long breath. “No. I ghosted her, I guess.”

Logan makes a disgusted noise, and I feel it in my chest, in my whole body.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “What did you even get out of this? And don’t say it was for those guys, because you didn’t have to do this.”

“I know.” His face crumples, and he starts to cry.

“Don’t.” The word feels like acid in my throat.

He sniffs. “I think maybe I liked talking to Lacey like that. I was embarrassed by her at camp, but … as Jake, it felt different.”

I toss the paper down onto the counter, because I don’t even want to touch it anymore. I don’t want to be anywhere near this part of Max or the feelings he’s still dredging up in me, the part of me that knows I’ve done exactly what I was afraid of: I trusted someone I shouldn’t have.

“I know it was wrong,” Max goes on. “Everything I did with the Jared Sky doc, everything I’m doing with my whole channel, it’s all to—”

“To clear your conscience?” I snap.

“I guess,” Max says, getting smaller. “No, it’s more like … I wanted to make things right. Or better.”

“But you never apologized to Lacey,” I say. “You never made it better with her.”

He deflates. “She deleted all of her social media after everything. So I haven’t…”

“You have no idea where she is,” Corinne finishes.

Max shakes his head.

“Sorry to burst this little self-reflective bubble, but what now?” Aaron picks up the paper. “Max is a catfish, Elody lied about being poor, Logan’s a sort-of murderer, and one of us is an actual murderer, who, by the way, still wants to kill the rest of us. Where the hell does that leave us with the safe?”

Elody leans back against the fridge, an empty look on her face. “Nowhere.”

Aaron starts to read the DMs, his forehead wrinkling with concentration or disgust or both.

Corinne takes a deep breath. “Okay. As messed up as this is, we need to set it aside. Right now, we need to focus on the safe.” She checks her watch. “It’s almost three. They said we have until tonight, so there’s time. We need to figure out the other clues.”

“Why can’t we just try everyone’s names as the code?” Logan asks.

Corinne shakes her head. “Because we don’t know if—”

“I just want to get out of here!”

“Yeah, babe,” Elody tells Logan quietly. “No offense, but you’re not special.”

Wind whips against the windows, making my whole body clench. In the quiet, the truth slips in again. One of us is a killer. Someone in this room wants me dead, maybe even tonight, and we’re trapped. Panic branches out from my middle to my toes and fingers, making them itch to move, to run, to get the hell out of here, but I can’t. We’re stuck, and nothing makes sense.

“What if there’s no answer?” The thoughts come faster than I can stop them, a panicked flood. “What if the Sponsor isn’t actually going to let us leave? What if—”

An earsplitting boom of thunder shakes the house. Then, there’s a buzzing noise, and the room goes black. In that first second of darkness, the terror zips between us like molecules, heartbeats and breath and sweat. When my eyes adjust to the stormy light still filtering in through the windows, I make my way to the wall and flick the light switch back and forth. Nothing.

Aaron laughs in the shadows. “Here we go.”