You Got Read!

As soon as Elle opened her eyes to the web-infested rafters above her, she knew something was wrong.

Where am I?

She slowly got up. There were tires propped against the wall beside her, bales of rotting hay strewn about the floor. Light was shining everywhere through the broken slats, striping the barren space around her with sun. It hurt her eyes, and her head pounded.

Too much to drink, that much was clear. Something buzzed and she looked down at the phone beside her, the cracks spread across its face. A picture of a dilapidated barn filled the screen beneath, most of its red paint faded and flaked off by time. The message below it simply said:

You are here. :)

“Rach? Kat?” No response. Then, though the name made her feel a guilty twinge: “Sam?”

“If you’re playing a game with my ass, I’m going to kill you.” She looked back down at her phone, getting unsteadily to her feet, and typed:

Who is this??

Elle went to the door and pushed it open, head pounding in the light. She looked to the road; the car they’d come in was gone. This has to be a prank.

The phone lit up again.

There’s something I want to show you ;)

Elle snapped her head up to look around. Now that she was in the open, she had the feeling was being watched. Real fear began to take hold.

If you don’t say who you are, I’m calling the police.

...

Don’t be so scared :3. If you go to the woods first someone will come pick u up :D

She took a deep breath, her finger hovering over the emergency button. Then, intrigued despite herself, a half-formed idea occurred to her.

I just called the police, Elle typed. They’re on their way.

The dots popped up, then subsided. Once. Twice. Then nothing.

So this person wasn’t watching her, not closely at least. She looked out to the woods, and, with the keypad open on her phone, began to walk through the tall grass. As she did, her headache remained constant, though her fogged-up brain was slowly unclouding. The night before began to fall back to her.

***

Elle and Rachel were sitting in Elle’s dorm room, after filming their next segment of You Got Read!, Or, as Elle had termed it in her college entrance essay, the podcast that had changed her life.

She’d started on YouTube as a bored freshman. There was a site she’d belonged to call Writer’s Anonymous, in which anyone could post a story that they’d written, and get reviews, comments and critiques. Elle would pick the worst story, and humorously tear it apart on video. At first, it was just a hobby for her. But things had changed, then Rachel had joined her, and the rest was history.

“We should be hearing back from Easton soon,” Rachel told Elle as she perfected another gold ringlet in the mirror beside her.

Elle, who’d gotten her own acceptance letter that morning, nodded. She and Rachel planned on continuing You Got Read! in grad school, and it would be ideal if they still lived on the same campus.

“Katrina won’t get in,” Elle said, running a brush through her hair.

“That’s mean.”

“It’s true though.”

There was a moment of silence, then Rachel said, “Did you know? Sam said you read his story once, when you were starting out.”

“No way,” Elle said, trying to ignore the leap in her chest when she heard Sam’s name. “Which story was it?”

“The story. You know, the one that made you famous.”

“OH MY GOD,” Elle almost screamed.

“I know.”

“It was terrible though. Is he mad?”

Elle could remember the segment vividly, the way she’d rolled her eyes and flashed on a gif of Kermit the frog face-palming every time the author used symbolism in a clunky, obvious way.

“He didn’t seem upset. You know Sam. He said he appreciated every time you clapped for him using a semi-colon correctly.”

“Oh god,” Elle said, forcing a laugh.

The story had gone viral on campus, everyone printing out pieces of it and quoting it for laughs. She cringed at the idea of Sam witnessing it all. She never knew he even wrote. He’d been so caught up in the world of lacrosse, even then. Elle knew because she’d been busy watching him, his lithe, tanned form cutting across the turf, his crooked smile.

***

It was this smile that she was greeted with when she and Rachel climbed into the back of Sam’s truck moments later.

In the passenger seat, Katrina was worrying that she hadn’t picked the right thing to write about for her essay. “I wanted to submit the story I’m doing right now, but I couldn’t finish it in time.”

“You’ll be fine,” Rachel told her, her eyes flicking to Elle’s for just one humored second.

“I suppose so.” Katrina sighed. “But I do think this is my best work so far. Right, babe? It’s definitely the best I’ve done.”

Sam put a hand on Katrina’s leg. “Everything is the best you’ve done.”

Elle had the urge to barrel-roll right out of the truck.

Rachel nudged her, mouthed “you LOVE him.”

Elle felt her face burn. “STOP,” she mouthed back.

She didn’t know if love was the right word for how she felt about Sam, but Rachel wasn’t wrong. And that night, something had happened, something unexpected.

***

They were over halfway through the bottles of wine, laughing and talking about their latest stories. Dusk was creeping in and Katrina and Rachel had waded off down the creek together. Sam had turned to Elle, and she imagined she saw something other than friendship in his eyes.

“Want to explore that place over there?” he said, or was it her? That part was muddy, but the two of them had stumbled out of the woods, across the grass and into the cool, musty air of the old barn.

They weren’t there to explore and they knew it. Elle took off her ruffled top and Sam unbuckled his jeans. They lay on the dirty ground and they did what she’d wanted to do since she’d seen him. It was bliss until the phone in Sam’s pocket went off with a buzz and he looked at it, face darkening.

“I have to go,” he’d told her.

“Why?” she’d murmured.

“We shouldn’t have,” was all he said, picking up his shirt.

“What happened?” she asked, but by the time the words had finished leaving her mouth, he was already out the door and out into a sky that was darker than she remembered.

***

The phone hadn’t made a peep the entire time Elle had walked to the woods. The silence was somehow more threatening than the weird texts had been. She made her way to the creek, feeling sick.

She didn’t know at first what she was looking at. A body lay slumped by the water, its feet in the stream. Elle went closer, bent down beside it, and let out a strangled cry.

It was Katrina. The corkscrew wine opener was twisted into her neck, blood smeared all over, her eyes wide open, a glazed blue.

Oh my god. Oh my god.

She turned to the phone, hands shaking, and began to type:

WHAT

“Police!” a voice boomed out behind her, and she dropped the phone, turning to look at the officer striding across the field. She knew how this looked: Katrina spreadeagled by the creek, Elle standing over her.

“Put your hands where I can see them!”

“I didn’t-” she started. “I-”

“We got a call early this morning,” he told her. “Young man, very distraught. He’d been partying out here with a couple of friends. Says his girlfriend left before him, but when he got home, she wasn’t there.”

He looked at the other officer who’d left the car behind him. She was crouched beside Katrina’s body. She looked up and gave him a brief nod. “It’s her. Like in the photo."

Elle looked at the ground. “I know what this looks like but I didn’t- I was getting crazy messages, look at my phone!”

The officer bent and examined the cracked phone on the ground, turning it over. and looking through the texts on the open screen.

“What is your name?”

“Elle. Elle Lopes.”

“This phone,” he said, “Belongs to a Rachel Osgood.”

***

Things escalated fast after that.

The whereabouts of Rachel were unconfirmed, so now she was unofficially a missing person, and Elle was the suspect both in her disappearance and Katrina’s murder.

She saw Sam twice: once at the police station on the other side of the glass, his eyes hard and red from tears. She tried to speak to him, but he turned away as soon as their eyes met. Again on television, going on about how she had an obsessive crush on him, how she’d clearly killed Katrina out of jealousy.

“You were texting her on some type of burner phone.”

“Sorry, who?” She snapped back to the moment, looking at the man across the table from her.

“Rachel. Clearly you or an accomplice was trying to lure her to the creek. She threatened to call the cops.”

With horror, Elle remembered her last words on the phone.

“Those texts are mine!” she burst out. “I thought the phone was mine. Rachel and I had the same phone, if I could find mine I could show-”

The officer reached into his pocket. “This was found near the creek,” he said, placing something in front of her. “I believe it’s yours.”

***

Elle sat in her holding cell, mind racing.

She thought of Sam… Sam with his fake tears and his too-white smile and the text he’d received from Katrina: I know what you did you fake bastard. I’m walking home.

What had Sam done after he left the barn? Had he really gone home like he said?

Her real phone, the one the officer had given her, buzzed, and immediately she looked down, her heart beating out of her chest. One text, from Katrina.

Title: You Got Read! :-)

Elle stared at it. Her breathing was shallow. Katrina didn’t write that. Katrina was dead, and they hadn’t found her phone anywhere on her body.

Suddenly, like an electric shock, she remembered. The very last blurry, waking memory of that night clicked into place as if the text had shaken it loose.

***

Sam had been gone for a few minutes when the barn door creaked open again. Elle tried to sit up and failed.

“I’ve been waiting so long for this,” someone said.

“Rachel?”

“I wrote the story, Elle.”

“Wh- no.”

“Yes. And you tore it apart. I was only a sophomore, and I was proud of that god damn story. You plastered it everywhere. You made me the laughing stock of the school. I used to be your biggest fan. If only you knew how badly I wanted to be you, how much I looked up to you.” Rachel loomed into view above her. Her shirt was stained dark with something like wine. “The tables have turned now, haven’t they?”

Elle tried again to get up, fell over again. The room was spinning.

“I’m crafting a new story now, your favorite kind, a mystery. I might be biased, but I think it’s a really good one this time- even you would have to agree. I'll text you the title when I think of one.”

“I’ll tell,” Elle ground out.

In her swimming, darkening vision, she thought she saw Rachel shrug.

“Tsk, tsk. Remember your pacing- the only one who can really tell is time. We’ll just have to wait and see if our perfect protagonist gets out scot-free.”

{Thanks for reading! If you liked, please drop a heart below! Tips are hugely appreciated, but of course not necessary! xx Raist}