“You alright?” Bill asks. “You’re really pale.”
“I—I’m fine. Got a bit dizzy for a second.”
“You girls don’t eat enough…” Bill continues his rant as my heartbeat fills my ears, tuning him out.
Once I log into my computer and check my emails to get them caught up, my bone-chilling moment is long gone, but the nagging itch to dig into researching thisNightstalkereats at me throughout the day.
I shoot off an email to the student, Penny Brown, letting her know I’ll begin pulling everything I can from our archives for heron my end, and asking her what angle she’s working from for her paper to get her the right material.
I wait around well past closing, awaiting a reply, but when it doesn’t come, I pack up and head outside to my car.
It’s dark and cold, and with the busy, mind-boggling day I’ve had, I forgot completely why I don’t leave after dark.
I’m reminded when I get to my car, and there’s a note beneath my wiper.
I wait to read it until I’m in my car with the engine running and the doors locked as if that’ll save me.
Drive.
4
Greer
My hands shake as I try to keep their quaking from ripping the paper.
I checked the backseat before I got into the car. A nervous habit ever since the stalking started. I didn’t understand the command at first, but that night came back to me in a flash.
The one word that Allison kept uttering over and over and over to me was the one that still lives in my nightmares.
The one that turned my world upside down.
Drive.
How could someone know that?
No one could. Other than Allison.
Anger rises in my chest and spurs me on as I toss the note aside and speed to her place. My Chevy Equinox looks out of place in Green Island Hills, but I make my way through without incident and bang on her door with all the fury of a SWAT team with a battering ram.
“I’m coming! Hold on!” I hear her call out, and her exasperation with my impatience is evident.
She swings the door open. “Greer? Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you non-stop! You never showed up last night.”
“Explain this.” I shove the note at her, and she takes it, uncrumpling it and reading it as she looks back at me.
Tears roll down my cheeks, stinging in the cold as she looks genuinely confused.
Did that night not fuck her up as much as it did me? Does she not recall every fine detail as I do?
“That’s what you said to me that night, remember? You kept telling me to?—”
“Drive,” she says, realization filling her face. “Wait, you don’t think I’m the one stalking you, do you? Fuck, how shitty of a friend do you think I am? I know we’re not as close as we used to be, but I’d never do this to you.”
“Then you told someone about the crash.”
Her head shakes violently. “No. I would never. It would ruin us both.”
She looks behind me as if she’s worried we’re being watched right this second as she tugs me inside and slams the door shut. “Tell me where you found this. Tell me everything.”
