“All I’m saying is that Jake is a lucky guy.” He put his hands up in the air and smiled. I was about to respond with some kind of self-deprecating joke to lighten the mood, but a buzz in my shorts distracted me. I decided to use that as a way of shifting gears, grabbing my phone and quickly checking the message. I thought it was going to be Jake telling me he was on his way back to my place, or maybe it was another politician talking about their dire need for donations and framing it as if I was the only one who could save the world by sending over ten dollars.

It was none of that. I had to read the message twice—no, three times—for it to make sense.

And that was when fear clamped its jagged teeth directly into my heart.

NOAH. This message is for YOU. Break up with Jake or you both WILL regret the day you two met, along with the day you DIE.

I nearly dropped my phone. My hands started to shake, my vision tunneling in so that all I could see were those terrifying words, typed out and sent from a number I didn’t recognize, from the person who had become obsessed with me and was now making impossible demands of me. It was like I had opened my eyes to wake from a dream only to step into a nightmare.

My phone buzzed again. Another message. This time, it was a picture, and it took up the majority of my screen.

It was a photo of needles on a table, all of them filled with some kind of clear liquid.

I couldn’t keep my grip tight enough on my phone. It slipped from my hand, falling in a spiral down onto the concrete, landing facedown between a shocked Robby and a paralyzed me.

“What’s going on? What happened?” he asked, bending down and grabbing my phone, looking at the screen and letting out a surprised “holy shit.” He looked at me, the sadness in his gaze from before being replaced by the same terror that currently threatened to stop my heart. He wrapped me up in a tight hug, which helped ground some of my more out-of-control thoughts, and guided me back into my house, helping me realize that my feet still worked.

Inside, I put my back against the wall and started to cry, unable to stop even once I got Jake on the phone.

“You need… to come… back,” I said through frightened tears, knowing that my next words were about to shred me apart. But they needed to be said. I had to get them out. Rip it off like a bloody Band-Aid. “And we… we need… to break up.”

22. Jake Perez

22

JAKE PEREZ

Noah’s words crashed through me like a runaway train without any brakes.

We need to break up.