If she killed Abby, people would know how good she was. Devon, too, might not feel the need to remind her of obvious things.
Abby lived a good twenty-minute walk from Lia’s, and in the quiet dark before dawn, no one was about. Frosted grass blades snapped underfoot, leaving an inky trail behind her as she cut across yards and little neighborhood parks. No one locked their gates in Lincoln. Lia’s parents had only started locking theirs after binging five true-crime podcasts last summer.
Abby’s house was a peak-roofed shadow backlit by a neighbor’s motion lights. Lia waited across the street, huddled against a brick mailbox. Lia didn’t know Abby’s full schedule, but she knew Abby would walk Omelet no matter what. So she waited.
The motion lights switched off. The wind sliced through Lia’s scarf, burning in her nose. A fence creaked, wood rubbing against wood, and a car passed on the adjacent street. Light flitted through the hedges and houses, washing the windows of Abby’s house white, and the motion lights switched on again. Omelet’s soft ah-woo echoed across the quiet street. A light flickered on behind a covered window of the Ascher house, and a door slammed shut. Abby and Omelet emerged from the dark backyard.
Omelet’s safety vest glowed, and Abby reached up to turn on a lamp attached to her ear warmers. The brace on her arm was a bulge beneath her white sweatshirt.
They started off power walking. Abby kept one eye on the windows of her house until she turned the corner. Another early morning runner sprinted down a parallel street, setting off lights and yappy dogs, and Lia sighed. Lia crept after them, keeping close to the shadows between the streetlights.
“Maybe we’ll run a little,” Abby said, and scratched the malamute’s head. “Don’t tell Dr. Kim.”
And they were off, two ghosts racing down the streets toward the park. Lia couldn’t keep up. She wasn’t sporty, and even if she was, her footsteps would have been too loud. She didn’t need to follow Abby closely anyway. She only needed to know which paths Abby took.
She followed the slap-slap of Abby’s tennis shoes against the pavement to the rougher concrete of the park. Spindly trees crackled in the breeze, and Lia ducked into the safety of their trunks to hide, using her phone to see. She added “long path” to her notes about Abby. It was the one that didn’t cross the bridge.
Slap-slap, ah-whoo.
The path wound through the narrow section of woods at the edge of the neighborhood, making the park seem bigger and more forested than it really was. It felt like some backwoods haven miles away from Lincoln.
Slap-slap, ah-whoo.
Lia crunched through the grass at the edge of the cracked concrete. Abby and Omelet began to round the bend, and Lia no longer had to creep so much. Someone was probably following Lia and pissed they couldn’t shoot her since she was too near Abby. During Assassins, few people went out alone, but Lia didn’t mind being alone. She had grown used to the loneliness. Mark was the sort of brother who was more apt to measure the Snickers they were about to split with a ruler than actually do things with Lia, and next year, Gem would be gone. Abby was just another classmate who knew what they wanted and had the means to get it. Lia hated the envy burning in her veins.