“No,” Charlie says. “But I’ve gone through a lot of things I didn’t want.”
“Like what happened to your parents.”
“Yes. And Maddy.”
Charlie finally senses it—the hardening of her heart she’s been waiting for. All it took was saying Maddy’s name out loud to the man who killed her. Yet it feels nothing like what she experienced in the movies in her mind. She’s angry, yes, but also sad. So exhaustingly sad.
“Yes,” Josh says. “And your—”
A deer suddenly leaps into the road, right in front of the car, the headlights making its eyes glow.
Josh pounds the brakes, and Charlie’s jerked forward a sliver of a second before the seat belt locks and yanks her back. Her head snaps against the back of the seat. Beside her, Josh cuts the wheel to the right, trying to avoid the deer. The animal springs across the road and into the woods, but the car keeps moving. Fishtailing at first, then rotating, the back of the Grand Am whipping in an arc across the road.
When the car stops, it’s still on the road but facing the wrong direction.
They sit there a moment, the car idling, the engine pinging, the headlights pointing in the direction from which they’d just come.
“Are you okay?” Josh says.
“I think so,” Charlie says before having two thoughts, right on top of each other.
The first is: If Josh plans on killing her, why does he care if she’s okay?
The second is: The driving has stopped.
Josh unhooks his seat belt. “We might have clipped that deer. I’m going to check the front of the car.”
He pauses, waiting for Charlie to say something. But she can’t say anything because that second thought she had repeats through her head like a siren.
We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving.
A third thought joins it.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
But Charlie does.
She’s known the moment they left the diner.
Josh is going to try to kill her and she’s going to try to kill him and only one of them is going to succeed.
With her hand in her coat pocket, her fingers in a death grip around the knife, Charlie watches as Josh gives up waiting for a response and gets out of the car. He crosses in front of it, his sweatshirt bright in the glow of the headlights. When he bends down to examine the front bumper, Charlie notices wisps of steam rising from the Grand Am’s hood. It takes her a second to realize the cause of it.
The engine.
It’s still running.
Ready to drive.
To end this, right now, all she needs to do is slip behind the wheel, shift into first gear, and stomp on the gas pedal.
Charlie moves quickly.
Snapping off the seat belt.
Sliding over the center console.
Grabbing the steering wheel for leverage.
She’s halfway behind the wheel when Josh catches sight of her. In a flash, he’s beside the car, flinging open the driver’s-side door before Charlie can hit the lock. As Josh pushes his way into the car, Charlie scrambles back into the passenger seat.
Josh gazes at her with regret in his eyes.
“Listen, Charlie,” he says, “I don’t want to hurt you, okay? But I can. Hurt you, that is. I’m quite capable of it. So we can do this two ways. You can be calm about it, which is my recommendation. Or you can try to fight it and I’ll be forced to get rough, which—I reiterate—I really, really don’t want to do.”
Shrinking against the passenger-side door, Charlie tries to put her hand back in her pocket.
“Keep those hands where I can see them,” Josh says. “Don’t make this hard on yourself.”
He plunges a hand into the front pocket of his jeans. He pulls something out and tosses it to Charlie. Unwilling to catch it, Charlie recoils and lets it drop to the floor with a rattle.
She looks down and sees it’s a pair of handcuffs.
“Pick them up and put them on,” Josh says.
Charlie shakes her head, and a tear flings from her eyes. A surprise. She didn’t know she’d started crying.
“You need to be smart now,” Josh says, his tone a warning. “Pick them up.”
“I—” Charlie’s voice cracks, cut short by fear and anger and sadness. “I don’t want to.”
“Please don’t make me get rough,” Josh says. “You don’t want that. I don’t want that. So I’m going to count to three. And when I’m done, those cuffs need to be around your wrists.”
He pauses.
Then he starts to count.
“One.”
Still shaking her head and still crying, Charlie reaches for the handcuffs at her feet.
“Two.”
She scrunches down, one hand scooping up the handcuffs, the other burrowing back into her coat pocket.
“Three.”
Charlie sits up, the cuffs cold in her left hand, the knife handle hot in her right.
She doesn’t move.
“Damn it, Charlie. Just use the fucking cuffs.”
Josh lunges over the center console, moving in an instant from driver’s side to passenger side.
Charlie pulls the knife from her coat.
She closes her eyes.
Then, with a scream so loud it shakes the car windows, she thrusts the knife forward and plunges it into Josh’s stomach.
She thought it would go in easier than it does. In the movies, knives slide in smoothly, like a blade through butter. The truth is that it takes force. Teeth-gritting, grunting force to push it through Josh’s sweatshirt, then his flesh, then deeper still, into places Charlie doesn’t want to think about. She stops only when she feels blood on her hands and hears Josh moan her name.
“Charlie.”
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie opens her eyes.
She turns her head.
Slowly.
So slowly.
Her gaze inches to the left, stopping when the tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror hits the edge of her vision.
Charlie sucks in a breath, taking in the too-strong scent of pine.
“Whoa. You there, Charlie?” a voice next to her says.
Her head resumes turning. Fast now. A neck-snapping swivel that brings her face-to-face with Josh. He sits behind the wheel, looking both amused and expectant. Like he’s been waiting a long time for this moment, and now that it’s here, it pleases him.