“Is this real?” she says.
Josh studies the back of his hand, humoring her. “Looks pretty real to me. Were you, uh—”
“At the movies?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
But she desperately hopes so. She wants to think she’s not capable of doing in real life what she’d just done in her imagination.
“How can you not know?” Josh says.
“It was—”
Scary.
So scary and detailed and confusing. Enough that Charlie feels dizzy. Gray clouds float in and out of her vision. Riding with them is a skull-filling headache. She feels like Dorothy waking at the end of The Wizard of Oz, suddenly in a sepia-tinted world that had minutes earlier been dazzling color.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she says.
And she truly doesn’t. She has no idea if she’s in reality or a movie or a memory. Maybe it’s all three, which is a perfect description of movies themselves. They’re a combination of life and fantasy and illusion that becomes a kind of shared dream. Charlie imagines this moment being projected onto a big screen, watched by all those beautiful people out there in the dark.
At this point, nothing would surprise her anymore.
The car is still stopped in the middle of the road. Through the windshield, Charlie sees trees on both sides of the car, their bare limbs skeleton-gray against the sky.
“We don’t need to stop driving,” Josh says, a tinge of hope in his voice. “We can keep going.”
“All the way to Ohio?”
“If that’s what you want, yeah.”
“Or,” Charlie says, “we could go to a movie.”
The suggestion makes Josh chuckle. “I wouldn’t mind that. Not one bit.”
“So you’re not going to try to kill me?”
“I can’t,” Josh says. “You already killed me.”
Charlie looks down at her hands. One grips a pair of handcuffs. The other is smeared with blood. On the other side of the car, Josh chokes out her name.
“Charlie.”
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie’s eyes open on their own. A willful snap.
In front of her, sprawled sideways in the driver’s seat, is Josh. His head is propped against the window, which has become fogged by his pained grunts. When he spasms, his hair makes a jellyfish pattern in the glass.
The knife remains in his side, poking out like a meat thermometer. Josh stares at it, wild-eyed and sweaty, the fingers of his left hand reaching for it.
“Charlie,” he grunts. “Help me.”
She stays frozen, save for her eyelids, which she rapidly blinks, hoping that doing so will jolt her out of this nightmarish movie in her mind. Because that’s all it is.
A movie.
It has to be.
This can’t be real.
Even though it looks that way. Blood has started to seep into Josh’s sweatshirt. A wet bloom around the knife that’s darker than the fake blood used in movies. Almost black. Like it’s not really blood at all but some kind of primordial ooze.
Seeing it makes Charlie back against the passenger door. She fumbles for the handle, finds it, pulls. The door swings open, and the Grand Am’s dome light flicks on, casting a brutal glow over the inside of the car. No longer dark, the blood now looks Technicolor bright in the dome light’s glare.
Charlie resumes blinking. Faster now. Her eyelids working in a way that makes everything flicker like a projector not running at full speed. She slides out of the car backward, dropping through the door, landing on the road with a burst of pain in her lower back.
She crawls away from the car, scuttling backward like a crab. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be anywhere else. Any time else. She wants to wake and find herself in a whole other existence. One without Josh and that car and that blood.
When thinking about stabbing Josh, she didn’t know how she’d feel if she actually went through with it. Victorious, maybe. Or sated. Or proud.
Instead, she just feels scared.
But it’s a strange kind of fear.
She’s no longer scared about what might happen to her. She’s scared about what she’s done.
Charlie climbs to her feet.
She takes one last look at the Grand Am.
Then she begins to run.
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
He removes the knife from his gut in one quick yank. Better that than trying to pull it out little by little, which hurts more than helps. And there’s plenty of pain already. The moment air hits the stab wound, a fresh bolt of agony pulses through him and there’s nothing to do but yell.
When it’s over and the boiling pain lowers to a more manageable simmer, he takes a few deep breaths and checks the damage. The first thing he notices—because it’s impossible to miss—is the blood. The side where Charlie stabbed him is crimson from hip to armpit. He doesn’t know if it’s because his sweatshirt is extra absorbent or if he’s really lost that much blood. Either way, the sight of it makes him dizzy.
It takes some effort to lift the sweatshirt to see the actual knife wound. The blood-soaked fabric sticks to his skin like glue. He considers leaving it like that. A makeshift bandage. But he’s been stabbed before, and he knows that doing nothing will lead to more blood loss, then infection, then death.
Like it or not, this bitch needs to be stitched.
So he pulls up the sweatshirt the same way he pulled out the knife—in one swift motion. Riding out another blast of pain, he looks down and sees an inch-long slice on the left side of his abdomen.
It’s good that the knife was small.
It’s bad that it was long.
The wound it left behind is deep enough to make him worry that the knife could have hit a major organ or severed some nerves, although if that were the case, he thinks he’d be in more pain. Or dead. And since he’s alive and not paralyzed in agony, he assumes he got lucky.
He reaches under the driver’s seat, his left hand fumbling for the first-aid kit he keeps there in case of emergencies. Each movement prompts a fresh wave of pain that makes him curse everything about this night.
It was supposed to be easy. Now it’s just a shitshow. And he knows exactly who to blame.
Charlie.
He wasn’t lying when he said he liked talking to her. He can’t remember the last time he enjoyed being in someone’s company. People, generally speaking, suck. It’s why he does what he does. Most human beings can’t stop being selfish, greedy, piggish assholes. And it’s his job to make sure they pay for that.