“Oh, yeah. I took a Lactaid when she wasn’t looking.” She pushed her round glasses up her nose, piled three pieces of pizza on a plate, then came back to the couch. “Thanks for letting me come over.”
“Please, I wish you lived here.”
“Yeah, if only you’d stop almost getting killed.”
Auri gaped at her. “You started it.”
“I know, right? My mom still hasn’t gotten over that whole kidnapping-and-almost-dying thing.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she said, taking a sip of her soda.
Sybil’s face lit up. “Is that Dr Pepper?”
“There’s more in the fridge. So what did you find out?”
“Oh, heck no.” Sybil jumped up, grabbed a soda out of the fridge, and hurried back. “I need more. I need all the deets. The dirt. The skinny. The 4–1–1. The lowdown.”
Auri loved it when Sybil morphed into a thesaurus. She brought out her phone to show her. “Right there. He just put it in. Himself. With Lynelle almost nearby.”
Sybil took her phone, then pressed it to her chest and fell back. “Do you know what this means?”
“Tim Redding is insanely brave?”
“It means the most popular boy in school likes you so much he put his number in your phone. Do you understand how amazing that is?”
“Not really since, you know, I’m saving myself for a better offer.”
Sybil’s dreamy gaze landed on her again. “Have you and Cruz … you know…?”
“Had sex?”
Sybil went ramrod straight. “What? No. Wait.” She leaned in and whispered, “Have you?”
“No. Not even. I mean, I did see his butt that one time.”
“Oh, my god, that is the best story ever. Tell me again.” She sat expectantly, waiting for Auri to tell her the towel story for the thousandth time.
“I am not telling you again. We have work to do.”
“Right.” She took a sip to wash down her pizza, then took out her laptop. “I’m on it.” She opened it up and angled it toward Auri. “From what I can tell after scouring Lynelle’s social accounts, she has seven cousins.”
Auri deflated. “Seven?”
“Don’t get your panties in a wad. Only three of them are girls.”
“My panties?”
“And of the three girls, only one goes to UNM.” She pointed to a girl on her screen. “Whitney Amaia.” The girl Sybil pointed to, a freshman at UNM, looked nothing like Lynelle, but they were only cousins. Whitney defined perky with blond hair, a button nose, and a sparkling smile. Lynelle was tall and slim with eyes like a bobcat. They were both supermodel material, just in very different ways. “But, and this is odd considering how kids are these days, she has yet to check in on any of her social accounts. Or share any pictures of her and her friends skiing.”
“That’s very odd.”
“Right? What did you get?”
“Okay.” Auri opened her laptop, too. “I looked it up and there actually is one ski resort in Colorado that is still open. The Arapahoe Basin. It’s open for another week so, I mean, it’s plausible.”
“Weird.” Sybil took another bite and chewed in thoughtful repose.
“Sybil, can I ask you something strange?”
“Are you kidding?” She dropped her pizza onto her plate and refocused on Auri. “You know me. I live for the strange.”
Auri scooted closer and lowered her voice. No clue why. “If someone you knew, someone you loved with all of your heart and soul, was considering taking their own life, what would you do?”
Caught off guard, Sybil sat a moment, then put her plate on the coffee table in front of them and turned toward Auri, an expression of absolute understanding and compassion on her freckled face. “He’s been through a lot, Auri.”
Auri pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and lowered her gaze.
Sybil put her hand on her arm and squeezed. “I would do everything in my power to let him know how loved he is. How adored. How … un-alone. And I would beg him to use a semicolon. Not a period.”
It took Auri a minute to get her meaning, but it was beyond perfect. Pause. Don’t end. Suddenly the whole semicolon movement made so much more sense. “Would you rat him out? Would you try to get him help? Because, I kind of did that very thing.”
Sybil frowned in thought, but she didn’t answer because her attention had been hijacked by something at the back of the house. Her gaze had strolled past Auri toward the kitchen window.
Auri looked over her shoulder. “What is it?”
Sybil pointed, the blood draining from her face. “Someone’s outside.”
“Cruz?” She started to jump up, but Sybil grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “No. Not Cruz.”
Auri stilled and tried desperately to see past the blackness of night. “Sybil, you’re scaring me.”
“I’m scaring me, too,” she whispered.
“Was it one of my grandparents?” Although why they would be at the back of the house in the dark she couldn’t fathom.
Unable to take her eyes off the window, Sybil simply shook her head.
“Jimmy Ravinder?” Auri asked hopefully. Surely it was Jimmy. He came over all the time and knocked on her bedroom window instead of the door, but again Sybil shook her head.
“Older. Bigger. Dark hair and beady eyes.”
Goose bumps raced across Auri’s skin as her brain shifted into overdrive. “Okay.” She clasped Sybil’s face and turned her gaze toward hers. It took some doing, but she finally got Sybil to quit looking at the window and focus on her. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to call 9–1–1 and we are going to make a run for it.”
Sybil’s already huge eyes went even larger, the outline as round as the wire frames on her glasses. “We’re going to run for it?”
“Yes.”
“Run for what?” she screeched, panic kicking in.
“Sybil,” Auri whispered harshly to get her attention. “For my grandparents’ house. It’s, like, twelve feet away.”
“It’s at least a hundred.”
“Okay, it’s thirty.”
“Thirty feet is plenty of room to kill and dismember someone.” Sybil’s voice grew louder with each word.
Auri rolled her eyes. They’d both seen the harsh uncertainties life had to offer, and the fear leaching into every molecule in Auri’s body proved she clearly had a touch of PTSD because of it. “Okay, whoever he is, he’s at the back of the house. If we run out the front door…”
“That’s exactly what killers want!” She shook Auri’s shoulders, trying to get her to understand. “They want us outside where we’re vulnerable. Have you never seen a slasher film?”
“You’re right,” Auri said, trying not to hyperventilate even knowing in the back of her mind Sybil could’ve seen an owl or a wolf or even a mountain lion. They lived in the wilds of New Mexico, after all. But for some reason, the thought of a man being outside her house scared her a lot more than a mountain lion. “I’ll call my granddad to come get us, okay?”