Page 13 of If Books Could Kill
The bad news is literally everything else.
• • •
I DON’T KNOWwhere I’m going, only that I’m running faster than I thought possible. Jack hasn’t followed me out of the library, but it’s only a matter of time. A book to the face—even the absolute doorstopper I chucked at him—won’t keep him down long.
Everything is churning—legs, mind, stomach. The world jostles, city lights streaking across my vision like a long-exposure photo. I dart across Boylston Street while fragments of the night scream through my head. Thethunkof the knife missing its mark. The howling blackness of Jack’s stare. The book cover slicing his cheek.
Adrenaline tangles with all of it and suddenly, I can’t hold it off any longer. I make a beeline for the trash can on the corner and land instead on my new rock bottom: puking heartily on the sidewalk while clinging to my life by a thread.
But, hey. At least this will be immortalized forever in the pages of a book.
When I finally come up for air, dragging the back of my hand over my mouth, I look down the street and my blood turns to ice.
He’s just outside the library doors, looking for me.
He sees me.
He moves.
It almost seems pointless to run. He’s relentless and unnaturally fast. I’ll run and he’ll catch me and this book-come-true will turn into a depressing, anticlimactic short story.
But then I notice it—a white sedan at the stoplight before me. Music blaring, driver oblivious and, more importantly, not seat-belted.
I get a sudden flash of my first and last relationship, how I spent junior year of high school cuddled up to Jeremy Woods while he cuddled up toGrand Theft Auto. He never even let me play. I just sat there in his basement after school and convinced myself that Ienjoyedwatching his blocky dead-eyed avatar jump from car to car and race around pixelated California without me.
Now, with danger nipping at my heels and a fresh wave of determination soaring through me, I remember Jeremy with the briefest spark of smugness and think,My turn, asshat.
“I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M SORRY,” I chant as I run up, throw the door open, and yank the bewildered driver out with adrenaline-fueled vigor. He bellows a stream of obscenities at me and slaps the car door, but I’ve already slammed and locked it. “I really am so sorry, this is not personal,” I say through the glass, then floor it, red light be damned. His torrent of curses fades away into the night, or maybe the thundering in my ears just drowns it out.
I’m doing it. I’m escaping a murderer. It’s a thrill like no other, and I can’t help but let out a celebratory shout.
I almost wish Jack would catch up to me so I could run him over. As it is, I have to settle for imagining him shaking with rage on the sidewalk. I don’t let my gaze flick back to the rearview mirror until I’m past the library.
That’s when I realize that I’m not alone.
“Oh, shit,” I breathe.
Those words seem to shock the nice-looking, petrified man in the back seat out of his silence.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Only then do I notice the sticker on the windshield. Of all the cars to carjack, I picked an Uber.
“Okay, I realize this looks bad—”
“Let me out,” he says. It isn’t quite a plea, but not a demand either. Like he doesn’t expect it to work.
“I can’t right now, but—”
“My—my name is Grant Hoffman,” he blurts. “I’m thirty-three. I teach English and creative writing at BU. I’m an adjunct professor, I have no money. Please, I’m just trying to get home.”
I try to explain that this is all a misunderstanding, that I’m not kidnapping him, that I’m not actually the bad guy here, but it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. The panic-induced autobiography he’s narrating to me is getting louder and louder. He has a brother named Ted and a sister named Caroline. He has a cat named Arthur. He’s mildly allergic to pineapple. He wishes he traveled more.
I’m yelling over him now. “Stop shouting humanizing details at me! I’m not going to hurt you!”
He’s not hearing me at all. His monologuing seems to be morphing into some kind of back-seat therapy session. In the mirror, he looks bone-tired and hapless in a way I’m not sure is entirely my fault.
“I was supposed to be a writer!” he shouts. “I was in the gifted and talented program! I got awards and scholarships and now I just lecture hungover freshmen about story structure and stay late grading papers and then go home and open my laptop and stare at a blank white screen until I give up and bury myself in crime novels instead of actually writing anything of my own!”
