Now You See Her Read Free Page A

brothers or sisters or close relatives, they had been more than best friends to me. They had been the only family I had left.
    The trip down here had actually been Maureen’s idea. She knew the anniversary of my mom’s passing was approaching, and she wanted to cheer me up.
    It was all too much. The pain of the betrayal I’d just witnessed hit me again like a wrecking ball. I began crying as I ran. Tears mixed with the sweat that began to drip off my face and onto the sandy blacktop and the tops of my bare feet.
    I dropped to my knees onto the sand when I arrived at the beach. It was empty, just me and the dark ocean and the star-filled sky. Staring out at the black water, I remembered when I’d almost drowned at an Ocean City beach when I was nine. I’d been caught by a riptide, but my dad had saved me.
    I breathed the night air in and out and listened to the lap of the waves, feeling more alone and desperate than I ever had in my entire life.
    There was no one at all to save me now.
    About twenty feet to the right beside me, I noticed a fat, concrete buoy-shaped marker.
    SOUTHERNMOST POINT, CONTINENTAL U.S.A., was painted on it. 90 MILES TO CUBA .
    I was standing, soul wrecked, about to take a shot at swimming those ninety miles, when I stuck my hand into the pocket of my shorts and realized something fascinating.
    I had Alex’s car keys.
    The keys to his Z28 Chevy Camaro, which had brought us down here from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He’d gotten his “baby,” as he called it, from sweating four summers at his dad’s landscaping business. I’d sweated four years, trying to get his numb jock skull through premed, so the sudden idea of taking the sleek red car out for a little spin instead of going for a swim seemed eminently logical. To my shattered heart, it seemed downright brilliant.
    I ran even faster back to the hotel parking lot. After I sailed one of Whore-reen’s bags out the window, I gunned the Z28’s engine like I had pole position at the Indy 500.
    Then I did what any self-respecting, suicidal, recently orphaned, currently being-cheated-on twenty-one-year-old girl would do.
    I neutral-dropped my boyfriend’s Camaro out of the lot in a cloud of rubber smoke.

Chapter 4
    AFTER A FEW FISHTAILING TURNS, I found an open road next to a beach and drove the Camaro properly—namely, like I’d stolen it. I didn’t drop the hammer. I very nearly busted it through the meticulously vacuumed floor.
    Its 5.7-liter V8 engine roared hungrily, demonically, as it rose in pitch, the intro to a heavy metal song.
    “Crazy Train,” I thought as I slammed back into my seat. Or was it “Highway to Hell”?
    Parked cars that I blurred past started making that zip zip zip zip NASCAR sound.
    I tried to decide what I wanted to wreck more at that moment: Alex’s pride and joy or myself. The notion of ending the utter silliness of my bad-luck life seemed very tempting. From where I was sitting without a seat belt, life was pain, and I was seriously thinking about ending mine as visibly and messily as possible.
    The Z28’s speedometer was hitting three figures, its rear end starting to rise like an airplane on takeoff, when I caught some movement on the dark beach to my right.
    I squinted at the motion through the windshield. It was a blur, something small running. Was it a rabbit?
    No, I realized as I got closer very quickly. It was a dog, a collie with a red bandanna around its neck. I recognized the belly-flopping dog from the bar at the exact moment it changed course, like a guided missile, and shot out into the beach road.
    Directly in front of the car.
    Immediately, instinctually, I slammed on the brakes and spun the steering wheel to the right, trying to avoid it. A high howl of evaporating tire rubber filled the car as the Z28’s rear end fishtailed to the left like it was on ice. I tried to straighten it, but I must have overcompensated because the car suddenly reversed momentum and went into a