I Dare You by Jeff Ross

Author:Jeff Ross [Ross, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459828032
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

When the police got around to questioning me, I lied, but first of all, I’m not very good at it, and secondly, my lie was super unconvincing. I’d been running, I said. At night, on a road in the middle of nowhere, in jeans.

Even to me it sounded totally stupid, but I just couldn’t come up with anything else.

The police were busy dealing with the crime scene for a while, so I sat in the back of the cruiser and tried to figure out what other stories I could tell. The only thing close was that I had seen the video online, thought I recognized the place and gone to investigate. But still, it was an hour from my house, and I didn’t have a car. The problem with any kind of lie, though, is that you have to stick with it. I couldn’t suddenly give them something else. And I’d be admitting I was a moron who’d been duped by some stupid video. I couldn’t bring myself to do that.

Meanwhile, my phone kept binging with text messages from Jordan. They were weird: Hey, what are you up to tonight? Hit me back if yer bored.

When the cops, two of them, returned to the cruiser, they seemed to forget I was there. We drove for a while as they talked about how the accident could have been much worse and speculated on what had happened to the woman’s ability to speak.

“Is she going to be okay?” I asked.

“That depends on what okay looks like to you, I’d say,” the male officer said. The female officer just glanced at me as she drove.

“I mean, like, she’s going to live, right?”

“She’ll live,” the male officer said. He turned to me, then looked at something on his nails. The cruiser was well lit from the computer and all the stuff on the dashboard. “What were you doing out there?”

“Running,” I said, because I felt I had to dig in. And then that stuck in my head and swirled. You run, you’re a runner, run, run, run. I let that slide out of me in a stream of whistles and yelps, which turned the officer back around.

They put me in a conference room to wait for my parents to arrive. I guess I was a bit of a problem. Like, what could they do with me? As far as I knew, the woman in the accident hadn’t spoken yet. I decided I had to lock on to my lie. It was a stupid lie and I knew it, but it was all I had. I could alter it a little if I had to. I could say I’d gone out there because it was where I thought the video had been filmed. But that would only be if the video ever came up. Or if the woman began talking and spoke about what she’d seen.

I decided I’d try to keep myself flexible. Be ready to pivot, as they say in public relations.

The two officers came into the conference room and sat down.

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