Influenced Eva Robinson (polar express read aloud .TXT) 📖

shiver of dread danced up the back of her neck. Not only had he manipulated Stella into murdering for him, but he’d been poisoning Hannah with amphetamines. Every night she’d woken at three a.m., certain that someone had poisoned her—it turned out she had been right.

Thinking of him, she shuddered. At least she was sure that Nora would turn out nothing like him. Nora was sweet down to her marrow.

She sipped her drink, lime and sugar.

She didn’t want Nora to ever see Luke again, and now that he was being charged with accessory to murder, maybe she wouldn’t have to.

“The news has finally forgotten about us,” said Hannah. “They still talk about Luke and Stella. The Ivy League Killers. They still talk about Rowan. But us? They’re bored of us.”

“The worst I could have been charged with was improper burial of a body, obstruction of justice, and that’s not so compelling for the news.”

She smiled. “Before this, I thought being boring was the worst thing in the world. And now it seems like heaven.”

“We have disappeared for now.” He squinted into the sun. “But when your book comes out, we will reappear, right?”

“I won’t write about you. Just the fraud case, and all the ways people buy their way into college.”

“Promise me you won’t read the comments about your book when it comes out.”

“Okay. But the articles about Stella and Luke, all the money they made… I can’t stop reading them. I just had no idea.”

The reporting on the “Ivy League Murders” had quickly opened up another scandal—the hundreds of families who’d paid Stella and Luke to write them letters, to get their offspring’s names on papers. Then there were the doctored photographs of sporting victories, the ringers who took the SATs for mediocre students. On top of that, Stella had a history of securities fraud—which Hannah still didn’t understand—so she was quite the con artist.

“Stella’s former friend wrote a tell-all essay about her. They lived together in New York during graduate school, and the friend always gave her share of the rent to Stella. And Stella would just deposit it, and charm the landlord into giving her an extension. Until one day, the landlord evicted both of them.”

“And what about Rowan? Do they still write about Rowan?”

A pit opened in her stomach.

Every now and then, it would creep up on her—the slow, dark memory of Stella’s hands on Rowan’s back, shoving her over the railing.

When she thought back on it, she felt herself falling with Rowan.

In fact, she felt like she’d plummeted twice that night. The first time was when she’d realized the truth about Luke. It had been a disorienting, blind panic that had robbed her of all the ability to think clearly. It had felt like she no longer understood the rules of the world, like everything solid was dissolving around her.

“Sorry, you asked about Rowan,” she said at last. “She was everyone’s favorite target when she was alive. She was a disgusting, lying murderer, a monster. She was a drug addict, getting old. Then she wrote her confession, and it was rambling. She admitted to some of the things they’d said about her—what they all thought, that her family bought her place in Harvard. That she couldn’t really write; she plagiarized. But after she died, it was all just… forgiven. It’s a lovefest. The articles explain that she’d practically invented the role of Instagram influencer. The entire thread about her on TOI.com was deleted. There are podcasts and articles about internet bullying. Everyone loves her now, but she’s not here to see it.”

Over the past few months, one of the few things to interrupt Hannah’s misery had been texting Daniel. Back and forth, all day. He’d send pictures of what he was doing throughout the day—his breakfast of fruit, his lunch of soup or sandwiches. The sculpture he was working on. And Hannah would try to stare at those instead of reading the comments on the Ivy League Killers articles. It stopped her from thinking about Rowan too much, and the guilt for being the one who’d lived.

“Are you okay?” asked Daniel.

“I’m a lot better here than I was at my mom’s house.” She smiled. “At least you don’t tell me I’m getting fat with broken legs.”

“I would never.”

She held up her gold bracelet, and the ruddy sunlight glinted off it. She thought maybe now she understood what had made Rowan’s commenters both so obsessed and so angry.

None of them had an ounce of Rowan’s magic.

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