Chapter 1: Buzzer Beater
Chloe's POV
I had Carter Sterling pinned against the red brick wall behind the haunted house at the Sterling theme park and kissed him for a full ten seconds. Not because I wanted to.
The countdown had one notch left on it. I grabbed a fistful of his coat, went up on my toes, and shoved him flat against the bricks. Fifty meters off, the carousel was grinding out a pop song that had gone sour, and somebody in the haunted house was screaming about something that had nothing to do with us.
The rules were carved in stone: deep kiss, lip and tongue, ten seconds minimum, no half-assing it.
I counted. One. Two. He didn't push me off, didn't turn his head, didn't even shift his weight — hands loose at his sides like, your call. Seven. Eight. At nine, my tongue caught his, and the root of it went numb. Ten.
I stepped back. He looked at me for a second, then raised his thumb and slowly wiped the matcha foam off the corner of my mouth, so unhurried it was almost rude.
"Chloe." He let the end of it trail. "You really do enjoy taking advantage of me."
I didn't look at him, but I could feel that stare sitting on the side of my face, and I shrank back half a step without meaning to. He followed and took back the distance I'd just bought, and dropped his voice.
"That was a tongue kiss. So what happens next time?"
A hand with long, clean knuckles closed around my wrist and pressed my palm flat against his stomach, just above the belt.
"Or do I undo your belt next time, mm?"
My ears went hot and numb. I pulled my hand back, shoved him hard, and put two steps between us.
"Carter Sterling, you're a creep."
He had a full head on me and the whole back of his neck had gone red, but his face kept that look of a man nobody has ever owed money to, and the corner of his mouth was curled anyway.
"Take advantage of me like that again, and I won't mind getting us a hotel room and being completely honest with you."
Echo: [Dare eleven complete. Congratulations, Chloe.]
The voice dropped into my head easily and unbothered, like a guy calling a game he already knew the score of. I'll admit my skin is a good deal thicker now than it was a week ago.
A week ago, I died. Twenty-one years old, senior year, Halloween.
The Theta basement, dry ice rolling along the floor and piling up ankle-high so everybody's sneakers looked like they were standing in weather. The lights pressed down to nothing, somebody's speaker clipping the whole time. A girl I barely knew pressed an iced matcha latte into my hand — clear cup, green straw, Chloe B. written on the side in marker. I got halfway through it before the sweetness suddenly went far away, and the room went soft at the edges and folded up.
Then I opened my eyes in my dorm bed in Whitlock Hall, freshman year, spring semester, Monday morning, my roommate's alarm still forty minutes out. The maples outside were bare. The radiator was doing its thing. On the nightstand sat the lamp I wouldn't buy until sophomore year.
There was a voice in my head that wasn't mine. It called itself Echo, and it said I was already bound to it.
The rules were short. One hundred dares, all of them pointed at the same person. Finish them and the countdown clears. Refuse one, or run out the clock, and you're erased where you stand. No customer service, no appeals, no five more minutes.
The person was Carter Sterling.
Which was a problem.
Freshman year, I wrapped a pink Ferris wheel music box and rewrote the card four times — he'd just transferred in, nobody in the whole grade would talk to him, and I figured that was a fixable problem. Serena Prescott came out of the parking lot with three girls behind her and put one heel through the box and into the mud.
"Cute. Very Townie of you," she said.
Carter stood fifteen feet away with his hands in his pockets and didn't say one word.
Junior year, I worked three months of shifts and bought him a record player for his birthday. Three weeks later, that machine was on somebody else's shelf in somebody else's dorm. No note, no explanation. From that day on I was sure of it: this person can toss away what somebody else meant by a thing without even noticing.
So the whole school knew we couldn't stand in the same room. Yesterday at lunch, I announced in front of four witnesses that I would rather be single for the rest of my life than have anything with Carter Sterling that exceeded the radius of the Earth.
And today Echo told me to kiss him, or die.
I was also sitting on a guess I hadn't said out loud. I suspected he was the one who poisoned me.
The far row of carrels on the library's fourth floor, where the elevator doesn't reach and nobody comes. I opened my cross-examination in my mind.
[Is Carter Sterling the one who killed me?]
Echo: [Not him. Friendly reminder: you have only three chances to name the killer. You just wasted one. Remaining: two.]
Not an ounce of warmth in it. I told it so. It ignored me.
Echo: [Chloe, five dares refreshed. Do try to keep up.]
Echo: [Dare one: after the basketball game, with the arena still full, kiss Carter Sterling in front of everyone.]
Echo: [Dare two: in your sweetest, most cloying voice, tell him, "Babe… your lips taste like candy."]
Echo: [Dare three: tonight at ten o'clock sharp, text him, "Hi hubby, miss you already." No more than thirty seconds off.]
Echo: [Dare four: during your dad's BIO 101 lecture, lace your fingers through his for five minutes.]
Echo: [Dare five: share that 18+ webcomic with him.]
Echo: [A little welcome gift, to lower the host's expectations in advance — skipping a dare means deletion.]
I pinched the bridge of my nose hard enough to see spots and nearly went down right there at the desk.
The Briarwood Cup final. Four thousand–plus people packed into the arena and not one of them sitting. White and blue across the whole bowl, every eye stuck on that number 20 jersey. Under the lights, his skin was offensively pale, hair a mess, features cut deep, and his entire face said this game had nothing to do with him. The jersey hung loose, and the second he jumped, it wasn't loose anymore.
At the head of the cheer squad, Rachel Alden stood in white Lululemon with a bottle of electrolyte water in her hand, gaze stuck on that number 20 with the devotion of a nature documentary. "CARTER! CARTER! CARTER!" She turned, saw me, and her smile stalled half a beat. One puzzled look, and she thought nothing more of it.
Last 2.1 seconds. He went up through two defenders, the ball left his hand, the horn went, nothing but net.
98–84. The building went off.
Echo: [Dare one. Five minutes on the clock. Don't dawdle.]
Girls were already pouring onto the floor with water bottles. It was, without question, the most undignified crowd I have ever shoved through — three shots to the shoulder, my hood yanked clean off my head.
He spotted me first. He can always pick out that pale blue tiered dress in a crowd. Heads turned one after another around us, and two of his teammates were mid-drink and just let the bottles hang there, water running down their chins, nobody bothering to fix it — by Briarwood's informal consensus, the girl who'd just shoved through an entire row of people was better looking than the cheer captain.
He looked down at me and pulled up one corner of his mouth. "Well, well. The little try-hard finally left the library?"
My lips moved. Nothing came out.
He tipped his head to the side, eyes creased, wearing that face you want to throw a shoe at. "Or did you come here just to watch me?"
The oooooh went up all at once, whistles pressing in from every direction, phones already raised into a field of periscopes.
