The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen (59 page)

“Watching the news.” Caitlin sniffed. “Didn’t you notice there’s like a million people in the common room?”

“I guess,” Lucas said with a shrug. “This is crazy. The most notorious mass murderer in American history was found dead just down the street. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. My mom won’t stop calling. Says she wants me to transfer to a nice safe school back home.”

Allison grunted, watching everyone carefully, looking for signs that one of them was drawing a connection between the Faceman’s death and Felix’s broken nose. The link was tenuous at best, yet Allison had been running at a heightened state of alertness ever since the story broke a few hours ago.

Caitlin sniffed again. Her nose was painfully red from a cold. “Anything new? All the stations are running the same story on a loop. ‘Faceman found dead in Portland, Oregon. Details to follow. How’s the weekend weather looking, Jim?’ I’m going to be saying that in my sleep.”

Lucas was staring at his food, not touching it. “So you don’t know?”

“Know what?” Allison asked, suddenly nervous. She bit down on the side of her lip.

“You’re not gonna believe this. Hold on.” Lucas took his phone from his pocket, tapped the screen, scrolled down and tapped it again. “Okay. Here it is. So this is from the Associated Press. According to this, the story was posted”—he checked his watch—“twenty minutes ago.”

“What’s it say?” Harper asked, annoyed that Lucas was taking so long. She hadn’t touched her food either. No one seemed very hungry.

Lucas started reading: “’The Portland police department has confirmed that the body discovered this afternoon in west Portland near the campus of Portland College is that of Nick Blair, better known by his moniker, the Faceman, a suspect in the murder of at least sixty people. The cause of Blair’s death is not known at this time. Blair’s body was found in an area of Portland known as no-man’s-land at a private residence leased to Quinn Traynor, an employee of
Hollywood Reality Bites
, a celebrity news and gossip publication headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Mr. Traynor was reportedly in Portland on assignment.’”

“
Quinn Traynor?”
Caitlin said, eyes wide. “Isn’t that the guy who—”

“Yeah,” Lucas interrupted. “My stalker. The guy we posed for a few weeks back. That might explain why our picture never ran in his paper.”

A shimmer of panic squirmed around in Allison’s gut and her feet began jittering under the table. The connection between Felix and the Faceman just got a whole lot less tenuous. She had to talk to Felix, but she couldn’t just get up and leave the table without raising suspicions.

Caitlin flushed crimson, staring at her bottle of water. If anyone brought up
The Kiss
—its official title—she blushed and looked like she was going to die from embarrassment. Normally, Allison would have had a good laugh at Caitlin’s expense. But not today.

“That’s where the Faceman died?” Harper asked. “At that guy’s house? At Quinn’s house?”

“Yeah, but it gets better.” Lucas looked down at his phone and started reading again: “’According to sources, Mr. Traynor’s parents reported him missing ten days ago after he missed his flight to Los Angeles and could not be reached. The Portland police department would not confirm such reports, but did confirm that Mr. Traynor’s whereabouts are currently not known. Mr. Traynor, twenty-seven years old, is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and a resident of Los Angeles. Anyone with information regarding Mr. Traynor’s whereabouts should contact the Portland police department immediately.’”

“Oh my God!” Harper said in a voice loud enough to snare the attention of the students at the next table over. “Should we, I don’t know, call the police… or… something?”

“And tell them what?” Allison demanded. She realized she was nail drumming on her tray and stopped herself. She didn’t like where this was going.

Harper looked around the table, clearly determined to draw Caitlin and Lucas to her side. “I don’t know. But if he went missing ten days ago, then maybe we were the last people to see him. Isn’t that something the police might want to know?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” Allison said firmly. Probably too firmly.

Harper cocked her head back and exhaled upward, fluttering a long strand of hair that had dipped beneath her eyebrow. She narrowed her eyes at Allison for a second, then went back to picking at her salad. Lucas put his phone away. He still hadn’t eaten anything.

“So Traynor was following me around for months,” Lucas said distantly, almost like he was talking to himself. “Then on maybe the same day we have our little rendezvous with him at the dead campus, he disappears. Then the Faceman gets killed at Traynor’s house.” He stared down at his plate, deep in thought.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked him. “What’s wrong?”

Allison felt a surge of panic. She didn’t think anyone could possibly piece together what had actually happened to the Faceman, but the connection to the photographer had changed everything, and the look on Lucas’s face was causing her to second-guess herself.

“I know what happened.” Lucas stood up.

Allison blinked.

“What are you talking about?” Harper said, still red-faced from her exchange with Allison. “You mean to that Quinn guy?”

Lucas snatched an apple from Caitlin’s tray and a bag of chips from Allison’s. “I gotta go.” And just like that, he headed out of the cafeteria at a jog.

Allison started to stand, then caught herself and quickly sat back down before anyone took notice. She knew where Lucas was going. But there was nothing she could do about it. Hopefully he was on the wrong track, and if he wasn’t, it was up to Felix to convince him otherwise.

“What are we supposed to do with this?” Caitlin frowned in disgust, shaking her head at the mound of meat on Lucas’s plate. “What a waste.” Then her face brightened. “I just had an amazing idea—you think I could start a program to donate uneaten food to the hungry?”

I killed a man,
Felix thought darkly.
I killed a man and I feel absolutely nothing. I. Killed. A. Man.
The words sounded so strange. So surreal.

I killed a man. I killed a man.

He skipped the song he was listening to on his phone—
Fall Out Boy’s
“My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark” seemed appropriate, and not in a good way. He hoped the next one would do a better job of calming his nerves. “Death Valley” was, improbably, worse. He lay on his bed, trying to relax, trying to make sense of what he was feeling. Only his desk lamp was on. The blinds were shut. But his cocoon of soft light and thundering guitars wasn’t helping.

I killed a man. I killed a man.

He had to kill the Faceman. He didn’t have a choice. He knew all that. But he didn’t just kill him—he’d wanted to kill him. Killing someone and wanting to kill someone are different things, right?
Intent’s important. Isn’t it?
But there was more to it than that; he’d wanted to make him suffer. But if anyone deserved to suffer, if anyone deserved to die a terrible death, it was the Faceman. But still…

I killed a man. I killed a man.

Felix didn’t feel guilt. He didn’t feel regret or remorse. He felt nothing. And this wasn’t the first time he’d experienced a complete absence of emotion. He’d felt the same dark void, the same sense of emotional nothingness when he learned that his real mom had died in a mental hospital. Even now, he didn’t feel any sadness or loss or anything else when he thought about her. Shouldn’t he be feeling something? Was something wrong with him? He touched the screen, skipping to the next song.

I killed a man. I killed a man.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door swing open and Lucas step into the room. He closed it behind him and flipped on the light. Then he turned and lobbed over an apple underhanded. Felix reached up and snatched it out of the air with one hand.

Lucas’s expression changed all at once. “What happened to your face?” he gasped.

His cocoon shattered, Felix plucked the buds from his ears, squinting against the bright overhead lights. “Huh?”

“Your face!” Lucas was pointing at him with a look of disbelief.

“Tennis racket. Remember?”

“Look in the mirror, dude.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Felix set the phone aside and went over to the wall mirror next to his closet. He looked at his reflection. His face was completely healed: no swelling, no gash across the bridge, no redness anywhere, and no dark circles under his eyes. He was shocked. He blinked. Nothing changed. Still perfectly uninjured. Still the same nose he’d been looking at his whole life. He couldn’t believe it. But he couldn’t let Lucas know that he was surprised. He quickly pulled himself together and went stone-faced.
This was completely mind-bending.
He was stunned, just as stunned as Lucas—or at least as stunned as Lucas appeared to be with his eyes going wide and his jaw slack. Then Felix had a strange realization: This wasn’t the first occasion that he’d recovered from an injury in startlingly little time. He recalled the lump on his forehead from colliding with a lamppost; the contusion on the back of his head the night he firebombed Allison’s room; the bruised solar plexus from Jimmy Clay’s ferocious blow to his stomach; the irrigation ditches Quinn Traynor’s fingernails had left on his hand; and sundry bumps and bruises and twisted ankles from playing football. None had left a mark or lingered for more than a day.

“How the hell…?” Lucas came over to get a better look at him.

“Funny, right?” Felix said lightly, smiling. He ran a finger over his nose. “It looked a lot worse than it actually was. After I got all the blood and everything off, it wasn’t that bad. And then I iced it for a while. I guess that took care of the swelling.”

Lucas shook his head, staring at him.

“It was just a bloody nose,” Felix told him. “No biggie.”

“It was broken, dude,” Lucas insisted, regaining his voice. “I’ve seen a broken nose before and yours was broken. My brother broke his in high school and he had raccoon eyes for like a month.”

Felix fell onto his bed, leaning against the wall, his legs out straight and hanging off the edge of the mattress. “I was trying to tell you guys I was fine, but you didn’t wanna believe me.”

Lucas still looked unconvinced. But he was wavering.

“What else could it be?” Felix said as he picked up his phone.

Lucas said nothing. If he was thinking about offering an alternate explanation he didn’t show any sign of it. “Did you hear where they found the Faceman?”

Felix nodded. All afternoon, he’d been obsessively refreshing his “Faceman found dead” Internet search. When he saw the article that Quinn Traynor had rented the house in no-man’s-land, he’d nearly choked on a protein bar.

“Crazy, huh?” Lucas sat down on his desk, tearing open a small bag of kettle-cooked potato chips. A Nerf football rolled off the desk, tumbling across the floor until a pile of gym clothes and a rain coat stopped its progress. Lucas didn’t even notice. He looked serious, focused. “It’s funny how Traynor goes missing the same day we see him. Don’t you think that’s kind of a strange coincidence?”

Felix shrugged. “I guess.”

“So I was thinking about it. I have a theory. Wanna hear it?”

“A theory about what?” Felix asked distractedly, fiddling with his phone.

“About what happened to the Faceman.”

“He died,” Felix said with a mouthful of apple, attempting to look relaxed. He swallowed. “Everyone knows what happened to him. It’s all over the Internet.”

Lucas was studying him carefully, skeptically. “So I have this crazy idea. I was trying to figure out if there was some kind of connection between the Faceman, Traynor, and all of us.” He aimed his gaze at Felix and added: “I know what it is.”

Felix twisted his mouth and gave his head a shake as if to say
I have no idea where you’re going with this.

“The Faceman killed teenagers,” Lucas continued, undeterred. “He didn’t kill older people. And Quinn Traynor was like twenty-seven. He was old.”

“So?”

“Traynor followed me—followed us—around for a long time, right? And ‘cause of his age, I don’t think the Faceman was after him. I think he was after one of us. Probably you, Caitlin or Allison. You guys are only children.”

“What?”
Felix exclaimed, doing his best to sound surprised. “Get outta here!” He’d been thinking about the connection as well and had drawn the exact same conclusion.

Lucas plowed on. “So this is what happened: The Faceman’s following us, and he notices we’re being followed by someone else. Traynor. So the Faceman goes to Traynor’s house to find out what he’s doing. And then he kills him. He went missing ten days ago, right? That dude’s a goner. No way they’re finding him alive. And then the Faceman somehow convinces you that I’m at Traynor’s house. So you go there. That’s how your face gets busted up. He tells you I’m dead, that he killed me. And then you kill him.” He raised his hand, pointing a finger at Felix. “
You
killed the Faceman.”

“You think
I
killed the Faceman?” Felix burst out, making a face like Lucas was spewing the most ridiculous nonsensical bullshit ever spewed in the history of humankind. Then to add insult to injury, he started laughing hysterically.

“Yeah,” Lucas said defensively. “I do.”

Felix laughed even harder. “You think I killed the Faceman? You’re crazy. How could I have done that? That guy’s a monster. He was like eight feet tall.”

“I don’t know.” Lucas tossed the bag of chips on his desk and folded his arms. “But a homeless dude goin’ all Rafael Nadal on your face is… weird.”

Still laughing, hugging his midsection, Felix said, “You think that’s weirder than me killing the Faceman? C’mon! The girls are gonna love this. Where are they? I gotta tell ‘em.” He tapped on the screen of his cell phone like he was making a call.

Lucas frowned, and ever so slowly, bit by bit, the first indication of doubt began to creep across his face. “But there was that thing with Traynor at the Old Campus. And you thought I was dead. And now the Faceman’s dead. And then your nose. And you were… you know… and…” He gave Felix a chagrined smile. “Shit. Maybe I’m losin’ it. You keep waking me up, ya know. This is exactly what happens when I don’t get enough sleep.” He let out a heavy snorting sigh. “Sorry. Some theory, huh? I’m not doing drugs. I swear.”