One by One

by Freida McFadden

Fine, whatever. As long as he doesn’t ask me to go with him. If the two of us go out on a boat into the middle of the lake, I have a bad feeling only one of us will come back alive.

Something I never told Noah is that between the two cute guys who lived next door to me during my junior year, Jack was the one I had been hoping would ask me out.

Heat causes molecules to disperse, so each breath takes in less oxygen.

“This is going to be a fantastic week. I’m going to make you forget all about him.”

And even though everyone is waiting for us back at the car, I let him kiss me again.

Not only am I cheating on my husband, but I’m doing it with his best friend.

So for the last four months, we’ve been sneaking off together.

I’m falling in love with Jack. And I think he feels the same way about me.

“That’s what my client’s husband did. He was a plastic surgeon too.”

“So nobody has a problem with making kids believe that a morbidly obese man comes down the chimney with a giant bag of presents? Nobody else is troubled by that?”

But when she finally does speak, what she says surprises me: “I saw you and Jack at the gas station.”

Belladonna berries look very much like blueberries. They’re shiny black, about half an inch in size, and they’re sweet. The berries are highly toxic. They cause delirium and hallucinations, and they disrupt the body’s ability to regulate its sweating, heart rate, and breathing. Eventually, seizures and cardiovascular failure will occur. Early humans made poisonous arrows using belladonna. In an

adult, fifteen to twenty berries are enough to kill you. A child could die from two or three.

He dug around for another few seconds, then pulled out a Bulls baseball cap. The angry red bull stared at me from the jet black cap. “Here you go, sport.”

She told me once that she never wanted to have me.

Thanks to my mom, I know everything there is to know about poison berries.

“Could be elderberry,” Jack says.

Noah has his phone in his hand. My eyes light up when I notice he has a single bar. But then he shakes his head. “No service,” he says.

We’re supposed to be lying in the Jacuzzi now with a glass of bubbly. Instead, we’re lost in the woods and Lindsay is dead. Dead!

He’s quiet for a moment. “I’m really glad you didn’t eat any of those berries.”

The water tastes a little chalky, but I could drink a gallon of it at this point.

I hear the sharp inhale of my mother’s breath. She knew what I wanted to do. And if my father hadn’t stopped me, I would’ve done it.

“I’m just trying to be polite here. I don’t have the time to plan a big sad event for some girl I was going to break up with in a few weeks anyway.”

planned this whole thing. This is his revenge. He set us up. He’s been killing us one by one.

Unless he set it all up at the beginning. He gave poor Lindsay the meet-cute he knew she’d been hoping for, allowing this handsome man to infiltrate our lives. He even knew what zodiac sign Warner needed to be. It was too easy.

“It’s so good to finally meet you, Lindsay!” she cried.

was my first true friend. She loved me in a way my parents never did.

We agreed that my former friends deserved to be taught a lesson. Like me, this wasn’t his first rodeo.

“You had it all. You had a great life with a perfect husband. If I knew you were going to screw it up, I never would’ve bothered to get rid of Ted.”

She was passionate about right and wrong, especially when it came to the opposite sex.

wanted to do whatever it took to get you back. I never asked Noah why he had that Swiss Army knife in his pocket. Or why he stole it back from the drawer. It seemed so unimportant after the fact. And maybe I didn’t want to hear the answer.

Sometimes it’s better not to know.

It’s ironic because I was the one who gave him that knife.

was Warner’s idea to put the magnet in Noah’s sweatshirt,

Jack suspected it, and that’s why he believed his best friend was trying to keep them lost in the woods for his own nefarious purposes.