Reeve | POV
It started as a joke.
Junior year, first week, Marcus Tell spilled an entire tray of food on Eli in the cafeteria — not accidentally, deliberately, the kind of move that gets laughs from the right table — and I said to Eli afterward, "Give it two weeks, something bad happens to Marcus."
Something bad happened to Marcus in eleven days. His older brother got picked up for something. Family chaos. Marcus stopped showing up.
I said, "Called it," and we both laughed and moved on.
That was the joke. The Eli Curse, I called it sometimes. Don't mess with Eli Voss unless you want the universe to correct you. We thought it was funny. The kind of dark humor that only works if you don't look at it directly.
I looked at it directly on a Thursday night in October.
And it stopped being funny immediately.
I don't know what made me sit down with the notebook. Some gathering pressure, maybe — the Devon thing, mostly, but also smaller accumulations I'd been carrying without realizing how heavy they'd gotten. I found a blank notebook under my bed, the spiral kind, and I opened it to the first page and I wrote the date at the top.
Then I started writing names.
I thought I had maybe seven. Enough to be a weird pattern, not enough to be a verdict.
I got to twelve before I slowed down.
Twelve names. Twelve events. Every single one connected to someone who had hurt Eli, embarrassed Eli, threatened Eli, or simply gotten too close to Eli in the wrong way.
My palms went damp somewhere around name eight. By twelve I had to put the pen down and flex my hand open just to make sure it still worked right.
Devon Cross. That one I didn't need to write much about. Dead. Fire escape, official verdict. The same Devon who'd spent three weeks dismantling Eli's reputation with a rumor campaign that almost ended with an expulsion. Gone now — permanently, completely, no longer a problem.
The way all of them stopped being problems.
I wrote everything I remembered and moved to the next name.
Coach Briard. Track coach, sophomore year. Benched Eli for four games over what Briard called "attitude issues" — which, if you knew Eli, was genuinely laughable. Eli had the attitude of a library. Three weeks after the benching, an anonymous tip reached the athletic board. Something about Briard's conduct with another player two seasons prior. Briard denied it. Didn't matter. He was gone before the semester ended, career essentially finished, the kind of professional damage you don't come back from.
Eli never found out who made the call. None of us did.
I wrote the name. Circled the outcome.
Next.
A boy named Jordan Fisk. Freshman year. He and two others jumped Eli near the east parking lot — not random, targeted, the kind of thing someone plans. Eli came home with a split lip and a broken phone and wouldn't tell his mom what happened. Three weeks later, security footage appeared. Nobody knew where it came from — the camera covering that section of parking lot had supposedly been broken for months. The footage was clean, clear, and completely damning. Jordan Fisk was expelled. His friends got suspended and transferred out quietly.
I remembered being relieved at the time. I remembered thinking justice had worked itself out.
I wrote it down. My handwriting was getting smaller. I did that when I was trying to be precise.
Last one I wrote in detail.
A girl named Sophie Crane. She found out about Eli's dad — about how he'd just stopped coming home one day when we were fourteen, no real explanation, no goodbye, just absence — and she made it a joke. Publicly. The kind of comment that lands in a full hallway with maximum damage. Eli went white and didn't say a word and walked away, which was worse than if he'd cried.
Sophie Crane withdrew from Hartwell six weeks later. Mid-semester. No explanation that reached anyone I knew. Just gone, same as the others. Her friends said she'd had some kind of breakdown, but none of them knew the details and none of them seemed eager to find them.
Gone.
I put my pen down and looked at the list.
Twelve names. Twelve outcomes. Every single one of them cleanly, quietly removed from Eli's life after causing him harm. No mess. No drama. No fingerprints.
The pattern was so clean it had a shape. You could feel the intelligence in it — the patience, the precision. This wasn't luck. Luck was scattered and random and sometimes missed. This never missed.
Someone was doing this.
Had been doing this for years.
Someone who was always close enough to know when Eli was hurting. Someone with access to information. Someone calm enough to plan, patient enough to wait, careful enough to leave nothing traceable.
I picked up the pen.
I flipped to a fresh page.
I wrote one name at the top, pressed hard enough that the letters showed through to the page underneath.
SABLE LORNE.
I stared at it. My chest felt tight in a specific way — not quite fear, not yet, more like the feeling right before fear when your body knows something your brain is still catching up to.
I drew a circle around the name.
Then I heard it.
A knock.
Sharp. Deliberate. Three times.
I turned toward the window.
My bedroom window. Second floor.
The curtain was closed. Nothing visible through it. No shadow, no shape — just the knock sitting in the silence of my room like it had always been there, waiting for me to finish the list before announcing itself.
I did not move for a long time.
The house was completely quiet below me.
I looked at the name on the page.
I looked at the window.
Twelve names. Twelve gone people. And now, on a second-floor window with no roof below it and no tree close enough to reach —
Three knocks.