Don't Look Behind You (Don't Look Series Book 1) by Emily Kazmierski (summer reads .txt) 📗

Mirror Museum a couple of summers ago. There were rooms filled with mirrors in all shapes and sizes. One room had the glass panes suspended from clear wires that made them appear to be floating in empty air. Another was filled with cracked and broken mirrors that distorted your reflection in strange ways. My favorite had been the small, octagonal mirror room that, when I stepped inside, made hundreds of copies of me appear, grinning from ear to ear and making silly faces. In that moment, I had felt infinite. Powerful. Not insignificant and diminished like I usually did.

My question wasn’t much more than a whispered plea. “The Chans?” The family who ran the museum.

Aunt Karen’s eyes didn’t leave mine as she nods her head.

This time I did stumble, falling back into the chair I’d just vacated.

My guardian had reached over and put a tentative hand on my shoulder. “If there’s anything you can remember that might be useful, just let me know.”

I’d nodded, unable to speak.

Another family had been shattered, and I couldn’t help feeling that it was my fault, although I couldn’t work out how. Why?

I swallow, bringing my focus back to the sheets of papers spread out over the library table. There has to be something here I can use. Something I can give to the police they’ve not already thought of and discarded as a dead end.

“I’m hungry. Want something from the vending machines?” Noah pushes to a stand and settles his gaze on me.

My stomach feels like an empty pit because I haven’t eaten anything since Aunt Karen’s news delivered over breakfast. I’m too worried the knot of nerves at the base of my spine will push any food right back up. By now I’m starving. “Yeah, okay.”

Noah smiles and heads toward the front of the library where there’s a water fountain and a vending machine.

When he’s gone, I look down at the paper in my hands. It’s a transcript of the messages the Mayday Killer has left behind at each of his crime scenes. His calling card. His crimes may be unique in their motivation, but his messages aren’t. They’re all bastardizations of famous poems. I read them slowly, trying to place each one. I guess I should have paid more attention in English class.

Wait.

All of these quotes are familiar.

Opening my social media app, I scroll through until I find one of the girls I follow—CuteAshleeXOXO. All of her posts are blurry nature images with famous quotes superimposed over top. I like them, usually. They’re… uplifting. But right now I can’t help but notice that the quotes are word for word the same as the ones the Mayday Killer has used. I start typing them into the search engine to find the originals. The social media posts contain some of the same misspellings as the killer’s leavings.

My hand starts shaking as I scroll through the girl’s older posts. I nearly drop my phone when I see what she posted the day Before. “Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”

My stomach contracts, sending me reeling out of my chair toward the bathroom, free hand clapped over my mouth to keep my empty stomach from puking bile all over the library floor.

I run headlong into Noah, who drops the snacks he was carrying in surprise. He tries to steady me with light hands on my shoulders. “You okay?”

Frantic, I push him away and sprint to the bathroom, letting the door slam shut behind me. I make it as far as the sink before acid climbs my throat and comes spewing out between my lips. My entire body writhes and heaves until my stomach is completely and totally empty.

Back in May. The crime scene where the Mayday Killer was interrupted before he could finish scrawling his macabre message on a wall with his victims’ blood. The words he did manage to get down before he fled from the house, taking his bloody knife with him? Never to suffer would never to…

On a shocked gasp, I scroll back through my social. Pausing on the photos I posed of myself with Nate and Kate that summer at camp. To the photos of me with my family at the Mirror Museum.

The killer’s getting ideas for victims from my posts on social media.

My entire body heaves again and again until I’m wrung out and dry as a desert.

There’s a knock on the bathroom door, and then Noah’s voice. “Megan? You okay?”

Wiping my mouth with a dry paper towel, I take in a few mouthfuls of air. “I’m okay,” I croak.

“That wasn’t reassuring. Can you come out? Do you need me to call someone? Your aunt?”

“Gimme a minute,” I say, trying to speak confidently. It doesn’t really work, but Noah says he’ll be right outside whenever I’m ready. He doesn’t mention the snacks he snagged for us, which is good because if I think about food too hard right now, I’m liable to start heaving again.

Straightening, I take a couple of careful breaths. My stomach stills. Okay. Here I go. Lifting my phone up to my eyes, I scroll to the bottom of CuteAshleeXOSO’s feed. The very first quote was posted the day before the Mayday Killer’s first victims were found. The quotes match. Word for word.

Either Ashlee inspired a serial killer’s wannabe artistic bent, or…

I knew he was following me, even when everyone thought I was delusional. What if, to infiltrate my life even further, he created a profile on social media and posed as a cute teenage girl named Ashlee?

Taking a screenshot of one of Ashlee’s few selfies, I do a reverse image search. My entire body flashes hot when the results come up. Her photos—they’re stolen from a stock site. If I look closely I can see the watermarks even through the blurring filter whoever posted these used to mask them.

Another heave wells up from the base of my stomach, and I clamp my mouth shut. I’ve been chatting with Ashlee online for months. And the entire