One Night. No Alibis

The house breathed with noise. Music pushed through the walls of Logan Hayes's place like something alive, spilling out into the warm Saturday night and drifting down the quiet suburban street. Inside, the lights were low in the way of parties designed to make people feel looser than they were, and every surface held a cup or a phone or a leaning body. Ava Monroe stood near the kitchen doorway with a drink she hadn't touched, watching. That was what Ava did best. She watched. Logan was in the center of the living room the way he always was, the way gravity organized itself around him without him seeming to try. He was laughing at something Zach Turner had said, throwing his head back, hand on someone's shoulder. Zach stood beside him gesturing wildly, the story growing bigger with each movement, and the small crowd around them leaned in because that was what you did when Zach performed. You leaned in. You laughed on cue. Ava had seen it enough times to know the rhythms. Riley appeared at her elbow with the slightly flushed look she always got thirty minutes into any social event. 'You're doing the statue thing again,' Riley said. 'I'm just standing here.' 'You're standing here like you're taking notes.' Riley bumped her shoulder gently. 'It's a party, Ava. You're allowed to exist in it.' Ava smiled but didn't move from the doorway. She wasn't uncomfortable exactly. She had simply learned, a long time ago, that the edges of a room held more information than the center. Caleb Foster was near the back wall with a beer he kept rotating in his hands, the label half-peeled off from the nervous picking of his thumb. He was watching the room too, but differently, in the way of someone waiting for something specific. Ava had noticed that about Caleb before: he always seemed to be waiting. And then there was Sienna. Sienna Cross arrived fashionably late, as was her way, in a white top and dark jeans, her hair down and her smile practiced and precise. The room noticed her without meaning to. That was Sienna's particular talent. She walked in like she owned the geography of any place she entered, but tonight there was something slightly off about the performance. Ava felt it before she could name it. Sienna moved through the party with her usual ease, stopping to hug people, laughing at the right moments, accepting a drink from someone. But her eyes kept going to her phone. She would glance at the screen, expression shifting for just a fraction of a second, and then the smile would reassemble itself and she would turn back to whoever was speaking. Ava counted four times in the first half hour. 'She okay?' Ava asked Riley quietly. Riley looked over. 'Sienna? She looks fine. She always looks fine.' That was the thing about Sienna. She always looked fine. Around eleven, Ava drifted toward the hallway to get away from the density of bodies near the speakers. She nearly walked into Sienna coming out of the small room off the corridor, the one people used for coats. Sienna's face was tight, phone pressed to her ear, and she held up a finger as if to say one moment, then turned away and kept talking in a low, clipped voice. Ava stood still. She didn't mean to listen. But the hallway was narrow. 'I told you I would handle it,' Sienna said. 'You don't get to threaten me. Not after everything.' A pause. 'Try it and see what happens.' Then the call ended and Sienna turned around, and for just a moment, her face was bare of everything. No performance, no composure. Just a girl who looked frightened and furious in equal measure. Then she saw Ava and the mask went back on instantly. 'Hey.' Sienna's voice was light and unbothered. 'Didn't see you there.' 'Sorry, I was just heading to get water.' 'Cool.' Sienna moved past her and back into the party without another word, and Ava watched her go, noting the way her shoulders stayed rigid even as she smiled at the next person who greeted her. Twenty minutes later, Sienna was gone. Ava noticed, as she noticed most things, without making a production of it. One moment Sienna was there near the fireplace, and then she wasn't. Nobody else seemed to track it. Logan was still holding court. Zach had graduated to attempting a card trick. Riley was laughing with someone from their history class. Caleb stood at the back and picked at his bottle. Ava went to the door and opened it, but the street outside was empty and dark and quiet, and Sienna was nowhere in it. She went back inside and told herself it was nothing. The sirens came two hours later. Not from far away, not the distant kind you barely register. These were close and getting closer, and then they stopped, and someone's phone buzzed, and then another, and the party did what parties do when disaster cuts through the noise. It went very, very quiet. The news moved through the room in fragments. A girl found in the park three blocks over. Someone from the school. And then a name, passed from phone to phone, from whisper to whisper. Sienna Cross. Ava stood in the middle of the room and felt the party collapse around her in slow motion, and she thought about the phone call in the hallway, and Sienna's bare, frightened face, and the way she had walked out alone into the night.