“I’ve never met someone like me, but when I do, eventually, I think it will be like two wolves meeting in the night, sniffing and recognizing a fellow hunter.”
Meet Chloe Sevre. Freshman honor student. Average-seeming, legging-wearing, hot girl next door…and diagnosed psychopath with an IQ of 135. Her hobbies include yogalates, frat parties, and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her.
Now Chloe and six other students at John Adams College are part of an unusual clinical study that includes smartwatches to track their moods and movements, in exchange for free tuition. The study, led by a renowned psychiatrist, has inadvertently brought together some of the most dangerous minds who feel no guilt or fear. When one of the participants is found murdered, it becomes obvious they’re all in danger. Chloe goes from hunter to prey, and joins forces with two other psychopaths in the program to discover why they’re being targeted – if they could only trust each other.
Wildly
entertaining with compelling characters and a vividly conjured campus setting,
NEVER SAW ME COMING will keep you up all night, pinned to the page, wondering
why you’re rooting for a would-be killer.
Buy Links:
BookShop.org | Harlequin | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
One
Day 60
As soon as the door to my new dorm room
closed, I went to the window, scanning across the quad for him. It wasn’t like there
was any possibility he would just happen to be out there among the families
lugging moving boxes or the handful of students sprawled in the grass.
But there! Ahead of dirty-blond waves.
Will. My mouth opened. Then the person turned and I saw it was only a girl with
an unfortunate haircut. Seriously, you’d think she’d put in more of an effort
for move-in day.
I turned and faced my empty dorm room with
its sad linoleum floors, mentally going through my to-do list. 1. Get rid of
Mom. Check. She had already left and was probably speeding up the I-95, popping
open a bottle of champagne now that she was finally rid of me. 2. Claim the
most advantageous space before my roommate, Yessica, arrived. 3. Make six to
eight friends before 4. My mandatory check-in appointment at the psychology
department. 5. Find Will.
We had a double with two bedrooms, one
clearly larger than the other. While my normal instinct was to claim the larger
one, I immediately saw the problem with that. The larger bedroom had windows
that overlooked the quad. What if I wanted to crawl in or out of my window in
the middle of the night? People will record anything even remotely interesting
on their phones these days, and I could be easily seen from the other dorms and
academic halls that lined the quad—too much of an audience for my liking.
I took the smaller room. My generosity
would score me points with my new roomie, but more importantly, the room had a
view of the brick wall of the building next to us and there was a metal fire
escape attached directly to the window. Easy access in and out of my room
without detection—perfect. I dumped some of my boxes into the room and made the
bed, placing my stuffed plushie whale on top to clearly stake my claim. The
voices inside the dorm were calling me and I had to establish myself quickly.
I gave myself a brief once-over before
leaving the room, reapplying my lip gloss and fixing my hair. The hair had to
be just right—a loose, effortless side French braid that actually wasn’t
effortless. You have to be the kind of girl who “doesn’t put any effort in” but
naturally rolls out of bed looking like a horny but somehow demure starlet. If
you meet some standard of objective attractiveness, people think you’re better
than you actually are—smarter, more interesting, worthier of existing. Combined
with the right personality, this can be powerful.
Brewser had one long hallway with rooms
shooting off on either side. I peeked into the room next door where two
brunettes were wrestling a duvet out of a plastic package. “Hi!” I chirped.
“I’m Chloe!” I could be whatever they wanted me to be. A fun girl, a potential
best friend, someone to tell secrets to over midnight snacks. This type of
socializing was just me playing little roles for a few moments, but when I need
to go all in, I can. I can make myself younger when I want to, opting or looser
clothes that hide my body and making my eyes shiny with dumbness—a whole
costume of innocence. I can look older with makeup and carefully selected
clothes, showing skin when necessary. It’s easy because people tend to see what
they want to.
I went door to door. Room 202. “Omigod I
love your hair,” I said to a bubbly blonde I suspect will end up popular.
Room 206. “You’re not brothers, are you?” I
said shyly to two boys on the crew team (nice bodies but babyfaces—not my
taste). They grinned at me, looked at my boobs, and each vied to say something
clever. Neither was clever.
Room 212 was a pair of awkward girls. I was
friendly to them but didn’t linger long because I knew they would never be key
players.
While I met a few more people, I was
simultaneously assessing who seemed like they were going to be part of Greek
life. Will was in a frat—SAE—and one of my first orders of business was to get
in with that frat. The crew boys were already in the hallway loudly talking
about going out to a club that night. That was good—an outing, and the crew
boys seemed like they would be the type to pledge a frat. “I love dancing,” I
said to what’s-his-name, the taller of the two, fingering the end of my braid.
“It’s the best way to get to know people.” He smiled down at me, his eyes
crinkling. If high school taught me anything, it’s that social life is a game
that revolves around navigating hierarchies. Be someone guys want to fuck or
you will be invisible to them. Be someone the girls want firmly tucked into
their inner circles, whether as friend or enemy or die the death of being
totally irrelevant.
Even from our brief interactions, I could
tell no one in this dorm was in my program. I’ve never met someone like me, but
when I do eventually, I think it will be like two wolves meeting in the night,
sniffing and recognizing a fellow hunter. But I doubt they would put two of us
in the same dorm—there were only seven and they probably had to spread us out
to prevent a war from breaking out.
I had to go then, leaving my new friends
behind, to check in with the program.
The psychology department was diagonally
across the quad, visible from the windows of the common area of my room. The
quad was lush grass crisscrossed with brick paths, with each brick having the
name of an alumnus engraved into it—John Smith, class of ’03. Funny—Will was
never going to get a brick, but I was. One of the larger dorms, Tyler Hall, had
a massive banner hung on it that said WELCOME FRESHMAN!!! I stopped to take a
selfie with the banner in the background: here’s a girl excited for her first
day of college, busy doing college things!
It’s practically destiny that I ended up at
John Adams University. I knew I had to be in DC, which meant applying to
Georgetown, American University, George Washington University, John Adams,
Catholic University, and Trinity College—all of which are inside the District.
As safeties, I also applied to reasonably close places like George Mason and the
University of Maryland. I got into all of them except for Georgetown.
Seriously, fuck them. My application was golden: I have an IQ of 135—five
points short of genius—solid SATs and grades. I paid for most of my wardrobe
with a business I set up writing papers for other students. Who knows how many
of them got into college with a heartfelt essay about the dead cancer
grandmother they didn’t actually have.
I had been offered scholarship money at
various schools, but nothing like what Adams had offered. Even if I had turned
down the psychology study, I still could have gotten generous scholarships
given to students with my pedigree to entice them to a Tier 2 liberal arts
school. But I didn’t care—Adams was always my first choice because of Will.
Another bonus was the school’s placement in DC: a busy city with a relatively
high murder rate. The campus was in the gentrifying neighborhood of Shaw, just
east of bougie Logan Circle, and south of U Street, a popular going-out
destination. A neighborhood that, despite the presence of nice restaurants, was
also a place where drunk people occasionally got into fights and stabbed each
other and pedestrians got mugged. Law enforcement was busy with the constant
parade of protests, conferences, and visiting diplomats—they probably gave two
shits about what was going on in the mind of a random eighteen-year-old girl
with an iPhone in her hand and a benign look on her face.
I liked the somber castle look of the
psychology department. Its dark red bricks were covered with ivy and the
windows, edged with black iron, were warbled like they had old glass in them.
The inside was dimly lit by a hanging chandelier with flickering amber bulbs,
and the cavernous foyer smelled like old books. When I walked through it, I
imagined a camera following me, viewers worried about what dangerous things
might come my way. I would be the one they would root for.
I went up the curving staircase to the
sixth floor where I was supposed to check in with my program. Room 615 was
tucked at the end of the hallway, secluded. A placard on the door said Leonard
Wyman, PhD, and Elena Torres, Doctoral Candidate. I recognized the names from
my paperwork.
I knocked and a few seconds later a woman
flung open the door. “You must be Chloe Sevre!”
She stuck out her hand. They probably had a
whole dossier on me. I had had a bunch of phone interviews with a couple of
screeners, then one with Wyman himself, and they had also interviewed my mother
and high school counselor.
The woman’s hand was bony, but warm and
dry, and her eyes were chocolate brown and unafraid. “I’m Elena, one of Dr.
Wyman’s grad students.” She smiled and gestured for me to come inside. She led
me past a messy reception area, a desk cluttered with papers and three laptops,
and down a hallway to a smaller office, hers presumably.
She closed the door behind us. “We’ll get
you all settled. Everything was fine with the financial aid office before you got
here?” As one of the seven students in the study, I was granted a free ride to
John Adams University. All I had to give in exchange was my willingness to be
a full-time guinea pig in their Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study.
I nodded, looking around. Her shelves were
crammed with books and stacks of printed-out articles. Three different versions
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Tomes on
“abnormal” psychology. Robert Hare’s book Without Conscience, which I had read.
“Great,” Elena said. She pulled something
up on her computer. She took a bite of the scone resting on her mousepad and
chewed loudly. She was pretty in a grad student sort of way. Olive skin and a
nice collarbone. You could picture her falling in love with some reedy nerd and
trying to have children too late. “Here you are!” She clicked a few times and
her printer came to life. When she stood up to retrieve the paper, I leaned
over, trying to see her computer screen, but she had a privacy shield. I didn’t
know if it was supposed to be a secret or something, but I had found out how
many students were in the program when one of the administrators had been
working out my financial aid package. I was dying of curiosity about the other
six students. The bizarre elite.
Elena handed me a bunch of paper-clipped documents. They were consent forms for the study, assurances that my data would be kept private, that there was minimal risk associated with computer-based surveys, that blood drawings would be performed by a licensed phlebotomist, blah blah blah. A lot more about privacy, location tracking—which I paid closer attention to—and what their legal obligations were to report it if I threatened to either harm myself or others. Oh, please. I wasn’t planning on making any of my threats known.
Excerpted from Never Saw Me Coming by Vera
Kurian, Copyright ©
2021 by Albi Literary Inc. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
About the Author
Vera Kurian is a psychologist and writer and a
longtime resident of Washington DC. She has a doctorate in social psychology,
specializing in intergroup relations, political ideology, and quantitative
methods. She has studied fiction at Breadloaf, Sewanee, VONA, and attended
juried workshops at LitCamp, Colgate, Juniper, and the Marlboro Summer Writing
Intensive. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a semifinalist
for the Mark Twain Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Contest.
Social Links:
Author Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
0 comments:
Post a Comment