14 Ways to Die Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Vincent Ralph

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Kerri Resnick

  Cover images © Kristina Strasunske/Arcangel; Yurlick/Shutterstock

  Internal design by Michelle Mayhall/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Originally published as Are You Watching? in 2020 in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ralph, Vincent, author.

  Title: 14 ways to die / Vincent Ralph.

  Other titles: Are you watching? | Fourteen ways to die

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Fire, [2021] | Originally

  published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin

  Random House UK, in 2020 under title: Are you watching? | Audience: Ages

  14. | Audience: Grades 10-12. | Summary: Seventeen-year-old Jessica

  Simmons becomes the star of a YouTube reality series, and she uses her

  fame to catch her mother’s murderer.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021001025 (print) | LCCN 2021001026 (ebook) Subjects: CYAC: Social media--Fiction. | Serial murderers--Fiction. |

  Grief--Fiction. | Justice--Fiction. | YouTube (Electronic

  resource)--Fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R3487 Aak 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.R3487

  (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001025

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001026

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Author’s Note

  A Q&A with Vincent Ralph

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my mother

  Chapter 1

  “My mom was killed by the Magpie Man.”

  The guy nods, and I wait for him to reply.

  When he doesn’t, I say, “Fifty-one seconds from home, she was strangled to death and left to be rained on all night.”

  They say to start with a bang, and that’s the biggest one I’ve got.

  The man types words I can’t see while the woman stares at me.

  “I was seven,” I say. I’m seventeen now.

  The man clears his throat and asks, “Do you
think you’re the only applicant to have lost a parent?”

  I shrug.

  “You’re not. But you are the only applicant whose mother was the victim of a serial killer.”

  The woman writes something on a notepad and pushes it toward him.

  He nods and says, “We’ll be in touch.”

  Chapter 2

  My name is Jessica Simmons, and I’m not your average internet star. But then I guess this isn’t your average internet show.

  The ads say it’s something different—a real look inside the lives of real people. No scripts, no airbrushing, no scenes set up for your entertainment. Just you and a camera crew and whatever you want to show.

  If this was halfway through the story rather than the start, I guess you’d call it a twist, because I’m not the kind of person to stream their life on YouTube. You’ll have to take my word for it that this is out of character for me.

  Mom was thirty-two when she died, the first victim of a man they still haven’t caught. Number one on a list that now stretches to thirteen.

  So if you ask why I want to be one of the five people to star in a new online show about them and only them, it’s pretty simple.

  I want to catch the Magpie Man, and this is how I’m going to do it.

  Chapter 3

  It’s been so long since Mom died that sometimes I doubt my own memories, even though the house is full of her pictures and her echoes live in the cracks on Dad’s face.

  It was Dad who gave the murderer his name. He said the Magpie Man liked shiny things and Mom was the shiniest of all. He said she’d been borrowed.

  “Like a library book?” I’d asked, and he’d said sort of, but without a date to bring her back.

  Now I realize it was for his benefit as much as mine: when a husband loses his wife, the last thing he needs is a kid asking questions.

  When you’re seven, you don’t think your dad’s full of shit, because he’s the person who hugs you and kisses you and keeps you safe. Why would he lie?

  He should have said that was our little secret. But he didn’t, so I told everyone at school that the pretty moms would all be taken eventually, and Dad got called in for that.

  Then when I was eleven, taking the bus home from school for the first time, we passed the shop where Mom used to work. The bus ride lasts twelve minutes and twenty-nine seconds, then it’s fifteen footsteps to the alley.

  I dared myself to walk through but refused every time.

  When I finally found the courage, I counted one minute and forty-two seconds from one end to the other…from the shortcut to home.

  She made it halfway, less than a minute from safety.

  Chapter 4

  There are no rules for mourning.

  When Mom died, the house felt gray and haunted, and Dad didn’t look like himself anymore.

  One day, all the pictures of her disappeared, gone as suddenly as she was.

  It was Dad’s way of preparing me for a truth he couldn’t speak.

  People told him to move, that it was unhealthy to live near the alley where your wife was murdered. But he ignored them.

  I heard him on the phone once, saying he had already lost so much of her, why would he sell his remaining memories? And that night, the photos returned, filling every surface.

  She was everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  I cried, but they weren’t real tears. I was copying the sadness of others rather than feeling my own.

  I believed Mom would come back, convinced she would be the next knock at the door, the next phone call, the next hug from the line of strangers whose touch felt so different from hers.

  People told Dad to send me to a therapist, but again he ignored them. Grief makes what you have more precious, and by then, I was all he had left. So he held me tight through his refusal to make our loss any bigger than it had to be.

  It was my grandma Nan who changed that. She got tired of Dad’s stories and cried if I asked when we could visit Mom in the museum for shiny things. She said I would find out eventually, and the sooner the better, so she told me Mom was gone forever.

  I called her a liar. I hated her. And then I cried the sharpest, heaviest, most unbearable tears of my life.

  Your grief journey changes when you aren’t looking. It moves in fractions: black shifting through a thousand shades of gray. It transforms into something else: a dull ache, a numbness that becomes the norm.

  Websites told me to write a note and put it in a balloon and release it to heaven. Or make a memory quilt and fall asleep wrapped in Mom’s best parts. Or make a wish list of all the things to do before I died.

  I took pictures and hoarded the ones my parents had taken. I drew and painted and wrote shitty poetry and started a feelings journal. None of it worked, but I tried.

  When I was fourteen, I got angry and took it out on a dad who refused to fight back.

  Seven years after Mom was murdered and he was still a body carrying around a shattered soul, like the newspaper you wrap broken glass in. But it was more than that. He let himself be my punching bag. I treated him terribly, and he took it, because he loved me and because he knew that when the anger comes, it is vicious and all-consuming.

  He hid his anger because he had to. I couldn’t because I didn’t know how.

  When I googled “the Magpie Man,” I got hundreds of articles but no answers, just the names of all the people he has murdered and comments from frustrated detectives.

  He’s still out there somewhere, still killing—the monster who took my mother.

  And that is why the cameras can’t start rolling soon enough.

  Chapter 5

  My phone rings with a number I don’t recognize, and when I answer, a man says, “Miss Simmons? It’s Adrian…from The Eye. We’ve reviewed your application, and although the competition was fierce, we’d like you to be Monday.”

  This means that on the first day of every week for a month, I will be live online from the moment I wake up until midnight. If I’m not a complete flop, one month will become three.

  The show is about real lives with unique twists—that’s what the application form said. It claimed audiences have had enough of the same old formats.

  I don’t know if that’s true, but I need to give it my best shot.

  I see myself smiling in the mirror and stop, because this isn’t supposed to be a happy moment. It’s just the beginning.

  “When do I start?” I ask.

  Adrian says, “Three weeks. We have a few briefing sessions for you to attend where you’ll get to meet the others.” He sounds like he’s reading off a sheet.

  I don’t particularly want to see them, but what choice do I have? I’m guessing they want to be famous rather than get justice, but I’ll go and smile and do whatever has to be done to get my story across.

  Anyone can put themselves online these days, but most get lost in the crowd. The trick is to find a stage big enough to be remembered, and this show offers that.

  “We need to meet your father,” Adrian says. “There are some things for him to sign.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, because Dad doesn’t know I’ve applied. He thought my interview was a shopping trip.

  “You’ll have to come here,” I say. “He doesn’t like leaving the house in the daytime.”

  This isn’t a lie. Dad prefers it when it’s quiet outside. He shops when the supermarket is empty. He doesn’t like crowds or conversations. Three times a week, he works night shifts in a factory, not because he has to but because we all need to escape sometimes.

  I hope YouTube people are too busy to visit normal people’s houses just to get a signature. I hope they send the paperwork and I can forge Dad’s scribble and have more time to wear him down.

  But without a pause, Adrian says, “No problem. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

/>   Shit.

  Before he hangs up, he says, “We have high hopes for you, Jessica.”

  I’m glad someone does.

  Chapter 6

  Some broken people look fine from the outside, but not my dad. He wears his heartbreak like a second skin, his eyes gray and heavy, his grief shouting over everything else.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He nods and puts his lips together in his best attempt at a smile.

  “I have something to ask.”

  He reaches for the remote and mutes the TV.

  I take a deep breath, almost chicken out, then say, “I’ve applied for a show. It’s called The Eye.”

  He sighs and says, “Okay.”

  “It’s on YouTube. I’ll be filming my life, and they need your permission.”

  He stares me down, because there’s only so long I can look into his eyes before I want to cry.

  “You’ll be filming your life?”

  I nod.

  “And who will be watching?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever wants to.”

  “No.”

  He unmutes the TV, and the sound makes me jump, drowning out the reply I’m planning in my head.

  But I say it anyway, a shortened version, a three-word battle cry. “It’s for Mom.”

  He stares at me, and this time, I don’t look away.

  I don’t care if I cry. I don’t care if, when I look long enough, I see the dad he used to be, mixed with the sadness he fights so hard to contain. I stare until my eyes are burning and I see Dad’s no crumble in his mouth.

  He turns off the TV, breathes deeply, and says, “Tell me more.”

  Chapter 7

  If I concentrate, I can still hear Mom’s laughter, and if I close my eyes, I can picture Dad’s smile, the real one, the one that could win an argument with a single flash. If I really focus, I can go back to certain moments, ones that didn’t feel special at the time but are now all I have.

  Mom would leave notes around the house for Dad to find: tiny reminders of how much she loved him. Once, a slip of paper fell into my bowl along with my cereal, and when I asked Mom what it said, she whispered, “Your dad can read it to you when he finds it.”

  Then she dropped it back into the box, and when he came downstairs, we watched him find the note and smile.

  The message was just one word: Always.

  They wore their love like some people wear designer brands. They advertised it with every look, every whisper, every secret smile. People used to say they were made for each other, and Mom would grin and say they were made for me.