Rebecca sat in the passenger's seat of her sad-looking little blue 2005 Toyota Prius, its cracked windshield responding poorly to Kennedy's attempts at scrubbing the blood off of it. It had taken them a few minutes to find a 24-hour car wash in Tampa that no one would be at, but they found one: Baywash Car Wash, empty except for the two girls and their rolling arrest warrant of a car.
Kennedy had gotten out of the car and had instructed Rebecca to go about her social media activity like normal, so that her activity didn't suddenly stop at the same time people would eventually realize the man they left on the side of the road died. Rebecca couldn't get the image out of her head. They had killed someone. They had killed someone and left him on the side of the road so that they could avoid being thrown into jail—rightfully thrown into jail.
Kennedy had closed the driver's door quietly and gone outside, putting her quarters in the machine before she started to wash the car by hand. The giant automatic car wash would make too much noise and would probably have too powerful a force for the crack in the windshield. So, she had started scrubbing on her own—scrubbing the front of the car, the back, and finally coming around to the windshield.
Rebecca obeyed Kennedy's orders from inside the car, scrolling through Instagram and liking people's pictures as they came up. She switched to Twitter after a while, retweeting things without thinking about them and hoping that she wouldn't have to do this for much longer. For all she knew, she could have retweeted something good about Trump. She was just blindly tapping.
Kennedy got back in the car twenty minutes after she got out of it, closing the door quietly behind her and starting the engine. There were still slight traces of blood on the windshield, but nothing too noticeable.
"We're going back to Clemson, right?" Rebecca asked quietly, "We're going back home?"
Kennedy shook her head shortly. Rebecca had no idea how the other girl was able to be so calm throughout the entire ordeal; she felt like she was about to lose her mind at everything going on. And Kennedy had been the one driving the car. She was the one who had actually killed someone, and she was acting as though it were just another Monday night for her.
That was a terrifying thought, and one that Rebecca didn't let herself entertain for long.
"We're not?" Rebecca asked as Kennedy remained silent and pulled onto the main road, "Why not? We can't stay out here, we killed someone out here—"
"Shut up." Kennedy ordered, "If we lose our minds about this, we'll get caught. It's a fact. We can't go back to Clemson right this second, because that would look more suspicious than staying here. We can go back tomorrow. Leaving our trip six days early in the dead of night wouldn't look good to anyone. Can we agree on that?"
Rebecca nodded. Her heartrate hadn't been at a normal speed for the past hour, but she wasn't sure if it would ever go back down again. The night felt like a fever dream—like she was going to wake up and realize she had had too much to drink and she was going to be fine. Everything was going to be fine.
Except that for the eleven times she had pinched herself in the last hour, she hadn't woken up.
Kennedy drove back to the Airbnb with directions from Rebecca's GPS playing. Rebecca couldn't help but think that she was the one in trouble if police searched their phones. They were using her phone for the GPS. The GPS that was taking them from the site of the hit-and-run to the Airbnb where online receipts put them staying at.
But if they didn't use a GPS, what were the chances that they would get lost again and hit someone else?
Rebecca's head hurt thinking about it.
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