14 Ways To Die

Copyright © 2021 by Vincent Ralph

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Cover design by Kerri Resnick

Cover images © Kristina Strasunske/Arcangel; Yurlick/Shutterstock

Internal design by Michelle Mayhall/Sourcebooks

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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.

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Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks

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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.

The bottom falls out of my world every time I think that.

Sometimes I imagine my life if Mom was the one left behind, and I feel guilty because I know things would be different.

She wouldn’t have broken down like Dad did. She would have fought through her pain and lived on.

Chapter 8

When they arrive, I lead Adrian and his colleague into the living room and pray that Dad hasn’t changed his mind.

Mr. Simmons, Adrian says, holding out his hand.

Dad takes it like a robot, does the same with the girl, and then looks at me.

So, I say, where do we sign?

Adrian laughs. Someone’s eager! Then he says, You’re very brave for doing this.

I’m not sure who he’s talking to, so I smile, and Dad does his best impression of happy.

Adrian says, This is a wonderful setting. He’s walking around the living room, going over to touch things, then stopping at the last minute, nodding to himself, and pointing at random places.

The girl must know why, because whenever he points, she writes something on her iPad.

This is my assistant, Lauren, Adrian says.

She looks about my age, and when she rolls her eyes, I smile and imagine her being Adrian’s boss one day.

He has a slap-worthy grin on his face, and he’s treating our living room like a movie set, but that’s a small sacrifice if it means finding the Magpie Man.

When we sit down, I grip my hands together in my lap, hoping no one sees them shaking.

We’re here to explain the process, Adrian says, "and to ensure you’re fully aware of the…all-encompassing nature of the show.

This is about five young adults who have experienced something extraordinary. People with stories to tell. It’s the first reality show of its kind truly for the online generation. The camera crew will start filming before Jessica wakes up. At least that’s what the audience will think. We’ll stage that part. Unless you’re a heavy sleeper. There will also be a highlights package, available the following day. We’ll edit Jessica’s best moments and post sixty-minute videos on her channel every Tuesday morning.

Dad looks at me and says, You agreed to this?

I nod and think back to our conversation last night. He listened to what I had to say. He sat in silence as I explained why this could help us find answers.

If I reach enough people, I might actually find a witness or a clue or something, I’d said. We can do this. All we need is a platform.

He didn’t reply for a long time, and when he did, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I’ll talk to them, he’d said. But no promises.

Seeing Dad’s concern, Adrian stands up and holds his arms out. This is powerful…an inside look at the life of a grieving family that refuses to be broken. A girl fighting back, seeking justice for her mother.

I catch him sneak a glance at my parents’ wedding photo above the fireplace and imagine how many times that will be shown on screen.

Adrian can’t contain his excitement, and I realize I was always going to be chosen. My patched-up family and its missing piece are gold dust, and I suddenly feel better, because if that’s how he feels, maybe the audience will too.

I’m sure Adrian thinks this is just about me telling my story, that wanting to catch my mother’s killer is a great hook. But he doesn’t know how serious I am…or what I’m prepared to do.

Dad is slowly reading the contract, taking in every word. He stops every few pages and asks a question, rarely looking happy with the answer but continuing on anyway.

Which school principal in their right mind would agree to this? he asks.

Adrian smiles and says, Every school involved is being paid well for their participation.

Would you let your daughter do this? he asks.

Adrian doesn’t reply for a while, like he’s drafting the answer in his head, then he says, If I had one, I’d be wary too.

Then why should I say yes?

Because this is a chance to tell her story. Something good might come out of it. Mr. Simmons, this show might even help people.

Dad glances at me, and I wonder if he sees through Adrian the way I can. Finally, he lays the contract on the table and says, We’re going to need some time.

Adrian smiles, but it wobbles at the edges. We don’t have much of that.

Ignoring him, looking straight at me, Dad says, There are some things we need to discuss.

Adrian and Lauren exchange a look, then stand. There’s a get-together on Saturday, Adrian says. It’s a chance to meet the other stars. He calls them that, not me.

Adrian looks at my dad and says, I understand this is difficult. But we wouldn’t have picked Jessica if we didn’t think she’d be a hit.

Dad stares at him, and I see a flicker of his fight. I said we need some time.

Chapter 9

When they’re gone, I stand in the doorway, watching Dad holding the photograph of Mom he keeps within reach.

It was taken before I was born, my mother looking at something off-camera, her lips slightly parted. She looks stunning, blissful, safe.

I remember her in a million different ways, depending on how I feel or who’s telling the story or who took the picture. This is Dad’s memory, but like all the others, I’ve adapted it and made it my own.

I wonder what he thinks as he stares at it: if he feels sad that she’s not around to make these decisions for him, if he blames her absence for my actions. Maybe it soothes him,