One Night That Changes Everything

by Lauren Barnholdt

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe because when I told you I never wanted to speak with you again, I meant it.”

  “Listen,” he says, still ignoring me. “You need to get back to Newton.”

  “For what?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Tyler called a meeting of the 318s at his house, and he’s pissed. He knows you guys broke in.”

  “How does he know we broke in?”

  “I guess his parents told him,” Cooper reports.

  Damn that Mrs. Twill. I knew she was totally untrustworthy. And I should have known there was no way Cal was going to be able to help, he was so completely and totally whipped.

  “What jerks,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, he called a meeting,” he says. “Of the 318s. Anyway, I tried to get your notebook back, but it’s not there anymore. But I think I have a plan. For how we can get it back.”

  “What sort of plan?” I ask, even more suspiciously.

  “Just … meet me outside of Tyler’s in half an hour,” he says. “Can you do that?” Um, only if we speed and get really, really lucky with traffic and don’t get pulled over.

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

  “Park down the block,” he says. “Where we were before, so that no one sees you.”

  And then he hangs up before I have a chance to ask him any more questions or protest or anything!

  “What did he say?” Clarice asks.

  “He said to meet him outside of Tyler’s in half an hour,” I say. “He says he has a plan to get the notebook back.”

  “And you believe him?” Marissa asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. But the truth is, I kind of do. Cooper hasn’t really lied to me about anything tonight. He’s helped me, even though at points I was a total and complete bitch to him. Of course, that could all be part of the master plan, where he and the 318s try to lull me into a false sense of security, only to let the whole thing come crashing down on me later, when I do decide to trust them at the worst possible moment. Cooper could totally be like the boy who cried wolf; only it’s the boy who cried notebook. And in reverse, since I would believe him at the end instead of not believing him. Whatever.

  “So what are you going to do?” Clarice asks. I hesitate. On one hand, I really do not want to rely on Cooper for anything, and part of me wants to just wait it out. Maybe the 318s are having a meeting so that they can figure out a way to get me my notebook back. Maybe they’re going to make me do a couple of other things, but in the end will stick to their part of the bargain. Maybe I should just give it a little more time.

  My phone goes off with a text then, and I look down at the screen. Tyler. “LAST TASK,” it says. “COME TO MY HOUSE SO THAT YOU CAN TELL COOPER HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT HIM.”

  Well. That settles that.

  In my defense, I’d totally had some wine. When I wrote it, I mean. The stuff in my notebook about Cooper and how I really feel about him. I mean how I felt about him. It was a few days after we broke up, and I got super-upset and spent all afternoon crying in my room.

  Later that night, I called Kate, and she rode the T all the way in from Boston and then took me back to her dorm. I skipped school the next day and, instead, Kate and I spent the day eating. We went from restaurant to restaurant, bakery to bakery, store to store. We bought hamburgers and cupcakes and ice cream. If we couldn’t decide between flavors or entrées, we got them both and wrapped up the leftovers.

  By the time the day was over, we had sore stomachs but, somehow, I felt better. We took the T back to our house and sat on the deck, drinking wine and watching the sun set. Kate was working on a project for school, and I had my notebook out, scribbling away as the sun dipped down and threatened to leave me with not enough light to complete my thoughts.

  For the first time, I wrote almost more of a diary entry. My purple notebook, up until that point, had been a list of things I wanted to do but was scared of. It was disjointed with cross outs all over the place and sentences scratched in my seventh-grade self’s handwriting. Names of boys and friends I no longer knew littered the pages.

  But this time, I felt like I needed to write something more. Something about Cooper. I wrote that if I was really being honest, that I wouldn’t have just screamed at Cooper and stomped out of his house that day. If I was really being honest, I thought that maybe I was falling in love with Cooper, and that maybe, if he apologized, I would take him back. I said that I wished I could talk to him, that I wished I could find out how much of what he had showed me over the past couple of months had been fake and how much hadn’t been. I wrote about how he was deeper than everyone thought, and how I really needed to know what part of him was true.

  Honestly, it was very overdramatic, very pathetic, and definitely embarrassing. And I’m sure that’s the part Tyler is hoping I’m going to read. He’s obviously setting up this big meeting at his house so that I’ll have to do it there, in front of everyone.

  Which is, you know, not an option.

  Which is why Cooper is my last hope and why I’m rushing Clarice and Marissa back to Newton before anything horrible happens.

  But by the time we get the car and get on the road, I’m starting to think that we’re not going to make it.

  “We’re not going to make it,” I say to Marissa. “I just know it.”

  Clarice is in the backseat, on the phone with Jamie, who seems to be talking about how she can’t believe how close she came to being involved in a drive-by or something tonight. Which is totally ridiculous and very annoying.

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” Marissa says. “I swear.”

  “I know you are,” I say, watching as the speedometer inches close to eighty. My life pretty much depends on us getting back to Newton in time to meet up with Cooper, but still. I don’t want Marissa going any faster, since as bad as tonight has been, I really would prefer to stay alive. Not to mention if we get pulled over, it’s definitely going to put a crimp in our night, and I will have no car and no way to get anywhere. I grip the sides of my seat and decide to look on the bright side—at least Marissa hasn’t been drinking.

  “Maybe you should call Cooper,” Marissa says.

  “Call Cooper?” I frown. “For what?”

  “To tell him we might be a little late,” Marissa says. “Maybe he can delay the meeting or something.”

  “Yeah,” I say. But I really, really do not want to do that. Calling Cooper means that I need him, that I’m actually dependent on his help. And even if that’s true, I don’t want him to know that. Otherwise, he’ll be able to … well … I don’t know what he’ll be able to do, but I just don’t want him to know.

  “I’m just saying,” she says. “It might be better.”

  “Fine,” I say, sighing. I pull out my phone and scroll through until I find Cooper’s number. I take a deep breath and then push the button.

  “Hey,” he says when he answers.

  I swallow. “Hey,” I say. “It’s me. It’s Eliza.” I clarify, just in case.

  “Where are you?” he says. “I have to go into the meeting soon.”

  “We’re almost there,” I say. “Can you stall them just ten more minutes?”

  “I’ll try,” he says. But he doesn’t sound so sure.

  “What did he say?” Marissa asks.

  “He said he would try,” I say. I slide my phone into my bag and lean my head back against the seat. There’s nothing to do now except watch the highway fly by and cross my fingers that we get there on time.

  When we pull off the highway, I call Cooper again. I don’t know why—I guess to give him an update. This is why I didn’t want to call Cooper in the first place. Once you break the seal on something like that, everything just breaks wide open. I mean, look at me, calling Cooper left and right now.

  “Hey,” I say. “We’re almost there.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m parked down the street, and I’m supposed to be at Tyler’s, like, now, so I won’t have too much time
to talk.”

  “Okay.” I say slowly. Why does he want to talk? What do we need to talk about? If he has my notebook, then can’t he just give it to me? I want to ask him, but I also don’t want to tip him off in case this whole thing is a big set-up.

  So I just hang up.

  When we pull onto Tyler’s street, Cooper’s parked where he said he would be. We pull up behind him, and he runs out of the car and over to the passenger-side door. I roll the window down.

  “Hey.” He looks around furtively, maybe because he doesn’t want to get caught, but maybe because he’s waiting for backup.

  “Where is it?” I demand. “Do you have it? Or at least some kind of plan?” I roll the window down a little so that it’s just slightly cracked.

  “I couldn’t get the notebook,” he says.

  “You couldn’t?” I repeat, my heart sinking.

  “No,” he says. “Tyler moved it, and I don’t know to where. But I have something even better.” And then he slides something through the window to me, a really thin black notebook with a leather cover. From behind us comes the sound of a car driving down the street, and Cooper looks behind him and then says, “I gotta go.”

  He runs back to his car, and then he’s gone.

  “What the fuck?” Marissa asks. She reaches over and pulls the black notebook off my lap. “What is this?”

  I snatch it back from her and open it up.

  The first page says, “The Order of the 318s, Official Documents and Procedures.” The second page looks like some kind of oath or creed. It’s typed up in a cursive font, very official and sort of old-looking. But more like it’s trying to look old, not like it really is.

  “We, the undersigned, pledge our undying loyalty to the order of the 318s.” There are hundreds of signatures filling the pages following.

  I page through. And then it dawns on me. Cooper has given me some kind of pledge book, some kind of secret notebook of the 318s.

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  “What is it?” Clarice asks, off the phone now. “What was Cooper saying? I missed the whole thing.”

  “He said he couldn’t get her notebook back and then he dropped that thing on Eliza’s lap,” Marissa reports.

  “What is it?” Clarice asks. She pushes her head between the two seats.

  “It’s their notebook,” I say. “It’s … it’s everything about the 318s, including all their members.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Marissa looks at me in awe.

  “We could totally give that to the school,” Clarice says. And she’s right. The school is always trying to figure out who the 318s are, especially when they do their “anonymous” pranks.

  It’s all here in front of me. Their names. Their signatures. Lists of the pranks they’ve done. Their dumb oaths and their dumb rituals and even lists of things they’re considering doing.

  “You can do anything with that,” Marissa says. “You could use it to get them to drop your disciplinary hearing.”

  “And,” I say, “I can trade it for my notebook.” I run my hand over the first page.

  “Cooper is going to get into a lot of trouble for giving that to you,” Clarice says. She claps her hands. “He must really care about you, Eliza.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Or he just feels guilty for being a complete and total prick, and now he wants to do something to make himself feel better.”

  “That’s a pretty big thing to do just to make yourself feel better,” Clarice says. She settles back into her seat.

  “So what do we do now?” Marissa asks.

  “Now,” I say. “We go to Kinko’s.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  5:21 a.m.

  We have to drive twenty minutes to find a Kinko’s that’s open twenty-four hours, so we plug the address into the GPS, crank the music, and roll down the windows. I let the brisk early morning air fly through my hair, and then I push all thoughts of this horrible night out of my mind for a little while. It feels SO. GOOD.

  When we get to Kinko’s, we spend half an hour photocopying the 318s’ notebook onto sparkly purple paper, which we then take and put into a glittery pink binder with a butterfly on it. The guy at Kinko’s thinks we’re kind of crazy, but I’m really having too much fun to care.

  “Smiley-face stickers?” Marissa suggests, taking a package of them off a rack and holding them up.

  “Are they pink?” I ask.

  “No.” She puts them back on the rack. “Ooh, ballet slippers!” she says. She pulls open the package and starts to decorate the spine of the binder.

  The guy working there gives us a nervous look from his place behind the counter. Probably he’s never seen a bunch of girls coming in with a secret society’s confidential binder that they’re making a copy of.

  Clarice taps her long fingernails on the side of a copy machine. “Explain to me again why we’re photocopying this?” she says. “I mean, we already have the notebook.”

  “Yes,” I say, affixing a tutu sticker to the cover of the binder as a final touch. “But now we have a copy.”

  “So?” She stares at me blankly.

  “So now we can trade their notebook for mine, but we have this copy”—I hold up the pink monstrosity—“as backup in case they ever decide to start their crap again.”

  “Oh.” Clarice looks like I’ve just taken away her innocence. “Kind of like … extortion,” she whispers.

  “Well, not really,” I say. “More like blackmail. But they started it.”

  Marissa nods. “Okay,” she says. “Now what should we—”

  Her phone starts ringing then, and she looks at the caller ID. “Jeremiah,” she whispers. “I almost … I mean, I kind of forgot about him.” She looks dazed, like she can’t really imagine that she could ever forget about Jeremiah. She flips open her phone and steps away for a second, over near a big table that’s piled high with office supplies.

  I gather up all the stuff we’ve used, bring it over to the cash register, and drop it down on the counter.

  The guy who works there looks down and sighs.

  “Sorry, Sam,” I say, reading his name tag and surveying the jumble of empty packages, ripped-open stickers, cellophane, and, of course, the pinkalicious binder. “I guess I kind of made a mess.”

  “Kind of?” he asks. But not in an unfriendly way. In more of an, “Oh, God, how am I going to deal with this?” kind of way.

  “If you knew the night I’ve had,” I say, “you would understand.”

  He gives me a thin smile, then picks up the binder and scans it.

  From behind me, I can hear Marissa on the phone. “Yeah,” she’s saying. “I’m glad you had fun. No, I know, I just … I’m not …”

  I start to feel a little nervous as I realize what’s going on. Jeremiah is finally calling Marissa, but it’s way too late to hang out. He probably spent the night getting drunk and grinding on different girls, and now he’s giving her some dumb excuse for why he didn’t call. I’m pissed, not only because I don’t want Marissa to get hurt, but because the three of us are having so much fun. And now Jeremiah’s going to put her in a bad mood and ruin everything.

  I look at Clarice, who is using one of the plate-glass floor-to-ceiling windows to check her reflection and give herself the once-over. She turns around, and I can tell we’re thinking the same thing. Whatever Jeremiah’s telling Marissa is complete and total bullshit.

  Sam the cashier finishes ringing up my ballet stickers. “Your total is seventy-six dollars and eighteen cents,” he announces.

  But I’m not really paying attention. I’m still trying to spy on Marissa’s conversation. “Yeah,” she’s saying. “It’s fine, I can probably come over later today instead. I just don’t understand why you didn’t call me earlier.” Marissa just listens for a minute. And then, it’s like a switch flips. And Marissa starts to, um, go a little crazy. “You were SMOKING UP with Brendan and Robbie?” she yells. Her eyes get really wide and start to bug out of her head. “And you had
to hang out with them because I LOST YOUR POT? I did not lose it, Jeremiah; I got it TAKEN FROM ME BY THE POLICE.”

  Sam the cashier looks at me nervously, and I try to give him a reassuring smile. I’m about to tell him it was a total misunderstanding, that Marissa’s not a druggie or a dealer or anything, but Marissa’s still practically screaming. “You know, actually, I don’t think I will be coming over later. I’m busy.” And then she ends the call. I look at her. She looks at me. Clarice looks at her. She looks at Clarice. Me and Clarice look at each other, and then we both look back at Marissa.

  “Jeremiah,” she says, “couldn’t call me earlier because he was getting high with his dumb friends. And apparently he thinks it’s my fault since I lost his pot. He invited me over later today, but I said I was busy.” She looks shocked at her own behavior, like she can’t believe for the life of her that she would say something like that.

  “Good for you,” I say.

  “Great for you,” Clarice says.

  “Is someone going to pay me?” Sam asks.

  When we get outside, I have three messages from Tyler, and judging from his tone, he doesn’t seem too happy.

  Message one: “All right, why the fuck aren’t you answering? You have five minutes to call me back, otherwise I’m putting your notebook up on the web. I don’t even care.”

  He’s bluffing, of course, because I have two other messages from him. I’m glad I didn’t get that first one, because I might have just been scared enough to call him back.

  Message two: “Fine, Eliza. Look, I’m sorry we did this. We were mad, okay? You tried to mess with us and bring us down.” Actually, I didn’t. What I did was post something that was very true (okay, halfway true) online about one of their members. But whatever. Semantics, I guess. “Just give us back our notebook, and we’ll give you back yours, and we can just forget the whole thing ever happened.”

  And then, finally, the third message, where Tyler has somehow turned into some kind of whiny thirteen-year-old.

  Message three: “Eliza, please, can you just give it back to us? We don’t care what you post on Lanesboro Losers, we just really need that notebook back.”