by Kate Brian
early 1900s to the history of space travel to the merits of Monet and Manet. At the other
computers, coffees were sipped as fingers tapped away crazily at keyboards. I could practically
smell the anticipation and tension in the air. Final exams. Final papers. Final oral reports. It was all
upon us.And I was spending my Saturday surfing the Web for a gift for Josh Hollis. Well, that and
Googling what was left of my suspect list. I hadn't done one full minute of studying since Sabine
had left me an hour ago to go hook up with her bio study group. I was so screwing myself, but I
couldn't bring myself to care. I had bigger things on my mind. Like murder. Like first love. Like not
letting the murderer--if it was Ivy--murder my former best friend.
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Sigh.
On the first-love front, it was impossible to find something good for Josh. Nothing said what I
wanted it to say. Namely, "I love you. Doesn't this gift remind you of how much you love me?" I
had been at it for hours, scouring every shopping site from L.L. Bean to art.com to eBay, but had
come up with nothing good. The Holiday Dinner was less than a week away. It was time to admit
defeat--especially since I definitely didn't have the money for overnight shipping. I couldn't pay for
an Internet gift with what little money I had left from the Billings fund, since it was in the form of
cash. All I had was the only-in-emergencies credit card my dad had given me over the summer,
and the less I spent on that, the quicker he would be to forgive me. I went back to art.com,
selected the Gauguin print I had been halfheartedly eyeing, and just ordered the damn thing.
Sigh, sigh.
The sophomore guy next to me vacated his computer and even before the scent of his raspberry
bubble gum had faded into the ether, Marc Alberro had taken his place. He sat down on the chair
sideways so that he could face me, the bulk of his winter coat wedged between desk and chair
back, his book bag on his lap. Instantly, my heart stopped beating and a tingle of fear shot through
me.
"Sorry I haven't returned your message. It's been crazy," he said. "So, what's up?"
I'd been avoiding him since James showed me that video, and glancing over at him now, I found I
couldn't even look him in the eye.
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Could he be the killer? Had he sneaked into Billings while we were all asleep and force-fed those
pills to Cheyenne? Suddenly I felt like I was about to retch.
"What? What's the matter?" Marc asked, tilting his head.
"I have to go."
I grabbed up my things, leaving the reserved card on my computer so I wouldn't have to stop to
return it to the front desk, and rushed awkwardly for the door. I tried to shove my arms into my
coat while semi-sprinting, my bag strap all twisted around my wrist. I attempted to untwist it as I
exited the building, but in the process my bag turned upside down, sending all my books and
notebooks tumbling down the library stairs.
"Perfect," I said under my breath, crouching to retrieve them. The sky overhead was a threatening
gray and wind whistled around the buildings. Any second the clouds were going to open up and
pour freezing rain on my head. I could feel it.
"Reed!" Marc was there in a flash. He stooped to help gather my things. "Are you okay? What's
wrong?"
As we stood up, our arms full of books, I forced myself to look at him. His brow was creased with
concern and his light brown eyes were open and honest. For a second I couldn't imagine that he
could have hurt Cheyenne. But after what she had done to him...
"You were Fourteen-in-Fourteen Flower Boy!" I blurted, rather more loudly than I intended.
All the color drained from Marc's face. He handed my notebooks to me.
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"Well, I prefer to go by Marc," he said, taking a step back and shoving his hands under his sleeves.
My cheeks were flushed with heat. "Marc, this isn't funny. How could you have never mentioned
that you and Cheyenne had a thing? Were you hiding it for a reason?"
A group of freshman girls scurried up the stairs between us and I realized it was a good thing this
conversation was taking place in such a populated area of campus. If Marc was capable of
violence, he couldn't get away with hurting me right here, out in the open like this.
"Well, yeah. I had a couple reasons," Marc replied, his eyes wide. "One, it was the most
humiliating experience of my life, and two, I don't really relish the idea of getting pounded on by
Trey Prescott. Cheyenne was his girlfriend last year during the, uh, fourteen-in-fourteen incident.
Although I swear I had no idea they were together at the time."
"And that's it. That's the only reason this hasn't come up," I said flatly, thinking of all the times
we'd talked about Billings and Cheyenne's death.
Marc stared at me for a moment. "Wait... you think I killed her."
"No!" I lied automatically. "No, of course not."
Was there any other way to answer that question? If he had, I didn't want him to know I suspected
him. If he hadn't... well, same deal. Besides, flat-out accusing him with no evidence to back it up
was no better than what everyone was doing to me.
"Yes, you do!" Marc leaned back against the metal bar railing in the
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center of the stairs. He stared at me for a second longer, then laughed. Laughed. Somehow, that
seemed inappropriate given the circumstances. "Well, I guess it would be hypocritical of me to be
mad."
"Why's that?" I asked. What was up with this guy?
Marc opened his bag and pulled out a yellow legal pad. He sighed before handing it over to me.
Scrawled across the top were the words Potential Suspects. My heart skipped a beat.
"You're investigating Cheyenne's murder?" I asked.
"Yeah. I figured it might make a good story," Marc said, his expression apologetic. He shrugged. "I
might even be able to sell it to a real paper."
I scanned the list quickly, hungrily, to see if he'd drawn any conclusions different from my own.
Unfortunately his list echoed mine. Even Astrid had made his suspect roster. But there were two
major differences between Marc's list and mine. My name and Noelle's name were written at the
bottom of the page. Noelle's name had been crossed out, but mine had not.
"Sorry. I couldn't play favorites." He grabbed a brown wool hat out of his bag and pulled it low
over his ears.
My eyes stung with heat and part of me felt like shoving the pad down his throat. But then I
realized he was right. That would have been totally hypocritical, considering I suspected him.
"It's fine," I forced myself to say, handing the legal pad back. "Actually, I've been kind of poking
around myself."
Marc's eyebrows shot up. "Really? Do you have a list?"
I dug in my bag until I found the folded piece of paper with my
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suspects on it. Marc looked it over and smirked. "Look at that. You're on mine and I'm on yours.
Twice, actually."
I had added Marc's name to the suspect list after seeing James's video, but Marc was now pointing
to the initials S.O.
"So you're S.O.," I said, stunned.
"Yep." Marc handed the list back to me.
I was at a loss for words. I knew Trey suspected someone by the initials S.O. had been seeing
Cheyenne, and I knew
that Marc had pursued Cheyenne and lost. How could the two be one and
the same?
"I don't get it," I said finally. "Why S.O.?"
"It's a common code when you want to cover up your identity," Marc said with a shrug, pulling a
pair of worn leather gloves from his pockets and tugging them on. "Last letter of your first name
and last letter of your last name."
S.O. Marcellus Alberro. It was so obvious now I could have screamed. Was all my paranoia and
desperation affecting the logical side of my brain?
"Just FYI, I didn't do it," Marc said. "I wasn't even on campus that night. My brother came up from
Miami and we went clubbing in New York. He ended up passed out on a bar stool and I had to drag
him by his armpits to a cab and take him to the hospital. It was way fun," he added sarcastically.
"The cops know all this and have checked it out, by the way."
Apparently the police had been more thorough than I realized.
"Well, I didn't do it either," I told him. "But I have nothing like that for an alibi."
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"It's okay. I kind of doubt you'd be investigating her death if you had done it," Marc told me,
shoving his legal pad back in his bag. "Wanna go back inside now that you know you're not in
mortal peril?" he joked. "It's freezing out here."
"Definitely," I replied, feeling chagrined.
Suddenly I couldn't believe that I had been running from him just moments ago. This whole ordeal
was really making me paranoid, and I didn't like the feeling. Marc started walking up the stairs,
back toward the library, and I fell into step with him. I took a deep breath of the cold air, letting it
whisk away the last of my suspicion.
"I just have one more question," I said. "How the hell did you afford all those roses?"
"Summer job money," Marc said with a grimace. "I thought my mother was going to fly up here
just to throttle me when she found out how much I'd taken out of my savings account."
I whistled under my breath as Marc held the door open for me. He must have really liked
Cheyenne to risk his mom's wrath like that. Suddenly I hated Cheyenne for the way she had
treated him. Why did she always have to make everything such a big, dramatic scene?
"So what have you found out?" Marc asked me.
"You first," I said. "You've decided Noelle is innocent?"
Of course, I already knew this in my heart, but I was curious as to how he had come to the same
conclusion.
"Yeah. She was on a boat all night that night. Some charity event on a cruiser that went around
Manhattan," he said as he unzipped his
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coat on our way across the lobby. "There're pictures and everything, so there's no way she did it."
Interesting. I wished Ivy had been around to hear that one.
"Honestly, though? She was my number one suspect until I found that out," Marc whispered,
sounding disappointed.
Then, off my offended and baffled look, he continued.
"I mean, after everything that happened last year with Ariana and Thomas Pearson, Noelle just
seemed shifty to me. And the fact that she moved right back in after Cheyenne was gone, took
over her room, took over your dorm..."
"Yeah, yeah. I've heard it all before," I whispered, shaking my head. "God, your best friend goes
mentally AWOL and suddenly you're public enemy number one," I joked lamely.
Marc smirked. "So who do you think did it?"
"Ivy Slade," I whispered back.
Marc nodded, unsurprised. "Yeah. She's high on my list too. I know she kind of hated Cheyenne,
but I never knew why."
"It's a long story, but for now I'll just say she's got about ten strikes against her. I tried to talk to
the police about it, but they won't even listen to me," I whispered.
We dropped our bags at the end of a table in the American history section and the freshman
students sitting there stared up at us warily. I stared them down until they blushed and went back
to their work. Being a scary murder suspect had its own kind of power. It was less pleasant than
Billings power, but it was still something.
"Anyway, Ivy's not about to let me interview her, and the Web
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hasn't been much help," I told Marc, tilting my head toward the computers. My station was still
empty, thanks to the reserved sign, but the screen had long since switched over to the Easton
screen saver--an Easton Academy crest bouncing around from corner to corner. "But my gut tells
me she did it."
"Have you tried LexisNexis?" Marc asked, pulling off his hat and gloves as I shed my coat.
"What's that?" I asked.
He dumped his own coat on a chair and then motioned me to follow him back to my reserved
computer. I stood behind Marc as he sat down and brought up a new Explorer page, typing in the
address window.
"It's a subscription-only search engine," he said. "I got a username and password at my summer
job at the Miami Herald and it still works. It's, like, a hundred times more powerful and thorough
than Google and pretty much anything else. Plus it only searches reputable publications so you
don't get any of that gossip or Facebook crap."
"Sounds good to me," I whispered.
I grabbed an empty chair from a nearby table and brought it up to the desk. Once he accessed
LexisNexis, Marc typed in "Ivy Slade" and hit enter. Almost instantly a list of articles appeared.
Some of them were familiar--the same articles I had been staring at for days, like the one about
the horseback riding competition and Olivia Slade's obit. I was just about to groan in frustration
when I noticed a link from the local Village of Easton newspaper--a link I had never seen before.
Next to it was a thumbnail photo that, even in miniature, looked mighty familiar. My blood ran
cold at the sight of it.
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"Open that one," I said, pointing. I felt so jittery that I was amazed at my steady hand.
Marc double clicked. Instantly, the photo filled the screen. Ivy, Cheyenne, Noelle, and Ariana
smiled out at us. It was the same photo that hung above Ivy's bed. Marc whistled under his breath.
"That's eerie," he said.
"Seriously."
"'Students from Easton Academy help out with last weekend's Coleman Park Cleanup,'" Marc read,
squinting at the caption. "I remember this! It was my freshman year. There was this park in
downtown Easton that they wanted to renovate and Easton Academy sent all these kids to help. It
was supposed to be a volunteer thing, but everyone who was sent was pretty much being
punished for some infraction or another. All of Billings and half of Ketlar went."
"What was the date of the picture?" I asked.
"It was taken on... May thirteenth," Marc read.
That freakish tingle of discovery I had been feeling so often lately rushed right through me. May
thirteenth. The date was familiar for a reason. That night, Ivy and Cheyenne had broken into Ivy's
grandmother's house in Boston and tripped the alarm. That very night Ivy's grandmother had
suffered her stroke and Ivy's vendetta against Billings had been born.
This was the picture she chose to keep within sight at almost all times? It had to remind her of the
worst day of her life. Why would she keep it so close? Why?
Um, because she's a psycho?116
And then, just like that, it hit me. She'd kept it
as a constant reminder of why she hated Billings so
much. She'd kept it to motivate her in her mission to bring all of us down. Looking at each of the
faces in turn, I got chills for a whole new reason.
One committed. Check
One dead. Check.
Noelle was the only one left.
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CRYPTIC GIRL
"Well, you've got me convinced," Marc said as we headed out of the library together an hour later.
He pulled his hat on and lowered it to his brow line. "I'd say Ivy's a pretty decent suspect."I had
just shared the entire Ivy/Boston/grandmother/Billings story with him and he had been riveted
throughout the telling.
"Glad we're on the same page," I replied as I pulled my scarf up to my chin. "But we do still have
another person on our list."
"Astrid Chou," we said in unison.
All night I had been wanting to ask him why he thought Astrid was a good suspect, but we had
been so busy talking about Ivy, I hadn't had the chance. Now he paused at the bottom of the
steps, hugging himself against the cold.
"Yeah, she's a weird one," he said as a gust of wind nearly knocked us both off our feet. "Not only
do she and Cheyenne have a long history,
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but no matter what I do, I can't get anyone to tell me why she was expelled from Barton last year."
I yanked my hat on as well and concentrated on not letting my teeth chatter. It was beyond bitter
out. "What do you mean, no matter what you do?"
Marc shrugged. "Well, I've tried talking to at least five people over at Barton and they all tell me
her records are sealed. Which means that whatever she did, it was really bad."
There was a sinking feeling in my gut and my knees started to shake in the cold. "Define really
bad."
"Like, could-be-violent bad," Marc replied, his tone ominous.
My mind immediately flashed back to a couple of awkward moments I had shared with Astrid
recently. Her going through my bag at the last soccer game, her bizarre comment about me trying
to take Cheyenne's place. And then there were all those arguments she and Cheyenne had had at
the beginning of the year. Plus she had been really paranoid when she found out about the Billings
disc....
"Damn," I said under my breath as my heart sank even further.
The Billings disc. Why did I have to break that stupid thing? Why had I never made a copy? I would
have bet my life that the information we needed about Astrid's expulsion had been in her file.
"What?" Marc asked, visibly shivering.
"Nothing. I'm just an idiot," I told him, starting to walk. If I didn't move soon I was going to turn
into a Reed-shaped ice sculpture. "I had this way I could have found out about Astrid, but... now I
don't."
I had already told enough people about the disc's existence, but at
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least they had all been in Billings and therefore had a vested interest in said disc. Marc didn't need
to know about it.
"Okay, cryptic," Marc said, but he didn't push it any further than that. He walked close to my side,
blocking the wind. "What about her friends from Barton? Do you know any of them? Maybe they
