“Full frontal,” she confirms, shuddering at the memory.
Knox snorts out a humorless laugh. “Imagine how much fun we could have with that if we were assholes like him.” Then he frowns and massages his temple. “So, what should we do about the video? Should we tell someone?”
“Well,” I say cautiously. “It doesn’t change anything, does it? It’s still a shitty accident, except now they’d all get in trouble for lying.” I don’t care about Sean or Monica, but there’s Jules to consider. “And then…the Truth or Dare game would be out there. Teachers would know about it, so we’d lose our phones at school. And parents would know.” I glance at Knox to see if that’s sinking in, and sure enough, he looks appalled at the thought. I’m sure he doesn’t want his parents learning his Truth any more than I want my mother to hear mine.
“Right,” Knox says decisively. “It doesn’t change anything.”
I turn toward Maeve. She’s usually the first to jump in with an opinion, but she’s been quiet for a while. Now that my eyes have gotten used to the drama club office lighting, she doesn’t look as green anymore—but she does look exhausted. Dark circles ring her eyes, and her usually shiny hair is pulled back into a dull, messy bun. “What do you think?” I ask.
Her amber eyes droop. “Whatever you guys want to do.” She picks up her messenger bag and loops it around her shoulder. “I have to go. I have a doctor’s appointment in half an hour.”
I pluck at her sleeve. “Everything okay?”
“Sure. Fine. It’s just…” Maeve glances between Knox and me and bites her lip, her face conflicted. Then she seems to make up her mind about something. “It’s just that I might not be around as much, for a while. Depending on how things go today. I’ve been having…symptoms. The sort of things that used to happen before I relapsed. So I’m getting that checked out. We’re starting with a blood test, and then we’ll see what’s next.”
My mouth falls open, and I’m rooted to the spot as Maeve gets to her feet. But Knox isn’t; he jumps up with her, knocking his knee hard against the desk. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Maeve, what the hell? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She gives him a wry half smile. “We haven’t exactly been talking.”
“Yeah, but that—that doesn’t matter. Not compared to this.” Knox runs a hand through his hair and snatches his backpack up from the ground. “I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t,” Maeve protests. “You have class.”
“I’ll cut. Phoebe showed me how.”
“It’s true,” I volunteer, but neither of them is paying attention to me.
Maeve twists her hands together. “My parents are taking me. I don’t think they’d want a committee in my oncologist’s office.”
“Then I’ll wait in the lobby. Or the parking lot.” Knox slips his backpack over his shoulders and grips the straps so tightly that his knuckles turn white. “God, Maeve, I’m sorry. I feel like shit that I didn’t know about this.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” Maeve says. “I do.”
“You tried. I wouldn’t listen.”
I get the feeling, suddenly, that I’m intruding on an overdue conversation. I stand and enfold Maeve in a quick, hard hug. “I better go,” I say into her hair. “Good luck. I’m thinking all the good thoughts for you.” She murmurs her thanks as I slip through the office door.
I part the velvet curtains onstage and descend the side staircase onto the auditorium floor. My thoughts are in a whirl, pinballing between Maeve’s news and the video I just saw. When I reach the back of the auditorium, I almost trip over a sneakered foot jutting into the aisle.
“Hey,” Matthias Schroeder says. “I have a message for you.”
He’s sitting in the back row, a brown paper bag in his lap, clutching half a sandwich. I pause and take him in: light blue hoodie with some Star Wars character I don’t know, skinny black jeans, and weirdly jaunty red sneakers. His wispy blond hair is too long, hanging in his eyes. “You have a message for me?” I ask, skeptical. Matthias and I have never spoken before. “And you, what? Had to trip me before you could tell me?”
“I waved at you the entire time you were walking up the aisle,” he says. “You didn’t notice me. Anyway, I had English with Emma before lunch and she doesn’t feel well so she took your car and went home. I guess she doesn’t have a phone, or whatever.”
“Oh. Okay.” I look at him warily. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“I followed you,” he says. His expression gets defensive when my eyes pop. “I’m not, like, creeping on you. I was gonna tell you in the caf but you came here instead. I eat lunch here sometimes anyway, so I waited for you.”
He takes a bite of sandwich. It’s made with thin white bread and some kind of pale pink lunchmeat, a wilted leaf of lettuce poking out of one side. It’s the loneliest-looking vegetable I’ve ever seen. When he places the sandwich on his paper bag, I can see indents where his fingers were pressing. “Well, thanks for letting me know,” I say.
I should go then, probably, but instead I hitch my backpack higher on my shoulder. “Did you have anything to do with the Truth or Dare texting game?” I ask abruptly.
Matthias looks startled. “What? No. Why would you think that?”
Everybody thinks that, I almost say. “You started Simon Says.”
Matthias looks down at his sandwich. “That was different.”
“How?”
“I just wanted to know what it was like.” It’s dim in the auditorium, but I can still see Matthias’s cheeks flush. “To have people pay attention.”
“They paid attention to the Truth or Dare game, too.”
“I said that wasn’t me.” Matthias seems surprised at the sound of his own voice echoing through the empty room. He lowers it. “I wouldn’t even know how to find out that stuff. The secrets. Nobody talks to me. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“I’m talking to you.”
“Yeah, well.” Matthias tosses the rest of his sandwich into the paper bag and crumples the whole thing into a ball. “We both know that won’t last.” He unfolds his lanky frame to stand up and I feel—I don’t know. Like I shouldn’t let him be right.
“If you don’t want to eat lunch here tomorrow, you could, um, eat with us,” I tell him.
Matthias stares at his red sneakers, looking mildly alarmed. “I don’t think so. Thanks, though.” He darts away before I can respond, and it’s probably just as well. I don’t know what we’d talk about for more than a few minutes anyway.
* * *
—
It’s hot for March—not the best day for me to get ditched by a sick Emma—so I’m grumpy and sweating by the time I trudge onto my block. My phone rings, and I curse at it under my breath. Hardly anyone calls me except my mother, so I don’t even have to look at the screen before I answer. “Hey, Mom,” I say, pulling out my keys as I approach the front door of our building.
Her voice is harried. “Hi, Phoebe. Is Emma with you? Can you put her on?”
I insert my key in the lock with one hand and twist it to the right. It doesn’t budge, and I grunt in annoyance as I pull it out to try again. Everything in this building looks great on the surface but works like actual crap. “She’s not with me,” I say distractedly.
Mom heaves a frustrated sigh. “I don’t understand. This isn’t like her!”
“Huh?” My mind is only half on her words as I wrestle with the key until the lock finally gives. “What isn’t like her?” I ask, pulling the door open.
“To just not show up like this. She’s supposed to be doing a walk-through for me at the restaurant where Ashton and Eli are having their rehearsal dinner. The manager could only be there this afternoon and I can’t leave work, so I asked Emma to go in my place. We had a whole list of questions prepared, but she never showed up. And
she still hasn’t replaced her phone, so I can’t even call her.”
I’m in the lobby now and pause in front of one of the potted plants. Mom is right. That’s not like Emma at all, even if she isn’t feeling well. She’s dragged herself to tutoring sessions when she had a fever. “She’s sick,” I say. “She left school early. Didn’t she tell you?”
Mom exhales into my ear. “No, she didn’t. Okay. What’s wrong with her? Is it that stomach thing again, or—”
“I don’t know,” I interrupt. “I haven’t seen her. She asked somebody at school to tell me she was leaving, and I just got home.” I cross the lobby to the elevator and reach it right as the doors are starting to close. I stick my hand between them until they spring back open, and smile apologetically at the old woman standing off to one side. She lives on our floor, so the button is already pressed. “Do you want me to go to the restaurant instead?”
“Oh, that’s sweet of you, Phoebe, but it’s too late. The manager already left. I’ll figure something else out. Could you please check on your sister and call me back?”
“Okay,” I say. Mom thanks me and disconnects as the elevator chimes. I’m kind of anxious about Emma now, because how sick does she have to be to forget she was supposed to help Mom out? That’s the kind of thing I’d do.
I open our apartment door and it’s completely silent when I walk in. “Emma?” I call, pulling off my ankle boots. I leave them beside the door and drop my keys and bag on the kitchen island, then pad toward our bedroom. “How are you feeling?”
There’s no response. The door is closed, and I push it open. Emma is lying on her bed in a messy tangle of blanket and sheets. For once, her bed looks exactly like mine. She’s out cold, breathing steadily through her half-open mouth. As I move closer, she lets out a little snore. I stub my toe against something on the floor and step into a patch of wetness. Emma’s Bayview Wildcats tumbler is lying beside her bed, and I pick it up and sniff inside. I wrinkle my nose and recoil. Gin, this time.
“Jesus, Emma.” I don’t know whether to be disgusted or worried, so I settle on both. “What the hell is going on with you?”
I grab some Kleenex from my dresser and bend down to mop up the spill, wincing when my knee connects with something sharp. It’s the edge of Emma’s phone charger, lying useless on the floor since she still hasn’t replaced her phone. She keeps borrowing mine any time she wants to look something up and doesn’t have the laptop handy, which is annoying because—
I pause, damp tissues dangling from one hand. Whenever Emma asks to borrow my phone, I hand it over without question. Half the time, I leave her alone in our room with it. What if she opened my Instagram and saw the messages from Derek? I never deleted them. Is that the kind of thing that might send her spiraling?
“Phoebe?” Emma’s sleepy voice startles me so much that I almost fall over. Her eyes flutter open and lock on me. “What’re you doing?”
“Cleaning up your mess,” I say, sitting back on my haunches. “There’s half a cup of gin on the floor. You’re not actually sick, are you? You’re drunk. Do you even remember that you were supposed to help Mom with Ashton and Eli’s rehearsal dinner?”
Emma blinks slowly at me. “I need to ask you something.”
My frustration rises. “Did you hear a word I just said?”
“Did you love him?” she asks hoarsely.
I swallow hard. Crap. She definitely saw the messages from Derek. “No. That was a huge mistake and it’s over. I wish it had never happened.”
She snorts out a humorless laugh. “I know it’s over. I’m not an idiot. It’s just that I never imagined…I didn’t think…” Her eyes droop, or maybe close. I can’t really tell from this angle.
“Didn’t think what?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer, and I get to my feet again, her Bayview Wildcats tumbler in my hand. I’m about to leave when I hear a whisper from Emma’s bed, so faint I almost miss it. “I didn’t think he’d keep going.”
“Keep going with what?” I ask. But the snores start up again, so I guess that’s all I’m going to get out of her for now.
I bring the cup into the bathroom and rinse it thoroughly, adding a few drops of liquid soap until it smells like lemons instead of alcohol. My head is pounding like I’m the one who drank God only knows how much straight gin. When I’m finished, I dry the cup with a hand towel and place it on the back of the toilet. Then I lean against the sink, meeting my tired eyes in the mirror. I don’t know what’s going on with my sister, or what I should do about it. I don’t want to worry Mom when she’s been so much more cheerful lately. I could try talking to Emma’s friend Gillian, maybe, but Gillian pretty much hates me after the whole Derek reveal. When she sees me at school, she looks right through me. There’s nobody else I can turn to who knows Emma well enough to help.
It almost makes me consider messaging Derek back. Almost. But not quite.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Knox
Friday, March 20
Sandeep frowns at the envelope and holds it up to the light. “Yeah, I think it’s the same person who sent the last couple of threats. The label has the exact same font.”
Bethany is perched at the edge of the desk Sandeep and I are sharing. She squints and leans closer. “Font? That looks like handwriting.”
“That’s how it’s designed,” Sandeep says. He reaches into the desk drawer for a Ziploc and drops the envelope inside, squeezing out all the air in the bag and sealing it before he holds it up to Bethany. “But look at the kerning. It’s too even.”
“The what?” Bethany asks.
“Kerning. The spacing between the individual letter forms,” Sandeep explains. “It’s a typography term.”
Bethany rolls her eyes as she gets up and heads back to her desk. “You’re such a nerd.”
“It’s not nerdy to care about fonts!” Sandeep calls after her. “Typography is an art form.”
Bethany sticks her tongue out at him and grabs her bag. “If you say so. I’m out, boys. Don’t stay too late.”
I swivel in my desk chair beside Sandeep. “Aren’t you going to open it? Read what’s inside?”
“Later. When I’m wearing gloves,” he says. I frown, confused—why would he need gloves?—and he adds, “At this point, we’ve gotten enough threats from this particular individual that we need to hand it over to the police. I want to contaminate the envelope as little as possible before then.”
I can’t take my eyes off the envelope. The last note I read is still seared into my brain: I’ll enjoy watching you die. “What do you think this person’s so mad about?” I ask.
“The threats aren’t specific, but if I had to guess, it’s the D’Agostino case,” Sandeep says, so promptly that I can tell he’s thought about this a lot. He pushes the Ziploc bag into one corner of the desk. “People get very angry when police officers are accused of a crime, but that anger is often displaced toward the accuser or the victim. The conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience is well documented.”
“Right,” I say, although I only got about half of that. When Sandeep launches into professor mode, he’s a little hard to follow. Plus I’m distracted, checking my phone for updates. Maeve’s oncology appointment ended four hours ago, and she told me when we left the office that they wouldn’t have results for a while. “They’re rushing it, but it still might take a few days,” she’d said. “Lab hours are hard to predict.” Still, I keep hoping that “rushing it” means “this afternoon.” We’re in the twenty-first century, after all.
This morning, I was still mad at Maeve. I was okay with the fact that holding a grudge might lose me a friend. But that was when the loss wasn’t a tangible, permanent thing. Now, I can’t stop thinking about how rare it is to have someone you can be completely real with, even when things get raw and uncomfortable and a little scary. Especi
ally then.
All I want is for my friend to be okay.
“Anyway, try not to worry too much. We’ll take care of it.” I blink at Sandeep’s voice, and the office comes back into focus. He slides a pile of folders toward me across the desk. “In the meantime, Eli needs somebody to give him the details about next week’s court schedule and I, my friend, am not it.” He runs a hand over his already-smooth dark hair. “I have a date.”
I sneak one last look at my phone. Nothing. Six thirty on a Friday probably isn’t prime time for medical updates. “What about those child labor laws you’re always going on about?” I ask.
“They cease to exist when I have a date,” Sandeep says, jerking his head toward the smaller conference room. “Eli’s in Winterfell. He just needs the basics on his calendar for now. Make another one of your magic spreadsheets. He loves those.” Then he tugs at his collar, looking guilty. “Unless you need to get home. I mean, it is kind of late.”
“It’s fine,” I say. I don’t mind the long hours at Until Proven, because what the hell else would I be doing on a Friday night? Besides, Eli and Sandeep and Bethany and everybody else act like my presence here matters—like things work better when I’m around. It’s a good feeling.
Sandeep grins and gets to his feet, stuffing his laptop into his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “Good man. I’ll see you Monday.”
“Hang on,” I call, grabbing a black leather jacket off the back of his chair. “You forgot your coat.”
Sandeep pauses midstep and turns with a quizzical expression. “What? I didn’t bring a coat.” He peers at the jacket I’m holding up, and his face clears. “Ah, I think that’s Nate Macauley’s. He stopped by around lunchtime to talk with Eli about a case study on Simon Kelleher. He might publish it in the Harvard Law Review.”
“Nate might?” I ask, confused.
Sandeep laughs. “Sure. Harvard always takes submissions from teenagers with no legal training. No, Eli might. But only if all the kids are comfortable with it. Anyway, just give that to Eli—he’ll get it back to Nate.”
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