Higher Learning

by Clare Kauter

  I heard a noise coming from the kitchen and guessed that Will was cooking himself up some breakfast. Trust this to be the one morning he didn’t go out for brunch. He wasn’t just here for a quick stop. What now? I needed someone to bail me out. Tim was in therapy, so that was a no-go. Who else did I know with a questionable enough moral compass or a strong enough loyalty to me to help me out of here rather than have me arrested?

  Adam was out. I was not in his good books at the moment, and if he knew I’d started breaking into houses that might push him over the edge. All of my friends from school would tell Will what was going on immediately, thinking that they were doing it for my own good. There was really only one person I could think of who might help me, and he was not going to be happy about it. I sent him a tentative text.

  What would you say if I told you I broke into your brother’s house but he came home early and now I’m trapped in his wardrobe while he makes himself brunch in the kitchen and I need you to come and bail me out?

  I received a reply a few moments later.

  I would say that I’m not at all surprised, I’m not even sure why I like you and I’ll be there in ten minutes.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. My phone buzzed again.

  Also I’m only doing this so Will doesn’t find you and get upset. I’m not happy about it.

  That seemed fair enough.

  Ten minutes later, there was a knock on Will’s door.

  “James! Hey, how are you?”

  “I’m good,” James replied. “I’ve got the day off, and I was thinking that you and I should go and grab lunch at that café down the road.”

  “I would, but I’m halfway through cooking myself breakfast.”

  “Is there enough for me too?”

  Will paused. “Um, not really.”

  “Then put it in the fridge and have it for dinner. You and I are going to that new café down the road. The one with milk crates covered in hessian sacks instead of real chairs. That’s how you know the coffee is going to be great – when the design scheme is as ridiculous as possible.”

  Will laughed. “OK, let’s go.”

  And just like that, they were gone. I considered continuing to search the apartment, but I didn’t want to push my luck. Instead I checked out the window to make sure I could see James and Will walking off down the street and exited the apartment. As I headed for my car, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was James.

  Wait in your car. I need to talk to you.

  I sighed and beeped open the Mustang. After briefly considering driving away, I decided to do as I was told. After all, James had just bailed me out of quite a sticky situation. I should probably do him the courtesy of listening to his inevitable lecture. One and a half podcasts later, I saw James approaching my car. The Mustang was pulled up next to a park filled with joggers, a block away from Will’s apartment. I wondered how James knew where it was. I guess he’d driven past it on his way to Will’s house.

  I stepped out, locked up behind myself and leaned back against the car.

  “Remind me to never trust you ever again,” said James.

  I bit my lip. “Would it help if I said it was for a good cause?”

  “No, it would not. I know you too well to believe that,” he said. “What were you doing?”

  I sighed. I was going to have to tell him, but as soon as I did, he would be suspicious that I was going to do the same thing to him. “I wanted to find the letter Topher left him.”

  “Right. And were you planning on breaking into my house next?”

  “No,” I said. “I was going to ask you politely.”

  “Really?” he asked incredulously.

  I nodded. “I promise. I wouldn’t have searched Will’s place, but when I asked him he said he’d never ever ever show me his note. I was forced to take drastic action.”

  James shook his head at me. “You can’t do that kind of stuff, Charlie. Especially not to your friends.”

  I looked down at the ground. “I know,” I said finally. “I just go a little crazy where Topher’s concerned.”

  James closed the space between us and pulled me into a hug. “I get it,” he said. “I’m the same. Less insane than you, though. Probably because I have a lower baseline of crazy.”

  I glared at him, but I couldn’t muster too much anger. It was a fair call. “Are you going to dob me in?”

  He sighed. “Would I have bailed you out if I was just going to turn you in?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So,” I said, realising that it was the first time we’d been alone together since The Incident Part 2. My heart began to speed up. He was making me nervous. “What happens now?”

  He shrugged. “I guess we make out again?”

  “What?” I said. “Sorry, I’m not sure if I heard you –”

  But he’d already answered my question. Yes, I had heard him correctly. We were making out. Again. Right, we were doing this. My mind was racing with a thousand questions – what did this mean? Once was an accident. Twice was, well, another accident. But three times? That was a pattern. This was definitely a thing now.

  Then our tongues touched and I ceased to think about anything other than how nice he smelled and how soft his lips were and how the stubble on his chin was a little spiky but not in a totally unpleasant way and –

  “I guess I know why he didn’t try to stop you from joining the cheer squad after that PE lesson, then,” said a voice to my left.

  James and I broke apart and he stepped away from me hastily. I turned to see who had spoken and found myself face to face with Chelsea.

  Oh, great. It was official. I was fired.

  “Chelsea, I –” James began, but I cut him off.

  “Chels, can you and I have a word?” I asked.

  She nodded and we walked away from James, who looked more than a little stressed out by this turn of events.

  Chelsea was dressed in active wear and had probably been jogging in the park when she'd seen us. It was lucky she hadn't overheard us talking about the case, I suppose, but this situation was still far from ideal. I put my arm around Chelsea's shoulder and whispered, “So, this is a little awkward...”

  “A little.”

  My heart was racing. It felt wrong to try and make a high school kid think that what she thought she'd just seen was OK, but what option did I have? I'd explain it to her eventually.

  “He's hot though, right?” I said.

  She laughed a little. “Yeah, he is.”

  “And he's not even that old, so it's not like it's that weird.”

  “You can stop panicking,” she said. “I'm not going to tell anyone.”

  Relief flooded through me. “Thanks,” I said. “He's a good guy, really.”

  She nodded. “I'm glad you went for him instead of Bicknell.”

  I frowned. That was an odd thing to say. “Really? Why?”

  “Uh, because he's a total creep.”

  OK, so apparently I was the only person who hadn't realised right off the bat.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “I'm pretty sure he only chose to coach the cheer team so he could watch us dance around in short skirts,” she said. “Plus he's always inviting us to do tutoring at his house. He tried to get Gabby – um, one of my friends – to have sex with him. Total weirdo.”

  Alarm bells went off in my head. I needed to find out more.

  “Are you serious?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. He pretended he was going to tutor her and then when she got to his house there were, like, candles lit and stuff. Then when she tried to leave he blocked the door. She had to push past him to get out of the house and he called her a whore and shouted at her. Total psycho loser. If you ask me, girls didn’t like him in high school and now he’s trying to make up for lost time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, lost in thought. “You could be right.”

  What did this mean? Elliot had known the g
irl who died – apparently a lot better than he’d let on. Or maybe he just wished he’d known her better. Either way, his behaviour was deeply concerning. Of course, Chelsea could’ve been exaggerating or Gabby could have made it up. Second-hand information like this wasn’t entirely reliable. I needed to find out as much as I could and see if anyone else had heard a version of this story. I decided to ask Abhati about it the next time I saw her.

  “Anyway, I’d better go,” said Chelsea. “And let you get back to your boyfriend. It looked like I might have interrupted something.”

  I laughed awkwardly. “Yeah, kind of. I’ll tell him to stop stressing out about you dobbing us in.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” she said, holding out her little finger. I took it with my own and we sealed the pinkie promise. “Oh, I just remembered. I was going to invite you to my house tonight, but I didn’t have your number. Do you want to come to my place and hang out with some of the other girls on the squad? You can stay over. Or do you have other plans for tonight?” She winked at me.

  “Oh, it’s not like that,” I said. “Making out is as far as we – I’d love to come to your house.”

  Bingo. I’d been invited to a party at Chelsea’s. Maybe she’d invite the guys she used to work with and I could find out who had supplied the drugs to Gabby from the horse’s mouth.

  “OK,” she said. “Give me your number and I’ll send you the details.”

  We exchanged phone numbers and she jogged off, waving goodbye to me and James. I walked back over to him.

  “So?” he said apprehensively.

  “All good,” I said. “She’s not going to tell anyone.”

  He frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “We pinkie promised. She wouldn’t dare break the sanctity of the pinkie promise.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “Forgive me if I’m not totally reassured by that.”

  “Well, you can take comfort in one thing, even if she does dob me in,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I just got what might be a massive clue.”

  James raised his eyebrows. “Really? What is it?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but for some reason decided to keep the information about Elliot and Gabby to myself for the moment. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust James; it was just that I didn’t want to give him an ‘I told you so’ moment before I’d confirmed that the story was true.

  “I want to check it out before I give you any details,” I said. “No point in getting your hopes up.”

  “You kind of already did, what with calling it a ‘massive clue’ and all.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “Don’t worry about it for now, though. And don’t worry about Chelsea. I thought she was a bit of a psycho at first, but I actually quite like her now.”

  James sighed. “I hope you’re right about her, otherwise you are definitely going to get fired.”

  “I can’t imagine your boss would be too happy about it either,” I said. “He’s not my biggest fan.”

  James gave a bark of laughter. “That’s a bit of an understatement,” he said. “That time a body showed up on your front doorstep and Harcourt came to your house, he actually described you to the other cops as ‘spawn of Satan’.”

  I frowned. “Really? That’s interesting,” I said. “I mean, my mum is intense, but I hadn’t considered the possibility of her actually being Lucifer until right this moment.”

  “Maybe it’s your dad.”

  “Nah,” I said. “He’s too happy being a mechanic to be the Prince of Darkness. Mum, on the other hand...”

  “Yeah, I can see that too,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m actually considering it a possibility that your mother is Satan.”

  I smiled and exhaled through my nose. (In a laughy kind of way, not in an ‘I’m trying to dislodge something’ kind of way.) “You and I should probably get out of here,” I said. “Just in case there are any more students around who spot us.”

  James nodded, smiling. “Probably.” He hesitated, then said, “Do you want to have dinner together tonight?”

  “I’d love to,” I said, “but I’m afraid I have already made plans.”

  He stuck out his bottom lip and pouted at me. For a brief moment I was tempted to cancel my plans and say yes to him, but I pulled myself together. “Chelsea invited me to a sleepover,” I said. “I can’t really afford to miss that kind of bonding activity at this stage.”

  He nodded. “You and I can delay our own sleepover until another night, then.”

  The very thought made me blush.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Chelsea’s house wasn’t all that far from my own – only a twenty minute walk or so. She was in the richer part of town, where the lawns were all perfectly manicured and people drove cars that weren’t second-hand. It was a nicer area than where my parents lived, but not quite a Madison Hill level of fancy. It had the air of a certain level of wealth, but not the ridiculous level of opulence that my street boasted. (I loved my house, but even I could admit that it was a little ostentatious, and if James charged the rent it was really worth, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it in a million years.)

  Even though I could have walked to her house, I decided to get an Uber there. I didn’t want to give away the fact that I lived nearby. I called Tim before I left to tell him what I was up to.

  “Guess who got invited to a rager at the head cheerleader’s house?” I said when he answered.

  “Honey, you’ve outdone yourself.”

  I grinned. “I know, right? I saw Chelsea talking to those guys who hang around the school yesterday, and seeing as they’re my main suspects I’m hoping they’ll make an appearance tonight. Maybe I can introduce myself.”

  “Good idea. Be careful, though. They might not trust you enough to talk to you.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “If they don’t want to talk, I have some blackmail material that should loosen the tongue of at least one of them.”

  “You do? What is it?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources,” I replied.

  He laughed. “Fine, whatever. Are you going to wear your wire? Do you need me there as backup? I can listen in from the car outside.”

  “I’ll be OK,” I said. “Wearing the wire is probably not a good idea since I’m staying the night. Someone might see it. Also you’d have to sit in the car just listening for ages. I’ll text you every hour or so and keep you updated, and if I want to record something I’ll just use my phone.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “Call me if you need me. By the way, how did your escapade this morning go?”

  I grimaced. “No luck.”

  “Should I ask?”

  “Probably not.”

  He laughed. “Good luck tonight.”

  “Thanks, Timmy.”

  Chelsea’s house was a white, two storey building which looked pretty much identical to all the others in the street. The garden was perfectly manicured, naturally, and there wasn’t so much as a leaf out of place. When I rang the doorbell, Chelsea’s terrifying mother answered.

  “Hi, Mrs Bales,” I said, trying to hide my surprise. If Chelsea had been organising a rave, surely she would have done it at a time when her mother wouldn’t be at the house. What exactly had I walked into? God, was this a dinner party or something? I wasn’t enough of a grown up for that!

  “Hello, Charlotte,” she said, letting me into the house. “Chelsea is in the upstairs sitting room with her friends. You can go up and join her. It’s the last room on the left.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and headed up the stairs. The sitting room? Who had a sitting room? Why would anyone have a whole room dedicated to sitting? A lounge room I could understand – I loved lounging. But what exactly was the purpose of a sitting room?

  When I walked in, I found everyone sitting. Well, that was one mystery solved. Now to find out who the dealer was. However, looking around the room, it became apparent that this wasn’t going to be the kind of part
y I’d expected. The table was littered with what I assumed were the products to be used for this evening’s entertainment: a game of Twister, various facemasks, nail polish and the binder Chelsea used to keep her choreography ideas all together. No alcohol. No meth. There weren’t even any snacks. What kind of hell was this?

  “Charlotte!” said Chelsea, jumping to her feet and rushing over to give me a hug. “How are you?”

  “Good, thanks,” I said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than I felt. Where were the snacks? I couldn’t last a night without snacks.

  “I was just about to go and get us some drinks,” she said.

  Oh, thank god.

  “Water or pineapple juice for you?”

  I paused for a beat. “Pineapple juice,” I said eventually, sounding a little defeated. What kind of high school party was this? No alcohol, apparent plans for physical activity later (and not even that kind of physical activity), and worst of all, no snacks. It was lucky Arnold wasn’t here. She’d have eaten a cushion by now. To be honest, I was sort of considering that myself. (What kind of party didn’t have snacks? At least a bag of Smiths Originals. A box of plain Jatz. Just something.)

  Chelsea returned a moment later with a tray of drinks, showing remarkable coordination as she handed them out like a waitress, not spilling a single one. A couple of people had chosen water, which confused me. Had they not known that pineapple juice was on offer?

  After what seemed like hours of sitting around, chatting about school and not eating snacks, Chelsea’s mother appeared at the door carrying a tray.

  “I thought you girls might be getting hungry, so I fixed you up some” – snacks? Glorious, glorious snacks? – “carrot sticks and celery.”

  Seriously? There wasn’t even any dip on the tray! Not snacks, unless you were Adam Baxter, although even he could put away a decent amount of wine given the chance. I wasn’t usually a heavy drinker – or much of a drinker at all – but in the absence of snacks and drug dealers, I was going to need something to get me through the party. Not that I would’ve taken the drugs – it was just that at least if they were here, everything wouldn’t feel so pointless. Maybe I could fake an illness, or sever a limb, or –