“Hold on a sec,” Fatima said, then she reached under her chin and worked the white cloth free, unwrapping the hijab in one fluid motion, her hair—a black jumble of waves and curls—falling to her shoulders. In the front seat, Shelly and Eric tried not to stare.
“You’re staring,” Fatima said.
Eric wanted to smile but didn’t know if he should. “I thought you weren’t supposed to take that off.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I take it off every day.” She shook her head and used her fingers to fluff up the flat parts. “Besides, they see an Arab-looking girl with a headscarf walking up to their house with a box in the dark, they’re not opening the door.”
“All people aren’t like that,” Shelly said.
“Maybe not,” Fatima said, opening her door. “But I’m not taking that risk.”
Eric carried the pizza, Fatima held the six-pack of Diet Cherry Coke, and Shelly rang the doorbell.
From inside they heard a shouted “I’ll get it,” then the door opened and a woman looked at them through the screen.
Shelly took a half step forward. “Hi, we’re here to see Morgan.”
The woman kept looking, but there was something uncomfortable about the way her eyes shifted, how her head tilted to the side as she turned the handle and inched open the door. “She didn’t mention anything about people stopping by.”
“It’s sort of a surprise,” Shelly said. “For her birthday?”
“Yes, her birthday,” the woman said, the words coming out slow, as if she was piecing them together for the first time.
Eric held up the box. “We brought pizza. Pepperoni. It’s her favorite.”
“It’s a bit late for a school night . . .” She paused, and they held their breath. “But I suppose you can say hello,” the woman said, swinging the screen door wide and leaning away as, one by one, they entered.
Back at the Pizza Hut, they had filled the time waiting for the to-go order with predictions of what it would look like inside Morgan’s house.
“I bet it’s trashed,” Eric had said. “Like one of those Hoarders Anonymous shows. Boxes everywhere, news-papers, just a path between the piles of junk.”
“Cats,” Shelly had said, shivering. “Lots and lots of cats. And that cat-pee smell. And fur. On everything.”
“Dark,” Fatima had said. “The kind of place you lure people to before you cut off their heads with a chainsaw.”
Now, as they stepped in, they saw how wrong they had been.
The living room was bright and neat, with low, modern furniture and a shiny, dust-free hardwood floor. Three Japanese prints—a mountain, a waterfall, and an orchid—hung on the main wall. To the side, on a teak-and-glass table, a muted PBS documentary played on a paper-thin flatscreen, and on the floor by the chair, a thick novel was bookmarked with a red ribbon. The house smelled like spring.
The woman shut the door behind them. “I’ll tell Morgan you’re here,” she said, and disappeared down the hallway.
Shelly looked at the art, at the shelf lined with books, into the spotless kitchen with its overhead rack of gourmet pots and pans, glass-fronted cabinets, and granite countertop, and thought of the place she was forced to call home.
Eric leaned over to Fatima. “Are you sure we’ve got the right Morgan?”
They heard a muffled knock and some mumbled words, then two sets of footsteps coming back toward the room.
“Smile,” Shelly said. “It’s showtime.” And a second later the woman was back, and right behind her, wide-eyed and hesitant, the girl in the tagged Facebook photo.
“Surprise,” Shelly and Fatima said in tandem, sugar sweet and giddy.
“Happy Birthday, Morgan,” Eric said, trying not to look menacing.
“We brought pizza—”
“Pepperoni pizza,” Eric said, going off script, his smile even bigger.
“—instead of a cake. Hope that’s okay.”
“And Diet Cherry Coke,” Fatima said, holding up the six-pack. “Your favorite.”
They stood there, grinning, holding out their offering, waiting for the eruption.
It seemed to take forever.
Stunned silence.
A blank stare.
Then slow recognition.
Realization.
A flash of terror in her eyes.
Her lip twitching.
A shaky breath, drawn in for a terrified scream.
Then a different kind of silence.
A different stare.
Thinking.
Connecting.
Assessing.
A second realization.
A gasp.
Eyes narrowing, the stare changing.
A flicker, then a gleam.
Lip twisting into a knowing smile.
Then Morgan Rouleau screamed.
Thirty-Two
“OH MY GOD, I DON’T BELIEVE IT, HOW DID YOU KNOW? YOU guys are the best!”
Morgan’s smile slid into a smirk as she looked at each of them in turn, their blank stares fueling her energy. “Mom, these are three of my best friends from theater camp. This is—”
“I’m Shelly,” she said, too loud, racing the words out, cutting Morgan off. “Shelly Meyer.”
“Oh, I know your name,” Morgan said, looking straight at Shelly. “She goes to St. Anne’s.”
Shelly pressed her thumbnail into the side of her finger and kept grinning.
“This is Eric Hamilton. He takes really good pictures.”
Eric forced a smile. “Hello.”
“And this is Fatima El-Rafie, who I almost didn’t recognize without her headscarf.” She tilted her head a bit as she looked at Fatima. “I thought you weren’t allowed to take that off in public?”
“No, it’s allowed,” Fatima said, her olive cheeks reddening as she absently touched her hair.
Morgan turned to her mother, her hands pressed. “Is it okay if we have the pizza in my room? I want to show them three projects I’ve been working on. We won’t make a mess, I promise.”
Her mother eyed the group, not bothering to hide her suspicions.
“Come on, Mom. I never have anyone over.”
“I know,” her mother said, a subtle warning not meant for her daughter. “Twenty minutes. Then they have to go.”
“Thanks, Mom. Come on, guys,” Morgan said as she turned, leading the way down to the last door on the left.
It was a bedroom like any other—bed, dresser, lamp, closet, posters, desk, a couple of chairs, computer—with a light blue and white color scheme and enough perfume bottles, stuffed animals, hair ties, bracelets, gum wrappers, and black-covered novels to link it to a ninth-grade girl. The EpicFail homepage was up on the screen, and in the background, Katy Perry sang about a road less traveled. Morgan spun the desk chair around and sat down.
“Just so you know, one sound from me and my mother will be in here in less than a second,” Morgan said. “And she’ll be bringing a gun.”
They laughed, and Eric said, “A gun?”
“You want me to prove it?”
They stopped laughing. “Don’t worry. That’s not why we’re here.”
“Okay, then why are you here?”
Eric set the pizza on the edge of the desk, knocked a paperback off a chair, and sat down. “It’s your birthday.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“And because we did what we had to do.”
“And we videoed it,” Fatima said.
Shelly met Morgan’s stare. “And we put it on YouTube. And now we’re here to collect.”
Eyes on Shelly, Morgan shifted in her chair, pulling the wireless keyboard onto her lap. “Give me the title.”
“Not yet,” Shelly said, and the way she said it—cool and low—made Eric smile. “We’ve got some questions. How’d you find us?”
She typed, and the generic YouTube homepage popped up on the screen. “If you don’t tell me, I’m sending out your secrets.”
“You said we had until nine. W
e still got a few minutes.”
“Why should I tell you?”
“You tell how you found us,” Shelly said, sitting on the edge of the bed, “and we’ll tell how we found you.”
Morgan looked at the screen. “I don’t care how you—”
“Oh, come on,” Shelly said, a whiny disappointment in her voice Eric and Fatima hadn’t expected. “Aren’t you even curious? It wasn’t hard to figure it out. It had to be a lot harder to find us. We just want to know how you did it.”
Morgan typed something, then backspaced it out and paused. Then she said, “All right. Fine. But you go first. How’d you know each other?”
“We didn’t,” Eric said. “We met at an antibully thing we got sent to. You brought us together.”
Morgan shook her head, punching the top of her thigh. She mumbled something, took a breath, and shrugged it off. “How’d you find me?”
The three of them looked at each other. Shelly nodded to Fatima. “Go ahead, tell her.”
“The only thing Connor, Heather, and Katie had in common was that theater program,” Fatima said. “When they told us what they did to you, we figured you were the caller.”
Morgan tried to hide her surprise. “What did they tell you?”
“Enough to figure out who was calling.”
Eric pointed at a microphone headset on the desk. “Is that what you used to change your voice?”
“That and some program I downloaded. It was easy.”
“And so was finding you,” Shelly said. “Now your turn.”
Morgan leaned back and crossed her arms. “I needed somebody in their schools.”
“We figured that much out. How’d you know about us?”
“You mean about all your little secrets?” Morgan waited, glancing at each of them in turn, but they didn’t say anything, and a second later her swagger returned. “Everybody’s got something to hide. Everybody.”
“Maybe,” Shelly said. “But you went after us.”
“I didn’t go after you, I found you.” She smiled at Eric. “You’re the one who gave me the idea.”
Shelly and Fatima looked at him. Eric shook his head. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“There was a football game at the school near here. Your school against that one. I went to see if I could spot Connor. I was planning on some sort of . . . accident. But I didn’t see him. Not his sort of thing, I guess.”
“How’d I give you the idea?”
Morgan’s flat smile returned. “It was your phone.”
“You took my phone?”
“I found your phone. I was watching for Connor from below the stands, and I saw it on the ground.” She smirked. “Must have fallen out of your pocket.”
“It couldn’t have even been there two minutes,” Eric said. “That’s the first place I looked.”
“It was way longer than that. Besides, I turned it in, didn’t I?”
“After you went through it.”
“Oh, and you wouldn’t? All I did was swipe it on. It was already in the camera app, so I flipped through your pictures. Big deal.”
“You shouldn’t have done it.”
Morgan looked at him, her smile growing, her voice dropping. “And you shouldn’t have taken that picture.”
“I guess you were in the right place at the right time,” Shelly said. “But I don’t see how that would give you the idea.”
“Take a theater class,” Morgan said. “Not acting, that’s for posers. Backstage, that’s where the fun is. Building sets, doing the lighting, props, sound effects—everything that makes a show seem real. You’ll learn how easy it is to get people to do what you want if you set it up right. And I wanted to set up those three. But I knew I couldn’t do it myself. If they saw me coming, they’d figure I was going to do something to them. And they’d be right. I wouldn’t be able to get close enough. I had to find the right actors. When I saw the picture on Eric’s phone, I knew I’d found his character’s motivation.”
“You knew you could threaten him with it to get even with Connor.”
“Not just Connor. All three of them. The whole plan came to me in a second,” she said, snapping her fingers, talking faster now. “How I’d do it, what I’d have to get. Everything. Starting with finding two more actors.” She smiled at Fatima. “You were next.”
Fatima swallowed hard.
“Your school, anyway,” Morgan said. “I knew that that’s where Katie went, and I knew that I had to have somebody there if my plan was going to work. It’s close to the mall, so I told my mother I wanted to go shopping. She dropped me off, I cut through the parking lot to the soccer fields, walked right in, and started looking.”
“For another lost phone?”
“I assumed I wouldn’t be that lucky. I just needed something that somebody wouldn’t want me to have. So I went locker fishing. Lots of open lockers. I got a whole bunch of stuff—love notes, cheat sheets, books, some pictures.” She glanced at Eric. “None like your picture though, just things like drinking or normal making out, one that showed these stoners with a big bong.”
Shelly said, “Why didn’t you ‘cast’ one of them?”
“I tried,” Morgan said. “The first one was a senior. She wrote this steamy love note to another girl. Lots of details. I called and told her I had the letter and that I’d send it to everybody at her school. She just laughed, told me to go ahead, that she didn’t care what people thought. Then I called this other kid. He had these multiple-choice test answers written on the edge of a dictionary, but he barely spoke English, so I didn’t call him back. Then I called you.”
“Great, thanks.”
“If it was anybody else, I don’t think it would have worked,” Morgan said. “I mean, who cares what you believe. Then I saw your name and figured you were an Islamic—”
“A Muslim,” Fatima said.
“Whatevs. I read some of the stuff you wrote in the book, which was still no biggie, but then there were these notes like ‘I could never tell my parents’ and ‘They’d be so upset if they read this.’ It was perfect, like you wrote a script for me.”
Fatima looked away, her hair falling across her face.
“Then there was your address book—how stupid was that? Every page was filled with stuff. You should watch what you write down.”
“It’s a shame you didn’t try that at my school,” Shelly said, grabbing a soda, clicking it open with one hand, playing it cooler than she felt. “Everybody knows everybody. You would’ve got caught in a second.”
Morgan paused, her icy smile growing. “You still don’t recognize me, do you?”
Shelly looked at the others, then back at Morgan, not sure who she was talking to.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Morgan said. “You were a year ahead of me.”
Shelly blinked.
“Come on, think,” Morgan said. “It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Wait, hold on,” Shelly said, stalling, forcing her mind back, then, when it clicked, forcing the words out slow. “You went to Lockport High?”
“No. We moved here over the summer. Now I’m homeschooled. But two years ago, I was in middle school with you. You remember middle school, don’t you? You should—you were one of the popular girls.”
“I was never a popular girl,” Shelly said, controlling her voice, keeping her nerves steady.
“More popular than me. At least, you didn’t get picked on as much. Anyway, that was ages ago, right?”
“Right, so just—”
“But I still recognized you,” Morgan said. “As soon as I saw you on the St. Anne’s Facebook page. I was looking for Heather, and all of a sudden there you were, in a picture of new students. Your hair is different. It used to be light brown and she parted it on the other side, and it wasn’t all wild like now,” she said to Fatima. “Plus, she never wore that much eye makeup in eighth grade. But I knew it was her.”
“Okay, fine,” Shelly said, careful not to meet Fatima’s gaze
. “Let’s get to the videos and get this—”
“So I looked for your name under the picture—”
Shelly motioned at Eric without turning. “Tell her the YouTube title or whatever it’s called.”
“—but it wasn’t your name. I thought it was a typo. So I found another picture—”
“We get it,” Shelly said. “Eric, tell her what to look up. We gotta get going.”
Morgan looked into Shelly’s eyes. “And that’s when I knew I’d found the person I was looking for. Somebody with a secret so big she had to change her name and hide.”
Shelly squeezed her fists tight, her thumbnails digging in.
“And your secret? It’s absolutely horrible,” Morgan said. “Whatever it is.”
Shelly froze.
“I mean, it’s gotta be something awful, right? Why else would you go through all that trouble?”
Sitting on the bed, Shelly watched as her knees started to shake, all of them staring at her, wondering.
“It was like you were pulling some witness-protection-program thing, only you’re the criminal,” Morgan said. “I searched you on Google, but nothing came up. It didn’t matter, though. You never asked me what I knew.”
Shelly felt faint.
“Whatever your secret is, you were willing to do some crazy shit to keep it hidden.”
A white-noise roar filled Shelly’s head.
“And that’s all I needed anyway.”
The noise grew louder as the meaning of Morgan’s words sank in.
“Good thing for me you didn’t ask,” Morgan said, turning back to the keyboard, the YouTube homepage on the screen. “No more delays. What do I type?”
Eric glanced at Shelly, her eyes glazed over. “Mac and Cheese Punks Three,” he said, sticking to the script, then leaned back and watched the screen. Morgan typed the words and hit ENTER. A page-long list of videos popped up. The first two were paid ads, and all but one looked like cooking shows.
Eric scooted his chair forward and looked down the list, remembering his lines. “I don’t see it,” he said.
“If this is some kind of—”
“Just hold on,” he said, faking the irritation in his voice. He pointed to a red screen capture he’d had Ian post two hours ago. “Try that one.”
Cold Calls Page 17
