Get a Clue

by Tiffany Schmidt

“It does matter,” I objected. “And by Wednesday, we’ll tell them you didn’t.” Hopefully sooner, because things were escalating. Last month it had been one to two posts a week. In the last twenty-four hours, there’d been five.

  “Is that supposed to make them feel better? Or just me? Because it doesn’t erase what was said about them. Whoever is doing this—they’re hurting these people to hurt me. So, fine, I didn’t type those words or post those pictures, but it’s not not my fault.”

  I stared at him for a moment. What if it wasn’t about Win? What if Win was just a convenient vehicle for other vendettas?

  I followed his eyes back to my phone, which was lying on the kitchen counter, photo still on display. I hadn’t looked closely at the non-poophead people in it. There were Wink and Win, Reese, Bancroft, Elijah, Morris, Shiloh, Clara, Mira, Elinor, Gemma, Atticus, Dante, and a handful of people I didn’t know. Among them was a Black guy who was smiling at Win instead of at the camera.

  “That’s Mac?” I’d avoided searching iLive for him, hadn’t wanted his face in my memory. But now I knew he had laughing eyes and shoulders that filled out a suit coat better than I ever would. “Swimmer?”

  “Yup. And soccer and baseball.” Win grinned, and my stomach twisted with the weight of a history I didn’t know or share.

  And also fear. Investigations were based on three things: motive, means, and opportunity. If Mac was on the Mayfield baseball team, he’d probably have been there when Erick dropped the ball. That was opportunity. And here was motive: revenge on Colleen. I needed to look up who he kept in touch with. Check how many posts were from this year versus Mayfield. And how many were like Ava’s picture or Clara’s gifs—pulled from others’ social media? Was it possible the person behind the page didn’t go to Chester or Hero High or even live in the state?

  So many people had heard Morris call me “Win’s new boyfriend” yesterday, and for a hot second I thought that plus my accepted friend request meant the page creator had to be in the Chester lunchroom. But news traveled—anyone could’ve reached out to Mac. Then the post about Shiloh and me would make so much sense.

  “Did you—” I swallowed, because this was the sort of information I absolutely didn’t want in my head, but absolutely needed. “Did you save your texts from Mac?”

  “Why?” Win frowned and stepped back. “You think Mac—no. No way.”

  “You can’t be certain,” I said slowly, then rushed to add, “And I’m not saying it’s him, but he could be a possibility.”

  “I can. For certain. I get you’re on your scavenger hunt for clues, but this is my life and I’m making Mac off-limits.”

  “That’s not how this works.” Watson didn’t get to hand out free passes for suspects or tell Sherlock to stop following leads.

  “It is now. Sometimes it feels like you forget this is real. It’s not some game or puzzle. Don’t you care?”

  I could feel my nostril’s flaring. I knew Win used alienation as a defense mechanism. He provoked as a form of self-preservation. Well, congratulations to him; this time he’d won, and I practically spat out the words “If you really don’t think I care, why am I here?” As soon as the words were out, I decided I didn’t want an answer. Not with his ex-boyfriend’s picture still on my phone like a reminder of all the fun memories Win and I weren’t making. “You know what? Maybe I shouldn’t be.”

  20

  I didn’t expect Win to call my bluff. To protest or stop me as I gathered my bag and shoes and coat. But I wished he would have. Instead he turned his back and hid any regret on his face. I felt like I was bleeding incompetence and wanted him to want me here anyway. To recognize I was trying—and that it killed me to be failing him.

  I paused with my hand on the doorknob, searching for a way to rewind to the better part of the afternoon, or tell him I understood Hudson’s loyalty. I didn’t want to leave him either.

  But the knob turned beneath my hand, the door swung open, and I just barely jumped out of its path.

  His parents froze on the threshold—their eyes skipping from me to the oblivious boy in the kitchen. The one stoically not acknowledging what he thought was my exit.

  “Winston Conan Cavendish!”

  As his parents shrieked his name, he jumped and clutched his chest.

  I silently mouthed a line from “The Speckled Band”: “How dangerous it is to reason from insufficient data.”

  It was a quote that definitely referred to this situation, but as Win and his parents argued about putting ice on his face and whether they’d needed to leave work early after Principal Nunes had called, I realized it applied to so much more.

  Win had respected my instructions to tell no one about the page, but it was time his parents had the full story. So I cleared my throat from my spot awkwardly hovering by the door. “There’s something you need to know.”

  “Is it that Win’s grounded and not allowed to have friends over?” asked his dad.

  I watched Win for a signal of protest, but he didn’t give one, so I said, “It’s that someone’s targeting your son. Not just the Hero High emails—they’ve also made a harassing iLive account using his name.”

  They looked at each other, mouths rounded, eyebrows raised. And really, if they’d been anything less than completely flummoxed, I would’ve been on DEFCON levels of suspicion. “What?”

  Win groaned and covered his face with the ice pack his mom had gotten despite his objections.

  “I don’t understand,” said Mr. Cavendish. “Someone’s impersonating him?”

  “Hey, Wink, can we borrow your laptop?” Maybe I was making myself too much at home by shouting down the hallway, but I’d cleaned their cabinets and almost helped with the toilets. Plus I didn’t want to leave Win while we felt so precarious.

  I wanted a Pause button so we could huddle up and get on the same page, because his parents weren’t even reading the same book. Before they continued to cast him as the instigator and blame him for the black eye, they needed the SparkNotes version of reality.

  “What’s up?” Wink called, then she turned the corner and the color drained from her face. I grabbed her laptop before she could drop it. She stammered, “M-mom. Dad. Huck. I didn’t know any of you were here.”

  Her parents were too distracted to pick up on her obvious lie—she’d carried the laptop out here because I’d asked her to. I set it on the island. “Can you pull up iLive?”

  She whispered, “We’re telling them? Good.”

  I walked around the island to stand beside Win. He wasn’t saying anything, and since he usually had no issues voicing objections, I was trying to interpret his silence and decode his body language. I asked, “Are you okay with this?” but what I was really saying was, I care—this is me caring.

  He shrugged but stepped closer to me. The action was stiff, and I finally got a read on his emotions: Not disinterested, not angry. Terrified. Which meant I was too.

  “Okay, so this is it.” Wink spun the laptop to face her parents and pushed a stool out of the way so she could join Win and me on the far side of the island.

  They scrolled and clicked, but the comprehension I’d been expecting didn’t surface. If anything, they looked increasingly confused. “This page says it’s by ‘Faker McFakepants.’ ”

  I’d been watching them instead of the screen, but my eyes darted there now. Win’s picture had been replaced by a digitally drawn stick figure wearing a shirt that read Super Fake News. His name was gone from the header and post attributions.

  “Oh.” Wink raised her hand. “I, uh, wrote a script to change that on my computer. I didn’t like looking at it the other way. Hang on, I’ll turn off the browser extension.”

  Win gave an asthmatic laugh; it faded before anyone joined in.

  A few clicks later and the page was back to his name and picture being used to spew unkindness. Wink was right; her version was better.

  And I’d forgotten Win hadn’t seen it all—he didn’t know about the exes post
, and he shot me a glance as it scrolled across the screen. It didn’t feel like the right time to announce, BTW, I met your ex-boyfriend today. He gave me a lesson on kissing, so don’t worry, I won’t bite.

  Especially since his parents had their own running commentary. “Is that poor Colleen with the poo on her face?” and “I’m not sure what this even means.” And “Oh, no.” They were a live-action reaction gif, cringes and gasps on repeat.

  Curtis came home mid-scroll, the grin on his face faltering as he took in our grim moods huddled around the laptop. “So we’re doing this? About time.” He peeled off his muddy sneakers and socks, then hip-checked Wink out of the way so there was room for him between the twins.

  I hoped Win recognized that they both had his back. That I did too. That the four of us were on the same team and any second his parents would be raising their hands and volunteering to be team captains.

  Mr. and Mrs. Cavendish paused on an anti–Hero High meme and exchanged a weary look. I groped blindly for Win’s hand, but all I managed to grasp was the ice pack. Even that didn’t chill me as much as his dad’s question. “And you’re sure you didn’t make this?”

  It was good I was holding the ice pack, because at the words, Win let go.

  “Geez, Dad!” Curtis’s shoulders had gone back, his chest forward. It was an angry, aggressive stance—one I’d never seen him take. “You’ve got to be kidding me right now.”

  “We have to ask—it’s not unprecedented. Win’s been forging our names since second-grade reading logs. Is that any different from lying about a webpage or sending fake emails?”

  “It’s very different,” Win gritted out. “Why won’t you trust me?”

  “Maybe we should talk about this privately, buddy,” his mom suggested softly, but her expression tightened when all four of us shook our heads. “Fine. Win, trust is earned. And you’ve got a history. The reading logs, putting our signatures on failing tests—your fifth-grade permission slip for the science museum—”

  Win closed his eyes—or eye, since the other one was practically swollen shut already. “You’d signed one slip and given us both money.”

  “We signed Wink’s.” His dad pinched the bridge of his nose. “When are you going to start taking personal responsibility? We become the behaviors we practice—what do your actions say about you?”

  I was ready with a list of accolades and examples of how he made all their lives better, but Wink said, “Actually—” and lifted her fingers off the counter in the world’s weakest hand raise.

  Win opened his eyes. “Wink, don’t.”

  She ignored him and whispered her answer to the counter. “It was his permission slip you signed. He switched with me on the bus when I realized I forgot and started crying.”

  “You shouldn’t have told them.” Win lowered his head so that their postures matched. The comparison was even more striking when Curtis took a step back so he was no longer separating them and Wink reached for Win’s hand.

  “Win’s slip?” His mom sounded stunned, and I wondered if this was some lodestone memory, one they’d constructed their whole belief system about their younger son upon.

  “It wasn’t just that.” Wink sniffed. “I know I shouldn’t, but I let Win take the blame for other stuff too—I was the one who let the Kimmels’ dogs get loose that time when we all had to look for them with flashlights in the snow. And I left the sink running when it overflowed and we had to replace the floor. It wasn’t Win who cracked the old TV with the controller. But they were all accidents. I swear.”

  They would’ve been accidents when he did them too—but I bit my tongue so I didn’t point this out. She was fully crying now, and I couldn’t tell if it was from guilt or fear. Because for someone with such a deep phobia of messing up and conflict, she’d just exposed a minefield of mistakes.

  “Let them believe what they want.” Win said as her grip on his hand tightened along with his jaw. “They always do.”

  “Just—just give us a second here, Winston.” His father was frowning but unsure of where to direct it—the computer, his youngest son, his daughter. When Curtis nervously hummed the Jeopardy! theme song, he got the full force of his dad’s glare. “This is a lot to take in.”

  “You think?” Win said.

  I looked around the kitchen, searching for the right words to interrupt this before it became a massacre. My eyes landed on my coffee mug. I’d picked a large blue one that read Cavendish Physical Therapy, but it had been nestled in the cabinet beside Curtis’s kindergarten handprint. Another thing Win had owned up to for Wink.

  “And that page . . .” His mom reached across the island for him and he stepped back. She flinched, so he rocked forward again, enduring her hand pat with rigid posture. “Why would anyone do this to you, buddy?”

  Wink wiped her face and lifted her chin. “Are you seriously blaming him?”

  Mrs. Cavendish pulled her hand back. “I didn’t mean it that way. Frankly, with all these revelations, I don’t know who or what to believe.”

  “Mom!” Curtis said.

  “Oh, you’re not blameless either, pal,” said their dad. “You knew about this and didn’t tell us.”

  “Why did we bother?” Win’s eyebrows told whole volumes and stories. How could his parents not see the truth pinned between them? The betrayal balanced across them as they confirmed his deepest fear. He grabbed the softening ice pack and stormed to his room. But even full of the most justified anger, he shut his door without slamming it. I wanted to follow, but he needed an advocate out here. Someone who knew the whole story.

  “Lincoln, you, Mom, and I will be having a big conversation later about personal responsibility, but let’s put a pin in that for now and come up with a plan about how to handle . . . this.” Mr. Cavendish waved a hand at the laptop and sank wearily onto a stool.

  “How do we get it taken down?” Mrs. Cavendish aimed the question at Wink, proving that even if she missed a lot about her kids, she knew the techiest member of her family.

  “We can report it,” said Wink. “But . . .”

  “Win and I agreed to report it on Wednesday if we haven’t figured out who’s behind it by then,” I shared. “My big fear is that if we don’t know who made the page, what’s to stop them from making another one?”

  “What about the police? Isn’t this a cybercrime or something?” their dad asked. “And the school. Someone needs to tell Hero High he didn’t send that email.”

  That their belief was conditioned on proof and only occurred after Win was out of earshot had me forcing the words “We already did” from between clenched teeth.

  “What I don’t get is—how could this be going on and he wouldn’t tell us?” Mrs. Cavendish’s damp eyes swung toward the hallway.

  I leaned over and shut the laptop, drawing all of their attention. “Respectfully, why would he tell you? He’s spent months dealing with social fallout from fires he didn’t set. People have been angry with him for reasons he couldn’t know. You said it was in his head or told him to be nicer. You called him ‘defensive’. . .” My finger was shaking as I pointed to the laptop. “You didn’t believe him. How do you think he felt?”

  “Huck!” We all spun toward the hallway. Everything in me that had been rage and powerlessness plummeted to the bottom of my stomach. Win was standing there, the dripping ice pack in hand. It was impossible to tell if any of the redness on his cheek was from crying or if the moisture there was from the ice. “Enough.”

  His voice was steady, but I wasn’t. I’d been trembling with fury; now I just shook.

  “I need to go,” I said softly. Because if I stayed, I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t say more or make things worse. Before he’d questioned if I cared; now I didn’t know how to look at him without how much I felt being too clear on my face. He didn’t need any more revelations today.

  Curtis walked out with me and stood next to me on the stoop as I bent to tie my shoes. “I know you’re judging my mom and dad right n
ow.”

  I let my raised eyebrows answer.

  “I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, but remember when I felt like the worst brother alive for believing that was his page? That’s how they’re feeling right now—probably times ten, because it’s got to be worse when it’s your kid you’ve failed. Give them a chance to process.”

  “Tell Win—” I yanked my shoe’s laces so hard that the plastic tip came off one side—it was called an “aglet,” a fact as useless as I felt right then. “Tell him . . . I’m sorry.”

  There should’ve been a second part to that statement. An explanation of what I was sorry for: the way his parents hadn’t listened, the way I’d gone too far, the fact that I didn’t have the right words or disposition to be in there comforting him.

  Curtis held out a hand. “Listen, I don’t know what you guys are or aren’t officially, or if you’ve put a label on it—but I’m sorry I tried to talk you out of dating my brother. There’s no better guy, Huck. You’re exactly what he needed.”

  Curtis was so rarely serious that I always paused to make sure he wasn’t headed toward a wink-nudge-eyebrow waggle. This time he was stone-cold somber. I put my hand in his and let him pull me up to stand. “I need him too.”

  I read “A Scandal in Bohemia” that night . . . or at least I read until the line “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Then I put the book down.

  It didn’t feel possible to ever have all the facts here. I was never going to understand all the personal entanglements or motives or histories of the people involved. The more I learned, the more I learned what I didn’t know.

  I scrolled through iLive, hoping patterns would magically appear between the pictures and posts. But the thing that stood out was the lone positive message on the page. It was a birthday tribute to Wink.

  HBD to the only person I’d let treat me like a dog. The attached picture wasn’t one Win would’ve voluntarily made public, so I needed to know who had access to it. Was it in a frame somewhere in their house? Hidden away in an album? Had Wink or Curtis or their parents ever posted it online? It featured Wink in overalls and lopsided pigtails, barefoot on their back lawn. She was holding a leash. Winston was on all fours on the other end of it, the leash’s clip attached to the back collar of his T-shirt. His tongue hanging out, fake-panting and revealing a gap-toothed smile. Someone had colored his nose black, drawn whiskers on his cheeks. It could’ve been eyeliner or face paint, but I bet they were courtesy of the Sharpie hanging out of Wink’s pocket.