by Melissa Grey
“Move,” came a familiar voice. Melody frowned at the interloper, but she moved to the side, allowing her in.
“Hey,” Tamsin said, nudging her shoulder into Hana’s in what was either a greeting or an accident. Hana wasn’t quite sure.
“Hey,” Hana replied.
Tamsin studied her for a brief but significant moment. They hadn’t spoken since that day in the abandoned music building, when Tamsin had prodded at wounds Hana was desperately trying to pretend weren’t there. She’d forced Hana to confront how infected those wounds had become, how the poison had seeped from them into every part of her existence.
“Are we cool?” Tamsin asked. She was evidently the kind of person who could just ask straightforward questions like that. Hana envied her the ability.
Were they?
Hana was still upset, but she knew she wasn’t truly mad at Tamsin. She was upset with herself. Tamsin just made an easy target, and that wasn’t fair. To either one of them.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re cool.”
Tamsin nodded, and only then did Hana realize how their previous conversation must have weighed on the other girl. If Hana had been haunted by it, maybe Tamsin had been as well. Hana got the feeling that Tamsin didn’t have a lot of friends. Now that Hana had started paying attention to the other girl, she noticed how much Tamsin kept to herself. Hana could relate. Navigating friendships was turning out to be much harder than she’d thought it would be. After all, she had so little practice doing it.
She took a deep breath. “Listen, I wanted to say I’m s—”
“Out of the way, Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
Summer Rawlins and her flock cut through the crowd like sharks through a school of terrified fish. Hana had never interacted with the girl much—she didn’t interact with many Maplethorpe students, but Summer had felt particularly distant—and the few encounters they’d shared had left Hana unimpressed. Summer was the queen of the academy, but the academy was such a small, isolated place. Her power was a puny thing and she didn’t even realize it.
In her hands, Summer held a stack of bright pink flyers. Hana angled her head just enough to read them upside down.
FOUNDER’S DAY DANCE
FRIDAY 7 P.M. TO 9 P.M.
AFTER-PARTY AT THE RAWLINS MANOR
10 P.M. TO WHENEVER
A manor. Who even lived in those?
“One for you.” Summer handed a flyer to Melody, who accepted it with a cheery thanks. Summer’s gaze slid from Hana, to Tamsin, and then back again. “And one for you.” Summer held a flyer out to Hana. “I don’t see you around school often but you seem cool. You should come.”
Hana blinked down at the flyer. She took it but only because it felt awkward not to.
“Oh, what? I don’t get one?” Tamsin’s pout dripped with insincerity.
“I’m sure you have much better things to do on Friday night,” Summer said with a toxic sugar smile. “Like dancing naked under a full moon or communing with the Prince of Darkness.” Summer wiggled her fingers at Hana and Melody in a way that was likely meant to be funny. “Bye. Hope to see you girls there.”
Hana’s smartwatch buzzed. She glanced down. Her rating had climbed a point. She looked up just in time to catch Summer’s eye. The other girl smiled at her. That was odd. Summer had never given her a positive or a negative before.
Tamsin glared at Summer’s back as the other girl weaved her way through the crowd, dispensing flyers to those deemed worthy and cold derision to those who weren’t. “I’d rather dance naked over hot coals than spend a minute inside that girl’s Barbie Dreamhouse, full moon or not.”
“Wait,” Hana said, still holding the wilting flyer in her hands, “you don’t really dance naked under the full moon, do you?”
“Would it make me sound more intimidating if I said yes?” Tamsin asked.
“Kind of.”
“Okay, then yes.”
Hana felt a smile tickling at her lips. It was nice, this banter. She could get used to it. But not here.
The faculty had finally managed to rope off the scene of the crime, and teachers were hustling students away from the sight of the defaced John Maplethorpe. They had a few minutes before the bell rang, signaling that they needed to be in their seats for morning assembly, and Hana was in no particular rush to get there. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d attended a morning assembly. She wasn’t sure she’d even know where to sit.
Tamsin tugged Hana away from the crowd and toward a recessed alcove that housed a large silver trophy. There were names inscribed on it, but for what Hana wasn’t sure. She’d heard it referred to as the school spirit trophy, but since Summer Rawlins had won it the year before, Hana wasn’t certain what they were calling spirit these days.
The alcove was barely large enough for the trophy and its plinth, much less two teenage girls. Hana had never had a growth spurt, but she was still waiting—dreading—one. If she got any taller, she’d have to relearn all her triple jumps from scratch.
Tamsin leaned in close enough to whisper to Hana without passersby overhearing.
“This isn’t a coincidence,” Tamsin said. “The graffiti. The notes. The statue. They’re all connected somehow. They’ve gotta be.”
“Okay, yeah,” Hana agreed. “But why? What’s the point of any of it?”
Tamsin wrapped her hands around the straps of her backpack. The black polish on her nails was chipped unevenly, like she’d been picking at it. “I don’t know. But there’s gotta be a reason.”
“Sure, but again, why? Why do any of this? Why go around saying the ratings aren’t real? Why put clown makeup on the statue of a dead old man?”
Tamsin nodded along but then stopped abruptly. Her face lit up. She looked a lot less Goth like that. “False prophets,” Tamsin said.
“False …”
The note. The poem. That awful little rhyme that haunted Hana’s sleep like the worst kind of lullaby.
“He’s the false prophet,” Tamsin said.
“John Maplethorpe?” It made a certain amount of sense, if one considered the facts.
Fact: The graffiti artist wanted to convey to their audience that the ratings were an arbitrary invention.
Fact: John Maplethorpe invented the ratings.
Conclusion: The graffiti artist was not a fan of John Maplethorpe.
“Okay,” Hana said, “but what about the rest of it? The copper and the gold and all that.”
And just like that, Tamsin deflated. She scraped at the polish on her index finger with her thumbnail, without letting go of her backpack straps. “I don’t know.”
The shrill sound of the bell ringing made Hana jump. Her hip bumped into the plinth supporting the trophy. It jostled on its base, and both Hana and Tamsin reached out to steady it.
“Teamwork makes the dream work,” Tamsin said.
Hana righted the trophy, frowning when she saw how their fingerprints had smudged it. She pulled the sleeve of her sweater down over her hand and used it to wipe away the offending marks. She might not have held the school spirit trophy in high esteem, but she’d polished enough trophies in her life that it was almost a reflex to clean this one.
“We better go,” Hana said. She wasn’t quite as keen to flout school rules as Tamsin. Maybe one day she would be. She had, after all, lied her way out of skating practice. Who knew where that slippery slope led?
“Yeah,” Tamsin said. “Listen, do you wanna meet up at lunch and go over that poem again? See if we can figure it out now that we have a clue?”
Lunch. With another person. The thought was almost unbearable. But it wasn’t lunch to eat. It was lunch to brainstorm. Hana could do that.
“Sure,” Hana said. Somehow, she didn’t dread the thought of spending her lunch break with another human being as much as she thought she would. Baby steps, for sure.
The second act of vandalism caused an even greater stir than the first. The first had been an appetizer. An amuse-bouche for the
palate of the mind. The second … the second had drama.
Bex stood on the fringes of the group crowded around the defaced bust of John Maplethorpe. She had to elbow a few people aside to get a good look at the writing on the plinth, but once she did, her breath caught in her throat.
She backed out of the crowd with as much grace as she’d made her way through it in the first place. None. Popping up onto her toes, she scanned the sea of students milling about the foyer and congregating on the steps. The dirty-blond head of hair she was searching for was nowhere to be found. With a grumbled curse at the universe, she continued to elbow her way through the front doors and onto the wide steps out front. She scaled the short dividing wall at the top—and purposefully did not look down at the ten-foot drop below. It was tall enough to let her see over the heads of the students surrounding her.
In the distance, standing next to a weeping birch that Bex was rather fond of, was Chase. A few of his teammates lingered around the tree as well, but none seemed particularly captivated by the commotion. They simply looked happy to be outside and not in assembly.
Bex clambered down from the wall and tried to shove her way down the steps as delicately as possible. Hurting someone in her zeal to get to Chase would be a bad look for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was that she didn’t want anyone to stop her.
Her steps slowed as she approached the group. Athletes were almost an entirely different species. Bex had tried her hand at sports—anything to pad a résumé—but the only one in which she’d excelled was bowling. It lacked the jock factor of more traditional team sports like baseball, and so she found it difficult to deal with those athletes in large groups. Individually, they were fine. En masse, they became something other.
But the gods of social interactions smiled on Bex, and Chase noticed her before she had to do something awkward to get his attention, like clearing her throat really loud or risking her voice squeaking when she said hello.
“Hey,” Chase said, an easy smile gracing his lips as she approached. It was almost like he didn’t mind their two worlds melding.
Bex liked to keep people separate. Chase belonged to one bubble. Melody to another. Her parents to their own bubble, far, far away from all the friend bubbles.
“What’s going on?” Chase said. “I didn’t want to brave the crowd to find out.”
Before Bex could answer, one of Chase’s friends looped an arm around his shoulders to peer at her. Perhaps peer wasn’t quite the word. Leer was more like it. A mild leer, but a leer nonetheless.
“Who’s your friend?”
Perhaps Bex was as unusual an entity to this guy as he was to her. She thought she was fairly well-known around school. She did hold offices in five or six clubs at any given time, but maybe the goings-on of organizations like the Lantern and the Mathletes weren’t particularly thrilling to baseball players.
“This is Bex. Bex, Steve.” Chase slid Steve’s arm off his shoulder with a shrug that managed not to look dismissive. Bex wouldn’t have been able to pull that move off as gracefully.
“Hello, Bex,” Steve said. He stretched the o of the hello out a second longer than was seemly. “What brings you to our huddle?”
“School stuff,” Bex said. It wasn’t a lie. Not technically.
“What kind of stuff?”
“She’s tutoring me,” Chase said. “Gotta keep those grades up to stay on the team.”
The slight twinge of Chase’s jaw muscle told Bex that he didn’t like saying that. But it’s not like the ratings were a secret. Everyone knew everyone else’s number. You might not know someone’s GPA, but the ratings never lied.
“Then, Bex, you’re doing a public service.” Steve punched Chase in the upper arm hard enough to hurt at least a little. “We need this guy if we’re gonna win the championships this year.”
“Yes,” Bex said. “The height of all accomplishments. Chase, can I talk to you for a second?”
Chase frowned at her. Her comment must have irked him. She hadn’t meant it. Not really. But sometimes she found her parents’ words coming out of her mouth without even meaning to speak them.
But still, he nodded. “Sure. See you later, Steve.”
“Aw, come on,” Steve whined. “Stay a while. Hang out with us.”
“Maybe next time,” Bex said. “Chase?”
She took Chase by the elbow, her fingers digging into the thick material of his letter jacket. She’d always hated those letter jackets. It wasn’t fair, in her opinion, that athletes received visible markers of their accomplishments while students who excelled in arenas outside sports were given a pat on the back and, if they were lucky, a trophy for academic excellence at the end of the year. But she didn’t hate the jacket on Chase. He wore it well.
She refused to examine that thought any further.
Chase was still frowning as he allowed her to tug him along, farther down the lawn, away from his friends who were jostling one another and laughing about something. Probably her.
“I’m sorry for saying that about the championship,” Bex said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s okay.” Chase gave her a little nudge with his elbow. “It’s not really that big a deal. But that’s as far as most of the guys are gonna get, so they take it really seriously. I just want the scouts to see me play.”
Oh. That made her feel like slightly less of a snob.
Chase jerked his chin toward the front doors of the school, where the faculty was still having very little luck relocating the horde of curious students crowding around the entryway. “What’s going on over there? Did the Jester strike again?”
“Yup. And not just that.”
She grabbed his jacket again, ignoring his grumbling, and led him closer to the crowd. It was thinner now as the novelty of the sight wore off. Chase was tall enough to see over most of the heads between them and John Maplethorpe.
He squinted. “What does that say?”
“ ‘Man is born free,’ ” Bex recited, “ ‘and everywhere he is in chains.’ ”
“Um. Okay. What?”
“I know that quote,” she murmured, keeping her voice quiet enough so that no one else could hear.
He leaned down a bit, to lessen their dramatic height difference. “What’s it from?”
Bex darted a glance around them. There were too many students and faculty clustered around the graffiti. It wasn’t safe to discuss it there. Anyone could overhear.
You’re being paranoid, she told herself. But then, was it really paranoia if it was entirely justifiable?
Someone was evading the notice of campus security, even after it had doubled in the wake of the original incident. Someone was also leaving cryptic messages for Chase and who knew who else to find. The two could not be mere coincidence. If this was a prank, the culprit was going about it in a very risky, very bizarre way.
Without uttering another word, Bex tugged on Chase’s elbow, dragging him away from the crowd. He mumbled something under his breath that she didn’t catch, but he followed her with little resistance. She liked that he was obedient like that.
Once she was confident they were out of earshot, she said, “Rousseau.”
“Who-sseau?”
Bex rolled her eyes at him. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
Chase lifted his broad shoulders in a shrug. “Yeah, that doesn’t really clear anything up.”
“Swiss philosopher,” Bex said. “He wrote Emile.”
“What’s Emile?”
“God, you’re lucky you’re pretty.” The words were out before Bex could smother them to death in her throat.
“Wait, what?” Chase asked. Now she had his attention. “You think I’m pretty?”
“Whatever. No. Shut up.” Bex thought about whipping out her tablet to search for Emile online, but she didn’t want anything related to the graffiti in her search history.
Paranoia, thy name is Bex.
“I did a project on banned books in the third grade,” Be
x said.
“Of course you did.”
“My mom wouldn’t let me submit it, so I had to do another book report in its place, but I remember Rousseau. He also wrote something called The Social Contract that’s almost impossible to find online.”
Chase blinked at her. “What third grader reads Swiss philosophers?”
“Me,” Bex said. “Now seriously, shut up.”
Before Chase could say something—he was quickly becoming less obedient—a deep voice cut him off. A long shadow cut across the grass as Headmaster Wood approached them, the lines of his sand-colored suit emphasizing the tension corded through his muscles.
“I take it the tutoring is going well,” Headmaster Wood remarked. “But if you could follow your classmates into the building, I would appreciate it.”
“Sure,” Bex said. She didn’t realize that she’d still been holding Chase’s jacket, but it served her well now. She tugged on his sleeve, leading him away from Wood and toward the school. “No problem. See you later, Dr. Wood.”
“Bye,” Chase said with a wave. Once they ascended the steps, he added, “You know, it’s not often I get dragged around by a girl half my size.”
“Would you prefer being dragged around by a girl twice your size?” Bex asked.
“Don’t know,” Chase said. “Could be fun. Where are we going?”
“Assembly. But slowly.”
Bex slowed her steps. Chase did the same until they were lingering well behind the wave of students heading toward the auditorium.
“Do you think the same person who sent me that message did it?” Chase asked.
“Possibly. It could be a copycat or someone just messing around, but I don’t think it is. It’s too bizarre, too weirdly literary.” Bex shook her head. “No, there has to be some meaning behind it. Some way they’re connected.”
Chase nudged her gently with his elbow. “Well, you’re the brains. Any ideas?”
Bex chewed at her lower lip. It was getting even more chapped. She rummaged in her pockets, looking for her lip balm. They were empty.
“What are you looking for?” Chase asked.
