Everyone wore the blue bracelets included as part of the invitation. The effect of everyone wearing the same piece of plastic was a weird one. It reminded me of nature shows I’d seen where the animals were tagged so scientists could track them.
Waiters removed china plates from the tables as half the student body converged around a large stage at the front of the room. Mr. Werner grabbed a microphone and asked his “little girl” to come up onstage. Everyone cheered as Tiffany walked onto the stage and over to her father. The cake was rolled out in front of her, the sparklers on top illuminating the smile stretched across her face.
After the sparklers fizzled out, Tiffany plucked the shiny silver keys from the top tier. She licked off a dab of frosting that clung to them and waved the keys in the air while the crowd applauded. I slipped back into the kitchen, worried that I might be caught on film, an outsider trying to look in.
Mom wheeled the cake back into the kitchen and we immediately began the process of cutting and serving. The waiters arranged little silver plates on their trays, and my mom would cut a thick square from one layer and place it directly onto the plate. When the plates were full, the tray went out. I sliced into another layer, and one of the waiters worked on yet another. I kept checking how my mom was cutting so I didn’t slice pieces that were too big or too small.
“This needs to feed three hundred,” she reminded me grimly.
We were moving fast, but it wasn’t fast enough. The waiters were grabbing the trays the second they were full and scurrying out to the main room. I didn’t let the commotion bother me. I’d worked at Something’s Brewing on days that were nonstop crazy, and I had to balance hot drinks and avoid crashing into Eli. This felt similar, except that I had to keep my arm from brushing against the frosting and avoid accidentally spearing one of the bustling waiters with the cake knife I was holding.
Mrs. Werner looked in on us a few times. “We’ll have enough, won’t we?” she kept asking. Mom didn’t bother to answer.
Finally, we were done. The cake had been served. Three hundred and four pieces, each one about the same size, each one served on a silver plate and placed in front of a person who had no idea how much work it had taken to get it there. The three smallest tiers remained, and my mom cut them into pieces in case there was a demand for seconds. I began to clean up our supplies.
“I’ll take these out to the van,” I told my mom after I collected all the pastry bags and dowels and tubes of extra icing. “Back in a minute.”
She grunted something but was too preoccupied with finishing her job to notice me. I couldn’t wait to leave. I wanted to forget the entire intense evening. I decided I would call Lan and cancel our overnight plans so I could just crash at home. I knew she wouldn’t mind because she was out with Brady.
Outside, it had grown chilly and quiet. I loaded our stuff into the back of the van and sat down on the hard metal bumper, glad to have a minute to myself. From the dull roar near the front of the building, I guessed that Tiffany was being led outside to see her new car. It was probably a convertible with an enormous bow wrapped around the hood. I wondered if she would scream when she saw her gift or play it cool, as though she had expected it all along. “Guess I’ll find out when it’s on TV,” I said to myself. I hoped that she wouldn’t spread a rumor on Monday that I had tried to crash her party, but if she did, I was prepared to deny everything.
I was about to go back into the kitchen to help Mom when someone came running from the side of the building.
“Reva? Is that you?” I didn’t think Reva was going to attend the party, but there she was, wearing a clingy black dress and long satin gloves.
She rushed toward me. “Oh, Kate, thank God!” She looked frantic.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Eli. He’s hurt. You have to help him!”
My heart skipped a beat. “What happened? Where is he?”
“Over there, by the Dumpster. I’ll call an ambulance. Just go!”
I ran in the direction Reva had pointed to while she hurried inside to call for help. The Dumpster was against the side wall, away from all the lights.
“Eli?”
At first, I couldn’t see anything in the dark except for the black outline of the Dumpster against the brick wall. I looked around. Was I in the wrong place? My foot bumped against something that rolled away and hit the wall with a hollow, metallic sound. There was a white shape in the corner, and I thought it was Eli huddled against the Dumpster. It looked like he was wearing a white T-shirt.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. Something was definitely wrong. I went over to him, knelt down and put my shaking hand on his back. Only it wasn’t him. It was a wadded-up bedsheet. I lifted the sheet and realized something was wrapped inside it. When I stood up, three metal canisters tumbled out.
I picked up one of the canisters. I didn’t know what was going on, but Eli wasn’t here. Had he dragged himself to the front of the building? I scanned the ground for blood, anything to give me a clue as to where Eli was. I had taken only a few steps when I saw the lights.
It didn’t make sense to me, at first. One second it was pitch-black and the next, red-and-blue lights were blinding me. I put one hand up to my face.
“Hold it right there!”
A man was yelling at me. I put my hand down. I was still holding the sheet and one canister, and I realized the light was coming from a car parked directly in front of me.
“Kate?”
The voice was familiar, but I still couldn’t see past the lights to the speaker. A man approached me.
“George?” It was one of the officers my dad worked with.
“Kate, what have you done?” He sounded worried.
“My friend Eli. He’s hurt,” I stammered.
My eyes finally adjusted to the glare of the headlights and I could see George more clearly. “Just stay there, Kate,” he said.
I could hear voices. People were walking toward us. My first thought was that more help had arrived. Then I saw that the group headed in our direction was dressed up. I almost groaned out loud. Three hundred students from Cleary High School were going to see me at my worst, and they would all think I was trying to crash Tiffany’s precious party.
I felt like a trapped animal and debated running back to my mom’s van. It seemed like only seconds before a huge crowd had gathered behind the police car. They were pointing at me. Some looked angry while others were snickering.
“Can you believe it was her all along?”
“Tiffany’s gonna freak.”
“She is so busted.”
They weren’t really looking at me, I realized. They were looking at something behind me. I turned. There, on the wall, was a gorilla.
And I was holding an empty can of spray paint.
17
IT ACTUALLY DIDN’T DAWN ON ME that I had been set up until I spotted Reva standing near the side of the crowd. She was smirking. I put the pieces together in one sudden, shattering second: Reva had framed me. She had, in the end, gotten her revenge on me for supposedly stealing her boyfriend, who was not injured and bleeding somewhere, but probably at home, oblivious to the drama unfolding at the Cleary Country Club. It would have been more humane, I thought, if Reva had simply slashed my throat with her nails.
I looked at the crowd. They looked back at me, waiting.
“I didn’t do this,” I said, but my voice was barely audible.
I was horribly aware of the hundreds of eyes focused on me. They were judging me, and I felt totally exposed. I took a step back until I could feel the wall behind me and I leaned against it, afraid that my wobbly legs might give way at any second.
The crowd began to part for someone. I could hear Tiffany’s voice before I saw her, and I closed my eyes and wished that I could disappear or melt into a puddle or sprout wings and fly away.
“You.”
Tiffany stood about eight feet from me. The TV crew was positioned behind her, and the intense lights from the
ir cameras hurt my eyes.
“I knew you were jealous, but I had no idea how much. You did that to my car, didn’t you?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. All I knew was that Tiffany was angry, and I had seen her angry before. Her voice was a deadly growl and, if looks could kill, I would have turned to a pile of ashes in that moment. She was headed for meltdown mode, despite the cameras and the crowd. Or maybe they just added to her outrage and she wanted to make a scene worthy of her audience. Either way, she stepped toward me, clenching her fists and trembling with raw rage.
George stepped in. I think he saw the potential for not only a homicide but some kind of crazed teenage uprising. “This way, Kate,” he said, ushering me to his squad car. Something crunched under my foot. I looked down and saw that a piece of the gorilla stencil was stuck to my shoe. I bent down and peeled it off, then handed it to George. Half the crowd began to boo while the other half cheered.
Mom heard the commotion and walked over to George and me. “What on earth is going on here?”
“I’m going to have Kate take a seat,” George said, opening the back door to his car. “It’s for her safety.”
“For her what?”
While I sat in the backseat listening to the crackling police scanner, George talked with Mom. More police arrived, my dad among them. I tried not to look out the window, but it was hard—people were pressing up against the squad car and taking pictures of me with their cell phones. I put a hand to my forehead and tried to shield my face, but it was useless. Everyone had seen me dressed in dirty sweats, holding a spray-paint can. I had never before been the focus of so much unwanted attention. It was beyond my worst fears and felt a thousand times worse than I could have ever imagined.
“So this is public humiliation,” I said to myself.
I had spent so much of my life avoiding the spotlight, only to have it shoved—literally—in my face.
Mr. and Mrs. Werner appeared off to the side. I watched from the backseat as Mrs. Werner held a sobbing Tiffany. Mr. Werner went over to my dad. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he didn’t look happy. There was a lot of pointing in my direction and raised voices. After a while, George got back in the car.
“Let’s get you out of here, Kate.”
I nodded. We weren’t able to pull away immediately because of the mob surrounding the car. George inched the cruiser forward, its blue lights flashing. I caught a glimpse of Trent in his pink tuxedo. He was talking on a cell phone, one finger pressed against his ear to block out the noise of the crowd. Reva stood behind him, smiling as she examined one of her long fingernails. I felt a surge of fury toward her. She had done this to me. She had created this mess and now she was just going to stand there enjoying my mortification and there was nothing I could do about it.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the seat. It was a long ride to the station.
The evidence was in my favor—sort of. There were at least a dozen witnesses who saw me in the kitchen all night, so I had a solid alibi. I had to sit in a tiny room at the station and tell my story about a hundred times and answer the same questions over and over, but I didn’t mind because I just wanted to get everything cleared up. It helped that my parents believed me.
Of course, there were spray-paint cans with my fingerprints on them. And, I discovered as I sat under the fluorescent lights of the station, a smear of black paint across my sweat pants. In a few months I would be on national television looking like I spent a week living under a bridge. If I had been guilty, that alone would have been punishment enough.
As I answered the barrage of questions the police threw at me, I had a few of my own. I wondered how Reva had gotten her hands on the stencil and how long she had planned her revenge. I wondered about Eli and where he was. And, as the police kept asking me about it, I wondered what had happened to Tiffany’s birthday car. Had Reva damaged the expensive gift first in an attempt to frame me for even more serious charges? I tried telling the police about Reva, but they didn’t seem to believe me. She was an invited guest at the party and I was not. George promised to look into it, and I knew he would. Still, that didn’t mean much. If Reva was smart—and I was sure she was—she would have gotten rid of anything that could remotely connect her to what happened.
It was well after midnight before they let me go. There would be an investigation, as both the country club and the Werners wanted to press charges. I was too tired at that point to care very much. I fell asleep on the ride home in my dad’s car and slept until noon the next day.
THE RINGING PHONE WOKE ME. I rolled over and grabbed it, still groggy.
“Hello?” I mumbled.
“Kate! I was so worried! Are you okay? Did they make you sit in jail all night?”
“Hi, Lan.”
“What happened?”
I rubbed at my eyes. Sunlight blared at me from the window. “It was a mess.” I didn’t feel like rehashing my story for the millionth time. I knew I would need to tell it at school on Monday to anyone who would listen. In fact, I thought miserably, I’d probably be repeating it for the rest of my high school career. Some people would love me for what I didn’t do, and some would hate me. Maybe I could get Eden to do a feature on my side of the story, I thought. It was definitely newsworthy.
“But you’re okay?”
“Physically, yes.” I sighed. “I’m never going to live this down.”
“Well, I know you’re innocent. When I saw you sitting in the back of that police car, I freaked, okay? Really freaked. They should never have dragged you off like that.”
I sat up in bed, fully awake now. “You saw me? How?”
“Oh. Right. Well, Brady and I were kind of there.”
“Kind of?”
“We were there. We messed with Tiffany’s new car.”
I remembered the officers asking me questions about the car, but I didn’t understand what they were talking about and they didn’t offer any details.
“What did you do, Lan?”
“Technically, it was Brady. I just created a distraction so security wouldn’t notice.”
“So security wouldn’t notice what, exactly?”
“We didn’t wreck anything, promise. Brady just wiped Vaseline all over the windows.”
I couldn’t help it—I laughed. Lan explained how she pretended to be throwing up in the bushes. When one of the security guards came over to check on her, Brady smeared the clear jelly across the front and side windows of the cherry-red convertible. It wouldn’t do any permanent damage, but it would take forever to get the stuff completely off, and Tiffany wouldn’t be able to drive her fancy new gift until it had been thoroughly cleaned.
“The police asked me about the car,” I told Lan after she finished.
“I’m sorry. Look, Brady and I will admit to it, okay? You won’t get in trouble.”
“I’m already in trouble.”
“This will all get cleared up, though. Really.”
I wanted to talk to Lan some more, but I also wanted to find out as much information as I could from my parents.
“I’ll let you know when I hear something,” I promised.
“It’ll be okay, Kate. I know it.”
I hung up the phone. “I’m glad one of us does,” I mumbled.
After taking a scalding-hot shower and throwing on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, I went downstairs. I could smell coffee, and a box of doughnuts sat on the kitchen counter. I grabbed a coconut one, poured myself a glass of juice and went to the family room, where Mom was sitting on the sofa with a steaming mug.
“You’re up,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have slept so long.” I sat next to her and took a bite out of my doughnut. “You could have woke me.”
“I just got up myself,” she said, sipping her coffee.
“Where’s Dad?”
“He went in early this morning. He’s going to try and sort this whole mess out.”
I sighed. “That’
s going to take a long time, isn’t it?”
Mom patted my leg. “We’ll get through it, hon. Promise.”
I hated the fact that she was giving me one of her fake smiles, like she wanted to reassure me that everything was going to work out fine when, in fact, I was screwed. I decided to play along, though, and gave her a fake smile of my own.
“You’re right,” I lied. “It’ll be okay.”
18
I REALLY DIDN’T THINK my parents would force me to go to school on Monday. They knew I had been framed and believed I was innocent. I thought I would get some sympathy points for being victimized and publicly humiliated, but no such luck.
“You’re going,” Dad informed me Sunday night.
“Everyone at school thinks I’m a party-crashing vandal with poor fashion sense!” I cried. “Haven’t I been traumatized enough?”
“Only guilty people avoid public situations. You’re not guilty. You’re going.”
I appealed to Mom, but she and Dad had this annoying deal: when one of them laid down the law, the other had to support the decision, no matter how wrong, unfair or downright cruel it might be.
“You’re going, but I’ll give you a ride,” Mom said. She was taking her much-needed vacation all week. Her boss had called a few times because he was short staffed (since Bud was still recovering from his fender bender), but Mom wouldn’t answer the phone. I tensed every time I heard it ring, not because of Mom’s boss, but because I was hoping it would be Eli. He knew what had happened—I was sure of it—and I was waiting for him to check on me. By the time I went to bed on Sunday night, I still hadn’t heard from him.
I got up early on Monday and spent extra time making sure I looked presentable. I wanted to wipe away the grungy image of myself that most of the party guests had witnessed, so I wore a crisp white blouse and my favorite khakis.
Mom took her time driving me to school and let me linger in the car for a few minutes so I could avoid the morning hallway crowds and walk right into class. I didn’t want to give anyone a chance to ask me about Saturday night. I didn’t know what people had heard: was I just a rebellious prankster, like Trent, or a Tiffany wannabe desperately trying to gain attention for herself? I knew a jury of my peers had already sentenced me. I just didn’t know the verdict.
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