by Jessie Rosen
“We didn’t get it now, Charlie,” he said. “We found it mislabeled in an old set of files belonging to Sarah’s guidance counselor at the time. It never got passed through the proper channels.”
“And believe me, son, I am devastated about that fact,” Hayden added, his voice rising. “This school is now under investigation for student negligence, which could cost me and a number of other teachers here our jobs. This is serious!”
“I know!” Charlie yelled back. “And I’m trying to tell you that someone is doing this to us! My friends and I did not harass Sarah for a single day. Not once. No notes, no threats, nothing.”
“Then why would she write this letter?” the detective asked. Charlie had been afraid of that question because he did not have an answer.
He couldn’t share all the details about the pranks and the texts and the VidBits because that would give the cops even more ammunition to question him and his friends. He had to make them believe him without giving away any more information about what was happening. For that to work, he had to make a bold claim.
“Well, I don’t know how to prove it to you, but this isn’t true,” he finally said. “I mean, my friends and I didn’t harass her beyond the one time I told her to stay away from me when she came up to my locker at school. You can have our cellphones or get our phone records or question all of us. We’ll even take lie detector tests. Not one of us bullied her outside of school or inside.”
Neither man knew what to say next, and Charlie figured it was smartest to stop talking. If the cops really did follow through and search all his phone history, they would find nothing cruel. If they hooked him or his friends up to a polygraph, they would pass. Of course, that was because bullying Sarah was not the way they planned to get their revenge for what she did to Charlie, and it wasn’t why they were with her that night. Their plan didn’t involve typical harassment. It was much crueler than that. But as of right now, that piece remained a secret.
Detective Pierson slowly walked from the corner where he was standing until he was directly in front of Charlie’s face—so close that Charlie could practically taste the coffee on his breath.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. The words came out slow and soft.
Charlie didn’t know how to respond. Something told him silence was the smartest option.
“Did you hear me?” Pierson said, louder this time.
“Yes, sir,” Charlie replied. The detective was even closer now. He’d lined his eyes up directly with Charlie’s so that they were forced to stare at each other. It was excruciating.
“I think you’re a liar. How does that make you feel?” Again, Charlie was tongue-tied. “I said, how does that make you feel?!” The heat from Detective Pierson’s breath hit Charlie’s skin, giving him chills over his face and neck.
“Um…angry?” Charlie said.
“Oh you’re angry? Why? Because you’ve been inconvenienced? Because people are going to say things about you in the halls? A girl is dead! Gone! Her family is destroyed! And you’re just going to sit there like you have nothing to do with that?! You do. I know it. I know it in my bones, Charlie. And I’m going to prove it. Then we’ll see if you feel something other than anger.”
The detective paused for one more second before finally taking a step back. Charlie caught the look on Principal Hayden’s face; he was just as terrified.
“I’m done with him,” Pierson said. “Let him go.”
“One second,” Principal Hayden said. “Charlie, there’s one more element to this situation, and, because of it, I’m going to recommend that you go home right now and stay home from school tomorrow.”
“What? Why?” Charlie asked, bewildered.
“Someone—we’re trying to find out who—leaked this letter from Sarah to the school newspaper, and the digital version got emailed out to every single student in this school an hour ago.”
Just before Charlie squeezed his eyes shut, he noticed the smile on Detective Pierson’s face.
Sasha
Sasha was sitting in Algebra II trying to focus on what Mrs. Bates was saying and not that fact that she was screaming it at them like some kind of drill sergeant. In fairness, her lack of attention wasn’t exactly Bates’ fault. Sasha could barely make it through a class these days without either nodding off or faking focus while staring at her tablet and tracking more information from the Englewood feed.
Paying a little more attention to Laura Rivers turned out to have an unexpected benefit, even if it did account for the loss of sleep. Laura’s internet searches revealed very quickly that she did think Becca had something to do with the messages Charlie was getting. Sasha tracked Laura digging through Becca’s social media profiles, looking for some connection to Charlie, Amanda, Kit, Miller, and even Sarah. Laura also did a more general search for Becca’s name related to the terms “suicide,” “drugs,” “mental illness,” and “Navesink River”—maybe thinking it was simply the idea of Sarah’s death that upset Becca enough to terrorize Charlie? Sasha couldn’t be sure, but she did know that Laura’s snooping was a little bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this was great news because it meant Laura was far off the trail of finding Sasha. Granted, Sasha could make herself impossible to find thanks to her skills in that arena, but it was still a plus. But the negative was that if Becca did actually have some tie to Charlie—something Sasha might be able to use if she could find the connection that Laura could not—there was a chance Laura’s suspicions would throw Becca into hiding. Sasha couldn’t decide if she should intervene or not, and she certainly wasn’t making any headway listening to Bates drone on.
Right now it was taking all her energy not to grab the tablet out of her school bag and refresh the feed to see if any new messages had popped up in her tracking system. A nearly inaudible ping from inside Sasha’s bag saved her from the exercise in willpower; there was new activity.
Sasha grabbed the device out of her bag when Bates wasn’t looking and checked the notification. There had been one ping, but what she saw was way more than one email or download. From the looks of it, every single student at Englewood was sharing, tweeting, emailing, or chatting about the very same web link. Sasha picked a random student’s chat feed and clicked on the link. It took her straight to an article on the homepage of The Englewood Chronicle.
The minute her eyes registered what the headline said, Sasha grabbed her bag and ran out of class.
She didn’t breathe until she was behind a stall inside the second-floor girls’ bathroom. Sarah Castro-Tanner Speaks Out, the front page of The Chronicle blared, and this was not a gimmicky newspaper trick. This was a real letter from Sarah with extremely damning allegations about Charlie Sanders and his crew. Sasha read the letter addressed from Sarah to Principal Hayden, reread it, and then read it for a third time. Even then, she could not believe what she was seeing.
It wasn’t just the shock of knowing that Sarah had gone to get help and no one listened—that maybe her death could have been prevented—it was the fact that Sasha did not plant this email with The Chronicle. She didn’t even know it existed. That meant that someone out there was doing exactly what she was doing to Charlie and his friends, and she’d had no idea.
Sasha couldn’t decide whether to be ecstatic or terrified. The letter, meanwhile, was even further evidence of what she had been tracking for months now: four people had something to do with Sarah’s death. They had clearly harassed her, scaring her to the point of telling her school principal. After Sarah killed herself, all anyone could talk about was how sick she was, how troubled she had always been, and the fact that there’d probably been no hope for her to ever have a normal life anyway. But that wasn’t true. People drove Sarah to do this to herself, and Sasha didn’t believe that they stopped at harassment. Based on what Charlie said in Kit’s basement, they’d been with Sarah on the night she died. There was more to the story than even this email revealed, and as far as Sasha was concerned, the four students should fe
ss up to the full lot so they could finally pay for whatever they had done.
But there was a second and even more prevalent question running around Sasha’s brain: who planted this note with the newspaper? Who else wanted these people revealed as guilty? And how had Sasha missed them in all her digging and tracking? It seemed completely impossible. Her system was extensive and, so far, flawless. Sasha needed to get home immediately so she could dive back into her tracking boards and figure this out.
After one faked nurse visit and a forty-five-minute walk home, she was back in front of her computer. She decided that she needed to think about this less like a hacker and more like a detective. As of right now, every single person was a suspect.
Sasha grabbed an old white board and markers from inside her dad’s office and tape from the kitchen junk drawer. She needed to organize all her thoughts before she could move on. She needed to walk through each and every potential source. First up were Kit Jacobs and Sean Miller.
Sasha picked up the original photo of them that she had turned into a prank weeks ago and stared at the high school sweethearts—he the loveable jock and she the perky Goody Two-shoes.
Kit and Sean seemed less likely to have a vendetta against their own friends, but Sasha didn’t want to rule them out. They were part of whatever plan unfolded, but had been curiously more silent on the matter than Charlie and Amanda. There was no question that they might be plotting against the two dominant teens in their group. Neither had been the ringleader throughout this whole charade. Besides, Kit’s recent online binge suggested she was close to cracking. So what if Kit and Sean wanted to rid themselves of Charlie and Amanda forever by implicating them? What if they truly did have less involvement? That would make them innocent enough to frame Charlie and Amanda, and keep themselves out of the story. Sasha taped their photo up to the board and underneath it wrote: “friend framers.”
Next was Amanda. Charlie first suspected Amanda of pranking him with the Vids, but had since dropped the accusations. But what if it was Amanda who sent the letter to the school newspaper? Maybe she was the jealous girlfriend who wanted to make Charlie pay for leaving her in favor of Laura? Maybe she was conniving enough to make herself seem innocent of whatever Charlie and the rest of them did? If she was telling on him, then she could control everything, and since she was part of the story from the beginning, maybe she knew about this letter Sarah wrote and somehow got a copy? Anyone from inside the halls of Englewood could hide a file in the principal’s archives and sneak a story into The Chronicle. Why not Amanda?
Sasha printed a copy of Amanda’s profile picture and taped it up next to the picture of Kit and Sean. Under it she wrote: “girlfriend + revenge.”
After that, there were Becca and Laura. The reason Becca didn’t seem a likely culprit to Sasha was because she’d known about Sarah’s story for years and done nothing. She was raised in the town. Why would she be out to get vengeance now? What was her motivation? And for that same reason, how could Laura ever be on the culprit list? Yes, Becca and Laura both worked at The Chronicle, meaning it would be easiest for them to just publish the piece, but anyone with basic hacking skills could do the same. Sasha could not find a connection between Becca and Laura prior to the start of the school year, so it didn’t make sense for them to be working together. Plus, Sasha still could not figure out a way that Becca or Laura had access to the email from Sarah in the first place. The person who planted this story in The Chronicle had information straight from Sarah from a long time ago, information that couldn’t even be found through a hack of Sarah’s computer. Sasha had personally searched every single device that Sarah Castro-Tanner owned after her death, and there wasn’t a shred of evidence that the letter existed.
The minute that thought left Sasha’s mind, a lightbulb went off. Who says the letter is from a long time ago?
She was falling for the same prank as everyone at Englewood, including the principal and the cops. That letter didn’t need to be from a time when Sarah was alive; it didn’t need to be from Sarah at all. Anyone could have written it now and planted it to seem like it was from years ago.
And in that case, maybe it wasn’t about uncovering the truth behind Sarah’s death. Maybe the person who planted this just wanted to ruin Charlie Sanders with whatever information they could gather. That meant they didn’t need to know Sarah when she was alive; they only needed to know Charlie back then. Sasha had been tracking him since shortly after Sarah’s death, but what if the person responsible for this knew what happened to Sarah before she set up her system?
Sasha didn’t know anything about Charlie’s whereabouts before Sarah’s death. Maybe Amanda was furious about something he did in seventh grade and had finally snapped? Or maybe Charlie met Laura years ago through some friend of a friend and did something to make her angry, but didn’t remember?
There were no immediate answers, but if Sasha had learned one thing from this entire experience, it was that people’s desire for vengeance should not be underestimated. Look at her. Two years ago she was a quiet middle school student, and now she was a cyber criminal. Anything was possible.
Sasha printed pictures of both Becca and Laura and placed them on the board below Amanda, Kit, and Sean. Next to them she wrote two giant question marks. Their motive was unclear, but they couldn’t be called innocent quite yet.
With that massive task finally done, Sasha decided to take herself for something to eat in town. Her parents wouldn’t be home from work for hours, as usual, and she needed some space to think. She would grab a burger at the bistro and then come home to scan the system for any more clues. Time away from the thinking felt impossible, but Sasha knew that she needed to keep a clear mind if she was going to continue. She could not afford to slip up at this point, especially not with someone else after Charlie and his friends. She would take thirty minutes away from her computer and phone, tops.
Thirty-three minutes later, after trying and failing to enjoy a burger and some fries, Sasha found herself face-to-face with an email that made her question ever walking away from her computer again. It was from [email protected]. Sasha felt a nervous flutter in her heart as she clicked through and starting reading the message.
Hello, Sasha,
Nice to meet you. I get the sense that you and I are playing a similar game with certain EHS students. I’d like to talk to you about it, but only if you can promise to keep this a secret. I don’t want to threaten you, so let me just say that if you don’t, you’ll end up wishing you were wherever Sarah Castro-Tanner is. So should we pick a quiet spot for a little meet and greet? I promise it will be worth your while. I’m really very good at what I do…
Your new friend,
CO
Chapter 12
Laura
Laura picked her cellphone up off her bed and silenced it for what had to be the tenth time that night. She knew she should just block Charlie’s number at this point, but she was curious to see just how many times he would call.
Laura knew it wasn’t entirely fair to shut out Charlie without any explanation, but she figured he knew why she went radio silent, and the truth was she still didn’t know what to say. She trusted him, but he lied. She wasn’t interested in the dozen excuses he’d probably offer. Dishonest people like Charlie did not deserve a girlfriend, especially one that had been trying to help him solve the very mystery he was lying about.
The letter from Sarah made it clear that someone was out to get Charlie for a good reason, giving Laura even more justification to avoid his calls. Laura looked down at her phone as the most recent call finally went to voicemail. She would listen to it later. Right now she had to prepare for another nerve-racking conversation with Becca.
It would be the second one in two weeks. The day after Laura saw Becca’s bike parked outside Charlie’s house, she’d decided to say something. That creepy action crossed the line, as far as Laura was concerned, and even though she herself was currently furious with Charlie, the tortur
e he was enduring had to stop. If the person terrorizing Charlie was Becca for whatever insane reasons, so be it. She’d gone to The Chronicle’s office just before the end of lunch when she knew she’d find Becca scarfing down the last of her meal.
“Why were you parked outside Charlie Sanders’ house late last night?” Laura demanded.
“You saw me,” Becca replied. Laura was surprised by how totally unaffected she was by the question. It was like Becca knew she’d be found out by Laura and had just been waiting for the moment.
“I did, and I thought it was messed up. What were you doing there?”
“It’s complicated,” Becca said. There still wasn’t an ounce of guilt in her voice. She seemed more sad than nervous.
“Try me,” Laura said.
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” Becca said.
“Well, I don’t care. If you’re messing with Charlie, then I need to know now.”
Becca took a deep breath. Laura could tell that she’d struck a nerve with her last line. Becca was quickly shifting from sad to mad.
“You don’t get to talk to me like that!” Becca said. “You don’t know me! You don’t know what I’ve been through! And you definitely don’t know what Charlie Sanders did to me!”
“Then tell me!” Laura fired back. “Let me help!” Becca’s face went from fiery to flat. She was done arguing.
“I need you to leave the Chronicle office, please.”
“Excuse me? We’re in the middle of an important conversation.”
“No, we’re not,” Becca said. “You’re screaming at me, and I’m done. I’m in charge in here, and I’ll get gladly call Principal Hayden if I need help keeping this office safe.”
Laura stood up and grabbed her backpack off the desk. “I’m trying to be your friend,” she said.
