We Regret to Inform You

by Ariel Kaplan

  “¡Canten con ellas!” Señora Ruiz ordered, perhaps out of pity, and she began to sing along, the freshmen reluctantly joining in on the chorus. “Bésame, bésame mucho…”

  Finally Mr. Pelletier passed by our room and hurried down the hall, as if he’d suddenly seen something much more interesting and picked up his pace. “Bebe,” I muttered. But she was into it now and hitting some high note. “Bebe,” I repeated.

  “Right,” she said, trailing off. “So that was our song. So, come out on Thursday. We’ll have, like, snacks and stuff.”

  “Thanks, everybody,” I said, and then I opened the door and we went back out.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “We never speak of that again,” she said. “Let’s find Emily.”

  * * *

  —

  We found her in the empty art room two minutes later, her laptop already set up on one of the tables. “Took you long enough,” she said.

  Bebe and I exchanged a glance. She pursed her lips at me. I said, “I had to. Um. Pee. I had to pee. Sorry.”

  “Mischa,” Emily said. “Never mind. While you were peeing, I was working on your Instagram page.”

  “You rehacked it?”

  “Well, no. First I reported your account as hacked, but you know, that can take days to get resolved, so I had to do something else.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “What did you do?”

  “Think about it this way. Instagram is a business, right? So what’s the number one thing any business wants?”

  I said, “To make a profit?”

  Without missing a beat, Emily said, “What’s the number two thing any business wants?”

  “Uhh.”

  “Not to get sued,” she said. “I reported the picture as a copyright violation. And, um. I had some friends report some of your other pictures, too. The point is, in another day or two your account will be suspended pending investigation, and hopefully by the time they realize you weren’t posting stolen pictures, they’ll also have realized that you were hacked, and fix it.”

  “Or I’ll get arrested for violating the Copyright Act!”

  “Yeah, probably that won’t happen. But I did deal with the more immediate problem, which was keeping your mom from seeing it.”

  “How exactly did you do that?”

  “I hacked her Instagram page.”

  “What?”

  “Her password’s your birthday. It wasn’t that hard. Anyway, all I did was unfollow and block you, so even if someone tags her on another picture before your page comes down, she won’t get any notifications or anything. She’d have to be specifically looking for your page.”

  “Which you said you hardly use anyway,” Bebe said. “So she probably won’t go looking.”

  I slumped onto one of the art stools, and Bebe sat down next to me. “Thank you,” I said. “Eeesh.” I rested my forehead on my arms. “I just don’t understand. I thought this was over! Why would someone bother messing with me again? It wasn’t enough to ruin my academic prospects, now they want me in jail?”

  “I don’t think they wanted you in jail,” Emily said.

  “Mischa,” Bebe said. “They tagged your mom.”

  “They wanted to get me in trouble with my mom?”

  I thought about the picture. It was supposed to be of a Blanchard party. “They wanted her to pull me out of school?”

  “That’s my guess,” Emily said.

  “Is there any way to figure out who did it?” I asked.

  “Unlikely,” she said. “Unfortunately. But let’s have a look.”

  Emily pulled the picture up on the computer. On the big screen, it was a lot more horrifying than it had been on Bebe’s phone.

  “Well, obviously it’s fake,” I said. “I don’t even know any of those people.”

  She blew the picture up, and then again, and then again. “Oh, it’s definitely photoshopped,” she said. “I just want to see how.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I want to know if the person who did it was any good.”

  She put a finger to a subtle line between my face and the background. “Here’s where they spliced it,” she said. “You can see where they cut you out and pasted you in front of the party.”

  I recognized the shot of me; it was from last spring, right after the SGA election. Caroline had ordered temporary tattoos for all of us, and I was holding my arm out so she could put the giant VP in flowery script on the inside of my forearm. I’d been laughing, we’d all been laughing, because we’d won and it was a fabulous thing to list on our college applications, and we were so, so happy. I’d posted the picture last May with a caption that said, abramaVICTORY!

  “Ew,” said Emily. “Someone is not good at Photoshop.”

  Bebe pointed to the periphery between my face and the background. “See how it’s all pixelated at the edges?” She glanced at Emily. “This is a student job.”

  “Probably,” Emily agreed. “Oh, hello.” She blew up the screen some more. “There’s a piece of paper on the table here. It’s got writing on it.”

  “Can you go to 800%?” Bebe asked.

  “I’ll try. It’s going to be blocky.” She clicked. “Huh. That should really be blocky.”

  But it wasn’t. What was on the piece of paper was a line drawing of a cat with its legs sticking straight in the air and Xs over its eyes. Over the cat was a crudely drawn knife, on which someone had written “curiosity.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” I said. “Someone put that there for me.”

  Emily said, “Oh, no. Someone put that there for us.”

  “For you?”

  “Whoever put this there knows two things: that you’re poking around, and that you have help.”

  “We’re being warned,” Bebe said.

  “We’re being warned,” Emily agreed. “How delightful.”

  Going back to class after that was not fun. Every time I saw someone I knew, I thought, Is it you? Are you the one doing this to me? Caroline said hi to me, and I just about knocked her head off. “What is wrong with you?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she meant what was wrong with me in general, or specifically at that moment. She flashed me this look that made me feel awful, because really, she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry. Bad day.”

  “Whatever,” she said

  “Caroline,” I said, but she was already walking away.

  When we got out of French, there was a crowd of people blocking the hallway and steadfastly refusing to move.

  “What is this?” I asked Jim, who’s a head taller than me and had a better vantage point. “Can you see anything?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “There’s two rent-a-cops up there with a German shepherd. Looks like they’re doing a locker search.”

  “A locker search?”

  “Looks like.”

  In all my years at Blanchard, I couldn’t remember them ever searching lockers before.

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Jeez, Vicious. They have a dog. What do you think they’re looking for?”

  “Right,” I said, because they only needed a dog to look for either drugs or explosives, and if they thought there were explosives in the building we’d all have been evacuated already. “Did they find anything yet?”

  “I’ve been standing here exactly as long as you have.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Leaving Jim behind, I pushed through the crowd to where Nate was standing with the rest of his English class. “Hey,” I said. “News?”

  “Someone said there was a tip called in,” he said. “But I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

  “I wonder who called,” I said, checking my phone to make sure I didn’t have any messages from my mother. Just t
hen the dog started to whimper and paw at a locker. A murmur went up around us.

  “Uh-oh,” Nate said.

  “Do you know whose locker that is?”

  He shook his head. “Somebody who’s about to have a really bad day.”

  The security guard opened the door of the locker, and the dog jammed his nose into the interior. The man, who was built like the side of a barn and blocked most of my view, started digging through a pile of discarded sweatshirts before pulling out a ziplock bag. I couldn’t see what was inside it, but next to me, Nate said, “Yikes.”

  The guard said something to Mr. Pelletier, who was standing next to him, and he looked out to the crowd.

  On the other side of the hall, Shira Gastman pushed her way to the front of the group of students that was huddled there.

  “Ms. Gastman,” he said blandly. “We need to have a conversation.”

  “That’s not mine,” she said. “I know it’s not.”

  “Let’s discuss this somewhere more private—”

  “No! It isn’t mine! I’ll take any drug test you want. It isn’t mine.”

  Some sounds of amusement were made near me, because the idea that Shira would come up clean on a drug test was a joke. I heard someone say they were surprised she’d never been caught before.

  “We should do something,” I whispered to Nate. “We know Shira’s clean.”

  In my pocket, my phone buzzed. It was Emily. The text read, Say nothing.

  I looked up and saw her on the other side of the hall, standing next to Bebe with a hand on her shoulder like she was restraining her, which was ridiculous, because Bebe could easily rest her chin on top of Emily’s head. They were having a quiet argument. Bebe looked like she was on the verge of punching Emily in the mouth.

  I texted back, What? She’s about to be arrested!

  I watched her text me back with one hand, the other still settled on Bebe as if she was pushing her down to the floor. Say NOTHING.

  Emily, what the hell?

  Wait until the crowd clears and meet me back in the art room.

  I looked over my phone at Nate, who had been reading over my shoulder.

  In my ear, Nate said, “She’s right.”

  “But we can clear her!”

  “No, we can’t. All we can do is go down with her.”

  * * *

  —

  Back in the art room, Emily sat with a hand on either temple, like she was trying to hold her brain in. Nate and I sat opposite her. Bebe paced angrily in front of the table, glaring at her. “You are seriously cold sometimes, you know that?”

  Emily dropped her hands. “If you had intervened, what would have happened?”

  “I could have told them it was planted!”

  “Think, Bebe! We have no evidence of that. If we get in the middle of this, suddenly we’re the ones having conversations with Pelletier and those rent-a-cops. Maybe they want to have a look at our emails.” She leveled a look at me. “Or they start checking our social media accounts.”

  I put my hands over my mouth, and Nate rested a hand on my shoulder. “This is going to be okay,” he murmured.

  Emily had her laptop open and was typing. I’d never seen her look so grim before.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Deactivating Shira’s Ophelia email.”

  “She wouldn’t put anything in an email,” Bebe said. “That’s what TalkOff is for.”

  “It’s not worth the risk,” she said. “They might make her unlock her phone, and God only knows what she has on there.”

  “Jesus,” said Nate.

  “It’s done,” Emily said. “We can reactivate it once this is over.” She looked to me. “If they ask you for your Instagram handle, tell them you don’t have one.”

  “But what about Shira?” Bebe said. “You’re so busy trying to cover our butts you’re completely forgetting about her!”

  “Listen,” said Nate, in his soothing Nate voice. “All Shira has to do to prove she’s clean is pee in a cup. She can clear herself.”

  “She can clear herself of using,” Bebe said. “Not possession.” She sat down in the other chair. “If they try to say she was selling it, she’s screwed.”

  “They can’t prove that,” I said.

  “Mischa,” Bebe said. “We don’t know what they can prove.”

  The bell rang out in the hallway, which meant we were all officially late for class. I felt a brief impulse to get up and run, like a baby duck chasing its mother.

  I said, “I just don’t get it. Why would someone want to mess with Shira? All she does here is stare out the window—Wait.” I pressed my palms down into the table. “Wait. Yesterday Shira was talking to me in the hallway, and she brought up my transcript.”

  “She brought that up in the hallway?” Emily said incredulously.

  “She was kind of jacked up about her trip to Accra,” I said. Emily flinched a little, like this was the first she was hearing about it. “Um. She was kind of going off about that, but then she brought up the transcript and said she thought there was more you guys could do, and she’d been on Blanchard’s server again.” I exhaled. “And then Meredith Dorsay ran into me.”

  “Meredith.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Wait. It wasn’t just Meredith. It was Amy, too. Amy Gregston.”

  “Wonky English Grade Amy?” Nate asked.

  “Yes! And they were together at the mall, too, a few weeks ago. Shoot. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? It’s Meredith. It’s Meredith, and this is because of me. She found out Shira was helping me, and first she did the Instagram thing and then this. A bag of joints in the locker, everyone believes it, and Shira’s out of school the next day.”

  “They probably won’t expel her this close to the end of the year,” Emily said to Bebe’s horrified face. “They’ll just graduate her early. Get her out of the way so she doesn’t embarrass the school, and try to keep a lid on it. They’ve done it before.”

  “What?” I asked. “When?”

  “Sophomore year. Do you remember Neil Hickman? Some teacher walked in on him selling ecstasy in the bathroom six weeks before graduation, but he was already in at Northwestern, so they just kind of disappeared him for the rest of the year.”

  “Did they ever tell Northwestern?” I asked.

  “Not sure. But he started there the next fall. My guess is they didn’t.”

  That almost made me feel a little better, because the last thing I wanted was for Shira to end up in the same boat as me. Still, though. I felt myself starting to shake with rage. Meredith had heard us. Meredith had done this. And that meant that she had been the one behind my transcript hack, too. There was my proof. It had always been her.

  I imagined twenty thousand ways to murder Meredith Dorsay and make it look like an accident.

  I pushed back from the table and got up.

  “Mischa!” Nate said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going,” I said, “to have a conversation with Meredith.”

  Emily said, “No, you can’t do that, Mischa.”

  “This is overdue.”

  “Are you stupid?” Emily said. “She’s just going to deny everything!”

  I stopped at the door. “I want her to deny it to my face,” I said. And before anyone could forcibly stop me, I pushed the door open and stormed into the hallway.

  * * *

  —

  Meredith was in French this period. I hated that I knew that. Why did I even know that? How much of my brain was taken up knowing useless minutiae about people I barely cared about?

  I tapped on the door of Madame Henri’s classroom, and then stepped inside.

  “Pardon,” I said, in my tightest accent. “Ils doivent s’adresser à Meredith Dorsay au secrétariat.”

>   Madame Henri nodded at Meredith, whose mouth had popped open at the sight of me, and who followed me out into the hallway.

  “What do you mean, they need to talk to me in the office?” she asked.

  “Just follow me,” I snapped.

  “Why would they send you?”

  I went around the corner without answering. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going back to class,” she hissed.

  I’d wanted to have this conversation somewhere more private, but it was either here or nowhere, so I spun around and said, “What you did to Shira was low.”

  “You think I ratted out Shira? Why would I? Everyone in this whole place knows her story. I’m surprised they never caught her before.”

  “Are you actually going to look me in my face and deny this?”

  “Deny what?”

  “What you did to Shira. What you did to me!”

  She stopped short. “Excuse me?”

  “I know what you did with the transcripts. And it’s going to come out.”

  “What I did with the…” She trailed off. Her eyes flared with understanding, but I couldn’t tell if she was faking the expression or not. “I see what this is. You screwed up and got rejected from everywhere good, and you’re too entitled to admit it was your fault. You need a scapegoat.”

  “No,” I said. “I saw what you did to my transcript. I saw it. Don’t deny it. And how many of your own grades did you go in and change? Did you bump that freshman English grade up to an A? I bet you did.”

  “You are pathetic,” she said. “I can’t believe you. We live in a meritocracy, Michelle. You get what you earn. I earned my place at Harvard. And now you’re trying to blame me because you couldn’t hack it.”

  “I hacked it. I hacked it fine.”

  “Oh please. You show up with your ‘poor little me, my mom drives a Honda’ sob story, as if we’re supposed to feel sorry for you? Your mom’s a lawyer. You aren’t some underprivileged kid from the street. Your dad’s not in prison.” She hesitated. “He’s not, is he?”