And Then I Found Out the Truth (14 page)

OLIVICE: miss u, juliet

And then that really was it.

But the uncontrollable smile stayed on my face for the rest of the night.

Nineteen

It wasn’t easy, but we eventually managed to convince Rafe that a kung pao—schnitzel casserole sounded delicious but might not be what we were in the mood for that particular night. Then Charley phoned in our taco order, the two of them went to pick it up, and we all had dinner together.

Rafe left for the airport soon after, and Natalie returned to hacking the security firm’s intranet while Charley and I pretended to keep ourselves busy. Around ten, though, Natalie pushed her chair away from the table in frustration. “I’m in,” she announced. “But there’s a problem.”

She’d been able to access the intranet, but the information we wanted was shielded behind an additional wall of security. “They’re asking for a scan of the barcode on an approved individual’s ID card,” Natalie explained. “I can run a program that will try randomly generated barcodes, but there’s a virtually infinite number of permutations, so it could take days and maybe even weeks to hit on one that will work, and the longer the program runs, the greater the risk it will trigger an alert that the intranet’s been compromised. Is there any way to get our hands on the ID card of a building tenant?”

We all knew exactly how we could accomplish precisely that, but we also knew just how loaded such a course of action would be.

Because hacking into a Web site was one thing — we needed to find La Morena for reasons of self-defense and climate preservation, and Natalie was too skilled to bring the site crashing down or to otherwise leave tracks.

But asking Quinn to go rooting through his father’s belongings so we could borrow an ID card might be crossing an ethical line. It only complicated matters further that I was still under strict instructions not to discuss the investigation with him — even if I was comfortable asking him for Hunter’s ID, I’d be skating dangerously near the topic of what we were trying to accomplish and why, and from there it was only a short step to his father’s potential role in the whole scenario.

So we were at a temporary impasse, since our next best idea was to find out what other companies were in the building and make an appointment with one of them in order to obtain another visitor’s pass. And while this would probably work, it would also have to wait until business hours resumed on Monday, which meant our chances of solving this problem over the weekend were pretty much shot.

Natalie was disappointed, but Charley and I appreciated that she’d gotten as far as she had, and Natalie actually seemed sincere when she said she’d had a good time. “As soon as I get home, I’ll start the program to try the randomly generated barcodes. It’s not mathematically impossible that we’ll arrive at a match quickly, before we need to worry about raising any red flags on their end.”

She gathered up her things, and we accompanied her downstairs. It was getting late, so we wanted to see her safely into a taxi, and we also had to replenish our ice cream supply at the twenty-four-hour deli.

As the elevator made its slow descent, Charley turned to Natalie. “I hope you have something fun planned for the rest of the weekend.”

To the casual observer, this would appear to be perfectly innocent small talk, but I knew better. Charley was fishing for an opportunity to give Natalie her two cents about Edward — it wouldn’t surprise me if she thought she really did have a shot at the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Earlier, when Charley and Rafe were busy in the kitchen, I’d asked Natalie myself what she’d decided to do, and she’d said she still wasn’t sure. Either way, I wasn’t surprised when she opened up to Charley now, telling her the whole story. Everybody opened up to Charley.

“I’m supposed to go out with this guy tomorrow night, but I’ve learned some disturbing information about his past,” Natalie confided. “There are significant discrepancies between how he presents himself to me and his broader reputation.”

“Do you like how he presents himself to you?” asked Charley.

“Well, yes,” said Natalie, and that was all it took for her to start gushing to Charley the same way she’d gushed to me. She kept it up as we made our way across Laight Street and over to Hudson Street, where we’d be able to hail a taxi to take her uptown.

But when we reached the corner, she stopped short and told Charley what Gwyneth had said. “I just don’t know how to weigh the data points from my personal experience against the third-party data points,” she concluded.

“Is it possible you’re overthinking this?” said Charley.

Overthinking was an unfamiliar concept to Natalie. “What do you mean?”

“Obviously, you want to make sure the guy isn’t an ax murderer or anything. But shouldn’t how Edward is with you be the most important data point of all?”

It sounded so simple when Charley said it, but I had the feeling Natalie would be debating it with herself the entire way home.

The next day, Charley and I spent the whole morning and a good chunk of the early afternoon figuring out what I’d wear to meet Quinn at the Museum of Natural History. This would have been hard enough under normal circumstances, but not knowing what the afternoon held in store made it that much more problematic.

So left to my own devices, getting dressed probably would’ve taken a while. But with Charley involved it sucked up every available second, starting almost at dawn and continuing until we were dangerously close to being late.

After I’d tried on everything in my closet and most of the items in Charley’s, we ultimately agreed on a cream-colored Marc Jacobs dress with a scoop neck and black banding at the waist, topped off by a cropped lavender jacket and, in honor of my destination, the cuff with the elephant we’d bought at Barney’s.

Charley took a step back to better appreciate her work, her brow furrowed in thought. “It’s good, almost perfect, but something’s missing, and I can’t quite put my finger on what —” Then she interrupted herself. “Wait here,” she ordered, dashing out of my room.

She returned brandishing a black fedora with braided trim. “Here you go.”

“I don’t know if I’m a hat sort of person,” I said, though I knew from experience this was just begging for a discourse on how I absolutely was a hat person but hadn’t yet been exposed to the right hat and fortune was smiling on me today because the hat she had in her hand would change my mind forever.

“There’s only one way to find out,” said Charley, setting the fedora on my head.

But it turned out I have a very small skull, which might also explain why I had so little room for processing certain types of physics-related information. The fedora slipped down so low over my face even Charley couldn’t argue it was wearable if I actually wanted to see. “Well,” she said, disappointed. “We’ll just have to do more shopping.”

More shopping wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, though, since it was already half past two. And given what we’d heard about La Morena making people disappear, Charley definitely wasn’t letting me go anywhere unescorted — we ended up running for the subway together. But as luck would have it, we caught an express train and reached the museum with a few minutes to spare.

Charley waited with me out front, by the statue of Teddy Roosevelt mounted on a horse, surveying the traffic on Central Park West. As all the parents with their little kids and tourists with cameras streamed by, she detailed the fabulous places we’d shop for hats once I’d embraced the vital importance of hats as a wardrobe staple.

I had to admit, I was glad Charley didn’t need me to hold up my end of the conversation. I’d been able to keep it together while we’d been planning my outfit, but now that we were actually there, with Quinn due to arrive at any second, I couldn’t ignore the overwhelming sense that a pivotal, do-or-die moment was approaching, the sort of moment when things were decided in a completely irreversible way.

So as we waited, each second felt like an hour, and the people going in and out of the museum seemed to move in slow motion. And just when I was beginning to wonder if I’d messed up, if Quinn’s IM hadn’t said three o’clock but an entirely different time and maybe even a different place, a cab pulled up and he got out.

He wasn’t alone, of course — Bea and Oliver spilled onto the sidewalk after him. Charley and I had been expecting they’d come along, since otherwise the museum as a destination was sort of random. Volunteering to take the two of them here was probably the only way Quinn had been able to convince Fiona to let him leave the house.

“Just as we thought,” observed Charley. “Using the kids as a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

I couldn’t respond. I hadn’t seen Quinn in more than seventy-two hours, and the sight of him induced full-on brain paralysis.

The day was cool and damp again, but Quinn was like a magnet for what little sun there was. A single ray escaped from behind the clouds, and the light turned his sand-colored hair to gold. Then his eyes landed on me, and the drab autumn day suddenly felt like summer.

By the time I recovered, Charley had said hello and good-bye and conveniently disappeared, Oliver had greeted me with his standard fist bump, and Bea had given me a big hug and was chattering excitedly about dinosaurs and butterflies.

“This way, guys,” said Quinn, putting one hand on Bea’s head and the other on Oliver’s and pointing them in the direction of the museum entrance. “March.”

As soon as they were moving forward, Quinn turned to me. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said back. The uncontrollable smile was spreading across my face, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

But it didn’t seem to matter, because a similar smile was on his face.

Then he was drawing me to him, and I felt the heat of his lips against mine.

Twenty

I could have stayed in that spot for the rest of my life. Nothing could compete with how completely right it felt to be there with Quinn, standing by the Teddy Roosevelt statue and kissing.

But reality intruded in the form of what sounded like a mob of people laughing and clapping. When we pulled apart, I saw we’d attracted a small crowd of spectators and some of them were even taking our picture. I probably should’ve been mortified, but I was too giddy from the kissing.

Meanwhile, Bea and Oliver had figured out we weren’t directly behind them and come back to retrieve us. “Dude, you’re embarrassing me,” Oliver muttered to Quinn as Bea grabbed my hand and began towing me toward the museum entrance.

Quinn had promised them we’d go see the model whale, and I guessed this was an old favorite because they led the way through the thronged lobby and to the Hall of Ocean Life like homing pigeons. Once there, they wanted to give me a guided tour, but Quinn offered up pizza for dinner and Bea a piggyback ride on the trip home in return for time to ourselves. And after negotiating pepperoni versus sausage and what duration of piggyback ride Bea could expect, they reached an agreement.

So Bea and Oliver wandered off to explore, and Quinn and I found a bench in the upper gallery, almost parallel with the massive whale suspended from the ceiling and with a clear view of the hall so we could keep an eye on the kids. And though I knew we had a lot to cover and the clock was ticking — Quinn’s get-out-of-jail-free card had to expire at some point — when he moved closer to me on the bench, it was impossible not to start kissing again.

“Nice,” he said.

That seemed like an understatement. “Really nice,” I said. And then we kissed some more.

“Well,” Quinn said when we next came up for air. “You’re probably wondering what’s been happening.”

That was also an understatement. At least, that’s what I would’ve thought if all of the kissing hadn’t pretty much erased my ability to think. “A bit,” I admitted.

“I tried to call you — Oliver had buried Fiona’s cell phone under a sofa cushion when she wasn’t looking — but you probably already know how that backfired.”

“Was Fiona angry?” I asked.

“Angrier, you mean? I don’t think that’s even possible.” “So, what is going on?”

The light in the room had a dim, underwater feel, and in its bluish tint Quinn’s eyes looked more gray than green. I wondered whether the way they changed color from moment to moment had more to do with the light or what was going on in his head. Now he seemed to be ordering his thoughts, like he was trying to decide where to start. “Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I should get this part out of the way. I didn’t do it. The gambling thing. I wasn’t involved.” I registered a vague sense of relief.

Until he added, “But it was my idea. I thought it up over the summer.”

“You what?”

“You know how my dad wants me to go to the finance program at Wharton?”

I nodded. “He went there, too, right?”

“Right. But with my math grades, it’s going to be a long shot. So I was trying to come up with ideas for businesses I could start, to show I at least have potential. And the poker thing was one of my ideas. Not the part about targeting underage kids or hosting it at Prescott — that was moronic — just the basic concept. But I realized that even if I could get the right licenses and figure out the logistics, an admissions officer might not look so favorably on gambling as an extracurricular activity. When school started up again, I forgot about the whole thing, but I also forgot I’d told some of the guys. They ran with it on their own.”

“Then why didn’t you just say so to Mr. Seton?” I asked. “You shouldn’t get in trouble for something you didn’t do.”

He’d been holding one of my hands, but now he let it slip from his grasp. “It’s not that easy,” he said.

“Why not?” It seemed pretty cut-and-dried to me, and I also wanted him to take my hand back.

“Because Seton would want to know who I told, so he can go after them all. He says it’s a matter of principle.”

“Oh,” I said, starting to understand. And after my own conversation with the headmaster, I knew exactly what Quinn was up against — Mr. Seton had very different views on what was and wasn’t principled behavior than the average high school student. “It seems like it’s a lot more honorable not to start naming names.”