And Then I Found Out the Truth (8 page)

Somebody was putting up condos a few blocks from Charley’s, and they’d surrounded the building site with a high wall of scaffolding to protect pedestrians from construction debris. Eight and a half hours earlier, when Charley and I had passed by on our way to the subway, the plywood had been covered with peeling blue paint, graffiti, and flyers for guitar lessons and movers and dog-walkers. It had all been completely harmless.

It turned out a lot could change in eight and a half hours.

Now every available inch of the scaffolding had been transformed by Dieter harnessing the power of visual media, or whatever it was he thought he was doing. He’d used the same image, and though this version was smaller — poster-sized instead of billboard-sized — he’d made up for the decrease in size with an increase in volume. Charley and I filled the entire wall, plastered in endless rows and columns for no discernible purpose.

I was speechless all over again. Carolina’s reaction, on the other hand, was a lot more upbeat than Charley’s and mine had been. We’d had our backs to the platform on the train downtown, so we’d missed seeing the billboards at the 51st Street station, and apparently this was her first encounter with Dieter’s handiwork. “But it is spectacular,” she said.
“Muy linda.
This will be yellow for you, no?”

“Why yellow?” I asked. Her tone was enthusiastic, and
linda
sounded okay, but she’d once said I felt red to her, and shortly after that someone tried to run me over.

“Yellow is good,” she assured me. “Much better than red. Red is only for the Sagittarius.”

Just as Carolina had promised, Charley wasn’t home when we got to the loft, and she’d sent another text saying she’d be even later than she initially thought. Dieter was nowhere to be found, which was probably wise of him, and she was busy trying to figure out if there was any way to have the pictures removed from the subway. This suggested she was unaware he’d branched out from public transportation to construction, and I hoped I wouldn’t be with her when she found out. In the meantime, Carolina and I didn’t have to worry about her showing up in the middle of our
Bewitched
marathon.

Not that it mattered. We spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the early evening in front of the TV, curled up on opposite ends of the sofa and watching episode after episode. And while my ice cream was wholly enjoyable and the show wasn’t entirely without entertainment value, the only productive thing that came out of it all was Carolina teaching herself how to twitch her nose like Samantha.

She broke it down for me — it was more of an upper lip twitch with the nose following along than an isolated nose twitch — but I still couldn’t quite master it.

“Do not be envious,” said Carolina. “One day you also will learn and then we will be the witches together,
sí
?” She was a lot more excited about this than I was, but for her sake I pretended I’d keep practicing until I got it right.

Otherwise, she left me nearly as directionless as I’d been before. “Your friend Rafe, he will take care of your mama,” she said as she was leaving. “And the Quinn, he will be okay. You should watch the ball and think about the Sagittarius. Also, the
examen
.”

“
Examen
?” I asked blankly.

She gave me her most severe look. “It will be happening soon, and you make the promise to your auntie that you will pass. You do not want to violate this promise.”

Of course, in typical Carolina fashion, just because she knew about the physics quiz looming in my future didn’t mean she could tell me the answers or even what questions would be on it. So after she’d gone home, I called Natalie. I’d started taking notes in class, but I needed help decoding them. And untangling scientific mysteries was usually Natalie’s idea of a good time — I didn’t have to worry about imposing.

But if I’d thought it was shocking to turn a corner and see my own image repeated hundreds of times on a wall of scaffolding, I was totally unprepared for Natalie having no interest in talking about physics. It was like Mr. Dudley having no interest in talking about the Muse, or Charley having no interest in accessories.

Tonight, however, Natalie had only one thing on her mind, and that was Edward, the guy from the science fair.

They’d met up after school for coffee, and while Carolina and I were watching
Bewitched,
the two of them were sipping lattes and discovering they were soul mates. And Natalie on the subject of Edward made me on the subject of Quinn sound like Gwyneth on any subject whatsoever. It probably didn’t help that she was also completely wired from the lattes.

“Did I tell you that Edward wants to go to MIT, too?” she said. “He spent his summer at Caltech doing neuromorphic systems engineering, but he spent the summer before at MIT, and he liked it better. He’s considering a joint degree in nanoscience and bioengineering, but I told him about the work I’ve been doing in optics and now he’s thinking he’ll do a triple major. I can’t wait for you to meet him, Delia. I invited him to the Homecoming Dance. Are you and Quinn going to go? Because if you do, we can all hang out, Edward and me and you and Quinn.”

It was hard to believe this was the same person who’d scoffed at the Homecoming Dance yesterday, much less the same person who’d been suggesting that Quinn was a criminal mastermind today. But her happiness was contagious, even over the phone, and since she agreed to meet up before school the next morning to help me prep for the physics quiz (she’d already guessed on her own we were due for one, and it wasn’t like Dr. Penske had sworn Charley to secrecy or anything), I wasn’t going to hold any of the other stuff against her.

The only problem was that all of Natalie’s romantic giddiness just kept bringing my thoughts back to Quinn, who, according to Carolina, was confused and under pressure but not for the reasons I thought and not because of anything that had to do with me. That was promising, though I had no idea what the alternatives were to having lost interest in me or having been involved in something moronic. And either way, he still hadn’t returned my text.

So after I’d paced around the loft a bit, sent a contrite belated birthday e-mail to Erin, fanned the pages of my physics notebook, done a run-through of Lady Macbeth, eaten some leftover Wiener schnitzel, organized Charley’s collection of classic ’80s teen movies by star (Lowe, McCarthy, Ringwald, Spader), and otherwise pretended I was being restrained and not giving way to obsessive, stalker-like behavior, I called Quinn.

I was sort of relieved when his number went straight to voice mail. It suggested maybe his battery was dead or he’d lost his phone or for some other reason hadn’t even seen my text, which was infinitely better than his having seen it and ignored it. And this thought gave me the courage to do what I did next, which was to call his home phone.

It rang four times, and I was about to give up when Bea answered.

“Riley residence,” she said carefully. “Beatrice Riley speaking.”

“Hi, Bea. It’s Delia. Is Quinn around?”

“Delia!” she cried. “Did Quinn tell you about —”

There was a fumbling noise, and she gave a muted screech as someone wrested the phone away from her. Then Oliver came on.

“This is Oliver Riley —” he started to say. But then there was another fumbling noise and an “ow!” as somebody else pulled the phone away from him.

“Both of you. Bed. Now.” Fiona had her hand over the mouth of the receiver, but I could still hear her, and she sounded scary.

I’d only met Fiona a couple of times, and she hadn’t seemed scary then — mostly just well-groomed — so this side of her was new. It occurred to me I should probably hang up while I still could, but before that thought could fully register, she was speaking into the phone. “Hello?”

“Hi, Fi — I mean, Mrs. Riley. Is Quinn there?”

“Who’s calling, please?” she asked.

“It’s Delia,” I said. And then, when she didn’t respond right away, I added, “Delia Truesdale.” And when she still didn’t respond, I added, “Quinn’s friend from Prescott?”

“Yes, Delia, I know who you are,” she said, and there was a bite to her tone.

“Uh, may I speak to Quinn?” I managed to get out. At this point, I was completely flummoxed.

“Quinn is unavailable at this time.”

“Oh,” I said. And then, since she didn’t offer to take a message, I said, “Should I call back later?”

There was another long pause, and when she spoke next, her tone was so acid it practically dissolved the phone. “No, you should not.”

And with that she hung up.

Eleven

I didn’t sleep well that night, so I wasn’t in a very good mood the next morning. Neither was Charley, though for different reasons.

It turned out that I shouldn’t have worried about her seeing the scaffolding near the loft, because Dieter had been busy plastering all of the scaffolding in the city with the same posters, and she’d encountered several equally striking examples of his work on her way home. And the man himself was still missing in action, which meant we didn’t know where our pictures might show up next.

I was already too upset to get more upset about this, but I was starting to wonder if I should be concerned about Charley’s mental health. On the subway to school, she kept muttering under her breath about what she was going to do to Dieter if she ever found him. Of course, I was busy replaying Fiona’s words over and over again in my head, and it was possible I was doing some muttering as well. The entire population of New York could have been staring and pointing at us, and a substantial chunk of it probably was, but we were both too caught up in our inner tirades to pay much attention.

So I wasn’t exactly the most cheerful version of myself when I arrived at Prescott. Natalie, on the other hand, was so happy she was nearly levitating. I could almost feel my aura and hers staring at each other in confusion from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. And though she hadn’t slept well, either, in her case it was due to being too thrilled and overcaffeinated, and not because her love interest’s stepmother had been overwhelmingly, crushingly mean to her.

The good news, though, at least for me, was that Natalie had used some of her excess energy to go above and beyond the call of friendship by creating a mock physics quiz I could use as a study guide. “Dr. Penske’s so predictable,” she said. “I guarantee whatever he hands out tomorrow will look exactly like this, just with his own inputs for the calculations.”

Of course, all of Natalie’s inputs seemed to involve references to Edward (“If Edward drives a car at a velocity of
x
and accelerates by a factor of
y
”), but it was so incredibly nice of her I wasn’t going to tease her about it. And while I still didn’t really understand why I was supposed to take the steps she said to take to solve the problems, they weren’t any harder to memorize than “out damned spot.”

She was walking me through everything with bemused patience — which I also credited to her euphoria since she usually walked me through things with clinically detached amazement that anyone could be so dense — when out of the corner of my eye I saw a blue Mercedes pull up to the curb. A driver hurried from the front seat to open the door to the backseat.

Fancy chauffeur-driven cars were a pretty common sight at Prescott, so I didn’t give this one much thought at first. But my heart skidded to a stop when I saw Fiona and Quinn get out.

Fiona was dressed a lot like Patience had been the other day, in a dark suit and oversized sunglasses. Quinn was in his Prescott uniform, though it seemed safe to assume the reason Fiona was there was to negotiate with the school about whether he’d be allowed to continue wearing it. Otherwise he would have arrived alone and on foot, the way he usually did.

It was only a few minutes before the first bell, so a lot of people were around, but Fiona didn’t look to her right or her left as she moved briskly forward, her lips pressed into a thin, tense line. Quinn walked alongside her, and I could tell his jaw was clenched even from where Natalie and I were sitting. He, too, kept his gaze focused straight ahead, but he paused at the entrance to hold the door for Fiona, and as he did he stole a quick glance around.

For a split second, I thought he saw me, but the expression in his gray-green eyes didn’t seem to change.

Then he squared his shoulders and followed Fiona inside.

The bell rang soon after that, and Natalie flitted off to her first class like Snow White singing to the birds while I trudged off like Grumpy on his way to the mines. I was glad Fiona wasn’t angry with me personally — her acid tone the night before must have had more to do with Quinn than me — but it still looked like Quinn might be in serious trouble, not that I knew how to reconcile this with what Carolina had said. And I was trying to keep my eye on the ball — I really was — but it wasn’t easy when the ball kept getting buried under avalanches of distraction.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Natalie said later, as we waited in the lunch line. “Mr. Seton’s called in the parents of half the senior class so far.”

In addition to mellowing her out, infatuation also seemed to be affecting her memory. Twenty-four hours ago she’d been certain of Quinn’s pivotal involvement in the gambling ring. And while I knew she was only trying to help, somehow her attempt to reassure me was even more disconcerting.

I didn’t have much interest in food, which was just as well since the chef had moved on from nation-based cuisine to color-based cuisine. The menu today was all about purple: There was coq au vin, and duck with plum sauce, and eggplant, and fig bars. It was a nice change from lamb and yogurt, but Natalie and I both went for grilled cheese anyway.

We’d barely sat down, and Natalie hadn’t even had the opportunity to cut her sandwich into halves, much less quarters, when without warning a third tray clattered down next to mine. And I didn’t need to look up to know who’d decided to join us. There was only one person at Prescott who considered

Fritos, pickles, and TaB to be three of the six major food groups.