Top of the Class (5 page)

Could it be that Eric’s affair with Miss Rogers wasn’t quite the beautiful, star-crossed romance it seemed?

I stepped into the courtyard of the building and sat down on a wooden bench surrounded by some droopy tiger lilies. If Eric had absolutely not hacked into Schecter’s computer, then someone else must have framed him.

Chapter
6

Thursday, 2:58 PM

B
ut who? Everyone I’d met so far seemed to be fans of mine—except for Richard.

I looked around the courtyard. There were wooden benches on patches of grass, nestled between cobblestone paths and patches of flowers. It looked like a fairy garden. Through a wall of windows in the cafeteria, I saw beyond into a computer lab, which was dark, except for the eerie glow of a single monitor, in front of which sat the silhouette of a person with thinning black hair. Could that be Richard, my nemesis?

I marched towards the computer lab. As I approached, I could see the reflection of a face in the computer monitor: Richard’s.

“Richard,” I called out.

“Not a good time, Justin Timberlake,” Richard barked.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to talk about. How do you tell someone that you think they framed you? Do you just…ask? There had to be a more roundabout way. “Where were you on Wednesday night?”

“I’m sorry, did I tell you that this
is
a good time?” he replied, never looking away from the computer screen. “Because I meant to say that it was
not
a good time.”

“What are you doing there?” I asked. His fingers were fluttering over the keyboard, typing code onto a blank black screen. He seemed to know his way around the empty recesses of the Internet, where ordinary men never dared to tread.

“I am ignoring you,” Richard said finally.

“You are an ass,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Richard. “I’d rather be an ass than a criminal.”

I stopped myself from pouncing on him and catching his neck in the crook of my elbow. I certainly could have, with these beefy arms. But I turned around and stormed out into the hallway instead, where I was intercepted by my friends, Caterpillar and Tooth.

“Hey, congratulations, Eric,” said Caterpillar.

“Yeah,” said Tooth, “everyone is really impressed. We didn’t know you were so good with computers.”

I expected them to start laughing at the silliness of the whole accusation, but instead they were glaring at me with disdain, even pity.

“You guys don’t think I would actually do something like that, do you?”

Caterpillar shrugged. “I don’t know, man. We hardly ever see you anymore, and when we do, your mind is somewhere else. And you’ve been complaining about getting B’s and stuff, which totally wrecks your chance of being valedictorian, like you’ve always been dreaming about, so…”

“You’re our friend, Eric,” whispered Tooth. “And we’ll support you either way. But we want to know the truth. Did you do it?”

“I swear I didn’t.” I said gravely.

They looked at one another.

“Well, where were you last night?” Caterpillar said.

“I was home. The whole night.”

Tooth looked at Caterpillar suspiciously. “You told us you were visiting your grandma, and that’s why you couldn’t come to my ice hockey game.”

Whoops
.
I hated getting caught in a lie that I didn’t even invent myself.

“I didn’t go, I stayed home. But that’s where I was the whole time. I swear. Do you believe me now?”

“Sure, man,” nodded Caterpillar, but I could tell that he was didn’t.

“I wasn’t alone!” I shouted, then immediately regretted it.

“Who were you with?” asked Tooth.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

I shook my head with frustration. The more I thought about it, the more I was certain that Richard had hacked into the principal’s computer and changed Eric’s grades in order to make him look like a cheater. Richard was a computer wizard, after all, and Eric’s public disgrace had filled his eyes with hopes of becoming student council president. But could I trust Tooth and Caterpillar with the truth? I was swimming in secrets—and they were drowning me.

“Look, guys,” I sighed. “I think Richard framed me. I don’t know how he did it, but I’m sure about it. He wants me out of the way so he can climb the ranks of student council.”

“Understood, man,” said Tooth, balling his fingers into fists. “Then we’ll go deal with him. If he won’t tell you what he did, then we’ll just…you know…beat it out of him.”

My eyes went wide. So
that
was the proper way to wrestle a confession from a suspect—you had to
physically
wrestle them. “Uh, no, that’s okay,” I replied.

“Why not?” said Caterpillar. “I’ve always wanted an excuse to hit that little freak.”

Just then, something buzzed in my back pocket. I reached in and pulled out my cell phone. There was a new text message from a phone number labeled “Linda”: “Come home NOW.”

I drove home, my heart pounding. I knew I was running out of time.

When I walked in, Linda was sitting at the dining room table, sinking back into a chair, her arms folded across her chest. She stared listlessly out the window.

“Hi, Linda,” I said, tossing my backpack onto the couch.

She just continued to stare. “You okay?” I asked.

“Well, frankly, no,” she said, turning toward me. The bottom of her eyes were red and swollen. “I heard about Principal Schecter’s computer.”

“I didn’t do it!” I shouted. “Why does no one believe me?”

“Because your fingerprints were all over the keyboard!” she protested. “You
promised
you would come to that PTA meeting. And when you said you had to study, you
promised
you’d watch me on TV. But you didn’t do that either. What am I to conclude, except that you were using the time to do some hacking for extra credit?”

I sat down at the table and put my head in my hands. I wasn’t sure if Eric was a weeper or not, but I couldn’t help it: it began as a pronounced lump in my throat, and before long, I could taste the salty wetness pooling in the corners of my eyes.

“Mama,” I cried. “I promise you I didn’t do it.”

She watched me cry for a minute, then moseyed around to my end of the table and draped herself over my back, kissing the top of my head over and over. “Eric, you know I wouldn’t care if you got bad grades, right? I will always love you—there’s nothing you could do to change that. Maybe if you started murdering children. So don’t do that. But otherwise, I will always love you. Even if you broke into the principal’s computer and changed your grades. I just need you to be honest with me. Truly, wholly honest.”

But I couldn’t be wholly honest with her, because I couldn’t tell her about my teacher/girlfriend. The secret danced on the tip of my tongue, burning like hot pepper. I wanted so badly to tell her and then let Eric deal with the consequences after I left. But now wasn’t the right moment.

“I honestly didn’t do it.”

She sat down and stared straight at me. “Okay. I believe you.” She patted my cheek. “But if you didn’t do it, who did?”

“I think I was set up.”

“By whom?”

“Well,” I said, “it might have been Richard, the VP of student council. I overheard him telling Miss Rogers that he thought he deserved to be the president and it should have been his in the first place.”

Eric’s mom squinted, thinking hard. “I don’t know. Boys don’t usually care enough to seek revenge like that.” She paused. “But girls do.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you ask me, Antonia took your breakup pretty hard. I’ve never seen a girl get so angry. Those e-mails she wrote you…I’m surprised she stopped at framing you for cheating. I thought she’d leave a decapitated animal on your pillow, too.”

I jiggled the mouse on Eric’s desktop and the monitor popped to life. I opened Gmail, and was thrilled to find that he was still signed in. Most of the e-mails were bits of spam from RadioShack, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. In the search field, I typed “Antonia,” and hundreds of e-mails popped up from an “Antonia Koch.” I went to the e-mails with attachments and found a few pictures of her, a beautiful girl with long blond hair and full lips, posing next to Eric. Reading through her e-mails, I saw that they were all romantic until around a month ago when they had taken a decidedly darker turn.

Subject: WTF

Dear Eric,

You have hurt me more than I thought it was possible to be hurt. We have been together for so long and now you dump me over the phone? Really classy. If you were so unhappy, you should have told me, so I would have known this was coming, instead of being completely blindsided—literally two days after my grandma’s funeral. You’re so tacky. I know I was in Louisiana, but what breakup is so urgent that you couldn’t wait another three days until I got back—from my grandma’s funeral—so you could tell me to my face? We’ve been together for two years—why did you have to break up with me on that particular day?

Whatever. Just know that you will pay for this. I hope you feel as bad as I felt.

Antonia, your EX

If that wasn’t a threat, I didn’t know what was.

Chapter
7

Friday, 7:45 AM

I
walked through the front door of the school the following morning to find Schecter standing in the middle of the welcome mat, high-fiving students as they walked past, the same errant piece of hair flapping in the breeze with every slap.

I turned as quickly and inconspicuously as I could and jogged in the opposite direction, but there was no slipping through the phalanx of blue blazers marching shoulder to shoulder into school. I was trapped.

Schecter stared right at me. “There’s the man I wanted to see.” The crowd pushed me in front of him, like an ocean wave carrying a boogie boarder back to shore. “Follow me, Mr. McCormack,” he said, leading me down the hallway.

Everybody stopped and stared as I followed him through the door of his office, past his two secretaries and then through an imposing wooden door with his name and title, “Harold P. Schecter, Principal,” embossed in gold.

He motioned for me to sit in a green leather chair opposite his massive wooden desk.

“I’d rather stand,” I said, leaning on the chair with one arm.

“Fair enough,” he said, smiling as he took a seat on top of his desk, his legs dangling off the front. A pair of purple argyle socks peeked from beneath his cuffs, which were just a hair too short for me to take him seriously. “Have you given any thought to my offer?”

“I can’t confess to something I didn’t do,” I said.

Schecter sighed and hung his head. “Eric, Eric, there are other wonderful high schools where you can finish out the year, and no one will be the wiser.”

Something told me that Eric would probably want to avoid becoming a new kid in the middle of his senior year. “I don’t want to go to another school.”

Schecter went on. “Now, I’ve already given you a day to think about it. If you turn in your confession and leave Pembroke Hall by the end of the day on Friday, which is…” He paused and investigated the
Far Side
daily calendar sitting on his desk. “Today! Wow. Today. Yes. If you confess by the end of the day, then we’ll forget about any criminal charges. After that, the offer is off the table.”

“But I didn’t do anything!” I protested. “Somebody framed me.”

“No one really frames anyone, Eric. That’s what people say when they don’t want to admit they’ve broken the law. I would hate for you to end up in jail because of your pride.”

“Jail?” I gulped.

“Well, you’re eighteen, and last time I checked, eighteen-year-olds go to jail with the rest of the adults.”

Ask Miss Rogers where I was!
I wanted to scream. I really thought about saying it, but I stopped myself. The point was to save Eric from having his life ruined altogether, not to ruin his relationship in the process.

“Eric, I didn’t want to say this at the police station, but it’s more than just the evidence against you. It’s your behavior. Last week, when you came to my office to discuss budgeting minutiae, you yelled at me.”

“I did?”

“As much as I’m sure you’d like to forget it, unfortunately I cannot. I made a note of it in your file—which the police have seen. So it’s more than just the fingerprint evidence that makes you suspicious. Your behavior has been erratic for weeks now. Aggressive, even. We both know that you weren’t framed. Admit it and it’ll be done. I want what’s best for you.”

“Please,” I said, “you have to believe me.” Even as I said it, I knew it was no use. I had to find another way to exonerate Eric, and I wouldn’t find it in Schecter’s office.

I hurried out into the hallway. I had until the end of the day. That was seven hours away. What if I couldn’t find any evidence by then?

As I raced down the hallway, I heard footsteps next to mine. Will was jogging next to me, wearing the school uniform.

“I know!” I screamed. “Seven hours!”

“This guy is headed to jail, Abby,” Will said. “You have to figure this out. Please…please don’t get trapped in his body.”

“What? Why does it matter to you?” I asked bitterly.

Will ran ahead and planted his body in front of mine. I couldn’t stop short in time, and I tumbled right through him, a sensation that felt like falling off the Titanic into the black, glacial water below.

I stood with my hands on my knees, the wind knocked out of me.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I know it’s not a pleasant feeling, touching me. I…it matters to me because I like you. As a Shadow, I mean. You’re good at it. And I like being your Guardian. So…hurry up and figure this out, so we can keep working together.”

I tried to smile, but I was so frustrated and frightened that it came out more like a grimace. It was nice to hear that Will thought I was good at this, but clearly, he was operating under some sort of personal bias. I was no closer to figuring out who framed Eric than I was when I’d arrived two days ago.