Unfriended (24 page)

“Okay,” Peyton said, nodding. “Doable.”

“Definitely,” Dell agreed.

I looked between the two of them, shocked. “Wait,” I said, “what do you mean, doable?”

“I mean that it’s feasible,” Peyton said. She looked across the table at Dell. “Don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “It’s not going to be easy, but it’s certainly possible.”

“And you both are just … volunteering to help me?” I asked, baffled. I had been anticipating that Dell would have been disinclined to help me, or would have at least insisted on charging me for his services. And I wasn’t sure how Peyton had gone from scowling at me to joining Team Mad.

Proving she wasn’t quite done with the scowling yet, Peyton glowered at me. “You do not,” she said, “get to hurt my stepsister and get away with it. Plus, this Isabel chick sounds like she needs to be put in her place.”

I glanced at Dell and studied his expression closely. I realized I wasn’t sure where his loyalties were. After all, Isabel was his cousin, and they’d joined forces once before.

“I’m in,” he said. He shook his head, his face darkening. “Nobody steals from me without consequences. And …” He met my eye, then looked down at the table again. “It is my fault,” he muttered. “This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me. And I’m sorry about that, Madison.”

I stared at him. Dell had never apologized, for anything—not for hacking me, not for helping to mastermind the whole prom debacle. And what’s more,
it seemed genuine. It was really the proof that I needed. There was no turning back now. “All right,” I said. “Well … thank you both.”

“Now,” said Peyton, clearly ready to get down to business. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to need more than three people.” She grabbed a napkin from the center of the table, extracted a pen from her bag, and pushed them both toward me. “People we can trust,” she added.

I nodded and took the pen and napkin from her, realizing that of all the people to have come back into my life, she was probably the best equipped to help me pull this off. When least expected, fate had handed me a wartime consigliere. I paused for just a moment to be grateful for this. Then I took a deep breath and began to make the list.

I stood on the doorstep of Dave’s house and tried to tell myself that there was no reason to be nervous. But my palms were sweating as I shifted from foot to foot. I was also without my phone, as I’d updated my status from my house and had left it there, so my location would be there and not changing. But I felt totally cut off without it. My hand kept reaching in my bag for it, before I would remember that it was no longer with me. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d rung someone’s doorbell. If the door wasn’t open, I would always just text. But I no longer had that capability. It was like I had traveled back in time to some terrible era before cell phones, like the 1500s, or the 80s. But I knew that it wasn’t actually
the ringing of the doorbell that was worrying me—it was what would happen after the door was opened and I went inside.

Earlier, at the coffee shop, I had made out a list of the people that I knew I could absolutely trust, while trying to keep the number of people involved as small as possible. As Isabel herself had pointed out, secrets get harder to contain the more people that know about them. And if the plan—such as it was—that Peyton, Dell, and I had started to talk about was going to be pull-off-able, it was imperative that Isabel not know that it was going to happen. After I’d given Peyton the list, she told me she’d organize people and tell me where and when. I’d gotten a text from her an hour before, telling me to meet at Dave’s at eight, and that Dell would be joining us later. But I had no idea what I was walking into—who was going to be there, what she might have told them, how they were going to be feeling about me at the present moment. It felt incredibly strange to be worried about seeing my friends again. It just served as a reminder of how fully everything had changed.

I pressed the doorbell, hearing a muffled chime play inside the house. As I waited for someone to come and answer it, I suddenly realized that this was exactly what Ruth must have felt the first morning she rejoined our group again.

I couldn’t hear the sound of approaching footsteps, and I adjusted the heavy canvas bag on my shoulder—it contained my laptop—and tucked my hair behind my ears. I wished for the umpteenth time that night that I
had my phone with me. I was preparing to ring the bell a second time, crossing my fingers that Dave’s parents wouldn’t be home, and if they were, they wouldn’t be in the middle of dinner or something, when a low, motorized whirring sound caused me to turn around. I couldn’t see anything, but a second later, something collided hard with my ankle. I looked down and saw a miniature monster truck—painted black with red lightning bolts on it—rev back, turn itself in a circle, and start to head in the direction it had come from.

I just stared at it for a minute, not having expected this to be the result of ringing the doorbell. The truck stopped, turned around, and revved toward me again, before turning in the other direction. Unbelievably, it seemed like the truck wanted me to follow it. Dave was probably controlling the truck, and he was somewhere close, where he could see me. But as I looked around, I didn’t see him anywhere. The truck spun itself in a small circle, and jolted forward once again before turning around and facing me, revving its engine, as though it was getting impatient.

Figuring that following the miniature truck seemed like the best—if most unexpected—course of action, I followed it away from Dave’s front door and around the side of the house. It would zoom forward ahead of me, then pause and turn around to face me, as though checking I was still following, before turning back and jolting forward once again. As I followed it to the pool area and then around the side of the pool, I was looking all around me, checking over my shoulders, trying to find out
where Dave—or whoever it was that was operating the truck—was operating it
from
. But I couldn’t see anyone, which made this whole thing that much stranger. The truck led me to the door of the pool house, backed itself up, then gunned its tiny engine and zoomed through the plastic pet door in the bottom of it. Figuring this meant I’d reached our destination, I reached out and pulled open the door.

I stepped inside and had to blink a few times, since I wasn’t sure exactly what I was seeing. Dave, Lisa, Schuyler, and Ruth were sitting on one of the pool house couches, while Kittson, Glen, and Mark were sitting on the other. Peyton was sitting apart from everyone, on the counter of the pool house’s small kitchen. Everyone’s attention was turned toward a huge TV screen, which was broadcasting … everyone sitting on the couches, and the pool house, back to them. It was a little bit like being in a carnival house of mirrors.

I realized that with everyone staring at the TV, my entrance had not yet been noted. I closed the door behind me a little harder than necessary, and one by one, my friends began looking over to me.

“Hi,” I said, hearing the hesitancy in my voice.

“You made it,” Dave said, giving me a smile. Today, he was wearing a shirt with arrows pointing to boulders arranged in a circle, with words underneath that read
Stonehenge Rocks
. He had a black controller in his hand, and I noticed that the truck was at his feet, and moving back and forth. “Wasn’t sure if you were going to follow Greased Lightning there. It sure took you long enough.”

“How—” I started to ask, but wasn’t able to get my question out, as I found myself being hugged, suddenly and fiercely, by a petite curly-haired person.

“Mad!” Lisa said, trying to sound angry but not quite pulling it off. “
Qu’est-ce tu penses?
What were you thinking? You should have told us—”

“Well—” I started, before Schuyler hugged me from the other side.

“I hope it’s okay that I told Peyton,” she said, her words coming out in a tumble. “But I didn’t know what to
do
, and I knew something was
wrong
, and—”

“Hi.”

I looked in front of me and saw Ruth standing there, twisting her hands together, her bottom lip trembling slightly.

“Hi,” I said back, hearing my own voice catch. Then, before I knew it, she was hugging me, too, and I hugged back, feeling for the first time since the spring that I had my best friend back. We had both made mistakes, but now, it felt like everything that had come before—the hacking, my recent behavior—no longer mattered.

I closed my eyes for a second, surrounded by my very best friends, who, it seemed, weren’t holding grudges against me, and were just happy to see me again.

In that moment, I felt utterly ashamed that I had ever taken them for granted—truly becoming one of “those girls” as I pushed them aside for Nate, convinced they’d always be there. It had taken me actually losing them to realize how foolish and careless that had been of me. As I took in the room around me—filled with people
who’d come through for me in the past, and were coming through for me again, even though I’d tried to push them away—I realized just how much everyone meant to me, and how close I’d come to losing the most important people in my life.

And even though I had cried more in that past week than I had ever cried in my life, I suddenly felt like I was going to start again. But not because something was wrong—but because something was back to being right.

“So here’s what I don’t understand,” Kittson said a few minutes later.

My tearful reunion with my BFFs had been broken up when Dave had started circling the mini monster truck around our ankles, and we had rejoined the others on the couches. At first, I hadn’t felt up to saying much, just looking around the room at my friends, and savoring the fact that I was there, among them, with nobody furious at me. After the last few terrible days, I hadn’t thought that possible. But it was, and I was silently vowing to never,
ever
take them for granted again.

Dave had showed me how the truck had seemed to know where I’d been and why the TV (since turned off, as it was proving far too distracting) had been showing a live feed from the pool house. There was a small camera attached to the top of the truck, and Dave could watch what it showed either on his phone or stream the
feed to the TV. Dave had just bought the camera a few days before, and was clearly having a little too much fun with his new toy, if Lisa’s impatient sighs were anything to go by.

I looked across at Kittson, who was sitting on Turtell’s lap. Turtell had seemed almost as happy to see me as my best friends had been, though I had a feeling that probably had more to do with the fact that my situation had brought his girlfriend back to town.

“What’s that?” I asked Kittson from my place next to Ruth on the couch. I knew that Peyton had given people the broad outlines of what had happened with Isabel, but I wasn’t sure how much detail she’d gone into.

“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?” Kittson asked. “I mean, we were in a
freezer
. Who was going to hear? But no, I have to hear the story from Schuyler’s weird relative.”

“
Shh
,” Schuyler hissed, glancing in Peyton’s direction. I seconded that emotion. I certainly wouldn’t dare call Peyton weird within hearing distance and expect to survive it. But she simply looked up from where she was drawing on her black Converses with Wite-Out, rolled her eyes, and focused back on her sneakers again.

“Because I didn’t want Isabel to find out I was talking to any of you,” I said. “She has information on all of you that she was threatening to let out if I did.” I looked over at Peyton, who met my eye and nodded, capping her Wite-Out. “I thought you guys should see it,” I said, reaching into my bag, and pulling out the sheets of
paper I’d printed out that afternoon—all of Isabel’s dossiers on my friends who were present. I handed them out—each person only getting the one with their information on it—and twisted my hands together, waiting, as everyone read in silence.

“This is messed up,” Turtell said after a moment, shaking his head. “What is
wrong
with this girl?”

“Does anyone else find this kind of creepy?” Mark asked, looking up from his paper. “I mean, I don’t want anyone keeping files on me.”

“It’s not all her,” I said, feeling that credit—or blame—should be assigned where it was due. “She stole a lot of this information off Dell’s computer.”

“He did say,” Dave said slowly, looking up from his paper, “that he had information on all of us. And that he was going to use it. At the prom. Remember?” Dave shook his head, balled up his paper, and tossed it on the ground. Then he picked up the controller and ran the mini truck over it, back and forth, until the paper was flattened and covered with small black tire tracks.

“But still,” Schuyler said. She set her paper aside, looking slightly sick. “This seems to be taking things way too far.”

“Isabel blackmailed you into taking the Hayes crown,” Lisa pointed out. “We know this girl is crazy.
Comme une folle
.”

“The worst part isn’t any of this, though,” I said. This was the part of going against Isabel that really made me feel ill. My friends’ secrets, though damaging, weren’t fatal. And Isabel didn’t have proof of most of them. But
Nate was another whole story. I swallowed hard and continued. “It’s Nate.”

Everyone in the room suddenly got very quiet, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kittson move even closer to Turtell, and Dave and Lisa join hands—as though just hearing about a breakup might be contagious, and they needed to guard themselves against it.

“Does this,” Dave started slowly, “have something to do with why you guys broke up?”

I nodded, though it hurt my heart to hear someone else talk about the situation. It hit home for me that the breakup wasn’t just something that had happened between Nate and me. Rationally, I knew that the news would have gotten out, where it had undoubtedly been talked about and speculated upon. But hearing Dave bring it up somehow made the whole thing seem that much more real. “Isabel has proof,” I said, “that Nate was one of the engineers of the Stanwich Senior Prank. She has evidence that shows him stealing the mascot costume. If she gave it to Nate’s headmaster, he might not be able to go to Yale.”

Lisa let out a pretty impressive stream of French curses, and I gave her a small smile, to let her know I appreciated the support.

“That,” Dave said, his voice low and angry, “is crossing a line.”

“I couldn’t let it happen,” I said. “And she told me I had to break up with Nate and stop being friends with all of you, or she’d release all this information. And that’s why … I did what I did.”

“Does Nate know?” Ruth asked me quietly. I thought about the note I’d written him, but I’d pretty much given up hope that he’d understood it. I shook my head.

“But you’re telling
us
,” Schuyler said. I looked over at her and saw that, even in this high-stress situation, with her hair hanging loose, she wasn’t chewing on it, and her voice was clear and steady. Taking this in, I felt a little surge of pride at just how far Schuyler had come.