Wicked Little Secrets: A Prep School Confidential Novel (34 page)

They say a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a tsunami on the other side of the world. None of this would have happened if I’d never started that fire at St. Bernadette’s and been kicked out. Probably the best thing to happen to the Wheatley School now is for me to go back to New York and bring my chaos with me.

A knock at the door startles me. It can’t be my dad—it’s an hour too early.

Through the peephole, I watch Brent outside my door. He curses under his breath and motions to walk away. Then he stops, ready to knock at the door again. I open it.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

He doesn’t protest as I hug him. In fact, he rests his head on my shoulder. “This sucks,” I whisper in his ear.

Brent pulls away, but he takes my hands in his. “You’re really leaving?”

I nod. He pulls me in, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but instead he presses his cheek to mine. When we break apart, he looks at me.

“I was wrong. About everything.”

“I was wrong about stuff, too,” I say.

Brent looks like he’s struggling with something. I wish he would say something, anything to make it feel slightly less shitty that this might be the last time we see each other. He sighs and takes in the empty room. “There’s always a chance the board won’t vote to uphold your expulsion.”

I laugh. He does, too. I realize I’ve missed the sound so much it hurts. In that moment I’d do anything to pick up where we left off, but a feeling of dread streaks through me as I remember the photo of Isabella’s body. The way Brent hesitated just now, as if there were something more he wanted to tell me.

Casey said he wasn’t the one who left the photo. A few weeks ago, I never would have considered the possibility Brent would do something like that. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing away the scene in Travis Shepherd’s foyer.

I’m not the same person I was a few weeks ago. And I’ll never doubt the terrible things people are capable of again.

*   *   *

My dad meets me in the lobby of Amherst, where Remy, April, and Kelsey finish their teary good-byes and promises to come see me in New York. I smile at them, even though I know by the expression on my father’s face that I’ll be lucky if I’m allowed out of our apartment ever again.

He doesn’t say a word to me for the first three hours of the drive. This is worse than I thought. I spend the whole time thinking of how I’m going to defend myself, and when we get near the George Washington Bridge, I open my mouth.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me or even believe me, but I had a reason for all the things I did. I can’t tell you most of them, because it’s better if you don’t know. You have to trust me that I did the right thing, though. You always told me that that’s all that matters. I know it’s hard for you to believe that; you always say you hate your job because it’s hard to tell the difference between right and wrong sometimes. I understand you now. And I’m sorry I got expelled again, but I promise you that this time it’s because I did something right, for once in my life. I found my white rabbit, Daddy, and I didn’t let it go.”

I think I see the corner of my father’s mouth twitch.

“Also, I want to learn how to drive this summer,” I say.

“Oh, Jesus,” my father mutters.

I smile to myself and look out the window. The sight of the Empire State Building fills me up with a happiness that replaces my regret over everything I’ve lost.

I didn’t find the happy ending, but at least I know it’s the right one.

My phone rings as we go down the FDR. Daddy looks at me as if to say
Go ahead and answer it—you’ll never own a phone again once we get home.
I glance at the screen. I don’t recognize the number, but I answer, thinking it might be Anthony calling from a different line.

“Hello?”

“Is this Anne?” a voice asks. A male voice. With an accent.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“It’s Dr. Muller. From the Wheatley School. I heard you were looking for me at my office this morning.”

“Ms. Cross,” I blurt. “Do you know why she left? I went looking for her this morning—”

“Anne, you won’t be able find her.” Dr. Muller inhales sharply enough for me to hear, and all I can think is:
He’s going to tell me she’s dead.

Please, please, don’t let him tell me she’s dead, because I can’t take anymore.

“Why not?” I keep my voice steady so I don’t alarm my dad.

“Because,” Dr. Muller says, “Jessica Cross does not exist.”

Suspicion is the companion of mean souls

—Thomas Paine,
Common Sense

CHAPTER

ONE

The first time I looked death in the face, I blinked and it was gone.

They say your life is supposed to flash before your eyes, but all I remember is the moment after. The adrenaline that filled me, knowing I survived. The weightlessness of having dodged a bullet. Literally.

Watching someone else die was different.

The details are the hardest to forget. The smell of cinnamon-and-pine furniture polish. The sound of glass breaking at the front door. And worst of all, the way Travis Shepherd’s eyes froze as the life left his body.

It’s been more than a month since Anthony and I watched Steven Westbrook shoot Shepherd, his former classmate, in the chest. Since then, I’ve been unofficially expelled from the Wheatley School, grounded for what’s quite possibly the rest of my teenage years, and exiled from my friends.

I know that having my phone, computer, and social life taken away is my parents’ way of ensuring I have nothing to do all summer but to think about the things I’ve done. If only they knew the whole story—the one that starts with a thirty-year-old photo of a missing student and ends with watching his killer die on the floor of his own foyer—they’d understand that I could never
not
think about what I’ve done.

I would give anything to be able to close my eyes and not picture the blood blossoming around the hole in Travis Shepherd’s chest. If I could, I’d stop it from happening in the first place.

Even though he had killed four people, including a five-year-old boy. Even though deep down, I believe that Travis Shepherd deserved to die.

Or maybe that’s what I
want
to believe, because if I’d gone to the police instead of to Alexis Westbrook that night, Shepherd would be alive.

It was like a horrible move in a game of checkers—a move where
bam,
all of the kings get captured. Shepherd is dead, Steven Westbrook is in jail, Headmaster Goddard is in hiding, and the only person at Wheatley I thought I could trust—Ms. Cross, my favorite teacher—disappeared without a trace.

And I’m in New York. Right back where I started, but so, so far away from the person I was.

*   *   *

I still don’t know where I’m going to school in the fall. My parents said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” which obviously means no one wants me. There was a time I would have made that work in my favor. Now, I mostly just stay out of their way and hope I don’t end up at a school where everyone either has a baby or a probation officer.

I technically haven’t been expelled from Wheatley. Yet. My disciplinary hearing has been postponed until July, because of “internal re-structuring.” Which is a fancy euphemism for the fact that Wheatley, formerly Massachusetts’s #1 secondary preparatory school, is up Shit’s Creek.

The administration of the mighty Wheatley School has fallen and now Jacqueline Tierney, aka Dean Snaggletooth, is the last person standing. Maybe she’ll wind up running the place. If you ask me, they could use a womanly touch over there, even though Tierney has all the femininity of a jock strap.

Anyway, none of that matters because the board is almost certain to turn my suspension into an expulsion, which will mark my second expulsion from a school this year.

The official citation in the letter Dean Tierney sent home said I “assaulted another student.” I guess they were willing to give me a break for using a Taser on Larry Tretter, the boys’ crew team coach and Travis Shepherd’s accomplice, since he’s currently in jail for conspiracy to commit murder.

The version of the story I gave Tierney and my parents is that I used the Taser on Coach Tretter because he was beating the crap out of Casey, Travis Shepherd’s son. Then I took a couple shots of my own at Casey, just for being a Class A prick.

My parents were probably too pissed at me to dig further into what happened. My dad wanted to know why, if I had to kick a boy in the balls, I couldn’t wait to do it until we were off-campus. My mom just wanted to know where I got the Taser.

Their reactions probably explain a lot about why I am the way I am.

So my sentence for being not-officially-but-basically expelled was virtual confinement to our apartment until the hearing. At first it wasn’t so bad, because I had a ton of schoolwork to finish. Then I turned in my final exams and realized I had no purpose in life. I was a prisoner in my own home. Except I think I’d prefer actually being in jail, because then I wouldn’t have to see my parents every day.

I told my dad this, and he didn’t think it was very funny. He decided I needed an attitude adjustment in the form of going to work with him.

His plan to further my misery backfired, though, because I love interning in his law office. I get to research cases and read trial transcripts, and my dad’s assistant, Leah, lets me tag along when she picks up lunch. If we have time, we browse Sephora or the bookstore and I get to feel like a real human being again.

Today is a particularly glorious day, because my father has to be in court at nine
A.M.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for weeks.

“Go
straight
to the office,” he says as we cross 51st Street outside our apartment. “I’m calling Leah in ten minutes to make sure you’re there.”

“Daddy, chill. I already snuck out to meet my meth dealer last night.”

He whirls around and gives me the worst look I’ve ever seen. I half-expect him to put his hands on his hips and say, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.” He did that a lot when I was younger.

“You are not half as funny as you think you are,” he says.

Well, that’s a little upsetting, because I think I’m hilarious. I lift the hair off the back of my neck and tie it into a loose bun. I’m already planning which layers of clothing I can ditch when I get to the office.

“I mean it, Anne,” he says when we’re across the street. He lifts his hand up, as if he wants to say something else, but lowers it. “Make sure you’re home by five-fifteen.”

I give him a captain’s salute, even though I know it irritates him. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s like I feel if I keep digging my hole, eventually it’ll get deep enough that I can disappear.

I catch Leah by the thermostat when I get to the office. Since my dad will be gone all day, we can crank the central air without him bitching about the bill.

And if I play my cards right, I can check my e-mail for the first time in weeks.

Seconds after I set my bag on the extra desk, Leah drops a stack of collated papers on my desk. “Need you to read up on State of New York versus Helen Peters. I flagged the pages.”

Crap. This is going to take me at least until lunch. As I flip through the photocopied pages, I watch Leah at her desk. She rolls away from the computer on her chair and starts thumbing through a stack of legal journals.

“I need to make a couple more copies,” she says. “Think you can handle the phone if anyone calls?”

“Sure.”

“Remember, no personal calls. Your dad
will
find out.”

“I know,” I say. “He’s got this place under
Homeland
levels of surveillance.”

Leah flounces out the door. I’m not stupid—she’s going down to the lobby to call her boyfriend. First off, we have a perfectly good copy machine in the backroom. Second, she didn’t even take the journal with her.

It makes me feel a little less lousy about using her computer. When I hear the elevator ping, I slide into her chair and log into my e-mail.

I was able to sneak a few e-mails to Brent Conroy—my ex-boyfriend—before my dad figured out I was using my school e-mail for personal business. Disappointment needles me when I see he hasn’t replied to my last message. He’s in England for the summer, visiting family, so I can only assume he’s met a British girl with an adorable gap between her front teeth.

Brent and I broke up under epically bad circumstances. I snooped through his phone so I could follow him and the rest of the crew team into the woods during one of their hazing rituals. And I also may have implied his father was involved in Matt Weaver’s murder.

The fact that Anthony, the other guy I was kind-of-sort-of involved with, hasn’t responded to any of my e-mails isn’t surprising either. The last time I saw him, we’d just made a promise to each other not to tell anyone what we saw in Travis Shepherd’s house. Then I had to leave Wheatley without getting the chance to say good-bye. He probably thinks I did it on purpose—almost as if I wanted to leave him, and everything we saw together, behind.