My spider senses were tingling. I didn’t want to believe that my girlfriend was lying to me, but I was pretty sure the threat of an extra math class wouldn’t turn her face terrified like that.
I dropped her off at her class, and when she tried to leave I threaded my fingers through hers and pulled her back. I kissed her softly and then looked into her eyes, hoping she’d change her mind and tell me what really happened in there. But she just smiled and finger-waved at me before letting the classroom door close, blocking her from my view.
“Wow,” Kimberlee said in a voice that sounded—for once—more concerned than mocking. “That was not good.”
“No shit.”
Returning stuff to the teachers had worked even better than I’d hoped. Almost all the teachers were in a good mood and had no problem helping to get the piles of bags on their desks to the right students. Several of them displayed their own returned objects on their desks like trophies. In English, Mr. Bleekman actually spent half a class period relating the history of the small sculpture that had been returned to its place on his desk after a two-year absence.
It made me want to take it back.
The really interesting part was that, thanks to the roses on the stickers, the whole school was talking about the Red Rose Returner—seriously, in capital letters. The conversations would totally dissipate if Hennigan came anywhere near—and man, he was patrolling the hallways constantly—but everyone was whispering about us . . . me . . . like we were heroes. Hardly anyone grumbled about the assumption that the Returner was probably also the thief. Like it didn’t matter now that stuff was coming back.
There were a lot of interesting theories, ranging from the thief-slash-Returner being the ancient school janitor, Mr. Benson, to the wildest one, that it was Mr. Hennigan himself and that his rages against it were just to keep himself out of the spotlight. Unfortunately, the rumors about a senior trying to atone for high-school sins before graduation—the ones that made me worry for Khail and some of his teammates—were still the most popular. And the most logical.
“Would you turn them in if you found out who it was?” I asked our lunch table two days later, in what I hoped was an innocent tone.
“Are you kidding?” Wilson said. “And get lynched by the rest of the school? No way. Whoever this Red Returner guy is, he’s doing everybody a favor.”
“I would so make out with him,” Jasmine said a little dreamily, stroking a keychain rabbit’s foot she’d gotten back in the Christmas-tree stunt. She seemed unnaturally attached to it. But hey, I don’t judge.
“What if it’s a girl?” I asked.
Sera kicked me under the table. “You just want to see Jasmine make out with a chick,” she said dryly.
“Sorry, I was totally kidding,” I said, defending myself.
“Well, no one knows who it is and even if they do, they’re not telling.” She stood without waiting for a response, and dumped most of her lunch in the garbage before striding out of the lunchroom.
The table was quiet and everyone’s eyes slowly turned toward me. This was a clearly a boyfriend-duty moment. “See ya,” I mumbled before throwing away a significant portion of my own lunch to follow Sera down the hallway.
I had to jog to catch up with her as she pushed through the doors at the back of the school and dropped down onto a cement parking barrier. I sat beside her, feeling more than a little awkward.
“Man, I wish I still smoked,” she said after a long sigh as she unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it into her mouth.
“You used to smoke?” I said, genuinely shocked.
She laughed tersely. “Like I said, I wasn’t always a good kid.”
The wind blew a few stray hairs across her face. I reached out and gently brushed them back. “Why are you so upset over this?”
She sighed again and rubbed at her temples for a few seconds. “I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “I really don’t. But Kimberlee Schaffer has to be involved with this. I know she’s dead, but somehow, she’s linked and I have . . .” She hesitated. “I have some bad history with her and now everything has returned to smack me in the face and I just can’t handle it all right now.”
“Well,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I knew too much, “it has to be over soon, right? She can’t possibly have stolen that much stuff. And then you can just forget about it, right?”
“No,” Sera said with startling firmness. “I have to find out who’s doing this. I have to.” She rested her forehead on her knees, already hugged tight against her chest. When she spoke again her voice was muffled. “Maybe she has, like, a cousin or something. There’s got to be a connection.”
I rubbed Sera’s arms gently, feeling like the worst boyfriend in the whole world. I was practically ready to confess. Even leaned my head down toward her ear when she sniffed and said, “I would rat the bastard out in a second if I knew. In a second!”
Laying my cheek on her back, I did the only thing I could.
I said nothing.
Twenty-Four
“DUDE, I’M TELLING YOU, it’ll work,” I said to Khail on the phone—as I drove toward his house, strangely enough—after school. “You’ve heard everyone talking. They love us!”
“I don’t know, man. Not many people can keep a secret. And you’re talking about trusting, like, five hundred of them all at once.”
“Yeah, but if we time it right, there’s no way we can get caught.”
I had come up with the idea while not paying nearly enough attention in calculus after lunch. We needed a way to return everything else in the cave all in one go so I could stop being a lying, dirtbag boyfriend. But other than Sera, the fact was that everyone was on our side.
And we could use that.
“If we start buzzing on Friday that there’s going to be a big return on Monday, everyone will do our work for us over the weekend.”
“Yeah, but then Hennigan’ll lock down the school. He’ll probably patrol it himself just to catch us.”
“But the drop-off point doesn’t have to be at the school. That’s the beauty of it. We start the buzz and Hennigan will find out. He’ll put loads of pressure on the school, but it won’t be at the school.” I waited for a second for effect. I think I inherited my mother’s affinity for drama and was only now seeing it. “It’ll be at Hennigan’s house.”
“What? Are you trying to get caught?”
“No, seriously. That’s the one place that Hennigan would never expect. I heard from some guys in English that he lives just a block or so away from school, and Kimberlee’s following him home today to make sure. But if it’s true, kids could totally storm the place during lunch and Hennigan wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.”
A long silence followed. “You may have something there,” Khail finally said.
“Yes! So you’re in?”
“Let me give it some thought,” he said. “I gotta go shower. I reek.”
“Okay. I’ll be at your house soon, just so you know. I don’t want you to turn around and freak out or anything.”
“Whatever. I’ll just keep pretending I don’t know you, nerd boy.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
I turned onto Sera’s street and pulled into my usual spot just south of the long driveway. Mrs. Hewitt was outside clipping roses. “Jeff,” she said a little tersely. I had assumed that the more I hung around the house the more comfortable she would get with me. Apparently I was wrong.
“Hi, Mrs. Hewitt,” I said, forcing myself to smile.
She looked down at her soiled gardening gloves and then back up at me like she was facing an earth-shattering problem. “Sera’s up in her room. I don’t want to track dirt in the house.”
Oh. Got it.
“I suppose under the circumstances you can go in and get her, but come right back down. Also,” she added, her voice vaguely threatening, “Khail’s up there too.”
I tried to look a little intimidated as I nodded and headed in
side.
The house felt particularly quiet as I tromped up the steps. I’d been a little too cowed to tell Sera’s mom that I didn’t actually know which room was Sera’s, so I was hoping there would be one of those signs on her door that said Sera’s Room. No such luck.
I peered carefully into the first open door I came to. It was obviously a guest room. Perfectly made bed, paintings on the wall, two matching armchairs—but nothing personal. The next two doors were closed but the last one was ajar. I poked my head around the doorway and heard the faint sound of water running. The black, masculine furnishings—complete with a messy, unmade bed that could easily have been mine—told me there was no way this was Sera’s room, so it took me a moment to realize that the auburn hair I was staring at was indeed the back of Sera’s head.
Then I noticed what she was doing. She was holding a pair of jeans that were obviously Khail’s in one hand, and she had his cell phone in the other and was rapidly pushing buttons.
“Sera?”
She shrieked as I spoke and jammed the phone into the jeans pocket.
“What are you doing?”
Her face turned bright red and she kept rifling through the jeans in her hands. “You scared me! I was, uh, looking for some gum,” she said. “I was out and Khail usually has some, but nope, okay, let’s go.” She dropped the pants on the floor and pushed me out of the room, closing the door hard behind her.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked, not looking at me as she made her way to one of the closed doors. “My mom never lets guys come up here alone. Actually, she almost never lets guys come up here even if they’re supervised.”
She swung the door open and I fumbled for words as I walked into her room. It was like every stereotypical rebellious-teenager bedroom you see in the movies. The walls were covered in rock-band posters, the bed was unmade, black stars dotted the ceiling, and the only light was from a lamp on a messy desk. “Um, she was doing roses, or something. D-dirt, you know,” I stuttered. “Whoa,” I said when I saw the enormous poster of Cryptopsy over her bed. “Is that . . .?” I just pointed wordlessly.
Sera looked at me funny. “What? Because I’m a cheerleader I can’t like death metal?”
“No, it’s fine, but . . . I don’t know . . . this is, like, all emo and shit.”
“Yeah, well, truth is I’m not really into most of this stuff anymore, but it bugs the hell out of my mom, so I keep it up.”
I just kept looking around. I’m not sure what I expected, exactly, but it wasn’t posters of girls in miniskirts screaming into microphones next to guy-linered, spiky-haired percussionists. It was too weird. Of course, when you go to a school with uniforms, it is a little hard to tell who’s preppy and who’s goth. But I saw Sera almost every day—in and out of school—and she’d always been the semi-preppy, casual type. Not . . . this.
“Speaking of my mom, we better head downstairs before she goes ballistic. Is your mom home?”
“She was when I left.”
“Good enough. I can’t do my homework here; not today.” Sera’s mom had this rule about Sera not going to a guy’s house unless his parents were home. I was starting to believe that Sera’s mom had rules for every situation imaginable. As she’d predicted, the first question Sera’s mom asked was if my mom was home. I hoped I wasn’t lying when I said yes. My parents tended to come and go as they pleased.
As I drove and Sera chatted, I tried to put the picture of her snooping in her brother’s phone out of my mind. I mean, if I had a sister, I’d probably snoop in her phone too. But at the moment Khail was much more than just Sera’s brother. He was . . . I guess you’d call him my first mate.
Turned out my mom was home, but she’s way more lenient than Sera’s mom, so we went up to my room and Sera and I did homework for an hour.
And by homework, I mean we made out.
Close enough.
“Is it safe to come in yet?” Kimberlee asked, poking her head through my bedroom door with her hands over her eyes.
Kimberlee and I had apparently arrived at some kind of truce. She kept her distance when Sera was around and if she wasn’t exactly nice to me, at least she wasn’t actively trying to insult me. She seemed genuinely impressed by our little break-in—that and I suspect she went to the cave and saw how little stuff was left. I guess not even the epically unappeasable Kimberlee Schaffer could argue with results.
“I took Sera home an hour ago. Chillax.”
“Chillax? Please, nobody actually says chillax, loser.” But even her insults had taken on a teasing tone in the last couple days.
Seeing that the coast was clear, she walked the rest of the way in and sank down on one of the beanbags. Her spot, she’d dubbed it.
“Were they right?” I asked. “About Hennigan’s house?”
“Yes!” Kimberlee said, eyes sparkling. “I have no idea how I didn’t know this while I was alive, but his house is just barely out of sight of the parking lot. It’s perfect.”
“Awesome,” I said, and reached into my pocket for my phone to jet a text off to Khail. I hesitated before I hit send, remembering Sera going through Khail’s phone, but this number was unlisted anyway; that was the whole point. I was probably just being paranoid.
“So,” Kimberlee said hesitantly as I put my phone away, “speaking of Hennigan, did you ask Sera what happened today?”
“No,” I said, not looking up from my history homework.
“Why not?”
“It’s her business, not mine. If she wants to tell me, she can.”
“Real proactive.”
“What do you mean?”
But Kimberlee just shrugged. “The timing just seems like a little too convenient, if you ask me.”
“Which I didn’t,” I said.
“Whatever. I just thought it sent up some warning signs.”
“Because it’s actually weird, or because it’s Sera?”
“Because it’s weird,” Kimberlee said. “I’m serious, Jeff, if you were dating anyone else, I would be just as worried. Think about it; your girlfriend—who also happens to be the sister of the guy you’re working with—gets called into the psycho principal’s office on the day after a big return and then starts acting all weird. If you took the names out and forgot our history, wouldn’t it totally make you suspicious?”
“No. I think you’re reading way too much into it,” I said. “Besides, we’re doing the last drop on Monday and then it will be over.”
“I don’t understand you, Jeff.”
“I’m speaking English, Kimberlee.”
She gave me one of her melodramatic sighs. “I understand the words you are saying; I don’t understand you. You think everyone’s good and noble and whatever. You’re sure Sera is innocent and you totally believe that Khail has no motivation except being a swell older brother.” When she said swell, she pumped one fist like the protagonist of a 1950s sitcom.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You’re living in a fantasy world. And the longer you pretend, the harder it’s gonna be when you find out we’re all miserable screwups. Especially her.”
I looked up from my homework. “And you vilify people. Is that any more realistic?”
“I don’t vilify people,” Kimberlee argued. “I see them as they are.”
“Sure you do.”
“I do!”
“So Langdon’s a nice guy and Sera’s a bitch? I don’t think that has any ground in reality whatsoever.”
“He was nice to me,” she muttered.
“What about Khail?”
“What about him?” Kimberlee asked, looking suddenly quite interested in the TV Guide I had left open on the floor.
“He didn’t do anything to you.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Kimberlee said, waving me off.
“I don’t believe that,” I replied flatly. “You can’t tell me that getting rejected made you so mad you took it out on Khail’s little sister. That doesn??
?t even make sense.”
“When does love ever make sense?” Kimberlee grumbled.
“Why does he hate you?”
She hesitated. “I can’t tell you.”
I should have known better than to try to have a serious discussion with Kimberlee. “Okay, well, I have a buttload of homework tonight—what channel do you want?” I asked, picking up the remote.
“I’m not lying!”
“You’re always lying,” I said, as I channel surfed.
“Not this time.”
“Yeah, okay,” I muttered, tossing down the remote and turning back to my calc book.
Kimberlee watched about two minutes of a tooth-whitener infomercial before breaking the silence. “Khail’s . . . significant other got sent to brat camp. He thinks I was responsible.”
“Brat camp?” I’d heard of parents who sent their “problem children” to special wilderness “retreats” for superharsh discipline, but I’d also heard that most of them got shut down—too many abuse scandals and a couple of deaths or something. I’d certainly never known anyone who’d gone. “Why would Khail think you had anything to do with his girlfriend being sent to brat camp?”
Kimberlee had a strange look on her face, like she was trying to both breathe and hold her breath at the same time. “It wasn’t a girlfriend,” she finally said before burying her face in the beanbag.
“What do you mean it wasn’t a—oh. Oh!” Comprehension dawned on me. “Khail? Are you shitting me?”
Her head remained buried in the beanbag, her words muffled and barely comprehensible. “Preston’s parents are superfanatic something-or-others. . . . Somehow they found out what was going on and totally went off the deep end about it. Khail thinks that somehow was me.”
“Why would he think that?” But what I wanted to ask was, What did you do this time?
Kimberlee glared up at me. “I already told you. I really liked him and he brushed me off. Nobody brushes me off! I wanted to find out what the deal was and I kind of started . . . following him.”