“Which is?” Jenny had a sudden gnawing feeling in her stomach.
“Why don’t you tell her the truth. About everything?” Tinsley suddenly appeared behind them, wearing a pair of slim-fitting black L.A.M.B. pants and a supertight black Ogle turtleneck. She towered over Jenny, her slim figure perfectly silhouetted against the white backdrop of the tent, and the space felt suddenly suffocating. The red light from the lava lamps played over her features, making her look positively devilish.
The hairs on Jenny’s neck prickled in warning. “What’s she talking about?” she demanded. Julian was staring up at Tinsley, an angry look on his face. What was going on?
Tinsley watched as Jenny’s annoyingly cherubic face wrinkled in worry. She knew it probably would have been smarter to keep Jenny in the dark about her and Julian. But when she’d spotted them ducking into the tent from across the party, looking all cute and coupley, Tinsley was reminded, as though by a slap in the face, that she’d been unceremoniously thrown over by a freshman. And for that big-chested dwarf, no less. At least her reign of over-boobed terror was about to come to an end, once and for all.
“Julian?” Jenny asked again, looking up at him fearfully.
“Tell her,” Tinsley said again, placing her hands on her hips in challenge. Julian frowned at her in annoyance, and she felt a momentary stir of regret—or maybe it was just pity. But really—did he think he could just dump Tinsley Carmichael and not suffer the consequences?
He sloshed back a mouthful of beer, as if to fortify himself, and then turned to Jenny. “I . . . I . . . Tinsley and I . . .”
He didn’t have to say anything else. Those two words—Tinsley and I—were all she needed to hear. They seared Jenny in half, tattooing themselves on her heart. She resisted the urge to hit him, but just barely. She couldn’t really slap him in disgust like girlfriends and wives did on TV—because she wasn’t really his girlfriend, and she never had been.
“That’s why you were always outside Dumbarton. . . .” She started to put the pieces together. He hadn’t been there to try to see her. He’d been there because he was hooking up with Tinsley. That was why he’d wanted to go off campus, too, and why he’d been so jumpy tonight—he was afraid Tinsley might see them. She wasn’t sure what hurt her more: that he’d been hooking up with the gorgeous mega-bitch who loomed over her at this very instant, or that he’d lied to her.
“But it was all before you,” Julian insisted. “Before I really met you.” He was looking at her intently, his brown eyes pleading, but she felt as though she didn’t recognize him anymore. He was just a tall figure with shaggy hair, a faceless boy she’d never really even known.
She stood up, shook off Julian’s hand, and wandered away from him, and Tinsley, and the party, and everyone in it. How could she have been so clueless—again? And what was she doing in a place full of liars and jerks?
From:
[email protected] To: Undisclosed Recipients
Date: Tuesday, October 15, 11:52 P.M.
Subject: Go US, go US, go go go US
My dear US’s and other less fortunates,
Thank you, ladies and gents, for giving US such a fan-fucking-tabulous farewell party.
I hope you’re all still as drunk as I am.
Thanks for not burning the Crater down. It’s all we’ve got.
Xxx
Heath
23
A WAVERLY OWL ARRIVES PROMPTLY FOR DISCIPLINARY APPOINTMENTS.
Brett could tell by Mr. Tomkins’s solemn glare that she was late. Oops. At breakfast she’d been jittery and had spilled an entire cup of coffee on her previously cream-colored Diane von Furstenberg wool skirt, a hand-me-down from her older sister, Bree. She’d had to dash back to Dumbarton, toss on the pair of jeans draped over her desk chair, and fly over to Stansfield Hall, out of breath and probably totally guilty-looking. The door to Dean Marymount’s office was left ajar and Brett could see the back of Callie’s head, her strawberry blond hair pulled back into a perfectly neat ponytail. The dead silence inside the office filled her with dread.
“Go on.” Mr. Tomkins nodded for her to go inside, and she slipped through the door to find that she was, in fact, the last of the Usual Suspects to arrive. Heath looked up from his chair at the end of the enormous oak conference table under the window, registered Brett’s presence with a nod, and then lowered his head back into his hands. A quick look around the room revealed similar reactions: Tinsley’s hooded eyes were barely open; Callie looked like she hadn’t slept all night. Jenny, wearing a pink button-down shirt beneath her Waverly blazer, held a cup of coffee from Maxwell, her knuckles white. Easy yawned silently three times in a row, until Callie nudged him with her elbow to stop. Alison Quentin, wearing a navy blue Polo turtleneck, was rubbing her left temple vigorously, as if trying to work out a kink. Even Brandon, who normally didn’t leave his dorm room without looking his best, seemed to have fallen asleep sitting up. Next to him Sage whispered to Benny behind two tall energy smoothies. Only Julian seemed to not be hungover. He stared out the window at the red and gold leaves shimmering in the morning light with unfathomable serenity.
Brett herself was a total mess. She hadn’t slept at all last night. As she’d tossed and turned, she’d tried to figure out which bothered her more: the image of Kara kissing Heath, or the look on Jeremiah’s face when he’d found out she had a girlfriend. Did that mean she was straight after all? Did she still have feelings for Jeremiah? Her mind was such a mess of conflicting thoughts, she wondered if she’d ever untangle them.
Jenny raised her eyebrows in Brett’s direction and looked like she was about to say something, but instead she took a small sip of her coffee—under Tinsley’s watchful eye. Tinsley’s gaze roamed from Jenny to Callie to Julian, before landing momentarily on Brett. “Those my jeans, roomie?” she asked, somewhat cheerfully, shattering the awkward silence in the room and causing everyone to look up. Brett glanced down at the jeans she had grabbed from the chair—her chair—that morning. She’d thought they were her dark-rinse Paige jeans and had been too preoccupied with running across campus to notice that they fit a little differently than she was used to. Fuck.
“Didn’t think you’d mind,” Brett threw back, her voice dripping with sweetness, “since you left them on my desk chair.”
Tinsley grinned back at her. “What are roommates for?” She wore an emerald Rebecca Beeson crew-neck dress, and her long black hair was parted neatly in the middle, falling down over her ears like curtains of silk. Brett took pleasure in the fact that although Tinsley’s hair looked perfect, her face looked haggard and hungover.
Not that Brett had gotten her beauty sleep, either. It was hard to believe that this time tomorrow, one of them would be gone, like they’d never even been at Waverly in the first place.
She remembered a girl from her freshman year—Sylvia something or other. One day everyone woke up and Sylvia had just vanished, expelled for plagiarizing an English paper. Brett’s first thought when she heard about Sylvia’s expulsion was a selfish one—the girl had borrowed a Wilco CD. Brett stayed angry about the CD for more than a week, until she replaced it at Trax-n-Wax in town. She mentally ran through the list of Usual Suspects, trying to remember if she had any outstanding debts—lunch money borrowed, clothes unreturned, anything at all that might malign her memory if Dean Marymount marched her to the tall iron front gates and gave her the boot. As far as she knew, her accounts had all been settled. But maybe she’d manage to not give Tinsley back her fucking jeans.
Dean Marymount strode in, whistling a tune Brett couldn’t place. He looked well rested, his clean-shaven face rosy in the morning light. If he knew anything about the goodbye party the night before, his face betrayed no hint of it. How could he not have smelled the bonfire smoke? Was the smoke from the weekend’s barn fire still masking it, as Heath claimed? “Hello, Owls,” he greeted them.
Everyone seated around the room nodded silently, except Tinsley, who trained her violet
eyes on Marymount, unafraid to meet his gaze.
“I’ve made a decision of great interest to everyone in this room,” Marymount announced grandly, as if he were going to tell one of them they’d just won a new car, or a trip for two to Hawaii. Brett’s heart skipped a beat. Was he going to let them all go? He straightened the calendar on his desk so that it made a perfect ninety-degree angle with the square pencil holder as the room waited in anxious silence. “Rather than try to ferret out the guilty party or parties with respect to the fire at the Miller farm, I’m going to let you work it out among yourselves.”
What? A murmur went around the room. Brett gauged the faces of her fellow inmates. Everyone had been planning to back each other’s stories against Marymount. But suddenly they had to defend themselves against one another?
“Quiet.” Marymount’s cheerful expression soured. “So here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to breakfast with the prospectives, whom I hope you’ve all been treating with great sensitivity and respect. When I come back, I’ll hear a confession from the guilty party. Whoever steps forward and says, ‘I did it,’ will be expelled, of course, and the rest of you will be free to go about your day. How does that sound?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Mr. Tomkins will be outside the door. If you need something, he’ll attend to you. But please don’t waste his time or yours with stall tactics. This ends here and now. Any questions?” He glanced quickly around the room and turned toward the door, clearly not expecting anyone to take issue with this change of events.
Brett cleared her throat. If the junior class prefect couldn’t speak up, what the hell was the point of being one? “But, sir.” Her voice came out as a squeak, so she cleared her throat again. “What if the real culprits aren’t here?”
Marymount looked at her evenly through his round, gold-rimmed glasses. Wearing his favorite blue crew-neck sweater beneath his Waverly blazer, he looked ready to give a lecture on The Tempest, not to ruin some poor student’s life. “They are,” he said simply, leaving no room for debate. “Any other questions?” He knit his sandy gray bushy eyebrows.
There were none.
“Excellent.” Marymount gathered some papers from his desk. Then he pulled out his chair and invited Brett to have a seat. “No use standing, Ms. Messerschmidt. This could take awhile.”
Brett didn’t know if she was being set up, but she took a seat anyway, her tired legs almost collapsing under her as she sat in his high-backed leather chair, in full view of her classmates at the large oval table.
“Oh, I forgot.” Marymount paused in the doorway, the framed Waverly class graduation photos behind him. In them, the smiling, rosy-cheeked graduates held their Waverly diplomas aloft gleefully, seeming to mock the students in the room. “If by the time I’ve returned you haven’t uncovered the guilty party among you, you’ll all be expelled.”
Brett had never seen so many jaws drop at once before.
Dean Marymount continued. “So think long and hard about it. I urge you to take this seriously. That includes you, Mr. Ferro.” And with that, he was gone.
Heath flipped Marymount off as the door closed, but no one laughed.
Tinsley was the first to speak in Marymount’s wake. “It’s fucking boiling in here.” She went to the window and heaved it open, the cool morning air swirling into the musty office. Everyone took deep, gulping breaths, as if they hadn’t inhaled since the dean’s announcement.
“Is he kidding?” Callie demanded, looking at no one in particular. She’d worn a puffy white cashmere sweater that looked like a remnant from middle school, and a blue-and-white-striped jersey dress, obviously trying to look as responsible and innocent as possible.
“Where’s Kara?” Heath asked suddenly, startling everyone. He ran a hand through his shaggy dirty-blond hair, looking like he wanted to go back to bed.
Brett searched the room and realized, along with everyone else, that Kara had skipped the morning meeting. Her green eyes widened.
“Funny, Marymount didn’t say anything,” Jenny said, her small voice sounding out of place in the stark room. She looked tiny compared to the high-backed leather chair she sat in.
“I say she did it.” Benny sat up straighter, clapping her hands together. Her brown hair was in a braid at the nape of her neck, and tiny Tiffany diamond studs sparkled in either ear. “Case closed. Somebody grab the dean.”
Brett felt her body tense, as if everyone was looking at her, expecting a reaction.
But Heath spoke up first in Kara’s defense. “Come on.” Heath tried to save his outburst by cracking a smile, but Brett noticed everyone shooting him a curious look. “She’s probably just too hungover.” He was still wearing his orange US shirt, which was heavily wrinkled, as though he’d slept in it—or hadn’t gone to bed at all. Had he been up all night with Kara? Brett shook her red hair out of her face, trying to banish the thought. It was a good thing Heath’s back was facing the wall—otherwise the dean would have seen the usual suspects written across the back of his shirt. They were in enough trouble as it was without Marymount knowing they’d had an enormous party making fun of him and his list.
“What if we all staged a protest?” Sage threw out, tapping her peach-colored nails against the oak table. “I’m sure if we all told Marymount we were leaving campus until this . . . persecution stops, he’d have to back off, right?” She looked around the room and finally let her gaze rest on Brandon, who sat in the chair next to her.
“It won’t work,” Brandon said in a flat voice. He was sitting awfully close to Sage, and Brett wondered if the intimate conversation she’d spotted them having last night had gone anywhere. The light played off Brandon’s golden head of hair, and Brett couldn’t help but hope something had happened between them. Brandon was so cute, he deserved a girl who wasn’t going to screw him over the way Callie and that St. Lucius ho-bag, Elizabeth, had. She immediately thought of Jeremiah—she still couldn’t believe he’d slept with that Elizabeth girl, even if it was a rebound hookup after being dumped by Brett. But after facing a dangerous fire, in a room full of people facing expulsion, Jeremiah’s indiscretion suddenly didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.
Brandon shrugged. “Marymount wants someone to take the fall, and he’s not going to give a shit who it is.”
“Look, someone started the fire, either by accident, or . . .” Brett’s voice trailed off. “But, whoever you are, are you really willing to let everyone else take the fall for you?”
“Yeah, dude, that’s not cool.” Heath propped his black leather Adidas on the smooth oak table. No one else spoke.
Outside, a burst of laughter filtered in from the quad, and everyone gazed longingly toward the windows. Easy put his head down on the table and a couple of others followed suit. The room fell silent again. What felt like an eternity passed as all the Usual Suspects sat in stony, contemplative silence.
“Oh my God.” The words escaped Brett’s lips automatically, her brain and mouth working simultaneously. She’d cast her eyes down on Marymount’s desk to try and keep her focus, and she had to look twice at the family picture perched behind a pencil holder stuffed full of sharpened number twos and the gigantic stapler with the ominous do not remove sticker across the head. She reached for the silver frame, bringing it close to her nose for inspection. She could hardly believe it. Marymount’s wife, the only other person Brett thought she recognized, was smiling at him as if he’d just said something really funny. It was a normal photo of a cheesy family get- together, one that could probably be found on countless desks of Waverly teachers. But Brett recognized someone else in the photo. She stood up and strode over to the closest person, who happened to be Sage, and handed it to her for verification.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Sage’s glossy lips dropped open. She held up the family photo for everyone to see, the fluttery sleeve of her pink Splendid blouse sliding up her arm.
“What?” Alison asked, raising her head from the table and looking up at B
rett. One of the pink plastic butterfly barrettes holding back her smooth black hair had slid out of place.
“It’s Chloe,” Brett answered, her voice emptied of all emotion. “That little sneak.”
“What’s Chloe?” Alison asked, panicked.
“She’s related to him?” Benny’s voice rose, incredulous. She stood up.
“Who?” Brandon asked, rubbing his eyes with his fists. “What’s going on?”
“I asked her if anyone in her family had ever gone to Waverly, and she mentioned something about her uncle. She could’ve fucking told us he was the dean.” Benny shook her head, frustrated, and her long braid of shiny brown hair flopped from side to side. But then she gasped loudly, covering her mouth with her manicured hand. “I told her about the stash of booze in our room.”
Sage turned to look at her roommate. “And she was totally interrogating me about what Easy and Callie were doing in the stables on Saturday.” Callie blushed, and Easy squeezed her hand under the table.
“But that means,” Alison started, then stopped, staring at the ceiling as if she was trying to work out a difficult algebra problem in her head. “She said this weird thing to me about Alan helping me study,” she said. “It didn’t register at the time, but . . .” She scrunched up her face. “Little bitch.”
Tinsley smirked and leaned back in her leather chair so far that Brett hoped it would topple to the floor. She stacked her black leather Sigerson Morrison heels on the table. “Wow, that’s underhanded. You’ve got to kind of admire it.”
Understanding washed over Heath’s face. “I was only kidding about the naked rule. . . .” Brandon’s eyes narrowed at his roommate, and Heath put both hands up, as if to proclaim his innocence. “So basically, we’re all in here because we said or did compromising things in front of that little prospective?” he cried, glancing around the room. He looked like he was both indignant and impressed.
“Yeah, or because we were mean to her. And then she ran and told her uncle. It’s so freaking unfair.” Alison grabbed a piece of her hair and started nibbling on the ends angrily.