Cold Calls (17 page)

“What about Connor?”

“He was there. He played somebody called Bud Frump,” Fatima said, squinting to read her tiny writing. “And my girl Katie had the female lead in the show. Rosemary Pilkington. She got to kiss J. Pierrepont Finch.”

Eric shrugged. “Who's that?”

“I don't know,” Fatima said, “but he was played by this cute guy with gorgeous blue eyes.”

“I've got blue eyes,” Eric said.

Fatima grinned. “Anyway, from what I pieced together, this is where they met. The Cubit Summer Theater Program.”

Shelly looked at the posters, at the notes on the table, then up at Fatima, a smile slowly spreading. “Oh my god. I don't believe it. You did it. You
really
did
it.”

Eric said, “Hold on, wasn't this compare-and-contrast thing
your
idea?”

“Yeah. But I didn't think it was actually going to work.”

“So all that research the other day—that could have all been a waste of time?”

“Could have. Turns out it wasn't. Thanks to Fatima.”

“I told you, I love this stuff,” Fatima said, waving a hand at the posters as she sat down, leaning across the table to bump fists with Shelly.

“Okay, great. We have the connection,” Eric said. “All three of them were in the same summer theater program, they were all in the same play—”

“Actually, it's a musical.”

“Whatever. The point is, what do we do now?”

Shelly started to say something, stopped, then leaned back slowly in her chair, her eyes losing focus as she thought. Next to her, Fatima began filling her paper with scribbled lines and connecting arrows. Eric stared up at the fluorescent lights of the study room.

For five minutes, no one said anything, the scratching of Fatima's pencil sounding loud in the small room.

Then Shelly said, “Something bad happened at that theater camp.”

Eric laughed. “Sounds like a line from a slasher movie.”

“No, seriously, think about it,” Shelly said. “Our caller wants us to go after three specific people who were at that camp. So something bad had to happen there to make her go through all this.”

“Go through what? We're the ones doing the work.”

“True,” Shelly said. “But she had to find a way to get us to do it for her. That couldn't have been easy.”

Eric nodded. “Sounds like payback. And how much you wanna bet it had something to do with a plate of macaroni and cheese?”

Shelly flipped the poster board over and started writing. “Let's assume Heather, Connor, and Katie did the same things to our caller that she's making us do to them.”

“Makes sense,” Eric said. “That would explain why we all got the same instructions. Bump 'em in the hallways, call 'em names—”

“Make them cry,” Shelly said.

“—all leading up to the mac-and-cheese finale.”

Fatima scribbled notes in the corner of the poster. “So what we need to do is find out
who
they picked on and we'll have our caller.”

“It's that simple.”

“What, we just
ask
them?”

“In a way, yeah,” Shelly said.

“I'm not talking to Katie,” Fatima said. “She scares me.”

“And Connor's too scared of me to say a word,” Eric said.

“You don't have to. We do what we did when we looked at their Facebook pages. I'll talk to Katie, you talk to Heather, and Fatima will talk to Connor.”

“It doesn't matter who gets who,” Eric said. “They're not going to talk to us.”

“Oh yes they will,” Shelly said. “They're going to tell you everything we need to know, and they're going to love doing it.”

“Sure they will.”

“And they'll fill in all the details we don't know, too. You'll see.”

Eric laughed. “You're crazy.”

“This whole thing is crazy,” Fatima said. “The people we bullied bullied the girl who's bullying us.”

“So in the end, we're all victims,” Eric said.

“Yeah,” Shelly said. “And we're all bullies.”

H
IS PHONE RANG AT
7:00
P.M. SHARP.

Shelly was right.

“Send them a message on Facebook,” she had said as they took down the posters in the study room. “Tell them you're the teen reporter for some local arts magazine and you're working on a story about young actors. Say, ‘I contacted the Cubit Theater Program and they gave me your name.' Tell them you've got a tight deadline, give them your phone number, ask them to call you tonight at seven. They'll be watching the clock, waiting to call.”

Eric flipped open the brick-size phone. “Hello?”

“Hi, Eric, this is Heather Herman? You sent me a Facebook message asking me to call you? About an interview for the paper or something?”

He said hello, thanked her for calling, then rattled off the story that he, Shelly, and Fatima had come up with at the library. He knew it was going to be easy when Heather went on about how much she loved the articles in
Scene It,
Fatima's imaginary magazine. He started down the checklist of the warm-up questions—what drew you to the stage, how long have you been acting, what was your first part ever, how do you prepare for a role—half listening to her answers as he sliced floating fruit on his iPad. After fifteen minutes, she took a breath, and Eric steered the conversation where it needed to go.

“I talked to this guy at the Cubit Theater Program—Aaron or Trevor or . . .”

“Stephen?”

Right again. “Yeah, that's it. Stephen. He said that you were one of the best students he had this summer—”

“Oh, I don't know if I was
that
good . . .”

“That's what he said. And he said there were three of you that showed real potential and that I should ask you what it was like working with, uh, Bud Frump and . . .” Eric paused a beat, as if checking his notes. “Rosemary Plinker?”

“Rosemary Pilkington,” Heather said, laughing. “Those are two characters in the musical we did.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Do you know it?”

“I thought it was a class you took,” he said, kicking it up into flirt mode. “You were Hedy La Rue, right?”

“Yeah, it was a cool part because I had—”

He steered her back. “So, who were the other actors?”

“Connor Stark played Bud—he was
so
funny. There was one point—”

“And who played Rosemary?”

“Katie Schepler. It's the lead role. She's really pretty.”

“Funny, that's what Stephen said about you,” Eric said, voice dropping a bit, laying it on thick.

“He
did?
That's sorta creepy. He's, like, my father's age.”

“He didn't mean it that way,” Eric said, backpedaling. “It was more like you were perfect for the role.”

“But Hedy's kinda slutty . . .”

Great. Stick to the script.
“Tell me what it was like, you, Connor, and Katie, all in the same show.”

 

Fatima glanced at the alarm clock by the side of her bed.

7:34.

Over twenty minutes and Connor Stark was still on the same question. At this rate it would be after midnight before he got around to anything important.

She'd followed the script, just like they wrote it out, and he gave her the answers that Shelly said he'd give, more or less. She'd gotten up to the part about the other two, Heather and Katie, and that's where it was stuck. First he had that long, dull story about how they met at orientation, which at some point morphed into an even duller story about how they struggled to get those roles, how they each approached their characters differently, but how, when the curtain went up opening night, they just, well,
jelled.
Whatever that meant.

Connor was trying way too hard to imply that he and Katie had, you know, fooled around, but he wasn't that good of an actor, the whole thing sounding like a script he recited to reassure himself he was straight. It was more boring than sad. When she heard him say something about his muse, she knew she had to act fast.

“You guys ever do any crazy stuff?”

“
All
actors are a bit crazy. That's acting, isn't it? As Oscar Wilde once said—”

“I mean offstage. When you were just hanging out. You had to do
something
to stay loose. Did you guys ever do anything kinda crazy?”

Connor chuckled in that stupid
playa
way. “Well, one time—and I can't believe I'm telling you this—Katie and I—”

“I meant like practical jokes,” Fatima said. “
That
kind of stuff.”

Again with the laugh. “Oh, the stories I could tell you.”

Fatima put a giggle in her voice. “
Excellent.
Tell me one. And you can skip the hand-in-warm-water kind of thing. I want the
good
stuff.”

So he told her about hiding a condom in a chorus girl's script, swapping out the backing soundtrack to the show with a Wiz Khalifa CD, having twenty pizzas delivered to the cafeteria at dinnertime, truth-or-dare setups, and way too many toilet-paper pranks. Fatima laughed where it was expected and played shocked when she thought it would lead him on, but then the stories slowed and she could tell he was waiting for another fluffy-light question, something involving his craft or his Broadway dreams. Instead, she went for the kill.

“You're not big on playing by the rules, are you?”

“Gotta do whatcha gotta do,” he said, the accent as ghetto as J.Crew.

“Everybody at my school is so freakin'
serious
all the time. Nobody ever does
anything
that could get them in trouble.”

“Hey, no risk, no fun, right?”

“Well, I heard you had a
lot
of fun at that theater thing.”

He mumbled something, but before he could change the subject, she said, “Like that macaroni-and-cheese video.”

For a long moment there was nothing. In the silence, Fatima knew she had gone too far, given away too much.

Then Connor laughed.

 

“Cut the crap. What's this really about?”

“I told you. I'm doing a story for
Scene It
magazine and—”

“Bullshit. There's no such thing,” Katie Schepler said in a flat, matter-of-fact, coplike voice. “And even if there was, they wouldn't waste their time on a story about a bunch of gleeks in a third-rate summer workshop. Right?”

Shelly paused, took a deep breath. “Right.”

“Good, that's out of the way. What's your name?”

“I told you. Shelly Meyer.”

“Why all the bullshit, Shelly?”

“I'm trying to find out something.”

“Obviously.”

“Not about you. About the girl you . . . the girl who . . .”

“Come on, out with it. I don't have all night.”

“The one you dumped the food on.”

“Hmm. Interesting,” Katie said. “Why do you want to know?”

“It's kinda complicated.”

“No shit, Shelly. That's why you had to make up that stupid magazine story. You a friend of hers or something?”

Shelly laughed. “No. I don't even know her name. She's sort of harassing me and I want to make her stop.”

“And you think that knowing her name and what happened at that waste-of-time camp is gonna help?”

“Yeah. I mean, I hope it does.”

“What do you know already?”

“Just that you and the other two, Heather and Connor . . . well, one of you dumped a plate of macaroni and cheese on her head, and then somebody posted a video of it.”

“Connor did the plate, Heather taped it. I'm the one who put it online.”

“Oh,” Shelly said, surprised by the ease of the confession.

“What else do you think you know?”

“I'm not sure—”

“Guess.”

Shelly shrugged as she switched the phone to her other ear. “The three of you probably picked on this girl. Calling her names, that sort of stuff?”

“Basically you're saying we bullied her.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

It was quiet for a moment, then a long, exhausted sigh that ended in a whispered string of swear words. Shelly waited, watching the red seconds on the countdown clock tick by.

“The little bitch had it coming.”

“Huh?”

“She deserved it. Actually, she got off easy,” Katie said. “After what she did to
us?
Yeah, we should have done something worse.”

“But I thought—”

“No, you didn't. You didn't think at all. You assumed. A whiny eighth-grade girl gets humiliated by three high school students and right away you know
exactly
what happened. But you haven't got a clue.”

“Okay, you're right. I don't know. So tell me.”

Katie laughed. “Why the hell should I?”

“Because—” Shelly started to say, then stopped, stumped by the question.

Why
should
this girl help?

Because she got a Facebook message to call a stranger who lied to her to learn about her past?

Because keeping her secrets isn't as important as making sure some stranger's secrets don't get out?

Because the counter was down to 26 hours, 9 minutes and 12 seconds?

“No answer, huh?” Katie laughed again. “Didn't think so. Well, good luck with your—”

“Because if I don't stop her,” Shelly said, the words rushing out, “she's going to tell everyone. This
thing
she knows. About me.”

“Ooh, secrets,” Katie said. “Do tell.”

“Look, all I need is her name—”

“Fine,” Katie said. “Just tell me your secret.”

Shelly ran a hand through her hair, grabbing hold.
“Why?”