Firecracker (19 page)

“W
e never meet like this anymore. It's a real shame.” When I came back to Bristol, Dean Rein and I both decided that I should no longer be enrolled in his class. He felt it was a conflict of interest. I told him that was fine because if I had to keep seeing him regularly, I might put a letter opener up my nose. So he was nothing to me. I wasn't cheating anymore, and he knew that because my grades were awful. I only had to see him in the morning during chapel and whenever we would pass each other on campus, and he would smile, and I would not smile in return.

“Why is it a shame? Did you miss me?” I asked.

Dean Rein had said that his door was always open, which is something people say even if (like Dean Rein) they don't mean it at all. His door was never open. I had to sit outside his office for ten minutes while his secretary, Beth, figured out whether he was actually in his office. She didn't like me. But if I were to go by what she had taped to her computer, the only things she liked were comic strips about trying on swimsuits, so I didn't take it personally. “My weeks have been a lot less exciting without our sessions. Boring even. I've had too many consecutive days without a student telling me my head is misshapen. And we were making some real progress, weren't we?”

“Sure. Totally.” I leaned in. “I actually need your help.”

I knew how happy it must have made Dean Rein to hear me asking for help. I did not like making him happy. “I'm here because I had no one else to talk to. I just want to make sure you know that up front. If there was anyone in the entire world I could talk to right now instead of you, I would do that.”

“Understood. I know this must be difficult for you to come to me. But I'm listening.” He was still smiling.

“I'm . . . ” I had to breathe between words. “I'm worried about what people think of me,” I said.

“Why?”

“I've changed, right? I mean, since all that stuff happened at the beginning of the school year, and then when I did the good things and . . . I mean, I'm back here at Bristol, aren't I? I've changed.”

Dean Rein took another sip from his mug. “You and I have never gotten along,” he said. “I think we could both agree on that. I would be the first person to doubt any changes you've made.” He thought about it a little more. “But I don't. I think you've made a lot of strides. I'm very proud of the person you've become.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So, what is this about?” he said. “Why the urgency?”

I told him about Lucy and Mason's visit. I told him about how after I basically changed their stupid lives, they still came here because they expected the Astrid Krieger they knew to have some sort of giant revenge plan brewing. “So, what's the point?” I said. “No matter what I do, nobody thinks of me as anything except this lousy person who's just out to hurt people.”

“Revenge for what?”

“What do you mean?”

“They thought you had a revenge plan. What would you be seeking revenge for?”

“Oh . . . you know . . . When I was kicked out of here before, they thought I was planning on doing something to whoever set me up.”

“Set you up? Ah, this business again.”

“I don't really think I need to go into how it went down. But I know you were manipulated, and I'm okay with it,” I said.

Dean Rein was smirking again. “I'm curious. How do you think I was manipulated?”

“I mean, it's not important or anything,” I said. “But, you know, because somebody told you that I was the one who broke into your office, and then that person sent you those tests. I certainly wasn't, you know, the world's most honest student or anything—”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“But I wasn't the only cheater. Cheating is wrong. I know that now. It was bigger than me. But someone tipped you off about only me. The person who did that might deserve some retribution. At least that's what Mason and Lucy suggested. It was probably Talia Pasteur, but you don't have to confirm that.”

Dean Rein's smile broke off into a full, long, ridiculously loud fake laugh. I thought he was going to tip out of his chair and hit his head on his desk, which would be the worst injury anyone had ever sustained from a fake laugh. “Not that it matters, but nobody set you up, Astrid. Not Talia. Not anyone.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I didn't get an email from some anonymous source letting me know when and where you would be cheating. I knew you would be cheating because I pay attention. I figured it out. I made you think someone sent me those tests, but I found them myself. It was me. I knew you were going to cheat on my test, and I caught you. So, if you were going to enact revenge on someone—”

“I'm not.”

“The person who set you up was me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So, am I safe? Should I fear vengeance? Do I have to worry about toilet paper all over my car?” Dean Rein predictably used as boring a prank imaginable as an example.

“You certainly don't have to worry about me papering your car. Or anything, you know,
more interesting
. I'm not looking for that. Not from you. Not from anyone. I just don't care anymore,” I said.

“That's a big step, Astrid. Aren't both of our lives so much easier without all of the distraction of this . . . ?” He made two fists and knocked them together. One of the fists was supposed to represent him, and the other one was supposed to be me. If I was a wrinkly, clenched, old-man hand. “Aren't our lives better without the headaches?”

“Absolutely.”

And that's when we both heard the screaming.

First it was just this loud wail coming from right under Dean Rein's window. It didn't sound like anything coming from a person. But I could just make out words. “MY LEG!” and “THE HORSE!”

Dean Rein looked at me as if for some sort of confirmation that we were both hearing the same thing, and then he kicked over his chair and ran to the window. “No. No. Not again,” he muttered.

“Stay here,” he shouted when he was almost out the door. “I'll be . . . Stay here!”

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

I didn't have to look out the window because I knew what I would see. There would be a tall boy sprawled on the ground. Nobody at Bristol would recognize him, but he'd look like he belonged there. He'd be wearing a Bristol blazer. No one would look at his face. If they did, they would see details that might have seemed out of place. His hair was curly and dyed black, but it was pushed forward, so all you could see were his teeth clenched in pain. He wore chipped black nail polish on his fingers. His belt was made from the drawstring for the curtains in my dorm room because the belt he'd been wearing earlier was covered in spikes. Nobody would see any of that. All they would see was the blood. There would be a lot of blood. Blood on his shirt. Blood on his face. Blood all over the rips in his pants. Yeah, there would be a lot of blood. Of course, he didn't feel anything. Although he was screaming about a horse running over his leg, he wasn't in any pain.

There was a simple explanation for this. A horse
didn't
run over his leg. He wasn't covered in blood. He wasn't even a student at Bristol. The mixture of soap and an entire case of raspberry juice boxes that covered Mason looked so much like blood that I wished I could take credit for it. But that detail was Mason's idea. He had an intimate knowledge of the texture and components of fake blood. He was out there because I told him to be there. And he was doing a pretty good job, from what it sounded like. Up until that morning, I'd had no plan. This plan—the new plan—was going pretty well so far.

My meeting with Dean Rein went exactly the way I'd wanted it to. He managed to give me every piece of information I needed without realizing he'd given me anything. By telling me that no one set me up and no one tipped him off, he'd managed to prove the opposite was true. His tell was that he complimented himself for figuring it all out on his own. I knew he wasn't the sort of person who could figure something like that out by himself. Maybe I was a cheater, but I'd been a cheater for a long time, and he'd never before noticed a thing. He wanted me to think he was smart. That's why he brought it up. He didn't even notice that he told me how he was tipped off—by an anonymous email. I'm very glad that I never conspired with Dean Rein to rob a bank or anything because I would be in prison.

I sat at his desk in front of his computer. It was password protected, but that part wasn't difficult. It is very hard to guess a smart person's password because it should have nothing to do with anything. My computer password this very second is tuxedohamburgerduckcancer-9943**12. And twenty seconds after I just typed it out, I changed it, so don't even bother. People who aren't very smart will usually just use something they like. Lisbet's password is
rainbows
. My father's password is
eyebrows
. From what I knew about Dean Rein, it was pretty easy to guess what the thing he liked more than anything else in the world was. Dean Rein's password was, of course,
deanrein
.

I knew what I was looking for, but I wasn't exactly sure what I would find. I was looking for a specific email. An email about me—but that was all I knew.

Everything Lucy said that morning had been right. She was much more observant than I'd expected her to be. She'd listened to everything I ever said to her. Maybe I could've listened to everything she ever said to me if it wasn't so damn hard to understand her. What she heard was that I would never be okay with Talia Pasteur getting me kicked out of school. Anyone who was involved needed to know that there were consequences. I needed to do something. I'd changed a lot in the past few months, and I was happy about being a better person, but that didn't mean I should abandon what was right. Talia Pasteur deserved whatever was going to happen to her. The part of me that was going to make that happen? Well, that was a part that I felt should never change. I couldn't get past this feeling that my grandfather had died disappointed in me. He made all this happen, and I didn't know of any other reason he would have for punishing me. Maybe I was disappointing. I should never have been the sort of person that lets things happen to her.

Finding the emails was remarkably easy. The anonymous tipster was blackmailing Dean Rein with some information he needed to stay a secret. It actually wasn't a big deal: Dean Rein's son, Martin Jr. (the one who blew his arm off in the meth explosion), stole fifty thousand dollars from the Bristol beautification fund and lost it betting on a football game. Dean Rein had replaced the money by taking out a second mortgage on his house, and he hoped that nobody would ever find out.

Joe Flemming had already discovered this while looking through computer records. He had told me, Pierre, Talia Pasteur, and (I think) Peter Elfrish. I knew I could probably use that information against Dean Rein. It might even put him in jail, but I wasn't interested in blackmail. A lot of things make Dean Rein a jerk, but having a fuckup for a son isn't one of them. I decided it was off-limits. See, I wasn't a bad person. Talia Pasteur was a bad person for using such a sad thing as blackmail.

From there, the emails mostly broke down the way I'd assumed they would. The emailer, who was calling herself Songbird (probably because Talia liked to sing, and her face was tiny and her nose was pointy), asked if Dean Rein wanted Astrid Krieger out of Bristol, and then she told him how to do it. What was interesting to me was that the “Songbird” emails didn't stop after I was kicked out. Songbird was still emailing Dean Rein. And it got weirder. Some emails were missing, but a month ago, Dean Rein wrote this:
I don't understand what you want or why you want this to happen, but I will allow Astrid Krieger to return to Bristol. However, after this I am done
.

I couldn't understand it. She wanted me out of Bristol, and then she wanted me back. None of my good deeds—nothing from my stupid list—had anything to do with it. It was Talia. I was walking into a trap that I didn't understand, and those were my least favorite kinds of traps. (My favorite traps were bear traps because they looked like shark smiles.)

The last email was from that morning. She said:
I need something else. You can't say no to me. When can we meet?

It was starting to sound like Talia and Dean Rein were having secret sex rendezvous, but because the thought of that was so revolting that it was probably revolting to them too, it had to be impossible. I needed to figure out a new plan, and I had, like, a minute. I needed to find a person whom Dean Rein and Talia Pasteur would trust but who actually would be working for me. There was only one person I could think of who met all of those requirements. There was a picture on Dean Rein's desk of a man of about twenty-five on a fishing boat with wraparound sunglasses and only one arm. Martin Rein Jr. I needed someone who could keep a secret and who could make Talia believe that she could tell him anything. I didn't know if this was true of Martin Jr., but I didn't need the real him. I just needed a man with one arm, which was easier to find than one might think (because everyone with two arms has one arm. It's called math, people).