Premeditated (12 page)

“I’m setting the keypad.”

Twenty minutes later, Uncle Paul had gone back to the hospital, and Tabs, Brucey, and I had turned the kitchen into our
base of operations. I might not have wanted Brucey involved originally, but I had to admit, he took to the idea of torpedoing Brooks’ social standing with aplomb.

St. Michael wasn’t the only avenging angel Claire had on duty.

Brucey had retrieved his computer from Grimace and built a techie nest on his side of the table. He was also horrified to discover that I hadn’t updated (or, as he said, “scrubbed”) my online profile. I’d been a blond less than a week, and my mind hadn’t exactly been centered on taking new pictures to replace the ones I had posted. Brucey set to work, Photoshopping Lowry Dinah into old scenes of the real me.

“This is why you should never leave me out of the loop,” he said as his fingers flew across the trackpad, giving photo-me a makeover. “You’ve got half a dozen friend requests already. If you hadn’t had your profile locked, you’d already be busted. These albums have to go—Claire’s in them.”

I moved around the table so I could peek over his shoulder to find out who had friended me; seeing Dex at the top of the list sent ripples through my stomach.

Considering Dex had already figured out that my Lowry persona wasn’t the usual me, I wasn’t too worried about him seeing the profile picture of me with Tabs and Brucey, with my usual black hair and not-at-all uniform appearance. But Brucey was right—I’d made a huge mistake by jumping into this without thinking. Jordan-from-homeroom, Abigail-not-Abby, even the school itself had me on standby (Tabs’ “spy on thy neighbor” theory was spot on, I guess). Two of the names I thought I recognized from one class or another and decided they were the kind of people who friended everyone whether they knew
them or not. Chandi was a surprise, and I wasn’t sure I’d accept her request once Brucey gave me the all clear. Sure, her profile and the secrets it held were potential ammunition, but earlier antagonism aside, I was uneasy about using Brooks’ girlfriend like that. Manipulating her private life felt too close to what had happened to Claire.

Brucey finished my pictures pretty quickly and moved on to changing my favorite movies and music.

“Add
The Princess Bride
,” I said.

“As you wish …”

Brucey was entering his comfort zone, where there was a movie quote for every situation. This required redirection, and fast, or else he’d recite the whole thing from memory. (Or just shift straight into the Oompa-Loompa theme from
Willy Wonka
.)

“When he’s done, you should send a request to He Who Must Not Be Named,” Tabs said; she must have had the same idea.

She was also right, and I hated it. I didn’t want to friend Claire’s tormentor, or have a link to him that others could follow with a quick click, but there was no other way. I couldn’t snoop without him friending me.

“Now that the groundwork is taken care of,” Brucey said, cracking his knuckles, “have you decided how you want to do this?”

“I’m pretty much winging it,” I said as my mind drifted back to Wonderland.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there
, or so says the Cheshire Cat.

It wasn’t like Amazon had a bright yellow
Vengeance for Dummies
manual I could download. (I checked.)

“Give me ten minutes with your uncle’s equipment and I can make him a ghost.”

“Ten minutes with Paul’s equipment and you’d crash the IRS,” Tabs said.

“You make that sound like a bad thing.”

“Go sit in the car.” I pointed toward the door. “Now. You’ve lost inside privileges.”

Brucey stuck his tongue out at me, reminding me yet again that I no longer had my barbell. His was blue.

“I checked Mom’s pill cupboard last night,” Tabs said, pulling us back on point.

“It’s a cupboard now?”

“And two of those ugly green storage boxes. She hasn’t touched the bitter orange or ma huang in months. The bottles were still sealed, so I grabbed one of each … but there’s a problem. No way can you disguise the taste of either one of them with drink mix. They’re awful.”

“Great. I had all of one idea and it’s a bust.”

“Actually, it’s a piece of cake.”

Tabs reached for her bag where she’d stashed it under the table and pulled out one of those plastic bowls people use to take food to parties. When she took off the lid and tipped it my way, there was a fudgy cat cupcake with licorice whiskers—just like the one from the hospital magazine.

“I looked it up online,” she said proudly. “Chocolate’s used to hide the taste of medicine for kids or poison at assassination dinners. It’ll kill the taste of anything. Try one.”

Maybe it was me, but knowing Tabs now possessed the skills to conceal arsenic at will didn’t make me want to be her official food taster.

“I put pudding in it,” she added as Brucey devoured our prototype, whiskers and all.

He mumbled something that, based on the okay sign with his fingers, was probably “It’s good.”

“I tried it with both of them and you can’t taste either one. I’m not sure we should use both, though. What if it’s too much for his heart or shuts his kidneys down?”

“Good point.”

Death was too fast.

I wanted to make him as miserable as he’d made Claire; it was no good if he had a heart attack. Things like that led to autopsies and overly sympathetic views of the guy who died. No way did I want him painted as the tragic boy with a bad heart who was cut down in the prime of life. I wanted Brooks to forget what happy felt like and stay healthy enough to regret his mistakes for many, many years.

“Which one do you want?” she asked.

“Isn’t ma huang a hormone?” Brucey asked, still trying to unstick the chocolate fudge from the roof of his mouth with his tongue. “Use that one. Make him grow boobs.”

“That’s Dong quai, moron.” Tabs hit him with the lid of the cupcake bowl.

“Oooh … you should turn his pee blue.” Brucey bounced up and down in his seat.

“See? This is why I tell you not to feed him sweets.”

“Sorry,” Tabs said.

“I’m serious.” Brucey pouted. “There was this show and they used a chemical, and you can put it in soda, and he’ll pee blue, and you can make him think something’s seriously wrong.”

“I thought we all agreed you would stop watching reruns of anything made before you were born.”

Brucey had been taking his cues from old TV shows since his dad got cable when we were nine. If he hadn’t had such a low tolerance for pain,
Jackass
would have done him in.

“Just because they did it on TV doesn’t make it stupid,” he said, sulking.

“Let’s stick to things anchored in this millennium.”

“Fine.” He tapped the trackpad on his laptop. “Here you go.” Brucey spun his computer around and showed us what he’d been working on besides my profile. Brooks Walden’s head was now sitting firmly atop the shoulders of some other guy in a boy-clench. “Say the word and I’ll mass email Lowry’s class list with my masterpiece. I doubt there’s too many guys at Lowry coming out of the closet.”

“Not helpful, Brucey.”

“What? You said you didn’t have any ideas.… This is an idea.”

“A stupid idea,” I said. “And where did you get that picture?”

The photo he’d used of Brooks wasn’t one I’d snapped at lunch. He couldn’t have snagged it from Brooks’ profile, either. Brooks had everything on lockdown; I’d looked for a picture of him after I found Claire’s letters, but the only thing I found was a drawing of an insanely detailed futuristic sports car with a stick-figure man behind the wheel.

“I used the password the school gave you and skimmed their archives.” He shrugged.

Lowry had archives? Who knew?

“If emailing the whole school is too much,” Brucey said,
“I’ll aim smaller. This guy’s one of those WASPy types, right? Find out where his family goes to church—I’ll send it to his pastor as an anonymous concerned parishioner.”

“No.”

“I can make an official notification stating he’s got twenty-seven STDs and post it to the school’s bulletin board for public health reasons.”

Brucey with a password was a dangerous thing.

“No.”

“Do the fish-in-the-tire-well thing! It’ll rot and he’ll never figure out where the smell’s coming from. Or instead of putting the powder in his orange drink, you could mix milk and juice to make him sick, or—”

“So help me, if you start quoting
Heathers
—” Tabs looked like she was considering hitting him again.

“Do
not
mock the cinematic classics.”

“Brucey, this is serious. I need some real ideas,” I said.

“No, you need real information,” he corrected. “What does he want? Find out and take it. What’s his dream? Find out and crush it. Who does he love? Find out and make them hate him. You have to crack whatever wall he’s got around him and get on his good side.”

There’s no way to describe the evil look that took over Brucey’s usually placid face, but it gave me goose bumps, and I was suddenly very happy that he was on my side.

The food court at the Five Points mall always filled quickly. It was worse on the weekends, when the mall’s major design flaw showed through—they’d built it half as big as it needed to be to hold the number of people flooding out of the stores when their blood sugar crashed. Tabs, Brucey, and I got there early and claimed a strategic table before the retail pilgrims descended for tacos and pizza.

Since this was Brooks’ meet-cute with Claire, and he’d said he’d be here today, I figured the mall was his hunting ground of choice. But he stubbornly refused to make an appearance.

“Remind me again why calling the cops on this guy ranks below your almost-sure-to-fail plotting skills?” Brucey asked. Armed with my Lowry-issued password, he’d combed through the school’s old newsletters and yearly reports and was currently building something he referred to as a dossier on Brooks Walden. Apparently Brooks hadn’t been lying about the extra-curriculars. He’d won all sorts of awards and medals for the school and on his own. It was also worth noting that there was no mother listed as an emergency contact for him, only his dad and a set of grandparents who lived in Wisconsin.

“What’s she going to tell them?” Tabs asked. “She found the diary of a girl with mental issues who decided to strip down and follow a guy under the pier, then
didn’t
scream for help?”

“The Cuckoo bird was fourteen, right? It won’t matter whether she said yes or no.”

“Forget it,” I said. “If I turn Brooks in without a confession from him, then all the cops will do is
maybe
question him. Claire can’t speak for herself, so they’ll fill in the blanks by making her out to be some kind of slut. She doesn’t need that waiting for her when she wakes up.”

Rumors wouldn’t die just because Claire refuted them later. Brooks would get the benefit of the doubt—and his dad’s bank account—and the whole thing would be forgotten by the time he was ensconced in whatever Ivy League school his dad bought him a place in. Claire would still be seen as trash.

“I’m not letting them destroy what’s left of her by making this her fault. We stick to the plan: make everything Brooks touches wither until he’s so off center he thinks his own karma’s got it in for him. He’ll either confess to try and get some peace or he’ll go crazy.”

“Gimme your phone,” Brucey said. “I want to see the pictures you took in the cafeteria.”

“You’ve got a half-dozen photos of him.”

“I want to see him in the wild, not posing for the school newspaper.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket but held it out of his reach.

“Swear you won’t send any emails without asking first.”

“I sw—”

“On your celluloid collection,” I added. “Any unauthorized messages and I’ll melt them in their cans.” Brucey has about two hundred flat, round cans of movie film like they use in the
projectors at the old drive-in. He’s also got an unhealthy attachment to every one. They live in his dresser and closet while his clothes get piled on the floor.

“When did you get so mean?”

“Five minutes after Claire cut her wrists.”

“Fair enough—I promise all I want is another look.”

I handed him my phone and let him scroll through the pictures.

“This is the fallback girl, right?” he asked, pointing to Chandi.

“Yeah.”

“How boring. Barbie-blondes are so last decade. Her bestie’s hotter.”

“Bestie?”

“One of your new friends: pixie haircut, twenty pounds soaking wet, built like a mini Victoria’s Secret model.”

He turned my phone around to show me Jordan-from-homeroom.

“What makes you think Jordan’s her best friend?”

“Look at her,” Brucey said as he zoomed in to get a better look at Chandi. Tabs and I leaned closer, but all I saw was a packed cafeteria table.

“What are we staring at?” Tabs asked.

“Body language,” Brucey said. “The girlfriend’s Miss Painted Perfect, but it only goes as deep as her topcoat. Look at the way she’s holding herself—arms bent in at the shoulders, hiding, body leaned toward our nefarious villain, eyes down. She’s trying to appear angry, but she’s biting her lip; she’s embarrassed, and terrified. See the way she’s picking at her sleeve cuff? It’s a nervous habit for people trying to control social anxiety.”

“You got all that from a snapshot?” I asked. It still looked like lunch to me.

“And six years of therapy with Dr. Useless.” He flipped the phone sideways to stretch the picture. “Look at your other girl. If anyone’s angry, it’s her. The others are watching the blonde, but her eyes are on that guy with the stupid grin. Whatever he did, she’s pissed about it.”

He was right. I’d missed it, since my focus was homed in on Brooks, but if looks could kill, Jordan and Dex would have both been dead—the kickback would have dropped her. In my mind, Jordan inched away from Tweedle status to possible enemy.

“What’d he do to her?” Tabs asked.

“He was just being himself,” I said. “Dex and Chandi don’t get along. It’s almost like the two of them are competing for Brooks’ attention.”