The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (30 page)

Meg cut her eyes at Mary-Anne, who took another delicate nibble from her chopsticks.

“Meg.” I must have yelled because the table of sophomores closest to us turned to look.

Meg rolled her eyes. “Well, she never said that she didn't do it.”

“Yes, she did!”

Everything that had happened at Harper's house the day before played in front of my eyes at quadruple speed. Lunch, list making, going through pictures. Harper hiding her face behind a teacup. Harper hugging me before pushing us out the door.

The clatter of plastic forks and laughing conversations and the soft tide of textbooks being opened and closed started to press in on me. All our friends had been folded into pockets—across the room, across the campus, across town. All of it was wrong. Peter and Ben and Cornell shouldn't have separated. Mary-Anne shouldn't have been the third person at our table. Meg shouldn't have been staring at me with her blank therapist expression.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. There should have been more voices, more help.

“No,” Meg said softly. “She didn't. I would prefer if it weren't true, but from the leads we came up with, the evidence points to—”

“Not her,” I shouted. I brushed my hands over my hair. Thoughts were pinging around my head with so much force, I would have sworn I could feel them boomerang off my skull. “I don't believe you. Why would Harper risk everything to go up one place in the ranking? She never cared about making valedictorian. You, on the other hand, went up six places when she got expelled. You care so much about your stupid thought experiment. Do you care about creating your adult identity more than you care about your friends? Because, in case you forgot, one of your best friends got expelled for something she didn't do and all you can do is sit there and dissect her relationship.”

“I am trying to be prepared for whatever happens next,” she shot back. “But we can't keep pretending that it's all going to be fine. There is a strong chance that it won't be.”

I goggled at her. “Can you hear yourself? You sound like a robot.”

“And you sound delusional.” She stood, sweeping all of her magazines into her arms and throwing her bag over her shoulder with a sniff. “I can't deal with you when you're like this.”

“I'm always like this!” I shouted as she started marching toward the student council table.

I put my head in my hands. A panic attack was creeping up my spine. My lungs went tight, working hard for the tiny molecules of oxygen polluted with perfume and soup steam.

Mary-Anne set her chopsticks down and gave a quiet
ahem
to remind me of her presence. As though I could forget.

“It seems fair that you should get to see my meltdown,” I said without raising my head. “I was ringside for you throwing salad at the junior officers.”

She made a tittering sound that I belatedly registered as a laugh. “Well, I was right. That dance was useless. The cricket team is stuck in their old uniforms and the band sucked. It was a total waste of a dress. I thought Jack getting cleared would save it, but then he ran off with you.…” She swept a fingernail under her lashes, erasing some invisible smudge. “I don't know why he keeps trying to make peace with Peter's friends. I've been telling him all year that it's a waste of time. He never listens.”

My head popped up. “I didn't know you talked to Jack.”

She leveled me with a droll stare. “I've been talking to Jack since sophomore year. Classic on again, off again. My literary agent said it's ruining my poetry. My last chapbook is apparently ‘unpublishable.' No one wants to read about the prodigy having boy troubles. I'm supposed to be finding my adult voice, not pining.” She wrinkled her nose. “Don't go blabbing about any of this. My shrink is on vacation and I have writer's block. That doesn't mean that I want everyone putting the pieces together. Some things are better when they're private, don't you think? Outside input gets so messy. Your friends judging you, making notes on you, comparing your rankings…”

She batted her eyelashes knowingly at me. The soup in my stomach boiled as I thought about Ben and I sitting on opposite sides of the student council table.
Oh, hell
.

“I don't have anyone to tell,” I said. The truth of this was physically painful. “So, when Jack got suspended, did you think he'd actually cheated? From what people say about him, it sounds like something he's capable of.”

“Most of what people say about him, he started himself. He did a paper on gossip last year for social psych that got really out of hand. I don't think he considered that the rumors would stick around. All that bullshit about making drugs and animal testing…” She rubbed her lips together in thought. Somehow, her lip gloss remained untouched by teriyaki sauce. “He could have hacked into the system, if he'd wanted to. He is a computer genius. But he's been working too much this year to have time for petty vengeance. He jumped up twenty places in the ranking in two months. Whoever messed with his grades cut him off right before he broke the top ten. He's trying to get a late acceptance to MIT to stay with Peter. It's so sweet that it makes me want to puke. I assume that's why he keeps trying to play nice with you all. Not that you've been very welcoming. He has this crazy idea that helping Peter's friends will prove that it would be okay for them to go to college together. He's been ignoring Brad and Nick all year. And me. Thus, our current off-again.” She sighed and fluffed the back of her hair as though thinking too hard had deflated it. “He showed up at winter ball, kissed me hello, and then started asking if you and Meg had shown up yet. He was so freaked out about Harper getting expelled and Peter thinking it was his fault.”

“Really?” I hadn't considered it at the time, but it had been strange that Jack had followed me out to the parking lot when I'd gone tearing out of the dance. Mendoza had pointed out that he had been risking a renewed suspension. Why would he have done that if he were guilty?

If the hacking had to be mathematically and emotionally reasonable, then it couldn't be Jack. Getting into the top ten wouldn't have done him any good if it hurt his relationship with his brother.

“Look, I know it's a long shot since you guys are, um, not together right now,” I said. “But do you think that you could get a copy of the code Jack used to find the source of the probations?”

She flinched an unconcerned shrug. “Oh sure. At the very least, I could get a copy from Nick. He owes me a favor. I tutored him in French last year so that he could keep his scholarship. What do you think you're going to find in the code?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “But I have to look for something that proves that Harper didn't get herself expelled.” I looked over at the student council table where Meg had planted herself next to Peter. “Since, apparently, I'm the only one of our friends who's worried about that.”

Mary-Anne scoffed. “Meg's hypothesis is inherently flawed. If Cornell valued his grades over everything else, he wouldn't be trying to quit the student council.” She paused, giving me a brief, bright smile. “Congrats on making valedictorian, by the way. Please don't let Ben get ahead of you. No one wants to hear
that
speech.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. I hadn't even begun to consider seeing my name at the top of the ranking list. It wouldn't get posted until we came back from winter vacation. It was a tenuous reality, a Bizarro world that had been created the second I'd left the winter ball.

Yikes. Even my inner monologue was making DC references. Everything was wrong.

I stared down at my lunch. “Do you mind if we sit here in total silence until the bell rings?”

“Sounds good to me.” She picked up her chopsticks again. “Same time tomorrow?”

 

Why is Mary-Anne asking me to pass notes to you? Since when do you write notes to Mary-Anne?

 

Think of it as analog texting. It's old school. She's emailing me a copy of Jack's code. Do you want a copy?

Also, if you're going to start passing me notes, you should work on folding them. This looks like it got run over by a truck. Didn't you see how tiny Mary-Anne folded hers?

(see how nice it is when you can read someone's handwriting?)

 

I'm crap at coding. Let me know the results?

I'll look into the art of origami after finals.

Can you get access to another storage closet?

Check yes or no.

 

Your initials are BMW? Hahahaha!

You find a closet. That last one was gnarly.

 

Your wish is my command. And my initials are classy as frak.

 

26

I'd convinced my
parents to give me access to the Mess website after dinner by telling them that my Econ teacher had sent out a study guide for our final exam. Since I didn't need the study guide—I had 104 percent in that class—the firewall would only show one download coming from my computer. If my parents were going to treat me like a common criminal, I had no choice but to act like one.