We Know It Was You (15 page)

“I shall say
guten Tag
, Merssus Fleck!”

“Oh my God, no, Gottfried. You say nothing. You are silent. Do you understand? My mother will kill me. She'll pull me out of school.”

Gottfried nodded stupidly. Benny couldn't tell if he really understood, but there was nothing to do but get in the car.
This is the end,
Benny thought.
This is the end, and I'm just walking right into it.

The Boarders, midnight

It was hard to describe what she was feeling. She felt like she was on a tire swing, or in one of those dreams where you can't walk properly. It was like time dragged for long moments, and she'd be staring at photographs on the bulletin board, but then time sped up again, and she suddenly couldn't remember what she'd been doing. And she kept missing things, like in a play where all the action happens offstage. Benny had been right there, and then he was gone, but she couldn't remember him leaving. Gottfried had been there too, but now she couldn't find him, either.

“Gottfried?” she called.

She heard a murmur coming from the common room. She stumbled back toward it and found Gottfried slumped on the sofa. “My first real American girlfriend!” he exclaimed, looking wasted and ecstatic.

“Whaaaa?” Virginia said, and burst out laughing. Did Gottfried think she was his girlfriend now? They'd sort of held hands for five seconds when Virginia had grabbed him
to keep from falling down.
Oh my God,
she thought, feeling a weird giddiness tinged with dread. But then she realized Gottfried was talking about his low-class old lady at the Sapphire Lounge. He had a piece of paper with her phone number on it and was kissing it over and over. Virginia started laughing even harder.

“Amerikanische Frau!”
Gottfried cried. “I shall never go home again!” And then he closed his eyes and fell over on the sofa, presumably to dream of fake blondes with two-inch roots and streakily tanned bosoms.

Virginia's laughter trailed off, and she stared at him, wondering if he was really asleep. Gottfried was famous among the boarders for being an extreme insomniac. Apparently back in Germany he'd had a personal sleep therapist or something, but he couldn't find one in America. Which meant that no matter what time of night, you could usually count on him being awake and padding around the Boarders in his slippers. He seemed thoroughly conked out now, though, unless he was faking. But Virginia didn't think Gottfried was the type to fake anything. He seemed incapable of the artifice required to act like a normal person.

“Gottfried?” Virginia said quietly. “Gottfried?” He didn't move. She eyed the pink piece of paper still loosely clutched in his hand. She heard Benny's voice in her mind:
Do you want to contribute or not?
She focused her bleary eyes on the paper, then reached over and grabbed it.

Then she was in her dark, quiet room, with no memory of how she got there. She sat up on the bed. She was uncomfortable. The gold skirt had been rubbing against her waist all night and it felt like she had a rash. Had she been sleeping? She looked at her clock. It was one in the morning. She felt dizzy in a way that alarmed her, not like the pleasant, airy, oblivious dizziness she'd felt earlier.

She found herself staring at the window. It was pitch-black outside, the black outlines of trees against a starless black sky. But as her eyes adjusted, she noticed a pale shadow standing against the background, almost like a ghost. It moved toward her window, like it knew she had seen it.

And then Virginia was screaming.

1:00 a.m.

“BENNY! BENNY! BENNY! BENNY!”

The screams were hysterical, like they were coming from an unhinged lunatic or someone waking up from a nightmare.

Zaire had been awake for an hour, listening to Gottfried crashing around the common room sounding drunk, which was pretty weird for a Wednesday night. She'd been waiting for Virginia to go to bed so she could see what the hell he was up to. But Virginia just kept hanging around, wandering the hall and giggling idiotically. What were they even doing hanging out together? Since when were Gottfried and Virginia Leeds friends?

The screams didn't stop. Zaire flung her door open and saw Virginia on the floor. She was backing away from her room like a deranged crab.

Other doors opened. “What's going on?” Chrissie White asked, rubbing her eyes.

Zaire knelt down next to Virginia. “Bloody hell, what's wrong?” There was a rip in the gold skirt she'd loaned her, she couldn't help noticing.

Virginia pointed to her room. Her face was completely white. “He was there. He was watching me.”

“Who? Benny?”

“NO!” Virginia shouted. “I need to call Benny!”

Zaire got up and flicked on the light in Virginia's room. She looked around. “There's no one here,” Zaire said. “You were having a dream.”

Virginia sat pressed against the wall, breathing heavily. After a moment she started to calm down.

“See? You're waking up now. You're fine. Go to bed, guys; she's fine,” Zaire said to Chrissie and the other girls. She turned back to Virginia. “So . . . wild night with Gottfried, huh?”

Virginia was holding her head in her hands. “Huh?”

“I heard you coming in with Gottfried. What were you two doing?”

“I don't know,” Virginia said. She sounded like she was about to cry. “I don't feel very good.”

“Well yeah, you're clearly trashed. Come on.” She helped
Virginia get up. “Go back to sleep. Nighty-night. Bye.” She pushed Virginia into her room, turned off the light, and shut the door. Zaire knew she was being brusque, but she was eager to get rid of her so she could get Gottfried alone. Zaire had assumed Virginia liked that Scooby guy she was always lurking around with. But maybe Scooby was gay like everyone said, and Virginia had given up on him and set her sights on Gottfried. If Zaire had known that, she definitely wouldn't have picked out her hottest skirt to lend her. She would have picked something ugly and beige.

Zaire listened at Virginia's door for a moment to make sure she wasn't coming back out. Then she dashed back to her room to smear some concealer under her eyes and do some contouring. She brushed her hair, tightened the belt of her blue satin robe, and snuck down the hall to the common room. As she peeked in the doorway, she expected to see Gottfried flopped on the sofa, maybe with that cute, spacey look on his face, his beautiful limbs sprawled out in all directions. But the common room was empty.

“Hello?” she said. No answer.
Where did he go?
Zaire was sure she hadn't heard him going up the stairs to the boys' hall. She walked around the room to make sure he wasn't lying on the floor or something. There was no one. She shouldn't have been surprised. Even when they were dating, he'd been impossible to predict, and impossible to control.

Thursday

The fountain, 8:00 a.m.

The sun had just risen over the top of the building when he saw Virginia. She was eating a banana and drinking a hot chocolate and reading the newspaper. Benny was surprised—he'd told Virginia she should read the newspaper every day to keep up with local crime coverage, but he hadn't expected her to actually do it. He also hadn't expected to see her looking so normal after last night.

The twenty-minute ride from the public library to the Boarders had been possibly the most stressful of his life. Trying to keep Gottfried upright in his seat, trying to keep up a steady stream of chatter so neither Gottfried nor Virginia would have a chance to drunkenly open their mouths. “I heard that reading aloud can enhance memory retention,” he'd announced to the car. “So I think I'll read aloud from my history book in preparation for my test next Monday. ‘Tokugawa Yoshinobu was the last shogun of the Edo period of Japan.' ”

“TO-KU-GA-WA!” Gottfried had boomed in a cartoonish
Japanese accent, while Virginia giggled in the front seat. Benny had continued reading, making his voice even louder. At which point Gottfried started barking random observations about whatever they passed on the road. “That house has a large door. This red light is very long for no traffic. In
Deutschland
we use the kilometer. Should the world not be in agreement of its measuring?” He was particularly upset by a Waffle House whose sign was not fully illuminated, reading
AFFLE HO SE
. Mrs. Flax had said nothing, her mouth pressed in a tight, disapproving line as she drove.

Virginia had been so out of it Benny had been forced to walk her to the door with his arm wrapped around her. It felt weird. He and Virginia had barely touched before, and now he was practically carrying her, her whole body leaning against him and his arm enclosing her waist. He'd even felt her skin a few times as her sweater bunched up. And now his mother probably thought they were in love or something. He'd dreaded getting back in the car and braced himself for one of his mother's scary lectures. But all she'd done was give him a deeply disapproving look and say, “I thought the Model UN was for
serious
students.”

And now here was Virginia, reading the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and eating breakfast as if it were an ordinary morning. A breeze rustled the pages of Virginia's paper and created a thin, cool mist from the fountain's streaming water.

Benny came up behind her. “Hey.”

Virginia jumped, almost sloshing her hot chocolate. “Benny, hi. You surprised me.”

“How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Oh, not too bad. Gottfried's dead to the world, though. He fell asleep on the common-room sofa and wouldn't even get up.” She lifted the paper. “Did you know Mr. Choi had a wife and a daughter? They live in
Gainesville
.” Everyone made fun of Gainesville, a sad suburban dump whose water tower desperately proclaimed
WHERE SUCCESS LIVES!

“It's a closed funeral,” she said, “at some Korean church. Maybe we could sneak in, except I don't know how we'd get all the way to Gainesville.”

Benny sat down next to her at the edge of the fountain. He looked at the photo in the paper. Mrs. Choi looked so normal. Like a nice vice principal or a bingo caller. Had she known she was married to a pervert? Did she have enough money to get by? When Benny's dad had his accident, the family got compensation from the company, enough to pay for Rodrigo and physical therapy and making the whole house wheelchair accessible during the months when Mr. Flax couldn't walk. What would Mrs. Choi get? Anything?

Benny blinked, snapping himself out of it.
Lift off,
he told himself. Whenever he found himself getting bogged down in the human element of a mystery, Benny tried to imagine himself lifting off in a plane and flying far above it. You had clearer perspective at thirty thousand feet.

“Wildcat's been glaring at me for fifteen minutes,” Virginia said, nodding toward the bench under the magnolia tree. Benny saw the scruffy brown cat hunched in the shadows under the bench, looking cranky.
Poor Wildcat,
Benny thought. He had probably been a nice, normal cat at some point but had grown violent and prone to hiding after years of being chased and smothered by gleeful sixth-graders. Now he was practically feral and wasn't allowed inside anymore. They had created a brute, and then punished him for behaving like one.

“Did you know Wildcat sleeps in the Boarders sometimes? On Zaire Bollo's bed?”

“That's hard to believe,” Benny said.

“I wouldn't have believed it either, but I saw it. Oh, and look what I got.” Virginia handed Benny a piece of paper. It had a phone number and a pink puckered kiss mark on it. “It's that lady's number. Serena or Ruby or whichever one was sucking Gottfried's face. I stole it from him while he was sleeping. We should call her when she's sober and ask about Choi.”

Benny examined the paper. “You should have copied the number and then put it back, so Gottfried wouldn't notice it was gone.”

“Oh . . . I didn't think of that.”

For a moment they sat there not talking. Virginia ate the last bite of her banana and tossed the peel in the bushes.

Benny frowned at her. “There's a trash can right over there.”

“It's
organic matter
,” Virginia snapped at him. “It's good for the earth. Will you stop criticizing everything I do? You're so annoying.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Benny said, standing up.

“You don't have to leave,” Virginia sighed. “I just have a headache.”

“The bell's about to ring,” he said lamely. “See ya.” He took the long way around the fountain so he didn't have to cross in front of Virginia. As he passed the bench, Wildcat hissed and lunged at him. “Wildcat, leave me alone,” he snapped, but then he felt bad. “Sorry,” he said, turning back. But Wildcat just hissed again and ran.

Room 300, 11:30 a.m.

“I feel eyes on me all the time. Even in an empty room.”

“In the locker room, we all change in the bathroom stalls now. It's like the age of innocence is over.”

Virginia rubbed her temples, wishing she could go back to the Boarders and get into bed. She was so sick of watching PSAs about predatory teachers and listening to the cheerleaders moan about the sanctity of their boobs. Winship always went overboard with this stuff. Like in the eighth grade when FCA tried to convert Benny to Christianity, and the principal reacted by making the whole student body watch
School Ties
and read
The Chosen
, which was supposed to make them learn acceptance but had pretty much doomed Benny forever.

Virginia noticed Zaire Bollo sliding a note across her desk. Virginia picked it up and unfolded it. Right away she noticed a Smythson watermark on the paper. That was so Zaire, to write notes in class on expensive British stationery.

You OK? You were pretty demented last night. Btw I didn't know you and Gottfried were drinking buddies. Invite me next time!