Reckless Hearts (17 page)

“Can we get
to the point, please?” Jake said, exasperated. Lunch was almost over and he still didn't know anything.

Finding Arnold had wasted the first ten minutes. He'd taken this spying thing way too literally. He'd chosen the farthest corner table of the cafeteria, a tiny two-seater that was half-hidden behind a massive easel on which a sign had been mounted announcing the winter dance next week. He'd also put on a too-large pair of aviator sunglasses and kept his head ducked, cupping a hand across his forehead in some weird attempt to hide himself further.

Once Jake had sat down, he'd had to listen to Arnold
babble for half an hour, first admitting that he hadn't known how to hack when he'd agreed to help, and then excitedly detailing every tiny nuance and every incremental step involved putting together the information in the manila envelope he still clutched like nuclear secrets under the table.

“I'm not trying to be rude,” Jake added, knowing how easy it was to hurt Arnold's feelings. “It's just, we only have so much time. I have to get to chem in ten minutes.”

Arnold fingered the envelope and peered at Jake over his aviators. “Is it safe?”

“Arnold! Arnold, why wouldn't it be safe? Nobody knows what we're talking about. And even if they knew, the only person who would care is Elena, and”—Jake craned his head around, making his point—“she's not here!”

“Well . . .”

“Arnold.”

“Okay.” Arnold slid the envelope toward Jake under the table, poking it at Jake's knee until Jake snatched it away.

As Jake leafed through thick stack of documents stuffed into the envelope, he could feel Arnold's eyes on him, waiting for approval.

It was all there. IP addresses. Locations of servers tracking Harlow's coordinates when he sent this or that
message to Elena. Screenshots of Nathaniel's computer. Everything Jake needed to prove to Elena that Harlow was Nathaniel.

For a moment Jake got hung up on a long, revolting email thread between Nathaniel and some guy named Bingham Prescott in which Nathaniel went on and on about Elena, taking a malicious glee in the charge he'd gotten out of stealing her out from under Jake's nose. Some of the things Nathaniel had written were so obscenely cruel that Jake wanted to strangle him. “I'm telling you, bro, she's so short it was like fucking a garden gnome,” he said at one point. And “Let me know if you want a taste. She'll do anything for me. I'll pass her off to you.”

Jake bit back his rage. “Thanks,” he said to Arnold, flushing.

He was surprised that he wasn't happier about having been proved right. He felt vindicated, but in a sour way.

Suddenly panicked, he wondered if maybe he shouldn't tell her at all, if maybe what he should do is find some way to secretly stop Nathaniel without Elena knowing.

No. She deserved to know. But he could just imagine how she would react when he told her the news. She'd be angry at first for his revealing truths she didn't want to accept. And that would be horrible. But what would be even worse would be the moment when she realized that
“Harlow” had only been pretending to care for her, that really he'd been trying to hurt Jake. She'd feel invaded, used.

“Did I do good?” Arnold asked. “You look like you're going to barf.”

“No, I'm okay.” Jake caught sight of himself in Arnold's aviators. He really did look pale. “Arnold, really,” he said, smiling weakly. “This is exactly what I needed.”

Arnold grinned. Then he leaned forward and stared at the table for a long minute as though this small praise from Jake was so overwhelming that he'd had to shut his whole system down to deal with it. When he looked up again, he said, “Are you really going to write a song about me now?”

“Sure. Absolutely. It'll be great. I promise. But listen, it still needs an ending, don't you think? I mean, you've uncovered the bad guy, but if we want the song to have a happy ending, there should be some way to get back at him, don't you think?”

Arnold flashed his evil-genius expression. He maniacally drummed the tips of his fingers together. “I've been thinking about that,” he said.

“I did something
really bad,” Elena said, whispering into the phone even though she'd tucked herself away behind some bushes in a corner of the back quad where the students at Chris Columbus almost never went. It was her free period and with nothing to do but think, she was beginning to panic about what she'd done that morning.

“Don't say that,” Nina said from the other end of the line.

Elena could hear the TV blaring in the background. She felt like she was going to hyperventilate and she tried to control her breathing.

“You don't understand, Nina. I really did.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, but this just allowed the horrors that had been burning through her brain to project themselves across her eyelids—visions of bees swarming that little black Mini, of the guy who owned it, whoever it was (she imagined him to be a massive hulk of a man, one of those Cubanos who still dressed for the island in linen chinos and a bleached white tank top), frantically trying to swipe them away and struggling to unlock the door as they dive-bombed toward his face, his car swerving, crashing, a mangle of steel, and him unconscious and bleeding behind the airbag.

It was like it had already happened, like the guy was already dead. No one deserved that. And the thought that she was the one who caused it . . . Elena felt rancid, like there was evil growing in her bones.

Nina sighed dismissively. “There's nothing to worry about,” she said. “I'm done with Matty. For real this time. I'm not going to let him set foot in the house.”

“I'm not talking about that.” Over the weekend, Elena had managed to calm her father down and convince him to let Nina move back in. The deal she'd made was that if Nina messed up again he could blame Elena and as punishment, take her computer away.

“Well, good,” said Nina, “because I'm already all packed and ready for you to help me move this afternoon.”

Elena heard Nina's words, but it was like her voice
was coming from underneath the ocean, like her concerns were so remote that they weren't quite real. “Yeah,” she said. “I'll be there after school. Don't worry.”

“Okay, good,” Nina said. Her tone softened and turned maternal. “What happened?”

Elena's head was swimming with guilt and shame and fear. She was afraid to say what she'd done out loud. It was as though, if she refused to say it, there might be a chance that it hadn't really happened. But she had to say it. She
had
to. “God, I feel like I'm going to throw up. Nina, it's so bad what I did. I feel like I've put some sort of hole in the universe and I'm going to explode as I'm sucked through it.”

“What happened?” Nina said again. “Tell me. We'll make it all better.”

Elena stood up from her crouch behind the bushes and looked around. It was one of those perfect warm, dry, sunny winter days. How ironic. The few students she could see weren't paying attention to her. Some guys were throwing a Frisbee back and forth. There was a girl reading something on her iPad under a tree, but she was far enough away that she wouldn't be able to hear.

She dove in and blurted it all out, how Harlow had been in trouble and she'd wanted to help him, how she'd broken into the Mini, how she'd planted the bees. “Why?!” she sobbed. “Why did I do that? And what kind of person is Harlow to ask the girl he's supposedly in a
relationship with to do something like this?”

“Well—” Nina said, but Elena cut her off.

“The worst thing is that while I was sneaking out to the parking lot, I knew I shouldn't be doing it, but I did it, anyway. Like I didn't have a choice. You know what I mean? Like I was betraying everything that makes me
me
. Isn't that horrible?”

“That's what happens when you date a guy like Harlow,” Nina said. “I would know. Let me ask you a question.”

“Okay.”

“I've been thinking about this all week. Since you came over crying on New Year's Eve.”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing with a dude like Harlow? He's not your type at all. He's more my speed, and you know where that gets you.”

“I . . . I don't know,” Elena said. The knot in her stomach tightened a little. She'd been asking herself the same questions ever since she'd planted the bees.

“Don't you think that's a problem?”

“He's . . . I mean, he's very cool. He's exciting,” she said weakly.

“So exciting that you've gone and done something you already regret to try and please him. Anyway, since when have you been interested in cool? Cool is for shallow people who don't know how to want anything else
out of life. You've got your life together. You've got a future. The things that come out of your imagination—they're beautiful. I couldn't begin to do something like that. You've got good taste, when you trust it.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Elena asked. She felt defensive, like she had to fight for her relationship with Harlow, but at the same time, she knew already that Nina was right about him and that however she'd felt about him before, her relationship with him was ruined now. She'd never be able to look at him again without seeing the person who'd asked her to put bees in somebody's car.

“What I mean is, it seems like with this Harlow guy, you're trying to be someone you're not.”

Just then, Elena's phone vibrated.

“Hold on,” she told Nina.

It was a text from Jake.
“YOU FREE NEXT PERIOD? I NEED TO TALK TO YOU!”

Typing quickly so she could get back to her conversation with Nina, Elena responded.
“I'VE GOT TRIG. I'LL DING YOU LATER.”

“Who was that?” her sister asked when she returned to the call.

“Just Jake.”

“‘Just Jake,'” Nina teased. “What? You asked me what I meant by ‘You've got good taste.' Well, there you go.”

“Nina, come on,” Elena said, realizing what her
sister was implying. A flash of memory, the sensation of laying her head on Jake's arm when they'd been at the pier last weekend, burned through Elena's mind. She remembered how her skin had tingled on the bike ride home. Maybe she
had
felt something more than friendship. But still, she felt she had to defend herself. “Jake's like a brother. He's . . . I've known him since I was a baby. And . . . there's no mystery or surprises with him. He practically . . .” She stopped herself from saying
knows me better than I know myself
. She realized that was a losing argument. She was blushing and she was glad Nina couldn't see her. “Anyway,” she went on, “I'm a Rios girl. We don't date nice guys.”

“Maybe we should start. I think it's about time for us to be treated the way we deserve to be treated.”

Elena didn't know what to say to that. She felt better, but why? It was like she'd suddenly gotten permission to let down her guard and open her heart in a way she'd always secretly wanted to.

“Okay,” Elena said in embarrassment. “Can we change the subject?”

The phone still jammed to her ear, she squeezed out from behind the bushes to head toward Mr. Conner's trigonometry classroom. It occurred to her that talking about Jake like this had managed to take her mind off her crime for a moment, but knowing that she was able to forget about it just made her feel guiltier about what she'd done.

Nina chuckled. “Sure,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Oh, I don't know. What I should do about those bees, maybe?”

“Do you think you can get them out of the car?”

“It would be hard. I just spent my last free period talking to you. Now I've got to go to class.”

“Well, you know, I think you're blowing this up into something bigger than it is. It's more of a prank than a real threat to the guy. He's probably going to see the jar. Even if he doesn't, the odds of him being allergic are very, very low. Bees get stuck in cars all the time without everybody in the car dying.”

“Jake's allergic,” Elena said.

“Well, it's not Jake's car, is it? I mean, you would have noticed if you were putting bees in the Rumbler.”

“That's true. And as far as I know, Jake's not in the Cuban mob.”

“Don't worry about it. Elena? Really. Let's call it a learning experience.”

A learning experience. Elena liked that idea, even if she wasn't sure she could bring herself to be as cavalier as Nina was urging her to be.

“I can try,” she said.

Jake didn't hear
back from Elena until sixth period, when his phone buzzed loudly enough to provoke a sharp, disapproving look from Mr. Lester.

“NOW A GOOD TIME? LOTS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT, TOO!”

Maneuvering the phone into the hollow metal tray under the desk, Jake tried to be as inconspicuous as he could while he picked out his response.

“STUCK IN CALCULUS,”
he said.
“AFTER SCHOOL?”

He glanced toward the front of the room, where Mr. Lester was writing an equation on the board with his back turned. He was known around campus as being cranky but absentminded, and Jake was glad this was turning out to be true. Still, he held the phone in his
hand under the desk so that it wouldn't clatter again when Elena's response came in.

“HAVE TO RUN AFTER SCHOOL. HELPING NINA MOVE BACK HOME.”

Jake typed quickly.
“YOU HAVE YOUR DAD'S CAR?”

“YEAH.”

“WALK YOU TO THE PARKING LOT?”

“SURE! MEET YOU IN THE QUAD.”

“Are you done, Mr. Gordon?”

Lester was glaring at him, arms crossed, a grimace pulling his walrus mustache down to his chin. Jake could feel everyone in the classroom turning to look at him. He heard snickers from the back of the room.

“Yeah,” Jake said, turning beet red. “I'm done.” Then, for good measure, he added, “Sorry.”

He slipped his phone into the pocket of his jeans and sat up straighter in his seat, trying to look like he was paying serious attention.

He wasn't, of course. He was tangled in his thoughts. Now that he and Elena had made a date, he had to make up his mind about whether or not to go through with telling her what he'd learned about Harlow. He'd flip-flopped five times already today, and he could feel his mind changing again now. He had to tell her. It would be dishonest, unfair, patronizing of him not to.