#scandal (24 page)

“No,” I say. “But maybe Clarice knows something.”

“Will she talk?” Franklin asks. “As I recall, your 420

interrogation didn’t go well.”

I scoop the photos back into the dossier. “I have pictures that place the president of Students Against Substance Abuse in a closet with the class pothead. I have a ten-minute slot at graduation with a projector and a captive audience. 420 might not care about his rep, but I bet Clarice does.”

Franklin shakes his head. “More graymail, Lucy?”

“Superlight gray,” I remind him.

“Right. In the meantime,” he says, “any leads on the Juicy page?”

All of us mumble and shrug.

“I’ll look into it,” Kiara says. “No guarantees, but if the page is public, there might be an electronic trail.” She turns 292

to Asher. “Request permission to access social networks for investigative purposes?”

“Permission granted,” he says.

“Permission to report findings to Lucy via secure e-mail alias, Code Name Hackalicious?”

“Permission granted,” Ash repeats. “Anything Lucy and the others need. Oh, one final matter of great importance.” He turns to Jayla with a serious glare. “What’s a helpless kid in a wheelchair gotta do to score a ride in that Porsche?” 293

HIGH SCHO OL, THE MO ON ll ANDING,

AND OTHER C ONSPIRACIES

MISS DEMEANOR

4,209 likes
C

1,097 talking about this

Thursday, May 8

The moment you’ve all been waiting for—since you forked over $100 of Daddy’s cash for a memento that will only torment you in the future as you drink your depression numb and complain loudly about how your life turned out and really, they should’ve voted you Most Likely to Do JACK SHIT, but that wasn’t a category on the list—has finally arrived.

294

YEARBOOK DAY!

There’s something magical about it, don’t you think?

And by magical, I mean . . . I’ve seen you people in real life, and your senior pictures aren’t quite as authentic as one might expect from the upstanding students of Lavender Oaks. Back me up, (e)VIL.

You kids know photo manipulation when you see it.

Poreless skin and ultrawhite teeth, shadowy footprint on the surface of the fake moon, could be a UFO, could be a reflection. Feel me?

Shit. I just remembered (e)VIll isn’t on Facebook.

All this carefully crafted conspiracy humor is lost to the ether. No matter. For the rest of you, speaking of manipulated photos, I’m compelled to report that the Prince Freckles photographer has yet to come forth.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for artificially curated infamy, people. What are you waiting for, an invitation?
Mi scandal es su scandal!

Don’t let me keep you, fishies. Run along to the cafeteria and collect your yearbooks, write those
keep in touch
es and
have a great summer
s until your hands cramp. In twenty years, when the delicate arts 295

of handwriting and eye contact are long forgotten and communication occurs solely via brainchip-to-brainchip text, you’ll have a lovely little keepsake of the good ol’

days. Or a doorstop for your space pod.

Either way, someone else’s money well spent.

xo ~
Ciao!
~ xo

Mis Demeanor

296

HAV E A GRE AT SUMMER! BON

VOYAGE! TRY NOT TO Sll EEP WITH

ANYONE Ell SE’S BOYFRIEND ON YOUR

WAY OUT!

I
’m sixty percent sure I’m ditching my yearbook anyway, but it’s already paid for, so I brave the hostile territory of the cafeteria and get in line for the pickup.

Right behind Olivia and the sprite sisters.

The line moves at an agonizing pace, and the girls keep whispering and turning around and laughing, making a big production of it just in case I miss the point.

“Yes,” I say. “You’re all quite cool, and I’m a horrible person. Moving on.”

“Did you hear something?” Quinn asks Olivia.

Olivia looks right at me, scans my zombie food pyramid 297

shirt. The scowl looks funny on her sweet face, like she borrowed it from one of her friends and it’s not quite her size. “Probably just the wind,” she says.

“Why does the wind advocate zombies eating people?” Haley says, absently tapping her phone screen with a seashell-pink fingernail. “The wind is so, like, morbid.” I’m all,
Whatevs. You three would be the
first
to get eaten if I
were in charge of feeding zombies,
but getting middle-schooled by Olivia and her friends stings. Kiara’s creeping on their Facebook profiles, but she’s yet to find any connections to the Juicy Lucy page owner. I haven’t cornered Clarice, either—she’s been too busy handing out flyers about staying sober at the upcoming graduation parties.
Avoid a
scandal,
the flyer urges.
Party with pride!

None of my allies are present either. Ironically, they’re suffering through their mandatory cyberbully training today. Zeff let me out of it since I’m doing the presentation with (e)VIL, but word on the streets is that Zeff’s trotting out her personal Facebook feed again, complete with babies and inappropriate messages from her mom.

“Oh my God, prom pics!” Haley squeals when she reaches the table. The yearbooks are stacked in a pyramid, and on the other side, there’s a file box with eight by tens of our unicorn pictures. In all the craziness that happened after prom, I forgot about them.

298

Say magic pixie dust. . . . cutest couple ever . . .

I wait for the girls to finish collecting their stuff before I hastily sign for my yearbook, locate my prom photo. Anxious, I slide it from the box.

There’s Cole, green eyes sparkling brighter than the unicorn’s golden horn. I’m laughing at something he said, and he’s got one arm over the horse’s back, a hand on my shoulder, and it’s almost the kind of picture you frame on the mantel to show your kids when you’re fifty.

Almost.

If not for the angry black letters scrawled across my face.

#SLUT.

Everything inside me shrivels and aches. I tear the defiled photo in half and drop it in the trash.

“Don’t throw it out,” Haley says from behind me. It’s obvious now that they knew, that they were watching me, waiting for the reaction. They must’ve planned it—probably got their hands on the photos earlier, left their mark. “Don’t you want something to remember him by when he dumps you?”

“Hot tip for you, Haley,” a voice says from behind us.

I’d recognize it anywhere. “Cole and I broke up
way
before prom,” Ellie says. “So I suggest you and your posse of haters recheck your facts and quit abusing Lucy. It’s none of your business, anyway.”

299

“It’s our business,” Haley says. “We have a right to know who’s skanking around, trying to steal our boyfriends.”

“None of you
have
boyfriends,” Ellie says, grabbing my hand. It’s so unexpected, I have to fight my instinct not to flinch. “We’re all women, aren’t we? We should be sticking up for our sisters, not perpetuating the patriarchy by tear-ing one another down.”

“
She’s
the one sticking things that don’t belong to her into places where they don’t belong,” Olivia says.

“What happened to you, Olivia?” Ellie says. “Lucy’s a person. She has a heart and a soul and she makes mistakes.

You want someone talking to your little sisters like this? Or your mothers? What is
wrong
with you guys?”

“We’re trying to help,” Quinn says. “You should be glad.”

Ellie snorts. “You’re trying to cause drama, and it’s pathetic. Show a little love and respect for your Lav-Oaks sisters. For yourselves.”

I turn to Ellie with grateful tears in my eyes.

She drops my hand as the girls slink away, waves the air like it was nothing special. Nothing she wouldn’t have done for anyone. “I can’t stand seeing girls hate on girls. There’s enough of that in the tabloids.”

There must be something meaningful and important to say, something to make her stay. . . .

300

We’re supposed to go to college soon. To buy coordinating bedspreads and posters. To pack up the car with snacks and playlists
and heart-shaped sunglasses in every color, Cali-bound, future-bound, best-friends-for-the-rest-of-forever-bound.

But all I come up with is, “Tell me about it,” and then she’s taking her yearbook from the stack, stuffing it into her backpack without asking me to sign it.

“See you around, Lucy.”

On the downside, by the end of the school day, my yearbook is MIA.

On the upside, I dug deep, and I’ve yet to unearth any regret about this. It was probably Quinn—she’s in my physics class and could’ve easy swiped it from my backpack when I was at the whiteboard calculating the velocity of an elephant sliding down a seesaw at a forty-five-degree angle.

Super
relevant.

The word of the day is . . .
meh?
By the time I stake out Clarice’s locker after last bell, I’m feeling more curious and less graymaily than I was yesterday.

“I need your help,” I say. “And before you refuse . . .

420. Photographic evidence.”

Beneath her sleek black bangs, Clarice’s eyes go wide, and an armload of flyers scatter at her feet.

“Relax.” I crouch down to help. “I just have some 301

questions. I’m trying to figure out what happened that night and who started the Facebook stuff. It wasn’t me.”

“It wasn’t
me
!”

“You might’ve seen something.”

She holds my gaze for a moment, considering.

“Photographic evidence,” I singsong. “Fairy wings, pot leaf hats . . . could be the biggest scandal to hit Lav-Oaks since the other biggest scandal.”

She blows a breath through her bangs. “Fine. Because I respect Cole and I’m a huge proponent of truth, I’ll talk to you. Confidentially?”

“Off the record,” I say, which basically means it’s not confidential but it’s not going viral, either.

We grab her stuff and duck into an empty classroom, shutting the door behind us.

Clarice confirms that she and 420 were making out in the closet when Cole and I came in—they heard us arguing about Ellie, but didn’t want to get busted. After we fell asleep, they saw their chance. 420 left first, and she followed a few minutes later.

“No one was around on the second floor,” she says.

“By that time, people were mostly chilled out in the living room and on the deck. Everyone was, like, wasted. Total
I
Love You, Man
stuff, stupid parlor tricks.”

“Olivia with the Mike’s Lemonade,” I say.

302

“Exactly. No, wait . . .” She shakes her head, presses her fingers to her temples. “That was later. I didn’t actually see it. When I was in the living room, she was sitting with her girlfriends, all smooshed together in the big recliner.

They were playing ‘I Never.’ A few minutes later, Farrah came in and told people that you and Cole were doing it upstairs.”

“Doing it? God. Was there a stampede?” I say. “I’m surprised there weren’t more pictures.”

She shrugs. “Most everyone was so blasted by then, it didn’t really register. Olivia and Quinn got up, just kind of giggling and whispering about it. But then Brian and Ryan got into a wrestling match on the deck with these two werewolves, and after that someone brought Prince Freckles inside, and . . . I don’t know. I think people kind of forgot about you and Cole. Seriously, it’s not like you really
were
doing it. You were asleep. It was just one of those ‘what happens at the party stays at party’ things.”

“Can you say for certain whether anyone went upstairs after that?”

Clarice nods. “A few people. Olivia for sure, and maybe Haley and Quinn. I don’t know them all that well, and everyone had wings, so . . . I just . . . People were kind of coming and going, and I found . . .” Clarice’s face goes from 303

pale to puce in a second flat. “I was doing something else.

In the mudroom.” She waits for me to get the drift.

Pause button on my own drama, because . . .

“You and 420, huh?” I say playfully. “He called you a Doritos kind of girl, right? In 420 lingo, that’s practically a sonnet.”

She blushes again. Despite our tense history, it’s hard not to like this smitten version of her. “He’s charming once you get to know him.”

“How will you cross the drug divide?” I ask. “I don’t mean that as an insult. But really. Clarice, you don’t even like my boots. You’re, like, hard-core straight-edge. And he’s . . . more of a squiggle.”

“Honestly? It’s an issue.” Clarice’s voice is thoughtful, but her smile doesn’t fade. “Look. I’m not one of those girls who thinks she can save the boy, or even make him change.

I’ve been trying for years with no results. The thing is, all that time I spent lecturing him and following him around, I got to know him—even more than I got to know John.

There’s a lot more to 420 than just . . . Well, for starters, he has an actual name. Lucas.”

Lucas.
Such a little thing, knowing a person’s name. A simple, everyday thing that changes my entire perspective.

Clarice smooths the back of her hair. “It’s not perfect, Lucy. But you can’t help who you love.”

304

I text Franklin to meet up at the lab for the Clarice update, but we cross paths in the hall at my locker.

With Olivia.

“Oh, there you are,” she says, all fake nice. She holds out a yearbook. “It was on the condiment table in the cafeteria.”

“I didn’t leave it in the cafeteria,” I say.

Her face pinches. “Well, that’s where I found it. Do you want it or not?”

Franklin’s giving her this look, like he’s trying to puz-zle something out, and when I reach for the yearbook, he makes a move to do the same. I’m faster though, and the second it’s in my hands, Olivia motors out of there.

“She’s up to something,” Franklin says. “Maybe you shouldn’t—”

“People
signed
this? For me?” Every page, every inch of white space is covered with signatures.

But they aren’t signatures. They’re messages. Identical.

Have a #JUICY summer!