The Fruit of My Lipstick (19 page)

The headmistress appeared in the doorway and they locked eyes. “Miss Aragon? Is there a problem?”

“I’d say so.” She tossed her curly hair. “Everyone thinks I’m the one selling the exam answers. Even my friends have put me on trial and decided I’m guilty.”

“And are you?” the headmistress asked coolly.

“Does it matter?” Carly walked to the door. “I’ll be in your office, ma’am.” And she walked out the doors with all the dignity of Anne Boleyn going to the scaffold.

VTalbot
      Test.

Source10
   What?

VTalbot
      OMG. I knew it wasn’t you.

Source10
   How?

VTalbot
      Uh . . . because I don’t flirt with girls?

Source10
   Glad to hear it.

VTalbot
      What’s going to happen to her?

Source10
    Does it matter? They’ve got what they want, and we can get on with it.

VTalbot
      Do I still get my Math exam?

Source10
   You give me what I need, I give you what you need.

VTalbot
      You don’t really need the money, do you?

Source10
   Who’s talking about money?

INSTEAD OF the suffocating mood lifting now that the administration had the guilty party, as the week wore on it just got worse. Or maybe it just seemed that way because of the contrast offered by people like Rory, Vanessa, Emily, and even DeLayne. They went around exchanging big grins for no reason at all.

“It’s like they all won the lottery,” Lissa muttered to me on Monday morning, as we gathered our stuff after breakfast in preparation for the first of the week’s load of exams. For me, it was Math. For Lissa, Bio, and for Shani, History. “When those guys are happy, it creeps me out.”

No kidding.

“This is so wrong,” I said for about the fortieth time as I made sure I had enough Scantron forms in my backpack. “I know it’s not her. I just know it.”

“That ‘confession’ was totally bogus.”

“They have to know that by now,” Shani agreed. “Do you have an extra one of those?”

I handed her a form. “Has anybody seen her?”

“I heard she got suspended,” Shani said, her mouth a thin line.

“Not expelled?”

She lifted her shoulders. “No proof. So they suspended her until they can find some, I guess.”

“Again with the wrongness,” Lissa said. “How’s she going to take her exams?”

Good question. So maybe the junior class wouldn’t fail, but Carly sure would. “This is all my fault,” I moaned as we headed down the corridor. “If I’d just kept my mouth shut, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“I don’t think it was you,” Shani said, the beads on the ends of her braids clicking restlessly. “I heard it in the halls at least the day before.”

“But she’s so defenseless. I’m louder than both of you combined. I should have defended her when Jake and those guys got on her case.”

Since they’d both been listening to variations of this all weekend, there wasn’t much they could say. “Remember the verse you found the other day?” Lissa reminded me. “The truth shall set you free. And it’ll set Carly free, too.”

That was about all I had to go on—the promise in that verse. I don’t know what had made all my suspicions of her fall away. Maybe the fact that she’d been so guilt-free that night after prayer circle. Or the fact that, just before she’d gotten all snotty with Ms. Curzon, the hurt and shock were plain on her face. This didn’t wash with the administration, of course, but it had turned my thinking around. And then finding that verse the other morning . . . well, that did it for me.

Which didn’t help us now, on our way to write exams that might get thrown in the trash on Friday.

Shani found me in the dining room at lunch, her eyes wide with suppressed excitement.

“What? Is it Carly?”

“It’s not Carly,” she whispered, dumping her books on the table and pulling a chair up close. “Not directly, anyway. The profs are running the Scantrons right away instead of waiting until spring break to do it and post grades. And guess what?”

“I got a B on the Math test?” My heart sank.

“I don’t know what you got. I’m sure your prof will tell you. But I heard Callum McCloud talking to Rory and Emily, and Rory said his tutor was really kicking—he got a ninety-two on his!”

“That’s impossible.” My voice went flat while my brain whirled with enough exclamation points to fill a book.

“Duh. But don’t you see? It means Carly couldn’t have done it.”

“She could have set it up when she was here. Like a last good-bye.” Why was I saying this? I didn’t even believe it.

Shani shook her head impatiently. “Milsom told us all the profs weren’t going to use the tests they always use anymore. They all juggled the answers around—days after Carly was suspended.”

I stared at her. “So someone hacked the mainframe, like, on the weekend?”

She nodded.

I let out a long breath. “We are
so
in trouble now.”

Chapter 18

I
F IT WASN’T CARLY
, then who was it?

My friends were as clueless as I was, and none of us were exactly
CSI
material. I hadn’t seen Lucas over the weekend, mostly because he was not only studying for finals but also doing extra work prepping for the Olympiad.

If he got into the top five in the country, he’d be off to Mexico this summer. I wondered if Dad would let me go if I could convince him it was science-related. I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than being in the audience when the U.S. team took the gold medal.

But I wouldn’t be going anywhere unless we found the exam fraudster. I’d be in summer school, broiling in my own humiliation.

Not going to happen. Nuh-uh.

After classes that day, I sent Lucas a text.

GChang
      Where RU?

LHayes
      Library. Table behind astro books.

Figured.

Sure enough, I found him with books spread all over one of the study tables that were interspersed between the stacks. Away at the back, he’d have a little quiet.

“Hiding from your fan club?” I slid into a chair on his left, careful not to disturb the blizzard of papers around him.

He snorted. “I tried staying in the room, but Travis just kept letting people in. I don’t think he gets how important this is.” Clutching a bunch of his hair in each hand, he hung over the sheet in front of him. “Or how difficult.”

“What is it?” I leaned over to look.

“It’s a question from last year’s exam and I can’t get it. It’s driving me nuts.”

I read it rapidly.

An otherwise uniform disk of radius R has a circular hole of radius R/2 cut out so that the hole touches both the center and the edge of the disk. The disk has a mass M after the hole is cut out. The disk is placed above a wheel so that when the lower wheel rotates, the disk will rotate with a constant angular velocity. The disk is constrained so that it can only move in the up and down direction or rotate freely. If the angular velocity of the disk exceeds a certain value (Ω) the disk will bounce up and down on the lower wheel. Find the total kinetic energy of the disk when the angular velocity is Ω. Express your answer in terms of M, R, and G (the acceleration due to gravity on the earth’s surface) but not in terms of Ω.

Guhhhhh
. I mean, I’m no dunce in the science department, but face it, when it comes to physics, he’s like an Olympic gymnast doing backflips on the balance beam while I’m still trying to find the handle on the gym door. But at the same time, I was his girlfriend. It was my job to try to help. I focused on the problem. “Let me see your work.”

He pushed the sheet over. Equations marched down the middle of it and then ended in a tangle and a bunch of irritated question marks. “I’m taking a break. Want to get a soda?”

“Just a sec.” Something caught my eye. This was math, and I was good at math. Okay, that looked reasonable. So did that. But . . . hmm. If you replaced M with R there, then that would change this and this and—

I put my finger on one of the equations. “Here. I think you reversed your variables. Try it with M there instead of R.”

He shook his head. “Come on, Gillian. This is advanced stuff, and you haven’t even had Physics yet.”

“No, seriously. I don’t know as much as you, but math is logic. And logically it makes sense to swap them.”

“Oh, for—” With a sharp sigh of impatience, he pulled a clean sheet toward him. His pen flew as he worked the equation, all the way to the bottom.

And there was the answer: (13/8)MGR.

I grinned with delight. “There! Now let’s go get that soda.”

He tossed the pen on the table, where it bounced off and landed on a computer science book. It wasn’t until we got to the soda machine in the cubbyhole under the stairs that I realized he was annoyed.

Really annoyed.

About what, I had no clue. Maybe the best thing would be to share some news. Get him thinking about something else— applying his formidable brain to the problem that plagued all of us.

“So did you hear the news?” I began.

“What now? R instead of M?”

“No, silly.” I pretended he’d made a joke. “They’ll probably de-suspend Carly now. Apparently our exam answer guy is still at large. The profs juggled the answers and Rory Stapleton still got a 92 on his Math final this morning.”

“What does that prove?”

“That Carly couldn’t have done it, obviously. The fraudster had to have gotten ahold of the tests sometime over the weekend, but she’d already been gone since last Wednesday.”

“Obviously. Gee, Gillian, I don’t see why you don’t find the person yourself. You’re so-o-o smart.”

I drew back a little, the soda icy in my hand. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing that you can’t fix. Obviously.”

Okay, that sneering tone was starting to hurt. “Is this about that problem? I was only trying to help.”

“Yeah, I know, but did you have to be quite so smug about it? Do you have any idea how much pressure I’m under?”

Smug?
“Yeah, of course, but—”

“No, you don’t. You can’t. In fact, you don’t know anything about what I’m going through right now.”

I put a hand on his arm. “I know. I know. It must be awful. Come on, let’s go back to the library and you can tell me how to help you the most, okay?”

He calmed down a little, and chewed on his lower lip. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I think I’m going nuts.”

“I can imagine.” Time to change the subject. “So, here’s a question. How can we do some damage control with Carly?”

A puzzled glance. “I don’t know. Can’t we talk about something else?”

“No, we need to do something. I mean, we were some of the ones spreading her name around, so it’s probably up to us to—”

“What?”

“I said, after you told me, we were spreading the rumor about her as much as anyone—”

“I heard you. What I don’t get is how you could say I was in on it.”

Now it was my turn to stare, puzzled. “But you said yourself that she was the one doing it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you did.” I pointed back down the corridor toward the library. “We were standing in the stacks during detention, and you said—”

“That’s enough!” He threw up his arms, and I stumbled backward again, just like I had in his dad’s apartment. This time, thank goodness, there was nothing on the floor. Instead, I banged up against the soda machine, making everything inside it rattle and clink.

“What is it with you, Gillian? Are you some kind of control freak? You always have to be right and everyone else is wrong?”

“Of course n—”

“Would you listen for once? I said I’d heard it might be someone with a name like an element from the periodic table. How did you get from something as vague as that to accusing Carly?”

“I—”

“Because you jumped to conclusions. And that makes you a lousy scientist,
doesn’t
it?”

On
doesn’t
, he pushed me—a ten-finger chest push that took me by surprise and threw me off balance again. I staggered back into the soda machine a second time and I couldn’t help it—tears spurted from my eyes both from landing on its sharp metal corner, and from sheer emotion.

Deep in my chest, it felt like my heart was tearing in half. How could the boy who’d kissed me on the side of a mountain do this? How could that easy grin turn into—into—

“I’m sick of you!” He got in my face, and I’m ashamed to admit I scrunched up against the soda machine and brought both arms up to defend my chest. “It’s always about you, isn’t it? I’m just arm candy to you. Just a white boyfriend you can parade in front of your Asian friends and say, Look what I got, like I’m some kind of catch.”

Since this had never once occurred to me, I just stared at him, my mouth opening and closing as I tried to drag breath into my lungs.

“Honey, you ain’t looking like much of a catch to me.”

I gasped, and Lucas spun around.

Shani stood in the corridor, Carly beside her holding a duffel bag and a toile hatbox. Hipshot, a thumb hooked in the front pocket of her cargo pants, Shani stared Lucas down. Disdain curled her generous mouth.

“You make a habit of picking on people who are smaller than you?”

“Butt out,” he snarled.

She crossed her arms and settled back on the other foot, clad in an orange D&G stiletto pump. “Not ’til Gillian comes out of there, away from your sorry a—self.”

“Gillian’s not going anywhere.”

Carly’s eyes had gone hard and flat. “Oh, yes, she is.” She ducked under the arm he had stretched out like a barrier across the cubbyhole’s opening and grabbed me. “Come on, Gillian. Here, take this hatbox.”

“We’re not finished.” His voice followed us up the stairs. I did my best not to break into a run, but all the same, his voice goosed me up a couple of steps double time.

“Sunshine,” Shani called down to him, “finished is exactly what you are. Once the word gets out, you won’t get a date from now ’til graduation.”