The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (28 page)

I had to find out who had plugged Harper's IP address into that tracking software.

“Where have you been?” Dad asked.

I unzipped my sweater and pried it off my arms. I blotted the sweat off my face with one of the sleeves before tossing it on top of my bag. “I texted you guys that I was going to the library after school.”

“After school,” Dad rumbled, gripping the arm of the couch. “Not in the middle of the day. I got a call at work that the nurse sent you home early with food poisoning. Your mother raced home to check on you.”

“Lo and behold,” Mom said unsteadily. “No Trixie. No bicycle. No returned phone calls.”

“I had my phone on silent,” I said, moving toward the kitchen. There had to be a granola bar or something to scavenge out of the pantry. “I was in the library. It's common courtesy.”

“Don't walk away when we are talking to you, Beatrice.”

My Mary Janes squeaked against the floor as I pivoted toward Mom's shout. I couldn't remember the last time either of them had raised their voice at me. They didn't even yell at Sherry.

“I'm sorry,” I said, carefully enunciating each word to cover for the lack of sincerity. “Next time, I will make sure that I check my phone consistently when I'm studying.”

“There won't be a next time,” Dad said. “You are not allowed to go gallivanting around town whenever you want.”

“What is on your neck?” Mom asked.

My hand itched, wanting to fly up and cover the side of my neck, even though I knew there wasn't anything there. I'd checked thoroughly in the bathroom at the coffee shop.

“I singed myself with a curling iron before winter ball. You guys took ten thousand pictures of me on Friday night. You can check the evidence.” I hooked my thumbs in the pockets of my khakis. “Can I go get a drink of water now? It's a long ride from the library and I'm tired.”

“Save it,” Dad said. “When we couldn't find you, we called the Royamas. Meg was honest with her parents. Sit down.”

Impotent rebellion welled up inside of me. I'd never refused a direct order from my parents before. There hadn't been many to disobey. Meg's dad had once told me that I had “pathologically permissive parents.” Despite the poppy alliteration, it hadn't been a compliment.

I sat delicately on the edge of the loveseat. If we were going to do this, I would face them like an adult, not a sulking child. And then I would go back to my bedroom and ask Meg why she'd tattled on me.

Tags jingling, Sherry padded in from the kitchen. He lay down on my feet and mockingly crunched on a dehydrated pig's ear. My stomach contracted. The Internet had been telling me for years that bacon was the perfect food. I'd never been curious about it before now.

“What were you thinking?” Mom asked, pulling my attention away from Sherry and his porcine treat. “Leaving campus in the middle of the day, riding across town—”

“My best friend got expelled. I needed to see her.”

Dad leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees. There was glitter on his knuckles. “We know that you're upset. But that's no reason to start shirking your responsibilities. This situation that Harper has put herself in is—”

“She didn't put herself in to anything!” I protested. “You know Harper. She wouldn't do something like this. Someone framed her.”

“Trixie,” Mom said. I recognized the bait and switch tone she used to trick toddlers into calming down before she stabbed them with a hypodermic needle. “It isn't unusual for children who've survived a traumatic loss to act out against their surviving parent. You know that Greg has been very hard on Harper over the years. If she thought that this was her only way out…”

“You're all still young,” Dad added, twiddling his thumbs. Years of teaching kindergarten meant that he couldn't help but give everything a bit of sign language.
This is the church, this is the steeple, open it up and see your parents' lack of faith in you.
“Your brains are still developing.”

“Don't try to tell me about how my brain is developing,” I snapped. “I took three years of advanced psychology and you majored in art history.”

Mom leapt to her feet, scaring Sherry, who dropped his pig's ear.

“Apologize. Now,” she demanded.

“No,” I said, nudging Sherry off my feet so I could stand, too. Why did the Mess even bother issuing the welcome packets every year if no one was going to read them? There was a whole section called
YOU AND YOUR GIFTED TEEN
that clearly outlined how to have a reasonable conversation without resorting to infantilizing. “I'm tired of this. You and Mr. Leonard and the Doctors Royama all sent your kids to the Messina. You wanted us to get the most out of our education and we got it. We've all worked so hard for so many years. And the first time that anything goes wrong, we're just kids. So, which is it? Are we geniuses who are allowed to interact with the adult world or are we children to be kept in our place?”

“No one is questioning your intellect,” Mom said curtly. “It's your choices that we're taking exception to.”

“I didn't get drunk or go swimming without a buddy,” I exclaimed. “I went to see Harper because she needed me. Because she's alone. When her mom was alone in the hospital, you went to see her, didn't you? You didn't say that she'd put herself into a coma. You went to hold her hand, even though she didn't even know you were there.” The color drained out of Mom's face, but I couldn't slow down now. Hunger and fury burned through the fog that had collected in my head. “Harper didn't ask me to go to her, but I went because that's what I needed to do. She didn't hack into anyone's account to spite her dad because that doesn't make any sense. Any one of us could just go to the public high school and test out.”

Then why hack into four accounts?
my brain asked.
Why frame Harper?

Mathematical reactions to a personal issue. It's not one or the other. It has to be statistically and emotionally reasonable.

“I'm sorry that I abused your trust,” I continued, keeping my feet planted and my head up. “I'm sorry that I was a jerk. But I won't apologize for trying to help Harper. She doesn't deserve having another person give up on her. Her dad locked her up. Her boyfriend dumped her. If it were me, wouldn't you want someone trying to find out who set me up? Nine people moved up in the top ten when Harper got expelled. I took her spot as salutatorian. If this is about statistics, then, logically, I would be the next target.”

My parents exchanged a glance. Mom sat down again and Sherry came sniffing around her slippers.

“You're suggesting there's a mass conspiracy at your school?” she asked scornfully.

I threw up my hands. “It's a school for geniuses. It only takes one Mess student to run a conspiracy.”

“You're tilting at windmills,” Dad said. “It's not that we don't understand that this is a difficult time for you. The Royamas said that Meg has been deeply affected, too. But you can't let one bad situation ruin your future.”

“Why not?” I asked. “One bad situation is ruining Harper's.”

He pretended not to hear me. “Your mother and I agreed that it would be best if you took a week or two to calm down. No distractions. No cell phone. You need to focus on your finals. Starting now.” He held out his hand. “Your phone will be returned to you at the beginning of winter break. We won't go digging through your search history. You can even keep your SIM card, if you're storing state secrets on it.”

I stared at his open palm. An errant piece of glitter winked at me. “You're not serious. You're mad that I didn't call you back, so you're going to take the one way I have to contact you?”

“You won't be needing it,” Dad said. “I will drop you off at school on my way to work and your mother will drive you home.”

The translation finally clicked into place.
Your mother and I agreed,
indicative past tense. A preordained statement. They'd sealed my fate over a bowl of cinnamon rice cereal before I'd even made it out of the library.

The phrase was strange as it built up on my tongue, like some long-dead language that I'd only ever heard rumors of.

“I'm grounded?”

 

This website has been flagged as ‘NOT SCHOOLWORK, TRIXIE'

Please enter administrative password for access.

 

Password incorrect.

Password incorrect.

Password incorrect.

An alert has been sent to your administrative email account.

 

“Go to bed, Trixie!”

 

25

“My parents installed
a firewall,” I said, watching as my breath hung in the fog. “I can't even read my school email without one of them punching in a password. I could break through it, but that would just prove them right, wouldn't it?”

Meg shivered beside me. Her hair had lost some of its shine in the last twenty-four hours. It swung straight and loose in the frigid morning breeze.

“I knew something was wrong when I didn't hear from you,” she said, kicking her feet against the planter box. “I begged my parents not to say anything to yours, but they wouldn't listen. They're afraid that this is going to turn into some kind of collective hysteria.”

I hugged my jacket closer to my chest. “Like a
War of the Worlds
hysteria?”

“More like the Salem witch trials,” she said. “My mom made me read a bunch of articles on conversion disorder. She's afraid that our stress is going to start manifesting in physical symptoms.”

I snorted. “I'll be sure to let you know if I feel like I'm being pinched by a specter.”

“I'm really sorry. I know it's stupid.” She scuffed her heels against the planter again before hazarding a glance up at me. “Your parents didn't call Harper's dad, did they?”

“No.” After I'd surrendered my phone, my parents had tried to make small talk over bowls of crockpot curry, but it was all too little, too late. “They're pissed at me, but they're smart enough to know that Harper would be in way more trouble if her dad found out she'd had guests over.”

“That's something, at least. I couldn't stand the idea of us making things worse for her.”

Thinking of the fight with my parents, it dawned on me that I'd wanted to talk to Meg about more than ratting me out.

“Why haven't you ever tested out of high school?”

She blinked up at me. “Leave the Mess?”

“Yeah. Harper said that it was a useless holding pattern. Any one of us could take a proficiency test and go off to college.”

“I'd never want to leave you and Harper. I don't even like knowing that it's going to happen next fall.” Her face fell as she remembered that Harper was already gone. She turned to watch the line of people marching their way through the front gate. It was hard to discern one from the next from under the masses of knitwear that everyone was wrapped in.

“Did you get the suspect notes from your frosh before the firewall went up?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I bit my lip. It wasn't a lie, but it felt like one. I hadn't been able to access B's typed notes, but I did have the hard copy in my binder from my clandestine trip to the library. “I mean, he's not my frosh. He's Ben's frosh. But he actually made a really good point about how the ranking could work as a motive.”

I searched her face for signs of affectation or chagrin, but she only nodded. Her eyes went glassy as she looked over my shoulder. She sat up straight and waved her arms over her head and called, “Peter!”

Peter was marching across the grass toward us. The collar of his polo stuck out from the neck of a faded MIT sweatshirt. A black beanie was pulled down over his eyebrows. “What are you guys doing out here? It's freezing!”

“Trixie's grounded,” Meg said, sticking out her lower lip in a calculated pout. “We need to soak up all the quality time we can with her.”

I forced a smile. “Frostbite is the truest form of friendship.”

“If you say so,” Peter said. He clapped his hands and rubbed them as though hoping to spark a flame. “What'd you do to get grounded? Your parents seemed really cool when we saw them before winter ball.”

“It doesn't matter,” I said quickly, just in case Meg decided to announce that we'd ditched the day before. Rule breaking was not the way to Peter Donnelly's heart. “Hey, do you know if Jack kept a copy of the code he gave to Mendoza?”

Peter's beanie rose an inch up his forehead. “Probably. He had to submit a copy to Dr. Kapoor for his extra credit.”

“Do you think I could get a copy?” I asked. “Through my school email. I can't access my regular account until after finals.”

Peter looked from me to Meg and back again. “Why?”

These are your friends,
I thought. Peter and Meg were innocent until I proved them otherwise, which meant that I had to tell them exactly as much as I would have if I didn't know how much they'd gained from Harper getting expelled.

“Someone put Harper's IP address into that code,” I said. “I want to see if they left any bread crumbs behind that Jack might have missed.”

Peter huffed a laugh. It hung in the air and slid toward the front gate on the wind. “You think someone set Harper up to be expelled?”

I didn't like how jovial he sounded, but I held my face in a deadpan. “It's kind of convenient, isn't it? Jack was about to be expelled and then he happened to stumble onto the code that saved him?”

That wiped the laugh out of his voice. He tugged his beanie farther down his ears. “So, now, it's not just that you think that someone set up Harper. You think it was my brother?”