The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You (31 page)

So far, I'd put up with being grounded with mute vexation. I'd always hated TV shows where surly teens went around slamming doors and screaming,
“I hate you!!!”
As much as the idea of slamming a door was becoming more seductive, I bit back the impulse. I stood patiently next to the front door while my dad gathered all his papers together in the morning. I waited alone at the edge of the parking lot after school until it was time for Mom to come fetch me. I didn't argue about what was on the radio or what they wanted to watch on TV after dinner.

I went to scho
ol. I ate lunch with Mary-Anne. I accepted the notes that Ben kicked under my desk in American Immigrant or slipped into my messenger bag as we passed in the halls. I came home and polished the final essays I'd started weeks ago and glanced at the review sheets that my teachers had passed out.

It'd only been two days, but I felt like my vocal cords were going to atrophy.

Not talking to Meg and Harper was hellish. I'd taken to sitting in the empty American Immigrant classroom before the bell rang rather than face the empty planter box at the front of the school. Meg had spent a day in the cafeteria with Peter, but then had disappeared into the library, probably to keep ignoring her homework in favor of her ongoing research into why Harper and Cornell had broken up.

It wasn't that Meg and I had never fought before. There'd been plenty of flare-ups in our group over the years. I'd spilled soda on her first copy of
The Fountainhead
and she'd given me the silent treatment until I'd ordered her an even fancier copy off the Internet. When we were freshmen, she'd told me I was too pudgy to wear Harper's bikini—which had been true, but we'd screamed at each other about it anyway.

This was new. This was a fight without Harper. Harper was always the deciding vote. Even if she hadn't been locked up in her fortress of solitude, she couldn't possibly have refereed an argument based on her.

All I could do was try to clear her name. My parents and Meg and Peter and Cornell and everything else could wait.

I turned up my TV. If my parents listened outside the door, they would hear the soundtrack to
Battlestar Galactica
and assume I'd fallen asleep while marathoning again.

There was nothing glamorous about searching through the thousands of IP addresses that had cleared Jack Donnelly's expulsion. From what I could tell, Dr. Mendoza had given Jack access to all the tracks of the senior homework portal. Every login, every piece of homework submitted, every email sent and where it went, all time stamped. There were no names attached, just line after line of student ID numbers and IP addresses.

Jack really did deserve all the extra credit for finding anything at all in the slurry. My eyes started to water almost instantly as I scrolled through page after page. I found my own student ID number and cross-referenced every email I'd sent since September. With only one class together, Harper and I hadn't used our school accounts for much this year.

I grabbed a notebook and started writing down student ID numbers. The Fake Harper had done a lot of damage. They would log in at one address and then submit an assignment in another immediately after. That would account for all of the plagiarism accusations. It wasn't clean work, but it was effective. The combination of school computers, home computers, and people checking their email from their phones meant that everyone's account was cluttered with different codes. The Fake Harper could have been using multiple IP addresses without anyone ever noticing.

I went back to my own account and checked the dates of each email I'd had with Cornell, Peter, and Meg. I fell into an easy patter, finding the student number of one of my friends, then tracing it in the list. Meg routinely submitted her homework from one address—the computer in her bedroom—and checked her email from another—her phone. Peter was the same. Cornell's account had the occasional blip address, but when I checked them, they appeared in multiple accounts. That had to be the school computers. And then there were the logins that the Fake Harper had left before the website crashed.

I sat back. Jack might have been able to delete any code that would have implicated himself or Peter, but he had no reason to cover for Meg and Cornell. Most of the Fake Harper's time stamps were in the middle of the night, so that ruled out anyone using Real Harper's computer to do the dirty work.

Except for Real Harper.

No. I couldn't go back down that road. I didn't care what Meg had said about Harper not denying Mendoza's accusations. I knew that she couldn't be responsible for this chaos.

My cursor hovered on the screen, waiting to be directed to another student ID number. There was only one other person I emailed with regularly. Seeing the numbers, it was impossible to ignore. It was an almost daily barrage, one IP address on a loop.

I'd already accused everyone else that I cared about. If I didn't find anything, I'd never have to tell Ben that I'd searched his account.

Don't let me down now, hobo clown
.

I typed in his ID number and picked up my pencil, tapping it against my notebook as I ticked through his logins. There was a home account and his cell phone, just like Meg and Peter. In September, he'd written emails to Peter and Cornell semiregularly. He got an email every Tuesday an hour after the student council meeting—Mary-Anne sending the secretary's notes. I quickly scanned her account. No sign of the Fake Harper. It was odd to be relieved by that. I'd never thought there'd be a day when I was comforted by Mary-Anne's innocence.

I scooted my chair closer to the screen. The last week of September, there was a random IP address logged in to Ben's account. That could have been anomaly. But then the Fake Harper started logging into his account. It never submitted homework. It never wrote an email. It just logged in and logged out. Over and over again. Sometimes it happened to overlap with Ben submitting something to the homework portal from his own IP address. Sometimes it showed up early in the morning or in the middle of the night. On weekends. On holidays.

I pulled up the calendar on my computer. The Fake Harper had accessed Ben's account on Wednesday afternoons when I knew he'd been at Busby and Tuesdays when he was at student council meetings. It'd logged in the night of the winter ball when we'd been at the park.

Fake Harper was spying on Ben West.

*   *   *

Dad turned on his blinker a split second before he swerved into the next lane. This was why I'd never learned to drive. I couldn't risk letting my father pass on his stunt-driving gene.

I closed my eyes and listened to the squeal of the windshield wipers. I wasn't positive that I'd managed to sleep at all. There hadn't seemed to be any reprieve from my own thoughts after I'd climbed into bed.

Whoever framed Harper was spying on Ben. They hadn't touched me and had only accessed Cornell's account twice.

This had to be what Harper meant when she'd said that even she'd believed she was guilty when Mendoza had shown her the code. The first, second, and fourth people in the ranking had been tampered with. Cornell's grades had been shifted. Harper's IP address was used. Ben was being watched. And my account was clean.

“I talked to Greg last night,” Dad said, breaking into my thoughts.

I opened my eyes. Ahead of us, there were watery smears of red neon brake lights. I swallowed as we came to a short stop behind a station wagon.

“I know that you think that your mom and I have been too hard on you this week,” Dad continued. He stretched in his seat as though he could spot the cause of the traffic. I kept my mouth shut rather than explain that the cause was the water pelting the ground. Sane people always drove slower in the rain. “And we appreciate you being a good sport about the whole thing. I think you took it better than either of us.”

He chuckled and half-looked at me. I lifted an eyebrow at him and turned back to the road. It was a bad idea to let him make eye contact when he was behind the wheel. He got too intent on it and forgot that there was a world of metal on the other side of the window.

“We can't stop Greg from doing what he thinks is best for Harper,” he said. His sigh fogged the windshield. He wiped it away idly as I reached down and turned on the defroster. “He says that she's been studying for her interview all week and that she's in a very good position to get placed at Marist.”

I went rigid in my seat. Today was the day of Harper's interview. I wondered what else I'd missed since both of our groundings had gone into effect. Had she read anything other than the Bible this week? Had her dad realized that it was utterly impractical to live in a house without Internet access?

“It took some convincing,” Dad said, unable to stop himself from smiling. “A lot of convincing. You know how hard it is to deal with Greg when he thinks he's right about something. I swear, he's got to be a Vulcan. You have always said that Harper reminds you of a blond Spock—”

“What's your point?”

“Greg said that Harper's interview is at two, so she should be out in time to come get you from school.”

I forgot to watch the road. I twisted against my seat belt to face him. “I-I get to see her? For how long?”

“I couldn't get her out of her curfew. She turns into a pumpkin at eight o'clock on the dot. That should be enough time to make a trip to the comic book store and come back to our house for some quality time, right?” He flashed me a smile before sobering and remembering to drive. “You still can't gallivant, but I hate seeing you this sad, hon. Open the glove compartment.”

The glove compartment door unlatched easily. It fell open, displaying a mass of old bills and insurance cards. My cell phone sat on top of the pile. I reached for it, not quite believing that it was there. I knew it was ten dollars' worth of plastic and computer chips put together by Chinese factory workers under terrible conditions and sold to my parents at a ridiculous markup. I knew that Meg's dad had published multiple articles about our generation being too dependent on technology and how it was rotting our developing brains.

But I'd never been happier to see its morally questionable, fingerprint-smeared screen.

“You need some time to decompress with your friends,” Dad said, watching as I turned the phone on. It had a full charge. “We can even order you guys some Indian food. Tikka masala for Harper and extra samosas for Meg, right?”

The phone trilled and buzzed in my hand as a week's worth of texts came pouring in. Meg telling me about Cornell leaving the student council. Ben laughing about us getting kicked out of the study room at the public library. And one from ten minutes ago, from Harper.

I can't wait to see you guys this afternoon. Slurpees and Busby? We can bring a tarp to the park and make a waterproof fort?

I could feel the alternate universe I'd been living in wink out of existence. The traffic started moving again. Time started moving again. There was hope. There was a chance to make everything right.

And then I remembered that I hadn't spoken to any of our friends all week. Harper was expecting both me and Meg to celebrate the limited return of her freedom. Maybe she'd want to see Peter and Ben. Maybe she'd want to talk to Cornell.

How could I tell her that, in the span of a week, the group had torn itself apart?

How could I tell her that it was mostly my fault?

 

[7:22 AM]

Me

It's Trixie. I need your help.

[7:24 AM]

Unknown Number

How did you get my number?

[7:25 AM]

Me

Mary-Anne.

[7:27 AM]

Unknown Number

Ah. What do you need help with?

[7:29 AM]

Me

Can you get everyone to the library at lunch?

[7:30 AM]

Unknown Number

Everyone meaning your friends?

[7:32 AM]

Me

They like you more than me right now. I have faith in your evil twin powers.

[7:34 AM]

Unknown Number

You must be desperate.

 

27

Every table in
the library was piled high with textbooks and laptops. The aisles were congested with people muttering reference numbers and trying to look things up on their phones without being caught by the roaming librarian.

I took the long way around the bookcases, silently cursing the Mess for not installing brighter lights. As I'd expected, the middle of the six hundred section was the aisle that finals forgot. I took a seat on the floor and wiped my hands against the carpet. I tipped my head back, reading the upside-down titles above me.

“Why animal husbandry?”

I jumped and grabbed onto the closest shelf to keep from face-planting into the carpet. Jack put his hands up in surrender as he walked toward me. He wore a plain black sweatshirt over his uniform. He considered me for a second before slipping the hood off his head.

“Good God, Donnelly,” I breathed, clutching my chest as my heart slammed against my ribs. “This whole creeping-in-the-shadows thing has to stop.” I peered around his legs, but there was nothing behind him except for more books and geometric-patterned carpet. “Where's everyone else?”

“I outsourced the job. It turns out that your friends don't actually like me more than you.” He flopped down across from me. “So, why did you choose the animal husbandry section?”

“Because there aren't any classes on it. Urban school for geniuses; not a lot of interest in sheep.” Not that you could tell from all the literature surrounding us. The Mess's generous benefactors must have been really dedicated to the idea of domesticated animals. “Aren't you curious about why I called a meeting?”

“Not particularly.” He propped his elbow up on the nearest shelf, shoving a row of books back. “I figured you either wanted to talk about this Harper thing some more or gloat about being the new valedictorian. Either way, it doesn't really concern me.”