Pushing Perfect(48)

Now for the hard part: setting up the camera. “Think of it as a replacement for your eye,” Alex had said. “Make sure you’ve got a clear line of sight.” I used my finger to trace a line between my eye and the book as I walked back and forth, searching for a good spot. The key was to get a good angle so we could see the face of the person who picked up the pills.

Finally, I found a spot on the adjacent wall that had a bunch of posters tacked up already. The camera wasn’t so conspicuous when I stuck it in between a couple of different flyers, and it lined up perfectly, as far as I could tell. I made sure it was securely fixed there, pushing on its sides to test that it was really stuck.

And then I ducked out of the library as fast as I could.

Once school was over, Alex, Raj, and I piled into my car and headed back to her house. Having the two of them in my car was starting to feel comfortable; the front seat was already moved far back to accommodate Raj’s long legs, and Alex tapped my shoulder from the backseat in what had quickly become the signal for me to turn the radio on to the indie station she liked.

“Any problems with the camera?” she asked.

“Nope. I think I found a good spot.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Raj said.

We stopped at the store to pick up junk food for our afternoon of waiting, since we had no idea when the person would come get the pills, or even if it would happen today. Armed with snacks, we settled into Alex’s lair while she set up the feed on her computer. The camera worked amazingly well—the video quality was a little fuzzy, but I’d picked a good location, and we had a clear view of not just the bookshelf itself but the whole row, so we could see when people walked by even if they weren’t the people we were looking for. Alex had set it to record, too, so the first thing we did was to rewind back to right after I’d set it up, just in case.

We scanned through the hour and a half of video that had accumulated since I’d dropped the camera, but no one had come. No one had even walked through the stacks. “This does give some context for why I never have to wait for any of the books I want,” Raj said. “One would have thought a school of this quality would have some students interested in classic literature.” He shook his head in feigned despair, his dark hair flopping over his eyes. I was tempted to brush it back, but I didn’t want to start something I wasn’t prepared to follow through. And right now, all I could think about was Blocked Sender. Well, almost all.

“Watch the judgment there,” Alex said. “Just because you’re British doesn’t automatically make you classy.”

“Compared to you lot? Please.”

“You’re responsible for tabloids and at least half of the boy bands.”

“That’s true,” Raj admitted. “But we’re much better at chocolate. Right, Kara?”

“Don’t bring me into this,” I said. I didn’t want to fight with friends even over little stupid things. You never knew when those small arguments could turn into bigger problems before you’d realized it was happening.

We sat in silence for a while, watching the video.

Until.

“Check it out.” I pointed to the screen, where a dark figure had entered the frame. The person was wearing all black clothes and a black baseball hat, kind of like the outfit I’d worn to Walmart. It wasn’t clear right away whether it was a boy or a girl, let alone who the person actually was. The figure walked right up to Dickens and, head still bowed, pulled back the copy of Edwin Drood, and reached for the pills.

“This is a disaster,” I said. “All this work and we’re not going to be able to tell who it is.”

“Patience,” Alex said. “This is definitely someone who’s trying to be stealthy, but they don’t seem to know there’s a camera—they’re not avoiding it specifically. We just need to wait.”

I wasn’t convinced, but I kept watching anyway. The person looked at the bottle of pills, then opened it and took one out to inspect it. The person put the pill back and replaced the lid on the bottle, then straightened up. We couldn’t see the whole face, but we could see the bottom half, and a slight smile.

“Well, that’s not going to be enough,” Raj said.

“Actually,” I said, my voice cracking, “it is.”

I knew that face.

“That’s Isabel,” I said.

“The one who’s in all the plays with Justin?” Alex asked.

“That’s the one.”

“She was on your list.”

“What list?” Raj asked.

“Early on, we tried thinking about who might be involved,” I said.

“How did you come up with her?”

“We used to be friends. A while back.”

Alex started singing the Veronica Mars theme, that old Dandy Warhols song.

“Now is not the time, Alex,” Raj said.

She stopped singing. “She knows Justin. There could be a connection there.”

“Like they could be Blocked Sender together?” I asked. “I thought we wrote him off.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t have. They could be working as a team. We’ve been assuming this was one person, but maybe it isn’t.”

“Do you really think Justin would do that? To you, especially?” Raj asked.