Pushing Perfect(67)

Math class was at least as awful as I’d imagined it would be. At first I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. I kept my head down, staring at my desk, sure that if I made eye contact with Ms. Davenport, she’d instantly know that I knew, and something terrible would happen. I couldn’t even imagine what, but it would be bad.

But today’s class was all about prepping for winter finals, and Ms. Davenport spent most of the time writing equations on the board, equations I had to look up to see so I could write them down in my notebook. She wasn’t paying any attention to me, which meant I could pay attention to her.

She wore her usual funky outfit, a vintage checkered dress with red cowboy boots that matched her lipstick, and I thought about how hard she tried to act young and cool like a teenager, even though as I studied her face more carefully than I ever had, I could see the beginnings of lines forming. She wasn’t quite as young as I’d always assumed she was, and now her outfit looked more like a costume. Or camouflage. She was dressed to attract the outsiders, the kids with problems, the ones who were most likely to be doing things they didn’t want other people to know about.

I’d thought she was hip; now I wondered if she was just manipulative. She used her look and her position to convince kids like me she was someone we could trust, and then took that knowledge and destroyed us with it. I got angrier and angrier as I thought about what a betrayal that was. I wanted to hurt her as bad as she was hurting me. I just didn’t know how.

I glanced over at Alex, sitting on the other side of the room. She, too, was staring at the board and frowning, like I knew I was. I bet she was thinking some of the same things, though she and Ms. Davenport didn’t have the same relationship we did. She felt betrayed too, though not on the same level.

It’s not like we both hadn’t been hurt by people before; despite the fact that what had happened with Becca and Isabel was mostly my fault, I still wished things had gone differently, that they’d somehow understood me better and stuck around even as I’d made things difficult. And Alex had to deal with Justin ditching her for a guy, and then sharing all her secrets with him, even if he hadn’t known how badly that would turn out.

But neither of those things was nearly as horrible as what was happening now.

“Ugh, the whole class I just wanted to go up and punch her in her stupid face,” Alex said after class, when we were a safe distance away.

“I know. I was like two seconds from going to the bathroom and never coming back.”

“It’s killing me to just sit here and do nothing,” she said.

“There has to be more we can do,” I said. “You know, we haven’t actually researched her yet. Maybe we can find some dirt.”

“Totally,” Alex said. “There must be something we can use. Then we can get some leverage.”

“That would be helpful.” I still wasn’t convinced going to the police was a bad idea, but if we could make this go away quietly, everyone would be happy.

“We should go now,” she said, pausing outside the door to our econ class.

“Now? We have two more classes left.”

“So we’ll ditch,” she said, like it was nothing.

But to me, it wasn’t nothing. I’d never skipped a class before. My attendance record was nearly flawless. But what was the worst that could happen? Absences didn’t affect grades until you’d been out a bunch of times, and since I’d never skipped before, no one would assume I was skipping now. I could tell my teachers tomorrow that I’d gotten sick and gone home, and they would believe me. Maybe they wouldn’t even ask for a note. The fact that I’d been honest before would make me a better liar now.

“I’m in,” I said.

We went to Alex’s house and got ourselves set up, her on the big computer screens, me on my laptop. Her room now felt as much like a second home to me as Becca’s had; I no longer superimposed Becca’s love seat and chairs into Alex’s workspace every time I came over. Being around Alex, I realized, made me miss Becca less. She wasn’t a replacement; it was more that I related to what Alex had said about thinking it was enough to have Justin as her only friend. It didn’t have to be that way. I’d been holding back with Alex as if us being truly close was some kind of betrayal of Becca, but there was no need to. That wasn’t how it worked.

“Where should we start?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said. “My brain is so full of rage I can’t think. You’re going to have to do the thinking for both of us.”

I was mad too, but it was making me feel focused. Maybe I didn’t need Novalert to get things done; maybe I just needed blind fury. “Well, I’ve got one idea—remember how Mark said that Ms. Davenport went through a divorce and then had to pay for her grandmother’s nursing home and mortgage? I think Mrs. Sinclair is her grandmother. Can you get into some legal databases and find out more about the lawsuit? And the divorce?”

“Definitely,” she said.

“Great. I’ll do the social media thing again and see if there’s anything there.”

“Bonus points for whoever finds the name of her ex first?”

“Yes!” A contest! I loved contests. I had the easier job, I was sure, so this one I could win. I started with Google just to see what I could come up with and found that Ms. Davenport was all over social media; she had accounts on all the major sites. But I quickly found that her privacy settings were locked down, and I could access almost nothing but the occasional photo.