Pushing Perfect(75)

“I know about the new wife, and the baby. And you of all people should know that I can do math. The timeline doesn’t quite add up, right? Is that what made you such a horrible person, or were you always like this?”

I was getting to her. “You have no idea what that kind of betrayal can do to someone,” she said. “And you have no idea what it’s like to be broke in Marbella, spending all your time dealing with lying, spoiled kids, or your senile grandmother with her nursing home that costs more than my apartment, and the mortgage she never paid off—”

“You mean the one you took out after you tricked her into signing her life over to you?” Alex asked. “That one?”

“You’ve been doing your homework,” she said, grudgingly impressed. “That lawsuit is a lie. But that doesn’t matter.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Raj said. “None of this excuses anything you’ve done.”

“We’ve got the pictures of you and Mark,” I said. “And we have Alex, who can explain to the police how you’re stashing the money. We have people who are willing to testify against you, and if we need to, we’ll find more.”

“Testify?”

“That’s what will happen if you don’t do what we tell you,” I said. “Meet our terms, or we go to the police.”

“You’d never do that,” she said. “I’d tell them everything. I’ve got enough dirt on Marbella High to decimate the whole school. The DA would make a deal with me in a heartbeat.”

“You really think so? You think it would look better for Marbella to go after its teenagers than to take down a teacher who blackmailed her own students?” Saying it out loud like that made me believe it more. Becca was right—we did have power.

And Ms. Davenport could feel it. “You’re bluffing,” she said, but she shivered. And it wasn’t very cold.

“We aren’t,” I said, trying to sound powerful still. We were kind of bluffing, though. I definitely was.

“You all have bright futures ahead, sunny skies all the way.” The bitterness was palpable. “I might be a bigger catch for the police, but my life is ruined already. You all have way more to lose than I do.”

There it was again—that little window of sympathy I felt for my favorite teacher. Even if she was older than I thought, her life wasn’t even close to half over, and she already thought it was ruined.

Alex had learned to read me well, though. “Don’t even, Kara.”

But I had to try. Making threats wasn’t really my thing anyway. “Ms. Davenport, your life isn’t over. Bad stuff happened, and you did terrible things in return. But if you do what we’re asking, no one ever needs to know. You can start over, pretend none of this ever happened. I know there was a time when you were a good person—you’re too good at playing one for it never to have been real. You can go back to that. We all can.”

“Some things you can’t come back from,” she said, but she was starting to slouch down in her seat. To relax. It was almost over. I could feel it.

“People start over all the time. That’s what I always thought college was—a place to become a new person. We talked about that, you and me. We talked about a lot of things. I trusted you then, and I have to be honest, right now I hate you for that. But you can make it better. You can make all this be over. Just promise us that you’ll stop, that you’ll go away and not do this to any more kids. Promise us that you’ll try harder next time, find a way to be better.”

“I’m not sure I can promise to be better,” she said. “You don’t really know me, after all. This is who I am. It always has been, in some ways.”

“Well, what about the other promises, then?”

She pulled on one of her pigtails like a little kid. “How do I know you won’t turn on me?” she said. “How do I know you won’t make this deal with me and then go to the police anyway?”

“You don’t,” Alex said.

I shot her a look. I was making progress, and she was about to undo it. “She’s right that you can’t know for sure,” I said. “Just like we can’t know that you won’t go off and do this to another group of kids at another school somewhere else. But we have the file on you, and you have everything you have on us. We may be willing to go to the police, but that doesn’t mean we want to.”

“You’re basically suggesting mutually assured destruction, then. I do what you say, or you’ll ruin me, but I’ll ruin you right back.”

“Sounds about right,” Raj said. “Doing what we say is certainly better than the alternative.”

“You haven’t fully thought this through, though. Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to the drug trade in this town with me gone? Someone worse is going to step in.” She was sitting straighter again. I hoped that didn’t mean she was changing her mind. We’d been so close.

“We’ll let the police take care of it,” I said. “Are you in or not?”

“I have to shut down everything? And leave in June?”

The three of us nodded.

“No police involvement?”

We nodded again.

“How will I know you’ll keep your word?”