Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(10)

She liked slightly drunk David. She had missed him.

“So here’s the thing . . . ,” he said.

Stevie’s stomach contracted itself into a tiny, hard fist. It was reflexive. Every hanging sentence burned along her nervous system. This was when he told her he’d met someone in England. Someone smart and funny with an accent, who raised horses or something.

“What?” she said when he trailed off. “What?”

“You’re pretty. And you’ve got a shiny face. . . .”

Her adrenaline levels dropped, but her heart was still pounding and her stomach churning. She rubbed at the highlighter with the back of her fist.

“What?” she said again.

“God! Okay. So, I was thinking. You know how I’m here and you’re there?”

Stevie nodded and gestured with her hand that he should get to the point.

“Well, it’s not good, right? So I was thinking, do you want to come here?”

“What?”

“Do you want to come here . . .”

“I heard you,” she said. “And of course I want to go there. But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . .”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go. Of course she wanted to go. Everyone wanted to go to England, and she especially wanted to go to England, but it wasn’t possible. She didn’t have a clear answer on why it wasn’t possible, but it was something, something, school, life, something.

“Okay, but here’s the thing . . .” He slid down the headboard a bit and had to straighten up, putting the laptop on his knees and changing the view. “I was talking to the people who brought me here and I was saying that you should come here too because . . . because you should and they said they would talk to someone at the American embassy who works in educational tourism or something and he just got back to me and . . . you’re a pretty little starfish . . .”

“What?”

“Okay! Okay. You wouldn’t stay in my building, but they have some rooms in the building connected to this one. They said they could get up to four rooms for a week or ten days or something and you could call it study abroad or something, like, you’d have someone to call at the embassy so if Quinn gets up your ass about it . . .”

“Wait . . . you got . . . four rooms? For . . .”

“For you. And for Nate and Janelle and Vi, because I know that is how this would work. You just . . .” He gestured expansively and knocked the computer off his knees. She was looking at the ceiling for a moment before he righted it. “Study abroad. Thing. This guy can help with that. You tell the school you’re looking at museums or some shit and you come here.”

Stevie was so distracted that she set her cake on the front of her hoodie, by her collarbone.

“I need a passport. Don’t I? I don’t have one.”

“You can get one. It doesn’t take that long. Just come here, stop being a dick about not being here right now and come here. There’s, like, a queen. So come here. Just do it. Come on.”

Stevie didn’t precisely rip Janelle’s door off the hinges a few minutes later, but there was a bit of violence inflicted on it. While Janelle called Vi, Stevie ran to the end of the hall and rattled Nate’s doorknob. He didn’t answer, so she texted him until the door cracked open and he peered out.

Everyone wanted to go to England.

Stevie woke the next morning assuming that everything she remembered about the conversation was a dream, but there were multiple messages from David waiting for her—a name, an email, a phone number, the address of a building in London. It was a genuine offer with a genuine person at the American embassy prepared to back it up.

She spent every moment between classes and lab and yoga looking up flights and passport information. She had some money—the result of work she had done over the summer with a guy named Carson who ran a company called Box Box and wanted to make a true crime podcast. She’d been undercover at the summer camp he’d bought and helped him solve the cold case of the Box in the Woods. He’d paid her decently for her time at the camp, plus he’d advanced her some money while he put together the podcast about the case. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was way more than she’d ever had before, working at the mall or the grocery store. She could buy a fancy coffee every once in a while, and she had invested in some new black hoodies. There was enough for a plane ticket, plus a little pocket cash for each day to pay for food and things.

Over dinner that night at the dining hall (maple-glazed pork with mashed sweet potatoes with a little bit of maple syrup in them), the four set about creating their presentation—their pitch to Ellingham about why they should be permitted to go to London. There aren’t many advantages to having a bunch of murders happen at your school. They tend to bring down the mood. However, in the search for silver linings, there was one—the school had fully embraced the concept of remote learning. Before, Ellingham expected its students to be there all the time, “going to class” and “being part of the school community” and that kind of thing. But once the murders started, they decided to get a bit more flexible. It turned out you could do a lot of school stuff outside of school. Ellingham still wanted you to go to class, but if people had to travel home, or go on college visits, or do a project somewhere, there were far more opportunities to do so. You could join your class remotely.