Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(91)

How’s it going? she wrote. Do you know when you’ll be back?

No dots appeared. It was almost five o’clock. Their show started at seven. Richard III. Stevie felt like watching a play about as much as she felt like tipping this pot of scalding-hot tea into her own lap, but what else was there to do? Angela was dead. She’d failed, and she would be leaving England tomorrow.

The show was at the Barbican, which was a complex built of concrete—a fortress, sort of like the Tower of London, it was made of bare concrete lumps instead of stone towers. More brutalism, Janelle told them.

“How did anyone make something this ugly?” Vi asked. “They could have made anything at all, and they decided to make this.”

“I kind of love it,” Nate said, looking around. “It looks like the moisture farm that Luke Skywalker lives on.”

“Me too,” Janelle added. “It feels like a machine.”

“Two different ways of looking at a big concrete block,” Vi replied.

If you’d asked Stevie what Richard III was about, she would have said two and a half hours, with a few minutes in the middle to get some expensive M&M’s from the lobby and shove them down her face near a concrete pole. There were a lot of people in tunics running on and offstage, seemingly all of them named Richard or Edward or Lord this or that, with the occasional Catesby thrown in to keep things confusing. Stevie had her phone in her lap for the entire performance, checking for texts from David that did not come, much to the annoyance of the woman sitting beside her, who huffed and tutted until Stevie got up and sat in the lobby for the final fifteen minutes. She must have missed the scene where Richard begged for a horse. She could guess that he wasn’t going to get one. No horse for you, Richard.

She didn’t want to be angry. She didn’t want to be wandering around the lobby of a brutalist building with only hours left to go in this country before she would be ripped away from all this, from David, from the case, from the misting rain and the relentless tea drinking.

“Why did you leave?” Janelle said as they exited the theater at the end of the play.

“Sorry,” Stevie replied. “I just couldn’t sit there anymore.”

“I didn’t really like it either,” Vi said, rubbing the peach fuzz on the back of their head.

The events of the day had gotten the better of them. No amount of tiny cakes and tea and screaming English lords was going to fix it.

On the Tube ride back to Craven House, the group settled into a damp silence. The silence came from the knowledge that the trip was pretty much officially over at this point, and the damp from the invisible rain that had attacked them on the way to the station.

“I’m going to figure it out on the plane,” Janelle said out of nowhere. “How many schools. I’m going to pick them on the plane. I’ll have eight hours and probably no internet. I just need to get it done.”

She turned to Vi, silently asking the question, “Are you in?” Because their project was largely a joint one.

“Maybe,” Vi said. “Can we see? I might just want to watch movies. Planes are so . . . I get sad on planes sometimes.”

Janelle slid her arm over Vi’s shoulder and kissed their forehead. Stevie could tell she was disappointed in the answer, but if planes made Vi sad, there was no way she was going to push it.

“How about you?” she asked Nate. “Want to work lists with me?”

“What?”

“I need to spreadsheet,” Janelle said. “Figure this out. We can work on our lists. Want to?”

“I’m good,” Nate said.

“Just tell me how many you’ve gotten down to. I need to figure this out. I need to make something work.”

Stevie lifted her head from her phone (which wasn’t really getting a good signal on the Tube anyway). Something was happening here. Janelle was about as frustrated as Stevie had ever seen her. The fact that this trip hadn’t been quite what she’d expected was eating at her, and she had to pull a victory from the rubble.

“How many have you applied to so far?” she asked. “I need something to work with. Data.”

Nate looked up like Janelle had pulled a gun on him.

“Come on,” Janelle said. “What? Is it a secret?”

Nate’s expression suggested that it was very much a secret. He was being evasive in a way that didn’t quite make sense. Something bubbled in Stevie’s mind. There had been a pattern developing. She’d been clocking it without being entirely aware that she was doing so. Nate had been writing all the time—or, Nate had been doing something on his computer. He’d been skipping the occasional meal or coffee, and his credit card wasn’t working.

“Oh my God,” Stevie said. “You’ve been applying to schools. That’s what you’ve been doing.”

Nate’s face flushed a faint purple. She’d hit the mark. Janelle and Vi looked to Stevie in confusion.

“How many?” Stevie asked.

Nate looked at her with an expression that said, I am never letting you use my ace pride drone.

“Seventy-one,” he finally said.

Silence for a moment from the assembled.

“Is that even legal?” Vi finally asked.

“How?” Janelle said. “How did you apply to seventy-one schools? You’d had to have applied somewhere every day for the last two months.”