They Wish They Were Us(23)

“You okay?” Henry whispers. He rests a gentle hand on my shoulder and his boozy breath is hot on my ear.

“What does this mean?” My voice is hoarse and I can’t make sense of the words.

For a beat no one says anything, and all we can hear is the party raging on without us.

“He’s a liar,” Robert finally says, his fist wrapped tightly around a cup. “We were there. We all know he did it.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment. I wonder if they’re trying to push memories of that night away, too. How the fire smelled like burning rubber. Shaila’s hard, steady gaze before everything started. My hands around her wrists. Her fierce gait as she walked away for the last time.

“Such bullshit,” Nikki says, toeing the dirt with her combat boots. “Of course he has to come back and ruin our senior year.” She wrinkles her nose like the whole thing smells like shit, which it does. “As student council president, I’m going to talk to Headmaster Weingarten about this on Monday. No way this is going to interfere with the rest of our semester!”

“We can’t get involved. It’s not worth it,” Quentin says. He shakes his head and picks up a stick, dragging it over the ground. “Not with college applications coming up.”

“But what if Graham’s telling the truth?” I say under my breath.

Five pairs of eyes turn to me. “You can’t be serious.” Henry laughs.

“You’re the journalist,” I say. “Aren’t you the least bit curious? Don’t you want to know what happened?”

Henry’s mouth forms a straight line. “We already do.”

“Can we all just agree not to think about this?” Nikki pleads. “Let’s just drop it, okay? If we ignore him, the rest of Gold Coast will, too. That’s just how it is and you all know it.”

Heads nod around me and one by one, they stand and leave.

“C’mon, babe,” Henry says, extending his hand.

I shake my head. “Just give me a sec, okay?”

He nods and walks back to the house. Huddled against the tree alone, I can almost forget about the party around me, the other Players, the undie wannabes, the countless vile pops we completed to get here. I watch as my friends trail back inside. We’re all we have. I want to wrap my heart around them and hold them close. I want to tie them to me to keep them safe. To do what we couldn’t do for Shaila.

Maybe they’re right. It’s not worth rehashing the past.

But there’s something I just can’t shake.

I reach for my phone with an unsteady hand and pull up Rachel’s texts.

Graham didn’t kill Shaila. He’s innocent.

My phone feels heavy in my hand, too heavy to hold, and the sky begins to swirl above me.

“Jill, you okay?” Henry returns and kneels down next to me. His hand slinks up the back of my shirt. It burns my bare skin.

I muster a nod. “Just drank that too fast,” I say, pointing to my cup.

“I’ll get you some water.”

“Thanks,” I mumble.

The ground is wet and hard under my hands and I push myself up to stand, taking one last look at what Rachel said.

It’s all so fucked up. Can we talk?



* * *



—

The first time I spoke to Rachel I thought it was unfair that she had to breathe the same air as me. She was striking, with cheekbones too high for someone who wore a high school uniform every day and eyes that were so dark you could barely see her pupils. She always wore her hair in soft waves that waterfalled down her back. When I got a haircut that year, I showed the stylist her class picture as inspiration. But my mane was never as smooth, always a little too unruly.

She found me in the library one day in early October of freshman year, with The Odyssey open in front of me. I tapped my fist against the desk, hoping that by some miracle I would absorb the final two hundred pages in thirty minutes flat before our midterm. My GPA was about to take a nosedive and for the first time, I could feel my scholarship slipping away, everything spiraling out of my control.

I had planned to stay up until 3 a.m. to cram, but I fell asleep with the thick book splayed out on my chest and all the lights still on. I woke up in a panic when my regular alarm sounded at 6:07. It took a Herculean effort on my part not to break into sobs right there in the stacks.

“You look like shit,” Rachel said. She rested her hands on the book and leaned down low so I could see the top of her cleavage peeking out over a lacy black bra. “Beaumont?” she asked.

I nodded. A ball sat in my throat. I swallowed hard.

“You know Adam, right? You’re Shaila’s friend?”

I nodded again.

“Cool.” Rachel disappeared and my face grew hot, mortified that she would run to Adam to tell him how awkward and gross I was. What loser screwed up this epically? A minute passed and then another, and then Rachel was standing in front of me, holding out two pieces of paper. “Here,” she said. “It’s a pattern. First answer’s A. Second’s B. Third’s C. Rinse and repeat. You get the picture. He’s just using Mrs. Mullen’s test from last year. And the year before that. She never changes it.”

“What?” I whispered, incredulous that she just had the answers.

Rachel smiled. “Trust me. Look it over, then destroy this. If anyone catches you with it, we’re done for, got it?” I thought about how disappointed Mom and Dad would be if I got caught cheating, if I was suspended or worse. How would I be able to live with myself? But then I pictured failing the test, losing my ride to Gold Coast Prep and all the college connections and the status and . . . the most precious pieces of my life would be gone. My chest pounded as I grappled with what I was about to do. I took the papers in my shaking hands.