White Rabbit(41)
My pulse starts to slow down again—but only marginally; just because Isabel isn’t about to chainsaw me to death doesn’t mean she’s not a threat. “Whatever you have to tell me, I’m sure Peter already said it inside.”
She doesn’t even blink. “I doubt that very much.”
“Okay, well … you can keep it to yourself, anyway.” I keep my expression stony, even though my nerves are still crackling like Rice Krispies. “Peter already promised to get a restraining order, and I’m more than happy to go along with it if it means you guys will keep the hell away from me.”
I try to step around her, but she moves like a cat—quickly, and with startling quiet for someone in spindle-heeled pumps. “What we have to talk about is more important than that.”
Searching her face, I wonder how much disrespect I can get away with. Isabel has the capability to make my life truly miserable if she wants, and a long time ago I learned it was better to put up with infuriating insults than to give her an excuse to make her point in more consequential ways. But it’s been a very long night, and I’m pretty much done being abused by the Covingtons. Coldly, I state, “I have to go home.”
I push past her again and am almost to the back of the Jeep when she calls out, “I know everything that happened tonight, Rufus. The money April paid you, the visits to her friends, the fake phone call to establish your alibi … everything.”
For the second time that night, I do a slow, horror-movie turnaround in that parking lot, cold all the way through with the frostbite of alarm. “What?”
“April told me,” Isabel says simply. “Peter and Lindsay got out of the car for a private conference”—these two words, private conference, are shaded with a subtle disdain that suggests volumes—“and April gave me the whole story. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
“Of course not.” I could strangle April. Of course she told her mother everything. She’s never been in serious trouble before, has never faced parental discipline, and has probably never been punished by anyone for telling the truth. She was either too naive to understand—or too apathetic to give a shit—what would happen to me when she laid all our cards on the table before Isabel. I taste bile. “So, what now? Are you here to threaten me? My mom already agreed to stop seeking child support. What else do you want?”
“You misunderstand me.” Maddeningly, she’s still completely unruffled. “Peter doesn’t know anything about it. I could have told him—I could also be in there right now, telling the police. But I’m not.” She waits a beat. “Aren’t you curious why?”
“Not really,” I lie stiffly, refusing to be baited.
“Because April’s the one with her butt in a sling,” Sebastian interjects, his reminder etched with confused agitation; he seems to sense that Isabel is up to something, but he can’t figure out her angle. “If the cops find out what … well, what really happened, she’s way worse off than either of us will be.”
“Not entirely true, Mr. Williams,” Isabel counters, vaguely amused. “April has a very, very good lawyer, and Rufus is under a lot of scrutiny right now by the school board. Probably more than his permanent record could withstand if charges were brought against him for withholding evidence, tampering with a crime scene, obstruction of justice—”
“What do you want?” A surge of unbearable rage spoils the meager contents of my stomach. Every time I think I’ve exhausted the supply of loathing I have for my father’s family, I tap into a brand-new vein of it waiting to be plumbed—a dark harvest that burns my insides like poison. No one knows better than Isabel Covington how much scrutiny the school board has me under; she is their president.
Six months ago, I was hanging out in an alcove behind the school one night with Lucy and our friend Brent, sharing a forty-ounce of disgusting beer procured for us by Brent’s older sister. Ironically, we were only out there—where it was dark as hell, and the lake gleamed like graphite through winter-stripped trees—because it was the most desolate place we could think of to consume alcohol. Imagine our surprise, then, when a security guard appeared out of nowhere, flashing his Maglite around like a death laser and screaming at us to put our hands up.
Brent and Lucy got off with slaps on the wrists, but since I had actually been holding the bottle when we got caught—and because my name is Rufus Holt—I was brought before a very special kangaroo-court school board hearing, where all my prior sins were exhaustively catalogued. My fights with Hayden and his cronies; the time I busted Cody Barnes’s tooth with that chair in the eighth grade; the time, freshman year, when my science teacher falsely accused me of cheating on a test and I got so upset, I hurled a ridiculously expensive microscope at a plate glass window, shattering both—they were all exhumed and picked over in front of me, like corpses found crudely buried in a basement crawl space.
In the end, I was given a week’s suspension and two months’ probation—along with the dire promise that the school board would be watching me.
“I want you to be fully aware of your circumstances, here. Given your background, I’m sure the board would feel compelled to review your file again in light of any police action against you,” Isabel goes on, my red-faced resentment clearly warming the cockles of her heart, “and put some further consideration into whether or not Ethan Allen High is really the proper environment for a student such as yourself.”