Lies You Never Told Me(42)

“What . . . what is this?”

DeGroot leans forward, clasping his fingers together. “I don’t know, Mr. Jiménez. Why don’t you tell me?”

I look up at the principal, shaking my head. The man’s face is hard to read, a slab of blank stone, but his voice is low and serious. After another long, silent moment, he reaches under the desk and pulls out a crumpled scrap of paper. It’s flecked with dark red, the same dark red as in the picture.

I don’t want to touch it. But when I lean closer to inspect it, I can see that the blood is fake. The color is spot-on, but the viscosity of it isn’t quite right; it looks like the concoction Irene and I once made out of corn syrup and food coloring, fake blood for a short horror movie we filmed together and put on YouTube. I had played a hapless victim of Bloody Mary, the demon who lived inside the mirror, and I can still remember how gummy the blood was, how it felt drying on my skin over the course of the long afternoon.

The note is short, scrawled in untidy pencil.

STAY AWAY FROM ME AND MY FAMILY YOU BITCH OR ELSE.

“It’s fake,” I say, looking up at the principal. “The blood.”

The principal’s expression doesn’t change. Talk about a poker face. “If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be here talking to me. You’d be talking to the cops.”

I shake my head. “But I didn’t have anything to do with this. I don’t . . . I don’t know what this is about.”

“That’s not what Sasha Daley says,” says DeGroot.

I stare back at the picture. Sure enough, now I can see it—the picture of Zayn Malik she’d taped inside her locker, now running with fake blood. And that’s her Mustang Sallys warm-up jacket—torn to shreds, but still identifiable. It’s Sasha’s locker. And I realize suddenly that I’m the one who supposedly vandalized it.

“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I say, pushing the camera back across the desk. “I’d never do something like this.”

DeGroot’s eyebrows lift slightly, but other than that he betrays no real surprise. “Ms. Daley says you two broke up recently.”

“Yeah, we did. A month ago,” I say. “But this is crazy. Why would I mess up her locker? I just want her to leave me alone.”

DeGroot nods. “I see. Ms. Daley also said there was a misunderstanding last week. She spent some time with your family, and you reacted pretty badly to that.”

My skin gets hot with anger. “She didn’t ‘spend time with my family,’ she kidnapped my little sister. She took Vivi without telling anyone she was going to do it. Yeah, I reacted badly. Who wouldn’t?”

The principal takes off his glasses and sets them upside down on the desk in front of him. He pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment, and then sighs.

“Look, Mr. Jiménez, I know that breakups can be difficult. There are a lot of emotions running high.” He clasps his hands in front of him again. “But harassment is a very serious problem, and we don’t take it lightly at Waterloo. No matter what happened between the two of you, this is not an acceptable way to react.”

“But she’s the one harassing me.” I can’t help it. The words burst out of me in a blast of justified outrage, but they sound nasty as soon as they’re out, defensive and entitled.

“I don’t care about the he-said, she-said,” says DeGroot, holding up his hands with a placating motion. “It doesn’t matter anymore who said what, Mr. Jiménez. The fact is, I can’t prove you had anything to do with her locker, so all I can do is issue the following warning. This is a learning environment. This behavior is disruptive. Whatever has happened between you and Sasha in the past, you need to steer clear of one another now, do you understand me? Stay away from her. Don’t talk to her, don’t look at her. If she tries to talk to you, just walk away. Because if I catch wind of anything else like this, I will be forced to get the police involved, and I don’t think either of you want that.” He leans back in his chair. It groans under his weight. “Am I being perfectly clear?”

I slap my hands on my legs in frustration. “So tell her to leave me alone.”

DeGroot looks at me, unflappable. “I have. And please control your temper while you’re in my office. I won’t be yelled at.”

I stare at him for a moment. I’m seized by a desire to argue, to make the principal understand that I’m innocent. But I can tell that DeGroot thinks this is some kind of tit-for-tat, back-and-forth spat between me and Sasha. That the locker is a vengeful prank gone too far. I wonder how Sasha played it. Dabbing her eyes, telling in a choked voice how she’d found the locker broken open and destroyed. Mentioning her volatile ex-boyfriend, how upset I’d been that she’d dared speak to my family after the breakup.

“Am I being perfectly clear?” DeGroot asks again.

Finally, I nod. “Yes, sir. I understand.”

“All right. Head on to class now. Mrs. Murray will give you a pass so you won’t be marked tardy.” DeGroot stands up from his desk. “I hope I don’t have a reason to see you again, Gabe.”

I don’t trust myself to answer. I grab my backpack by one strap and step out of the office. My fury mutes the sounds of the hallway. I barely notice as a sophomore slams into me, eyes on her phone. She looks up to apologize, but the words die on her lips; I have no doubt my rage is plain for anyone to see.