The Hand on the Wall(22)

“Anyway,” Vi said, shaking their head. “Six o’clock. I’ll bring tacos if they have them.”

When they were alone, Janelle ate some fruit salad and looked at Stevie.

“You’ve been really quiet,” she said. “What have you been up to? Ever since we played that recording on that old machine you’ve been squirrely. And your teacher, the one from Burlington . . . What’s going on with you?”

“It’s a lot of things,” Stevie said. “Do you remember the message that appeared on my wall that night? The dream one?”

“Sure.”

“I met a friend of Ellie’s in Burlington yesterday. She told me some stuff, like that Ellie knew all about the message and she thought someone put it there. Ellie thought it was real. She may have even known it was real.”

Janelle drew her head back in surprise.

“But who would do that?” she said. “David?”

“I don’t think so,” Stevie said. “I mean, the only one who makes any sense at all is Hayes? Because of the video? No one really makes sense for it. But this girl said Ellie was sure it was real and that Ellie knew who did it.”

“Well, if we find out,” Janelle said, “there will be hell to pay. No one does that to you.”

Stevie felt a warm rush. She’d had friends at her old school—people she spoke to and sometimes texted with. But if she was being honest with herself (and she often tried not to be), she’d never really had that IRL connection. Her most real relationships had been with people on her case boards. Ellingham had provided her with that something—maybe even the something her parents had talked to her about. Friends who hung out together in pajamas and talked. Friends who listened. Friends who stood up for you.

But she didn’t know how to express this or even if she should, so she dipped her waffle piece again.

“Can you look inside of walls?” she asked Janelle.

“Can I personally look inside of walls? I can do anything. But I think you’re asking if there is something that can penetrate a wall to show stuff behind it, and the answer is yes. A wall scanner. They’re pretty common. They use them to find studs, wires, pipes, things like that. Why?”

“Just . . . wondering.”

“Oh! I already got four replies!” Janelle said as her phone pinged. “People are going to come tonight! Oh my God. What if it doesn’t work?”

“It works,” Stevie said.

“Okay. I have to be calm. I’m going to class, then I’m going to run it a few times. See you there, yeah?”

“Of course,” Stevie said.

Janelle grabbed her things and stuffed them into her big orange bag and hurried out. Stevie got The Great Gatsby out of her bag and stared at the cover: a midnight-blue background with a woman’s face floating in it—a flapper made of light and sky, mostly eyes, with a city dripping in the background like a string of jewels. It was a little like the Ellingham family portrait by Leonard Holmes Nair, the one that hung in the Great House. It was a hallucination of person and place.

Speaking of flappers . . . Maris was just coming into the dining hall. She was wearing a big shaggy coat of fake black fur. Maris had a lot of shaggy, fringy things. She wore lots of darks, smudgy eyeliner and strong lipsticks. Dash was with her in his oversized coat and long scarf.

Maris and Dash were the theater people—Ellingham had only a few, and they were definitely in charge of all things dramatic now that Hayes was gone. It looked like Maris had shaken off some of her gloom after Hayes’s death. For a few weeks, she’d walked around like the town widow, wearing black on black with black lipstick, crying in the library and in the dining hall and tending to the impromptu shrine for Hayes that had sprung up in the cupola. It seemed like a lot of mourning for someone you had been dating for about a week, maybe two at the most. Maris had shed the widow’s weeds for a yellow dress—a vintage-looking one, which she wore with black fishnet stockings and chunky heels. She was doing blue lipstick now, as she transitioned back to her signature bright red.

On the other side of the dining hall, Stevie saw Gretchen—a pianist with a head of fiery red hair. She had been Hayes’s girlfriend last year. Hayes had used her to do his work, to write his papers. He’d even borrowed five hundred dollars from her, which he’d never repaid.

In theory, both Maris and Gretchen would have had something against Hayes. Hayes had screwed Gretchen over in several ways. And Hayes was dating Maris while also having a long-distance relationship with fellow YouTuber Beth Brave. Was that enough to kill? Also, Maris could have helped if Hayes had wanted to project that message on Stevie’s wall. Maris was smart. Maris knew theater things, so she would likely have been able to put something together to project a message.

This thing about the message on the wall was nagging at her. What did it even mean? It was a harmless prank at best. Well, not harmless. It had caused her to have a massive panic attack. But in the scheme of things at Ellingham, it was harmless. It had not killed her.

It wasn’t the severity of the thing; it was the why. Why do it?

She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she could figure out the mystery of the hand on the wall, she would understand everything.

Almost all of the incoming class took Dr. Quinn’s literature and history seminar, a class in which everyone read a novel and then learned about the historical period and context that surrounded it. The Great Gatsby was about the 1920s, a period that vaguely interested Stevie, as it had a lot of good crimes and it butted up against the Ellingham Affair in the 1930s.