I sigh and put down my phone, rubbing the bridge of my nose to ward off a sudden prickling in my eyes. It’s just hit me—what an impossible task this is. The note could mean anything, or nothing at all. I could be looking in the exact wrong direction. He could be anywhere, waiting for me to figure it out and lead in the cavalry. But what if I don’t figure it out? What if he’s waiting for reinforcements that never come?
I tamp down a wave of nausea and try to rein in the fear galloping through my chest. Having a mental break is not going to do my dad any good. I count silently back from ten, forcing myself to breathe. To think. There’s got to be something I’m missing. And then I look at my phone again and realize that I’m going to be missing the beginning of second period if I don’t get moving.
I force myself to my feet and nod a final thanks to Mike as I head back toward campus and, more specifically, my locker. I need to switch out a couple of books before heading to my morning classes. Plus, I need to set Murphy’s job in motion.
As I pass the girls’ bathroom, I duck in and dig in my bag for a pocket mirror. I lean back against a sink and check the reflection of the back of my head, fluffing my hair and waiting for an opportunity to present itself.
Luckily, I don’t have to wait long. A couple of girls walk in, gabbing about boys. Not surprising, really, since everyone’s obsessed with the upcoming dance. Heather’s one of the organizers, so she’s been subjecting Sam and me to gossip about it for the last month. In any case, I can use the conversational topic to my advantage.
“Who are you going with?” Paula, a thin, reedy girl on the cheer squad with Bryn, asks Harper, a curvier girl on the dance squad.
“Matt, of course,” Harper says. “You?”
“Well, I’m throwing hints at Sebastian, but he’s not getting it.”
“I wonder who Tyler is going to ask,” Harper says, referring to the masculine object of every St. Aggie’s girl’s (and some of the guys’) fantasies.
“And how he’s going to ask,” Paula says. “Jack’s formal proposal to Elise last year was epic.”
I clear my throat, pulling out a tube of lip gloss. “You know, Murphy still hasn’t asked anyone.”
“Murphy? The AV nerd?”
“Geek is the new black, you know,” I say, hiding a smirk behind the applicator brush. “Besides”—I lower my voice to conspiratorial—“I hear he’s the envy of the guys’ locker room, if you know what I mean.” Then I stow the gloss, leave the bathroom, and meander to my nearby locker.
While I twirl the locker dial this way and that, I notice the girls from the bathroom passing by, heads bent together. They are no doubt dissecting my comment from every possible angle. I can’t help but smile—easy as selling candy to a PTA mom.
Then I notice something off about my locker. It smells funny, like wet alley trash. I pull up the metal latch and swing the door open slowly.
A girl behind me screams.
THE WARNING
“You really have no idea who would have done this?”
Susan Porter, St. Agatha’s bulldog dean of students, is glaring suspiciously at me as she calls the janitor on her walkie. I keep my snark in check, but it isn’t easy. My relationship with the dean isn’t what you’d call amicable.
“I really don’t,” I say. I’m not great with authority. Especially when that authority is on to me. “I certainly didn’t put a dead rat in my own locker.”
Her expression tightens, and since her features are already sharp enough to cut, the effect easily cows the more naive students. She’s wasting it on me, but I suspect it’s not something she can turn on and off. Her face just looks that way when she’s aggravated, and she’s almost always aggravated. Don’t get me wrong; she’s great at her job. She somehow manages to keep twelve hundred or so teens from outright revolt without getting so much as a strand of her titian bob out of place. And she’s perpetually suspicious of me, so she must be doing something right.
She scribbles something in a Moleskine notebook with a tiny pencil, both of which she carries in her navy-blue suit-jacket pocket. I’m sure whatever she’s noting is going straight into my file. The dean’s been on my case almost since I started at St. Agatha’s. She can’t have anything substantial against me or she’d have used it by now, but her ability to sense the criminal element is uncanny. I have yet to get a connection to the dean’s office, but when I do, I’m going to prioritize pilfering said file.
“Rest assured, Miss Dupree, that I will find the culprit,” she says, and stalks off.
It sounds more like a threat than a promise, but I’ll take what I can get. If it’s a student prank, she’ll find out. If not …
The janitor arrives, and I move out of his way to give him full access to my gore-covered locker. I try not to watch as he wraps the furry corpse in a piece of brown butcher paper before detaching its tail from the coat hook. I’m not really an animal person, but I still feel sorry for the little guy.
The puddle of guts on the floor of the locker is going to take the janitor longer to clean, so I decide to give up on my books. I turn to head for class and run smack into a hard, warm pillar.
“Are you all right?” asks the pillar.
I step back in surprise and look up, immediately recognizing Tyler Richland, the St. Aggie’s demigod/senior Harper name-dropped in the bathroom. He’s captain of the fill-in-any-sport-here varsity team, he’s popular, and he has a hotness factor that approaches solar levels. You don’t go to St. Agatha’s and not know Tyler Richland. In fact, you don’t live in Chicago and not know Tyler Richland. His dad’s a senator.
“Fine,” I say, and move to go around him.
“I meant about your locker. You must be pretty shaken up.”
I frown at him. I don’t like people telling me how I should feel. And it’s weird that he’s talking to me at all. I’m a sophomore, on top of which I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to stay relatively anonymous. But then, maybe he has a job for me.
“I’d be shaken up,” he continues, turning his charm up a couple of notches. “I’d probably faint.”
“I suppose it’s not the nicest present someone’s ever left me,” I say. My chilliness is starting to thaw under the onslaught; that’s how powerful those molten-chocolate eyes are. But I am nothing if not professional, so I keep my expression neutral.
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“I have an inkling,” I admit, thinking about my trashed apartment. Coincidences are like unicorns—you can believe in them all you want, but that doesn’t make them real.
“Why didn’t you tell the dean?”
“Because it’s none of her business.” I start again in the direction of class. Tyler slides into step next to me. “Can I help you, Tyler?”
“I think I may have seen something.”
I nearly trip over my own foot. “What? Who?”
“I only saw him from the back. Long black coat, black boots. He didn’t look like he belonged here.”
“Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again?”