The girl on the left cracked first. She was tiny and had white-blond hair, and her blue eyes were huge as she looked up at me. “It’s just the . . . uh, special Homecoming edition of The Grove News.”
My smile froze in place. Surely, he wouldn’t have.
“Can I see it?” I asked, still grinning, still upbeat.
The one who looked like Bee shook her head ever so slightly at the tiny girl, but she was already handing me the paper. I took it with trembling hands.
My worst fears were confirmed.
There, on the front page of the special Homecoming edition of The Grove News, was a huge, albeit blurry, picture of me leaning on Bee, clearly sobbing my eyes out, as we made our way out of the girls’ bathroom. It looked like it had probably been taken with a cell phone, and the headline read, “It’s Her Party and She’ll Cry If She Wants To?” Under the picture of me and Bee, there was a smaller caption: Homecoming Queen misses crowning under mysterious circumstances. My eyes darted over the rest of the article as my heart started pounding. “. . . hiding in the boys’ room . . . violently ill . . . tension between the ‘Queen Bee’ and her underling, Bee Franklin . . . this reporter . . .”
By now, I had sort of started hyperventilating as my eyes zeroed in on the byline in bold letters.
David Stark.
Who I was now going to murder.
Chapter 6
IT WASN’T just the humiliation of having the entire school know that I was puking and crying in the bathroom during Homecoming, or the veiled insinuations that I’d been sick because I was pregnant or on drugs. It was that the school probably already knew that Mr. Hall and Dr. DuPont were missing. And sure, that bathroom had looked spotless, but it’s not like I’d done a sweep for DNA. For all I knew, the police were in Headmaster Dunn’s office right now, with big folders full of evidence that two men had died in the girls’ bathroom last Friday, and asking if anyone was displaying any “strange behavior.” And, oh, look! Here was a convenient picture of me sobbing around the girls’ bathroom.
“Are you okay?” the tall sophomore asked. “You look kinda . . . purple.”
I snapped my head up and smiled, or at least pressed my teeth together in the semblance of a smile. “I’m fine,” I said, but my voice was way too loud. “This is just a silly misunderstanding between me and David. Can I keep this?”
“Sure,” the shorter girl who’d handed me the paper said.
“Thanks so much!” I turned around and headed straight for Wallace Hall.
Before I’d gone more than a few steps, I heard Ryan call my name. He was jogging over from the parking lot, a bunch of papers crumpled in his hand. “Hey!” he said once he’d caught up to me. One hand cupping my elbow, he leaned down, studying me. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” I said, trying to look more okay and less homicidal.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick Friday night?”
“It was nothing,” I insisted, shifting my backpack to my other shoulder. “And I didn’t want to make a big deal about it. Honestly. This is just another one of David Stark’s jerk moves. I can handle it.”
Ryan clenched his jaw, looking up toward Wallace Hall. “What is that dude’s problem?”
“He’s a jackass.”
Not taking his eyes off the building, Ryan shook his head. A muscle worked in his jaw and he shoved the sleeves of his dark blue sweater up his forearms. “No, it’s more than that. He’s always been like this with you, ever since we were little. Back in middle school, I thought maybe he had a thing for you, but—”
“First of all, I highly doubt that. Secondly, sometimes people are just . . . I don’t know, born mean or something.”
Glancing back down at me, Ryan gave a half-smile. “Maybe. Want me to go kick his ass?”
Ryan was joking; I think the closest he’d ever been to a fight was watching UFC with his brother on Saturday nights. But as soon as he said it, it was like someone had punched me in the stomach, an almost overwhelming sense of wrongness washed over me. “No!” I yelped, and Ryan startled.
“Whoa, Harper, I was kidding.” He held both hands up in mock surrender. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
That weird, nauseous sensation subsided, and I rubbed my temples. “I know, sorry. Anyway, let me go talk to David, and I’ll see you at lunch, okay?”
“Sure you don’t want me to go with you?” An auburn curl fell over Ryan’s forehead as he ducked his head to meet my eyes, concern all over his face.
But the idea of him coming with me to see David sent my stomach roiling again. I managed to give a little laugh. “No, I’ve got this.”
Ryan dropped a kiss on my cheek and gave my elbow one last squeeze. “You always do.”
He headed across the quad, broad shoulders held back, long legs striding across the grass, and I turned back to Wallace Hall. I don’t know what I looked like, but it must have been pretty scary, because everyone was quick to jump out of my way. Most of them were holding papers, though, so they probably all thought I was about to have a nervous breakdown right in front of them. Which actually was a good thing. After that weird thing with Ryan, a lot of my anger had died down. Hearing people whisper behind my back powered it right back up.
As I pushed open the heavy door, I mentally called David Stark every bad word I could think of.
By the time I reached the journalism lab, it felt like sparks were exploding from my head. There were a few articles taped to the door, and even in my rage, I saw that almost all of them had David’s byline. Gritting my teeth, I stepped inside.
Thanks to all of the computers lining the back wall, the classroom felt a lot warmer than the hall. No one was working at the computers now, and there were only three people in the room. David was sitting on a desk, laughing with two other newspaper staffers, Michael Goldberg and Chie Kurata.
I’d planned out this whole speech in my head amidst all the bad words—yay, multitasking!—about how what he’d done was not only personally offensive to me, but demoralizing and degrading to the school, because when we make one of us look bad, we all look bad. And honestly, how did he expect to get away with this kind of crap? He had to have written the article and printed up the paper over the weekend. That meant he’d done it behind Mrs. Laurent’s back, and that had to be a detention-worthy offense at the very least.
But something about seeing him sitting on top of a desk, eating yogurt and laughing with his friends made me snap. I could feel my face get red, and this intense, trembly feeling rose up from the middle of my chest. My intelligent and calm speech flew right out of my head.
“WTF, David?” I asked, storming into the room and throwing the paper on the nearest desk.
He at least had the good grace to look chagrined. “Harper—”
“No!” I said, or at least I meant to say. It came out a little shriek and Michael flinched and looked at his feet. Chie, a pretty, petite Asian girl who’d transferred to our school just this year, raised her eyebrows so high they disappeared underneath her heavy black bangs.
David stood and put his hands up in front of him in the universal sign for “calm the heck down.”
But there was no stopping me now. “Why would you do this?” I gestured angrily at the paper. Just over David’s head, there was a poster featuring a typewriter and the quote “Journalism Is History on the Run,” and I made myself stare at that rather than meet his gaze. Man, laser eyes really would’ve come in handy now.