Which is why I was glad when Chase changed the subject.
hey… got plans 2morrow nite?
Okay, I was glad for about half a second. Then those TVP balls started moving again in nervous circles as I typed back, no. y?
meet me @ pizza my ‹3 4 dinner? 6?
For a full five seconds my entire body froze. My heart stopped, my lungs forgot how to breathe, and my fingers hovered stupidly over my keyboard. It sorta sounded like he was asking me out. But it had sorta sounded like that before with the football game. But this sounded more like it. Sorta.
u there?
yes, I typed back quickly.
yes ur there or yes 2 pizza?
I paused, my heart suddenly going from frozen to racing at a hundred miles a minute. And while I still wasn’t sure what this all meant, somehow I found my fingers typing back the word both.
Cool, Chase responded. c u then.
Then he logged off, his icon disappearing.
I stared at the screen trying to process what had just happened.
I thought I had a date with Chase.
“I think I have a date with Chase tonight,” I concluded the next morning as Sam and I stood outside Señorita Gonzalez’s classroom waiting for Jenni Pritchard. (I’d found out last night from Erin Carter that Jessica Hanson said Cody Banks said that he had Spanish with Jenni first period. I only hoped my sources were correct.)
“No way!” Sam said, smacking me in the arm. “Deets.”
I complied, relaying the IM conversation I’d had last night. When I was done, Sam was grinning so wide I could see her molars.
“Holy fermenting fish sticks! He’s totally into you. I knew it!”
My stomach did that rolling thing again, only this time all it had to churn over was the breakfast latte I’d stopped for at Starbucks on the way to school.
“So,” Sam asked, leaning in. “Are you into him?”
I bit my lip. “I don’t know. Maybe. Sorta. We’re friends, I guess.”
“You guys would make such a cute couple,” she said, staring off into space at a bank of lockers to our right. “You know what? I totally have some yarn leftover. I could make you matching heart bracelets!”
“Look, isn’t that Jenni?” I asked, pointing to a brunette down the hallway, infinitely glad to be saved from that disturbing thought.
Jenni Pritchard had dark hair, dark eyes, and a tan complexion that had nothing to do with her ethnicity and everything to do with the tanning salon on North Santa Cruz Avenue. As usual, her hair was teased up a good four inches off her head, giving her five-foot frame a much needed boost in height. She was wearing short shorts, tall boots, and a chunky necklace with a lot of fake rhinestones in it. A wad of gum popped between her teeth as her head bobbed back and forth to a song in her earbuds.
I waved as she approached. “Jenni?” I called out.
She looked up, blinked, and frowned at me as her little brain worked overtime to forage for recognition.
“Hartley Featherstone,” I supplied. “I’m on the school paper.”
She pulled one earbud out of her right ear. “Huh?”
“Um, Hartley Featherstone,” I said again.
“Oh. ’Kay?” she said, more of a question than a statement.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Um, I guess,” she said, popping her gum. “Why?”
“I wanted to ask you a couple questions for a story I’m doing for the school paper.”
She blinked at me. “We have a school paper?”
I barely resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
“Yeah, we do. So, can I ask you a couple questions?”
“What kind of questions?”
“About Sydney Sanders’s death.”
“She committed suicide, right?”
“Actually, we think it might have been Twittercide,” Sam said.
Jenni gave her a blank look.
“We think Sydney might have been killed while tweeting,” I explained.
“No way! What a total dramathon that would be, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. “Did you know that your boyfriend was going out with Sydney?”
Jenni looked from Sam to me. “Well, yeah, but that was totally in the past. Like… last week.”
A whole week. It was getting harder and harder to resist that eye roll.
“Did you know Sydney?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Not well. I mean, I knew who she was, but we weren’t, like, friends or anything, ya know?”
“What about Connor?” Sam jumped in. “How well did you know him before you guys got together?”
She shot Sam a blank look. “What’s to know? He’s hot.”
One could resist only so long. My eyes did a three-sixty.
“So hot you dumped Ben Fisher for him?” Sam asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, her top’s spaghetti straps coming *this* close to falling off. “Yeah. So?”
“After Connor dumped Sydney for you,” I said.
“After she was kicked off the homecoming ballot,” Sam added.
Jenni shrugged again. “So? She totally brought that on herself. Cheating is, like, way not cool, ya know?”
I formulated my next question carefully. While I didn’t necessarily owe any vow of secrecy to Connor, I didn’t really want to be the one to let his plan out of the bag.
“You weren’t afraid that maybe Connor was only dating you to get the homecoming nomination?”
Jenni blinked at me again, popping her gum.
“Or that he might go back to Sydney after he won?”
“Why would he?” she asked.
Either she was ignorant of Connor’s intentions or really good at playing dumb.
“I gotta ask,” Sam said, cutting in. “What do you see in that guy?”
“Who, Connor? You’re kidding, right? He’s gorgeous.”
“He certainly seems to think so,” Sam mumbled.
“What?” Jenni asked, leaning in.
“Nothing.”
“Back to Ben,” I cut in. “You were seeing him before Connor?”
Jenni nodded. “That’s right. But when Connor asked if I wanted to go out, I totally gave Ben the boot.”
“Why?”
Again she blinked at me as if I was asking the most obvious questions in the world. “Um, Ben is a linebacker and Connor is a quarterback. Duh!”
Did her depth have no bounds?
“Where were you when Sydney died?” I asked.
“I dunno. What time was that?”
“Just after three.”
She pursed her eyebrows together, scrunching up her nose as if thinking that hard really hurt. “Um, pro’ly shopping. I didn’t have any shoes to go with the color corsage Connor was getting me. So I was at the mall every day last week after school.”
Hardly an ironclad alibi, but the more time I spent chatting with Jenni, the less sure I was that she could carry out a plan to tie her shoes, much less kill someone. While shoving someone in a pool might not take a PhD, covering your tracks afterward did. I’d venture to say that if Jenni had been the one to off Sydney, her teased DNA would have been all over the crime scene.
“Lookit,” Jenni said, popping one hip out. “If you really think someone killed Sydney, I’d take a look at that so-called best friend of hers.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So-called? Why do you say that?”
“Because Quinn hooked up with Connor before he dumped Sydney.”
“O. M. G,” Sam said. “She did not!”
Jenni smirked. “Oh, yes she did. Right before Connor and I got together. He told me he was studying after school with Quinn and Sydney one day, and Sydney had to leave for yearbook committee. The second she was gone, Quinn was all over him. She totally made out with him.”
I refrained from pointing out that it took two to tongue tango, instead asking, “Did Sydney find out about it?”
Jenni shrugged. “I dunno. But it might explain why she ratted Quinn out to the vice principal.”
Good point. It also might explain why Quinn had seemed like she was hiding something when she’d talked to us. I wondered what else she might have been hiding… like the fact she’d Twittercided her best friend? (I had to admit, Sam’s new word was growing on me.)