I bit my lip. I hadn’t seen Chase since the awkward non-date at Pizza My Heart. While I thought I’d played off the I’m-totally-not-overdressed-and-date-ready-for-you thing then, I still felt a blush hit my cheeks as I remembered my foray into Idiotville thinking he had possibly been interested in me. I took a deep breath, trying to diffuse the heat in my face, and walked toward the table as confidently as I could.
Chase spotted me first, but if he had any inkling of the awkward controlling my every movement, he didn’t betray it. “Hey,” he said, scooting his tray over to make room for me.
I set mine down, doing my best to eradicate the awkward from my voice as I returned his “Hey.”
“Hart, check out the shirts I had made!” Sam said, gesturing to her chest.
I looked down. Today Sam and Kyle were wearing matching red ones with big gold half hearts on each.
“Cute.”
“Oh, wait for the full effect…” She nudged Kyle in the ribs and he moved in close, putting his arm around her shoulders. Sam put her arm around his back, and with the two of them close together, the two heart halves on their shirts came together to make a whole.
“Okay, that is actually kinda clever,” I admitted.
Sam beamed. “Ashley Stannic took our picture after second period and said she was putting us in her column as the Herbert Hoover High Honeys of the week. How cool is that?”
Chase smirked and shook his head at Kyle. “I can’t believe you let her dress you, dude.”
Sam stuck her tongue out at him before turning to me and doing an artful subject change. “So, what did Nicky say yesterday?”
I quickly filled them in while I dug into my platter of chicken nuggets (our lunch lady’s version of “Wings Wednesday”).
“So, Nicky’s too scared to talk?” Chase asked when I’d finished.
I nodded. “Yep.”
“But clearly someone is after him.”
I nodded again. “Clearly.”
“And chances are it’s the same someone who went after Sydney,” Sam added.
“Be quite a coincidence if it wasn’t,” Chase said, mirroring my own words to Raley yesterday.
“I guess that means that Sydney’s Twittercide does have to do with the cheats after all,” Sam said.
“Which puts both Quinn and Connor in the clear,” Kyle observed.
I thought about this, chewing on a nugget. “Not necessarily.”
“What do you mean?” Chase asked, grabbing a nugget from my plate.
I moved my tray out of his reach. “I mean, what if Quinn was the person stealing the cheats in the first place?”
Sam raised an eyebrow at me. “Could that be?”
“Why not? Sydney gave up that Quinn was in on the cheating scandal, but what if what she didn’t say was that Quinn was the one behind the whole thing? Maybe Sydney found out that Quinn was the one supplying the answers to Nicky in the first place. Maybe that’s what Nicky was going to tell me that night, only Quinn whacked him from behind before he could.”
“Brilliant!” Sam said. “Let’s go bust Quinn.”
“Hold on there, Sherlock,” Chase said, putting a hand on Sam’s arm. “How would Quinn get the answers?”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. “I dunn-” I stopped myself just in time from saying the forbidden word in his presence. “We’d have to find that out,” I hedged instead.
I thought I saw the corner of Chase’s lip quirk up ever so slightly, but it might have been my imagination.
“Well then, what about Connor?” Kyle suggested.
“What about him?” I asked.
“Couldn’t he be the guy with the answers?”
I shrugged. “I guess. But then why would Sydney go through all the trouble of buying them from Nicky if her boyfriend had them all along?”
“Maybe she didn’t know,” Sam said, jumping on the theory. “Maybe it wasn’t until she bought them from Nicky that she figured out where they came from. And once Connor dumped her, maybe she wanted a little revenge. Maybe she was going to blow the whistle on him, and he killed her before she could.”
“Or,” I said, getting into the swing of things, “what if it was Jenni? What if she got the answers, then sold them to Sydney to set her up so she could get Connor!” I’ll admit it, I really wanted the twit with the big hair to be the bad guy.
“There’s just one small problem with all these harebrained theories,” Chase said.
“And what would that be?” Kyle asked.
“How did they get the answers to the test in the first place?”
I bit my lip. Good point. “Mr. Tipkins said he keeps his answers in a locked cabinet in his classroom,” I pointed out. “I’d guess most of the other teachers do the same. And if their cabinets look anything like Tipkins’s ancient thing, they’re not exactly vaults, you know? Anyone could have broken in and stolen them.”
“But wouldn’t the teachers notice? I mean, if the locks were broken on their file cabinets?” Sam said.
“Maybe whoever was stealing the answers didn’t break the locks. Maybe they just picked them.”
Chase paused, then nodded. “I suppose it’s possible. But wouldn’t someone have seen them?”
“Not if they went in at night,” Kyle offered. “No one’s around then. They could have broken into the school, slipped into the classroom, picked the lock, and copied the test answers with no problem.”
“This is a lot of ‘could have’ and ‘maybe,’” Chase pointed out. “It’s easy to say someone broke into the school, but how easy would it really be to do?”
I had a bad feeling I was going to regret this but… “I think we need to find out.”
Three pairs of eyes turned my way.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked slowly, even though I could tell by the way her eyes were narrowing at me that she had a pretty good idea what I meant.
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat with a bravado that I most certainly did not feel, “I think we need to find out how easy it is to break into the school at night. By breaking in ourselves.”
“Dude!” Kyle said.
Chase just grinned. “You are a baaaaaad girl, Hartley Grace Featherstone,” he said.
Coming from him that sounded like a compliment.
Even worse… I kinda liked it.
We all agreed to meet up in front of the school beneath the shaded oak tree after dark.
Which, I realized, was easier said than done.
As soon as school got out, Mom was parked at the curb, windows open, her stereo blasting Aerosmith. I made for the car at a dead run, then slumped down in my seat, shooing her away from the curb before every single person in San Jose heard her screeching power ballad.
Once home, Mom made me do my homework in the kitchen, where she could “keep an eye on my safety.” One macroburger and edamame fries dinner later, I was still trying to figure out how to slip away from the SMother.
I had snuck out of my room after dark once or twice before but only in emergencies. There was the one time that I’d hopped out of my bedroom window and the other time I’d gone up into the attic, out that window, and then slid down the roof until I hit the top of Mom’s minivan. But Mom had found out about both routes, first installing an alarm on my window, then boarding up the one in the attic. Which left precious few ways out of the house.
There was one window in Mom’s room, but I realized as I snuck down the hallway to check it out while Mom was in the bathroom, the two-story drop was a no-go. A large oak tree grew just a few feet away, but I’d have to be either a spider monkey or Spider-Man to reach it from her room.
Which left just one alternative: the front door.
I waited an agonizing eternity while she cleaned up dinner and tidied the kitchen, then sent me upstairs to my room and settled herself in the living room to watch the cooking channel with her laptop. I paced my carpeted floor, listening to the muted sounds of the TV, and watching the sun sink lower and lower in the sky, until our backyard was bathed in deep, inky blues.