She got to her feet, heart pounding. Her hands burned.
Laine took another step toward Heather. Heather backed up until she hit the still-growing crowd. Nobody moved to let her through. Instead they squeezed closer together, trapping her inside Laine’s circle.
Trapping both of them.
Laine walked by Becca as if she weren’t there. She moved closer and closer to Heather until their feet almost touched. “Are you going to confess? Go ahead. Tell us you’re a dissident just like your parents.”
Heather cringed away from Laine. “I—I’m not…”
Laine grabbed Heather’s shoulders. Her fingernails dug into Heather’s shirt. She spun Heather around to face her audience, and addressed the crowd. “You all know what she is. What do you think we should do with her?”
Becca couldn’t just stand here and watch this. No matter what Laine and the others might do to her. On shaky legs, she started toward Heather.
Before she had taken more than two steps, someone pushed through the crowd until he was inside the circle. Someone with dark hair that fell into his face.
Jake pulled Laine away from Heather. “What do you think you’re doing?” he growled in a voice that made the hair on the back of Becca’s neck stand on end. His gaze drilled into Laine’s.
Laine took a step back. She straightened, visibly regaining her composure. “Protecting our school.”
Jake closed the distance between them again. “You’re protecting yourself.” His face was just inches from hers. The words overflowed with barely-restrained rage. “Are you afraid everyone will start wondering about you if you don’t show them how loyal you are?” His pitch changed abruptly, from a near-shout to a hiss. “Is there something you’re trying to hide?”
Laine backed up until there was nowhere else to go. Just like Heather had a moment ago. The circle didn’t open up for her either.
“Heather is not a dissident.” Jake’s voice was low, but it carried easily. “If Internal thought she was guilty, they would have arrested her along with her parents. They didn’t. And Internal doesn’t appreciate people questioning their decisions. Unless you want to be reported for making false accusations, don’t come near her again.” His gaze traveled from person to person. “Any of you.”
A few of the watchers looked like they might challenge him. But the threat of Internal was greater than any physical threat he could have made. Slowly, the crowd dispersed. Laine shot Heather a glare of contempt before scurrying away.
If Jake was spying for Internal, why would he have saved Heather from Laine?
Jake met Becca’s eyes. His smile snapped on like he had flipped a switch.
Right. To make Becca less suspicious. She wished it didn’t make sense, but it did.
Unless she was just being paranoid because she didn’t know how to deal with the idea that a guy might actually like her.
Anyway, whatever his motives, he had saved Heather.
She smiled back. “Thank you.” What else could she say? She didn’t want to think about what could have happened to Heather—to both of them—if he hadn’t intervened.
But when she remembered that growl in his voice, her skin prickled.
Heather came home with Becca; she said she didn’t want to be alone. On the bus, she stared out the window while Becca stayed alert for anyone who might follow Laine’s lead. She heard their names whispered a few times, but nobody came near them.
Still, Becca breathed a little easier as soon as they got off the bus and away from all those eyes.
“Thanks for what you did back there,” Heather said in an anemic voice as they entered the building.
“I didn’t do as much as I should have. You should be thanking Jake, not me.” They walked up the stairs side by side. They used to walk inside together like this every day after school, and do homework at Heather’s apartment or Becca’s. Only two weeks had gone by since Heather’s parents’ arrest, but the old routines already felt unfamiliar.
“Who was that, anyway?” asked Heather.
If Heather didn’t know who Jake was, that meant he hadn’t approached her. Good. “He’s that guy I told you about before. The one who might be spying for Internal.” She unlocked the apartment door and pushed it open.
The old Heather would have been worried, or confused, or curious, or something. The new one just nodded. “Thank him for me.”
They walked inside.
Not ten feet from where they were standing, Becca’s mom had told her she had killed Heather’s parents. Becca squirmed as though Heather could see the conversation playing out in front of her.
She had to get out of here, away from the ghost of her conversation with her mom. She hurried toward her bedroom. Heather followed.
In Becca’s room, they sat down on the bed together, like they had so many times before. Like they had when they had found the note. Becca glanced across the room at her desk. She had buried the note in the bottom drawer, under a stack of old homework. Even hidden there, to Becca’s eye it blazed like a neon sign.
They sat like that for a moment, not quite looking at each other, as the silence grew around them.
Enough. There was too much that she was avoiding, that they were both avoiding. It had to stop.
“We need to talk about…” Becca lowered her voice, even though her mom wasn’t home. “About what we found.”
Heather went rigid. “You mean, that my parents were—” Her voice broke. “I know, okay? I get it. They were dissidents all along. I don’t need to sit around and talk about it.” She flicked a piece of dust off Becca’s bedspread like it had offended her.
In all her thinking about the note, Becca had barely considered what it meant for Heather. For Heather, it wasn’t a source of doubt, but something all too black-and-white. Again Becca wondered: what kind of a best friend was she?
“We don’t have to.” Becca tried to shift into a more comfortable position. Nothing felt right. “Whatever you want. But just so you know, it doesn’t make a difference to me. No matter what your parents were, I know you’re not a dissident.”
Some of the tightness went out of Heather’s body. She lay back and stared up at the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter in the end. You might know I’m not a dissident, but everybody else thinks I am. Laine is right—eventually Internal will decide they made a mistake and come back for me. Didn’t you say they already have someone spying on me?”
“They can’t arrest you just because some idiots at school are saying things about you. You haven’t done anything wrong.” But neither had Anna. And now, because of Becca’s lie, Anna was gone.
Which led her right back to the note, and what it had said. What if Internal didn’t care as much about truth as she had always believed?
“The stuff in the note… do you think—” She couldn’t force out the rest of the sentence. I’m just talking to Heather, she reminded herself. She read it too. She’s not going to turn me in. She started over. “Do you think it could be true?”
“Of course it’s not true!” Heather frowned in confusion. “Why would you—” She jerked up from the bed, her movement so sudden it made Becca jump. “You… you’re trying to…” She took a step toward the door, then back toward Becca. “You believed me when nobody else did. You defended me when nobody else would. And now you’re turning on me too?”
What had just happened? “I’m not turning on you. Why would you even think that?”
“There’s only one reason you would say something like that. You’re testing me. To see if I’m a dissident after all.” She balled her hands into fists. “I thought I at least had one person on my side.”