Jared groans. “You’re really gonna make me work for this?”
“Yup.”
“You don’t know how hard it’s been,” he whines. “How many pops I’ve had to do. Stuff I never thought...” His brow furrows.
I fold my arms over my chest and picture the worst. My baby brother streaking through town after midnight. Eating dog food and trying not to cry. Lying to Mom and Dad about where he was going. Cheating on tests just because he could. Everything I did when he was still in middle school. But there’s no way his would be that bad. The guys didn’t have to do half the stuff we did. They were always tasked with things like bartending and blowing up the pool floats. Never asked to bend over in a bikini in the middle of winter. Never expected to laugh it off when Derek Garry honked their boob or smacked their butt—but, like, as ajoke.Relax, they’d say. Never told to send nudes. Never punished with even more dumb pops when they didn’t.
Jared drags a socked foot against the hardwood floor. “I think they’re making it harder for me because of you,” he says in a soft voice.
I inhale sharply. “Leaving in five,” I say. “With or without you.”
I push past him and head downstairs, away from his gaze, fighting the urge to challenge him on what hethinkshe knows about me and about the Players.
—
At school, the halls are creepy and quiet, only punctuated by the sounds of metal lockers slamming and hushed whispers. Everyone walks like they’ve just seen a crime scene. Giddy. Anxious. Hungry for information and thrilled just to be alive.
When I get to English class and slide into my seat, the one next to Nikki, Mr. Beaumont isn’t there, obviously. Instead some baby-faced sub with greasy bangs pulls down the projector.
“We’re, um, going to watch a movie today,” she says in a high-pitched squeak. “The Great Gatsby.The one with Leo. You read that in the fall, right?” She tries to smile, but when no one returns the favor, she furrows her brow, turns her back, and hits some buttons. The lights go down and the music starts.
Just after the opening scene, my phone erupts and Nikki’s name blinks back at me.
Bathroom in five.
I turn around to see her staring at me, her eyebrows raised.
She shoots her hand into the air. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
The nameless sub doesn’t even turn around. Instead, she waves her hand in our direction and Nikki slinks out the back door. A few beats later I follow suit.
The Gold Coast restrooms are nice, to put it mildly. They all come stocked with little baskets full of peppermints, Q-tips, and tampons. The good ones, too. Not the cardboard kind that stab like knives. Each girls’ room is outfitted with a baby-blue leather couch. They’re usually reserved for seniors, though sometimes an undie will plop down when they think no one’s looking. I did that once freshman year and was promptly caught by Tina Fowler. I had to carry her SAT prep books around for a week after that.
When I shut the door behind me, Nikki pulls me into the stall closest to the couch, the one that’s big enough to be a horse stable, and locks the door behind me. “Shaila,” she says. Her voice is scratchy, like she’s been yelling or crying. Both could be true. “Do you think Beaumont did it?” I turn over what I know in my head. How much I want to reveal. I’m so, so tired of lying. Of trying to hold everything in. And so, instead, I decide to tell the truth.
“Maybe. But there’s so much you don’t know.” I take a deep breath and close my eyes. Then the words tumble out, tripping over one another. I tell her about Rachel’s texts. Her cramped, cozy apartment. The drive up to Danbury. The way Graham cried when he spoke about the blood. Sneaking into Shaila’s room. Finding the tiny folded-up letter behind the photo of us. The look on Kara’s face when we showed her. The sparkling diamonds someone had gifted Shaila. How Shaila only trusted Kara with her secret. How that secret may have gotten her killed.
“I don’t know if there’s any proof yet that it’s Beaumont,” I say. “But it has to be. There was that rumor. Shaila wrote that he was older. Maybe the police will find something.”
I wrap my arms around my stomach, holding myselftogether, and sit on the toilet. The porcelain is cold against the backs of my legs. I expect Nikki to run out of the bathroom, to tell on me, to tell the others, to ruin everything more than I already have. But instead she steps backward and slides down the wall to sit on the tile floor, resting her chin on her knees.
“I knew,” she says.
“What?”
“I knew Shaila was cheating on Graham. She told me. One night when she was shitfaced. Said we’d never understand.” Nikki shakes her head. “It was just like her, always pretending like she knew more than us. Was moreexperienced. I was shocked. I told her to break up with Graham. That it wasn’t right. And you know what she said to me? ‘Don’t be such a baby, Nikki!’ She didn’t give a shit what we thought. I don’t even think she liked me all that much. You didn’t either.”
Nikki’s words sting like a slap. I was always jealous ofthem. It never occurred to me that Nikki wasn’t one hundred percent confident about everything—including her friendships.
“Shaila had todiefor you to be friends with me. It was always you and her against the world. Until she told me her secret. It was the one thing I had over her. Over you, too.” Nikki’s eyes are wet and glossy. She swallows hard. “She was nicer after that. I didn’t know she told Kara, too.”
I want to ask her so many questions, to hold her and tell her we have to stick together now. That she has to stop her Toastmaster tirade. Her eyes fixate on the two-ply toilet paper and its perfectly folded triangle edge as she continues talking.
“She never said it was Beaumont, though. Just said it was someone older. More sophisticated. Someone who knew what he was doing. ‘You’d be lucky to have someone like him,’ shetold me.” Nikki turns to me, her eyes now rimmed in red. “Guess she was wrong about something.”
I sink to the floor to sit beside her and rest my hand on Nikki’s knee. She lays her head on top of my fingers. Her hair falls to one side so it skims the tile floor.
“I thought this was all over,” she says.
