The woman nods, checking her phone. “Hold on, I have to take this.” She steps away and presses her phone to her ear. “Deirdre? What is it?” She pauses. “No, I’m at the Club. Was going to get a lesson in before…Theywhat?” She pats her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Well, that’s circumstantial.” She pauses. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Alex’s eyes flick to mine finally, and I mouth the wordVreelandto him, a look of recognition passing over his face.
She hangs up and turns back to us, apologetic. “Never mind. Thanks anyway.”
As she rushes off to the parking lot, I spin around and press my palms into my knees. “Dude, that was totally his lawyer.”
“Seriously? What was her name?”
“Ellen Davis,” I say as Alex starts typing on his phone.
“Ooh, look here. Says here she’s worked on dozens of murder trials in Manhattan.”
An electrical current zaps through my body. “Do you think we should go down to the station on our lunch break? Do a little stake out and see what’s going on?”
“Frankie, no.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun!”
“That’s not fun. That’s messed up.” Alex turns away from me and starts drumming his fingers against the desk.
“What’s up with you?” I ask, an edge sliding into my voice.
“Nothing.” He stays turned around, not looking at me.
“So, don’t you want to solve the puzzle?” I crack my neck this way and that, suddenly impatient. I want to shake him and drag him over to the station, but Alex curls his knees up under his chest, leaning away from me almost like he’s scared.
“It’s not a puzzle,” he says. “It’s a murder.”
“A better reason to figure out if Justin did it or if there’s some other freak on the loose.” I throw my hands up in the air. “Don’t you want toknow?”
“But it’s not ourjob,” he says. “And besides, Billy sucked anyway.” Alex’s voice rises to a peak, then cracks when he says Billy’s name. I try to catch his eye, but Alex turns away from me, looking at the water.
Alex’s chin quivers, and suddenly, a puzzle piece clicks into place inside my brain. Alex’s indifference to finding out what happened. I swallow and try to calm my voice, make it as kind as possible. “Alex, what did he do to you?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“Come on. It’sme.”
“It’s too embarrassing,” Alex says.
“As embarrassing as the time I farted so loud on the bus to the Met that everyone opened their windows and called me Frankenfarts?” I ask.
“Worse.”
“Well then, it sounds like you’ve been torturing yourself by keeping it a secret.”
“Fine,” Alex says. His spine curls into a C shape, and he sneaks a look at me before resting his cheek on his knee. “You know how when I came out, I said there wasn’t any specific reason why I was doing it then? Only that I was ready?”
“Uh-huh.” I had long suspected that Alex was attracted to boys, mostly because in middle school, he kept wanting to watchThe Kissing Boothmovies over and over, pausing on the Jacob Elordi scenes. But I had never asked him point-blank, assuming if he wanted me to know, he would tell me. And he did, in January, when we were sitting side by side with the logic puzzle book splayed out on the coffee table in front of us. We were halfway done with the clues when Alex said, without looking up, “I’m gay, you know.”
“That’s great,” I said, squeezing his hand. “I love you.”
He told everybody else in quick succession, and that was that.
“Well,” Alex says slowly, “that’s not entirely true. All fall, I had been talking to someone that I met in that game theory forum online.”
“Okay,” I say slowly.
