AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He laughed at that, to my surprise. “Sure, Kathleen,” he said. “Foreshadowing.”
Chills went down my spine as he said that—my name.
No one ever just said my actual name like that, as if it were as casual as Kat, or Sam, or even AJ. He made it sound like he’d been saying it all his life, as if he’d been practicing, at the very least.
I liked it.
“Anyway,” he continued, leaning a little more toward me, lowering his voice so I was forced to do the same. “I think he wanted to help without being obvious about it. Maybe Vivian did want him to come tell us not to bring this to the school’s attention, but the way he’d said it… I don’t know. It just seemed like he was hinting that that was the exact thing we should’vedone.”
“But how can you know that?” I asked.
“Because,” Felix said, and let out a hefty sigh. “Vivian alreadybroughtit to their attention.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
Just then, I got a notification on my phone, feeling it vibrate in my hand. Gulping, I flipped my phone over in my hand to find that I got an email in my school inbox. I swiped it open, read its contents,thenlooked back up at Felix.
“You’vegottabe kidding,” I said, re-reading the message just in case I was imagining it. As if my imagination could be responsible for any of this. “It’s an email from the Office of Student Life. They’re summoning me to some kind of meeting.”
“Fuck,” Felix breathed.
“They want me there at three tomorrow.” I shook my head, putting my phone away. “I don’t understand. How could Vivian bring this up to them? How could she defend herself?”
Felix shrugged, but it was a sad, almost defeated gesture. For once, he didn’t know. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Again, I narrowed my eyes at him. “We?”
He pulled out his phone and showed me the screen. “I got the same email. All of us did. Me, Leo, Ell.”
Shaking my head, I pushed past him to head back to Tara’s room. I had no space in my head to deal with this meeting right now. When the time came, I’d go, and give it my all. But I couldn’t preoccupy my thoughts with it right now. Tara was sobbing her eyes out, and Vivian was asking for sweet, sweet revenge.
“Hey,” I said, pushing the door open slightly to find it was still unlocked. Tara was still crouched on the floor, and Elliot and Leo were leaning awkwardly against the wall to her side, feeding her a tissue box. Her eyes seemed to light up, a small spark of hope, as I walked in.
“I hope you beat her up,” she gurgled. That evoked a giggle from both of us. “Hope you made her cry like a baby.”
“Not quite,” I said, stooping down to her level. Once Felix had shut the door behind us, I settled down on the floor across from her. “Look,” I began, “we can still get back at her.”
“How?”
I looked up at Elliot. “Did you tell her anything?”
He shook his head. “Told her to wipe her face up.”
I rolled my eyes, turning back to Tara.
“We have an idea, inspired by that little stunt you told me to pull with the bottle of Vodka, or whatever it was that was chilling in my room earlier. You said there are room checks coming up. What if we planted some hard drugs—something sketchy as hell—into her side of the room?”
I watched her expression carefully to see if she was following me through her curtain of bleary tears. She was, it seemed, as a frown formed on her lips.
“Like I told you before,” she began, “both of you can get into trouble. Even if you didn’t right away, she could always allege that you were the one who put the stuff there.
I smirked. “Not if I’m not there to begin with.”
Tara’s eyebrows drew together. I looked to my side to find that Elliot and Leo had the same confused expression. “What?” they said at the same time.
I got to my feet.
“My mom wanted to pull me out of school,” I started explaining, “when all this shit started happening. I could still take her up on it. Classes haven’t even started yet, and refunds on tuition are still valid through the next two weeks. It’d be believable. If I pretended to leave, then how could they blame me for something I wasn’t there to do?”
