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“Okay.” Mina nods, looking relieved.
I grab a few pieces of fruit from the bowl near the card swipe and we cross the quad together. A few students are sitting at library tables, studying through lunch. I navigate through and head for the far back, picking a spot near the stacks marked SOCIETIES, SECRET, BENEVOLENT, ETC. and sit down on the carpet.
I pass out the apples and take a bite of mine. “Let’s start by going over the facts of the case one more time. This will get Sam up to speed and help us see the whole thing with fresh eyes.”
Sam is looking a bit bewildered, possibly because I am talking like we really are playing detective here.
Mina looks at Sam. “Someone’s blackmailing me. I’m supposed to pay that person five thousand dollars. Which I don’t have. And I’m supposed to give it to them tomorrow morning.” Then she looks back at me. “Please tell me that you know what I should do, Cassel.”
“What do they have on you?” Sam asks. “Did you cheat on a test or something?”
Mina hesitates.
“Pictures,” I say. “The naughty kind.”
She flashes me a hurt look.
“Hey,” Sam says. “Nothing to be ashamed of. We have all taken them. I mean, not me personally, but Cassel’s grandmother, you should really see—”
“Okay,” I say. “The point is, she had them on a camera. Then the camera got stolen. Mina, the more I think about it, the more I think that someone on your hall must have done it. One of the girls. Maybe she broke in to steal a packet of hot chocolate, saw the camera, and took it. Then a week later she started flipping through the images, found the naked pictures, and during one long night of giggling and eating too much junk food, she and her friends dreamed up a funny prank.”
“You said you would help me.” This time when she looks at me, her eyes are wet. She isn’t crying exactly, but tears cling to her lashes, making her look lush and terribly vulnerable. Her misery makes me doubt myself.
“I am trying to help you,” I say. “Honestly, it fits. But look, tomorrow morning Sam and I are going to get up early, go out to the baseball field, and watch. There’s no way whoever is setting you up like this is going to be able to resist seeing if you bought it.”
“You’re upsetting her,” Sam says.
Mina turns to him. “He doesn’t believe me.”
I sigh. I do think she’s hiding something, but since I don’t know what, it’s no help. Telling her that I don’t entirely believe her won’t be any help either. “Look, if the blackmailer shows to get the money, we’ll know who it is.”
“But what about the money?” Mina says. “I won’t have it.”
“Just bring a big enough bag that it looks possible for you to have the cash.”
Mina looks disconsolately out the window and takes a shaky breath.
“It’s going to be fine,” I tell her, curling my gloved hand around her arm in what I hope is a sympathetic way. She looks tired.
The bell rings, loud enough to startle us. Mina jumps up and brushes off her skirt. When she tosses her hair, it moves like a wave. It moves the way hair does only in movies.
No real hair moves like that.
I take another look at her as she pushes a lock of it behind her ear. “You seem really nice,” she tells Sam. “Thanks for trying to help.”
There are no split ends, I realize. And while her bangs make it hard to see, the part on top of her head shows a color that’s subtly different from the rest of her skin.
Sam nods, expression grave. “Anything I can do.”
“We’ll figure this out,” I say.
She gives me one of those almost-smiles that some girls seem to be able to summon up, the kind where her lip trembles and she looks so vulnerable that you find yourself desperate for a way to turn it into a real smile. Her lashes are still wet from tears that never fell. I wonder what it would feel like to wipe those tears with my thumb. I imagine the softness of her cheek against my bare skin. Then she picks up a messenger bag covered in pictures of singing anthropomorphic strawberries and marches out of the library.
Her wig swings behind her.
* * *
The rest of the day is a blur of hastily composed texts that don’t get returned. Lila isn’t in the common room of her building, and I had to promise Sharone Nagel a copy of my statistics homework to get her to look. Lila’s car is not even in the lot. By the time I discover that she’s not at dinner, I am practically crawling out of my skin with my desire to find her.
