Firecracker Page 18

  “We all cheated. Someone sold me out, though. And that person was you.”

  “Why would you be so sure it was me?”

  “Wasn’t it you?”

  “You can’t prove anything,” she said. She had a point. “You can’t do anything anymore. I filled the power vacuum when you left and there’s no more room for you. Nobody’s going to help you.”

  “You know, we were kind of friends, Talia. Maybe that’s why I’m mad at you. Because I sort of liked you. I thought you were like me.”

  “It turns out I never really liked you.”

  “Get off it. Don’t all friends go through the ‘I never liked you’ stage?”

  Talia shook her head. “No one likes you. No one wants you to be here. Lukas said that no one even liked you at the other school.” Apparently Pierre had been talking about me to Talia. Which was awesome. I was so glad I had a boyfriend. “You’re all alone, and nobody likes you,” she said. “I just want to make sure you know that.”

  Apparently satisfied that I knew it now, Talia got up off the bed and walked slowly out the door, knocking another glass on the floor as she went.

  “That one’s not mine either,” I called after her.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  As Talia had said, I was all alone. I’d been all alone a lot. For most of my life. I’d almost always chosen to be that way. But I didn’t want to be all by myself anymore. Alas, it’s hard to choose not to be alone.

  The next few weeks, I went into hiding. I wasn’t hiding from anyone in particular; I just didn’t want anyone to see me. I slept a lot. I felt like I was catching up on sleep I had spent years missing. I woke up one morning to the phone ringing. I didn’t know how long it was ringing. I didn’t even know the dorm rooms had phones. “Hello?”

  “This is security.” Security was a new thing at Bristol. Part of it was related to me, but also one of the princes of Jordan was a student, and so they put an old guy who was barely coherent in a uniform and sat him in front of the main entrance. That way, if an international assassin were to break into the school, he might be asked to show ID. He mumbled something about how I had a visitor and asked whether it was okay to send him through.

  I didn’t want a visitor. I didn’t want anyone near me. “He says he’s from your other school,” the guard said. I had told myself a hundred times that I never, ever wanted to see Noah again. But you can’t lie to yourself forever, which is why I smiled. I smiled like a drunk five-year-old.

  “Can I send him over?” the security guard wanted to know.

  Before I could change my mind, I said, “Please do.”

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  For the next five minutes, I went through every emotion available to me. I landed somewhere in between nervous and thirsty. I practiced telling him, Die, asshole, and slamming the door in his face, and I practiced saying, Hi, I’m glad it was you. I figured I would do whatever felt most natural. Then there was a knock, and I opened the door.

  I said neither of those things because it wasn’t Noah behind the door. It was Mason. And behind him was Lucy. When Lucy saw me, her mouth opened so wide that her hair fell out and returned to the side of her head where it belonged. All she said was, “You don’t look good at all.”

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  Lucy would not stop talking.

  It was about five minutes until I could even figure out why she and Mason were at Bristol at all, and that was only because I actually stopped to ask her. She had gone kind of nuts.

  In my room that day, she was pacing around like my cousin Crispin before he takes his pills. Or like my cousin Gunther after he takes Crispin’s pills. She had this look in her eyes. It wasn’t crazy, but it was intense. “I’ve been meaning to come up here for weeks and weeks and I’m sorry. I’ve been trying, and I’m really sorry,” Lucy said.

  “She’s been meaning to. She kept saying it,” Mason said.

  “I know. I know,” she said. “I’ve been like, ‘When are we going to see Astrid? Can we go up to Astrid’s school today?’ And then my mom’s car—she was in an accident; she’s fine. She was parked. But the car . . . And then—”

  “I don’t have a car. I use my brother’s and he needs it for work.”

  “Mason’s brother has to drive to work, right. And then the days, they turned into weeks. And then I just looked at Mason this morning and I said, it’s been a month. Can you believe it? It’s been a whole month. I said, ‘I don’t care how we do it. I’m just not going to be able to live with myself if we don’t go up there today.’”

  “We took the bus.”

  “Two buses and a taxi. It’s not the easiest place to find.”

  “There were cows. There were a lot of cows.”

  “I know. But we’re here. Finally. Phew.”

  Lucy stopped talking. She sat down on my desk chair and caught her breath. I continued to have no idea what the hell she was talking about, but I did notice that as she and Mason were having this back-and-forth tennis match of a conversation, her weird lisp had disappeared. I had understood everything she said, even though I didn’t understand why she was saying it. And also, Lucy looked entirely different without actually looking very different at all. She was wearing the same sort of lumpy clothes she’d worn before, and her hair was the same, but she was kind of colorful looking. She showed her teeth more, and occasionally she would brush her hand across Mason’s hand. And when she was sitting, Mason would lightly tap her. They both had moments of silence when they would look at each other and not say anything, and then they would nod as if communicating telepathically. I guess I had kept my promise to Lucy. Maybe Lucy and Mason were in love. It was sweet. It was disgusting. But still, sweet.

  They were both looking at me like it was my turn. It was as though I’d asked them to show up, and we had planned out this whole day, and I was supposed to play some sort of part at that point.

  “Lucy. Mason. Let me just say, thank you for coming. But I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Why did you come here?” I said.

  Lucy blinked a few times, then looked at Mason and then looked back at me. I couldn’t tell if I’d hurt her feelings or she was just as confused by my reaction as I was by the conversation. She said, “Mason was right. That’s what he said. He said you were going to have no idea what we’re talking about. But I just, I just thought that was totally ridiculous. I just knew. But I guess I didn’t know.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Mason said.

  “Should we go?” she asked. “We should go.” Lucy was suddenly the fastest person in the world since she’d walked into my room, so she was almost out the door before I could respond.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t have to go.”

  Lucy took a deep breath and settled back into the chair. “I just couldn’t figure out why you left our school. Then I heard that you came back here and I thought, oh, of course. That makes total sense. You must have a plan.”

  “A plan for what?” I said.

  “You know,” Lucy said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Because you’re back here.”

  “Yeah, because . . .” Mason said.

  “What plan?” I asked again.

  “It’s why we came,” Lucy said. “We assumed you needed help. You did something great for us, and so we needed to help. To return the favor.”

  “Seriously. What plan?”

  “Well, of course . . .” Lucy said. “For revenge?”

  “We never meet like this anymore. It’s a real shame.” When I came back to Bristol, Dean Rein and I both decided that I should no longer be enrolled in his class. He felt it was a conflict of interest. I told him that was fine because if I had to keep seeing him regularly, I might put a letter opener up my nose. So he was nothing to me. I wasn’t cheating anymore, and he knew that because my grades were awful. I only had to
see him in the morning during chapel and whenever we would pass each other on campus, and he would smile, and I would not smile in return.

  “Why is it a shame? Did you miss me?” I asked.

  Dean Rein had said that his door was always open, which is something people say even if (like Dean Rein) they don’t mean it at all. His door was never open. I had to sit outside his office for ten minutes while his secretary, Beth, figured out whether he was actually in his office. She didn’t like me. But if I were to go by what she had taped to her computer, the only things she liked were comic strips about trying on swimsuits, so I didn’t take it personally. “My weeks have been a lot less exciting without our sessions. Boring even. I’ve had too many consecutive days without a student telling me my head is misshapen. And we were making some real progress, weren’t we?”

  “Sure. Totally.” I leaned in. “I actually need your help.”

  I knew how happy it must have made Dean Rein to hear me asking for help. I did not like making him happy. “I’m here because I had no one else to talk to. I just want to make sure you know that up front. If there was anyone in the entire world I could talk to right now instead of you, I would do that.”

  “Understood. I know this must be difficult for you to come to me. But I’m listening.” He was still smiling.

  “I’m . . . ” I had to breathe between words. “I’m worried about what people think of me,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve changed, right? I mean, since all that stuff happened at the beginning of the school year, and then when I did the good things and . . . I mean, I’m back here at Bristol, aren’t I? I’ve changed.”

  Dean Rein took another sip from his mug. “You and I have never gotten along,” he said. “I think we could both agree on that. I would be the first person to doubt any changes you’ve made.” He thought about it a little more. “But I don’t. I think you’ve made a lot of strides. I’m very proud of the person you’ve become.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “So, what is this about?” he said. “Why the urgency?”

  I told him about Lucy and Mason’s visit. I told him about how after I basically changed their stupid lives, they still came here because they expected the Astrid Krieger they knew to have some sort of giant revenge plan brewing. “So, what’s the point?” I said. “No matter what I do, nobody thinks of me as anything except this lousy person who’s just out to hurt people.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They thought you had a revenge plan. What would you be seeking revenge for?”

  “Oh . . . you know . . . When I was kicked out of here before, they thought I was planning on doing something to whoever set me up.”

  “Set you up? Ah, this business again.”

  “I don’t really think I need to go into how it went down. But I know you were manipulated, and I’m okay with it,” I said.

  Dean Rein was smirking again. “I’m curious. How do you think I was manipulated?”

  “I mean, it’s not important or anything,” I said. “But, you know, because somebody told you that I was the one who broke into your office, and then that person sent you those tests. I certainly wasn’t, you know, the world’s most honest student or anything—”

  “Yes, you could say that.”

  “But I wasn’t the only cheater. Cheating is wrong. I know that now. It was bigger than me. But someone tipped you off about only me. The person who did that might deserve some retribution. At least that’s what Mason and Lucy suggested. It was probably Talia Pasteur, but you don’t have to confirm that.”

  Dean Rein’s smile broke off into a full, long, ridiculously loud fake laugh. I thought he was going to tip out of his chair and hit his head on his desk, which would be the worst injury anyone had ever sustained from a fake laugh. “Not that it matters, but nobody set you up, Astrid. Not Talia. Not anyone.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I didn’t get an email from some anonymous source letting me know when and where you would be cheating. I knew you would be cheating because I pay attention. I figured it out. I made you think someone sent me those tests, but I found them myself. It was me. I knew you were going to cheat on my test, and I caught you. So, if you were going to enact revenge on someone—”

  “I’m not.”

  “The person who set you up was me.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “So, am I safe? Should I fear vengeance? Do I have to worry about toilet paper all over my car?” Dean Rein predictably used as boring a prank imaginable as an example.

  “You certainly don’t have to worry about me papering your car. Or anything, you know, more interesting. I’m not looking for that. Not from you. Not from anyone. I just don’t care anymore,” I said.

  “That’s a big step, Astrid. Aren’t both of our lives so much easier without all of the distraction of this . . . ?” He made two fists and knocked them together. One of the fists was supposed to represent him, and the other one was supposed to be me. If I was a wrinkly, clenched, old-man hand. “Aren’t our lives better without the headaches?”

  “Absolutely.”

  And that’s when we both heard the screaming.

  First it was just this loud wail coming from right under Dean Rein’s window. It didn’t sound like anything coming from a person. But I could just make out words. “MY LEG!” and “THE HORSE!”

  Dean Rein looked at me as if for some sort of confirmation that we were both hearing the same thing, and then he kicked over his chair and ran to the window. “No. No. Not again,” he muttered.

  “Stay here,” he shouted when he was almost out the door. “I’ll be . . . Stay here!”

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  I didn’t have to look out the window because I knew what I would see. There would be a tall boy sprawled on the ground. Nobody at Bristol would recognize him, but he’d look like he belonged there. He’d be wearing a Bristol blazer. No one would look at his face. If they did, they would see details that might have seemed out of place. His hair was curly and dyed black, but it was pushed forward, so all you could see were his teeth clenched in pain. He wore chipped black nail polish on his fingers. His belt was made from the drawstring for the curtains in my dorm room because the belt he’d been wearing earlier was covered in spikes. Nobody would see any of that. All they would see was the blood. There would be a lot of blood. Blood on his shirt. Blood on his face. Blood all over the rips in his pants. Yeah, there would be a lot of blood. Of course, he didn’t feel anything. Although he was screaming about a horse running over his leg, he wasn’t in any pain.

  There was a simple explanation for this. A horse didn’t run over his leg. He wasn’t covered in blood. He wasn’t even a student at Bristol. The mixture of soap and an entire case of raspberry juice boxes that covered Mason looked so much like blood that I wished I could take credit for it. But that detail was Mason’s idea. He had an intimate knowledge of the texture and components of fake blood. He was out there because I told him to be there. And he was doing a pretty good job, from what it sounded like. Up until that morning, I’d had no plan. This plan—the new plan—was going pretty well so far.

  My meeting with Dean Rein went exactly the way I’d wanted it to. He managed to give me every piece of information I needed without realizing he’d given me anything. By telling me that no one set me up and no one tipped him off, he’d managed to prove the opposite was true. His tell was that he complimented himself for figuring it all out on his own. I knew he wasn’t the sort of person who could figure something like that out by himself. Maybe I was a cheater, but I’d been a cheater for a long time, and he’d never before noticed a thing. He wanted me to think he was smart. That’s why he brought it up. He didn’t even notice that he told me how he was tipped off—by an anonymous email. I’m very glad that I never conspired with Dean R
ein to rob a bank or anything because I would be in prison.

  I sat at his desk in front of his computer. It was password protected, but that part wasn’t difficult. It is very hard to guess a smart person’s password because it should have nothing to do with anything. My computer password this very second is tuxedohamburgerduckcancer-9943**12. And twenty seconds after I just typed it out, I changed it, so don’t even bother. People who aren’t very smart will usually just use something they like. Lisbet’s password is rainbows. My father’s password is eyebrows. From what I knew about Dean Rein, it was pretty easy to guess what the thing he liked more than anything else in the world was. Dean Rein’s password was, of course, deanrein.

  I knew what I was looking for, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I would find. I was looking for a specific email. An email about me—but that was all I knew.

  Everything Lucy said that morning had been right. She was much more observant than I’d expected her to be. She’d listened to everything I ever said to her. Maybe I could’ve listened to everything she ever said to me if it wasn’t so damn hard to understand her. What she heard was that I would never be okay with Talia Pasteur getting me kicked out of school. Anyone who was involved needed to know that there were consequences. I needed to do something. I’d changed a lot in the past few months, and I was happy about being a better person, but that didn’t mean I should abandon what was right. Talia Pasteur deserved whatever was going to happen to her. The part of me that was going to make that happen? Well, that was a part that I felt should never change. I couldn’t get past this feeling that my grandfather had died disappointed in me. He made all this happen, and I didn’t know of any other reason he would have for punishing me. Maybe I was disappointing. I should never have been the sort of person that lets things happen to her.

  Finding the emails was remarkably easy. The anonymous tipster was blackmailing Dean Rein with some information he needed to stay a secret. It actually wasn’t a big deal: Dean Rein’s son, Martin Jr. (the one who blew his arm off in the meth explosion), stole fifty thousand dollars from the Bristol beautification fund and lost it betting on a football game. Dean Rein had replaced the money by taking out a second mortgage on his house, and he hoped that nobody would ever find out.