by Katie Zhao
Akil gasped. His breathing came out in ragged, uneven bursts. Sweat glinted on his brow. His eyes, wild. “I . . . don’t know what . . .”
“You’re having a panic attack,” said the medic. “Everyone—back away and give him air!” she barked, and we all took a collective step back. “Do you need an ambulance?”
“Ambulance? N-No,” Akil wheezed, trying and failing to wiggle out of the medic’s grasp. “You can let go of me. I’m fine now.” He broke free and then stood up, almost losing his balance. “See?”
“You’re coming with me to the nurse’s office, mister,” said the medic, grabbing him firmly by the hand. “Alone,” she added when she spotted us taking steps toward Akil.
“We’re his friends,” I protested.
“He needs space from everybody,” she insisted.
Helpless, we watched Akil and the nurse walk off the field toward the school. Disappearing into a mist. Out of the mist, whispers, whispers everywhere. And then, a new notification on my phone screen, from Tip Tap.
Jamie has four former friends. Each friend has a secret. One day, Jamie goes missing. Which friend is guilty and deserves punishment?
Correct answer: a) the one who sunk the lowest to get highest
Explanation: J.R. definitely had a hand in dealing A.P. his stash. How far would A.P. go to protect his secret, his GPA, and his chances of becoming a recruited athlete? Far enough to take a little too much . . . from yours truly . . . and maybe even far enough to silence J.R.
That’s one secret revealed. Three more to go. Unless someone wants to fess up to what they did two years ago. What’s it gonna be?
—The Proctor
CONFESSION TEN
Confirmed: A.P.’s drug abuse finally catching up to him at the track meet. Say goodbye to Dartmouth, dude. —Anon
*****
The teachers searched Akil’s belongings and, of course, they found exactly what they were looking for. Then he was suspended from school for the next two days. He was lucky he didn’t get a harsher punishment for getting caught with drugs, and I heard a rumor that it was because the Patels poured money into Bates’s pocket.
But I knew Akil, knew the pressure he was under, always under, from his family. Whatever punishment Bates doled out wouldn’t compare to the punishment he’d face at home.
Nancy: Hey Akil, you doing ok?
Akil: Not rly . . . I mean yeah I’m physically fine, but let’s say I’d rather be anywhere but home rn. Plus the scouts from Dartmouth and Columbia emailed me to let me know they’re no longer considering recruiting me . . . pretty sure the others are gonna follow
Alexander: sorry to hear that bro
Nancy: I’m sorry Akil
Akil: It’s ok guys, no one to blame but myself
Krystal: Can’t your parents make a huge donation to Dartmouth or something so you can still get in?
Akil: LMAO no way. I pissed off my folks so much that they’re threatening not to pay for my college tuition at all. So prob not . . . idk we’ll see
Krystal:
Nancy: Akil, who gave u the drugs that u used last night? The Proctor said it came from “yours truly” which means that whoever gave them to u has to be the person behind all the posts
Akil: That can’t be it
Nancy: Why not?
Akil: The person who gave me those drugs was Jamie, a few weeks ago
Akil’s response made no sense. And it made perfect sense. Jamie knew his secret all along. Jamie had been the one supplying Akil with drugs.
Jamie was dead, of course. But the echoes of everything she’d done, the reverberations of everything we’d done, lingered here. Making sure this school remembered her. Making sure we remembered all the secrets, and the people, we’d tried to bury.
Alexander: Yo, I’m sure you’ll be fine, Akil. You’ll prob be able to perform better at track meets now cuz I’m pretty sure the drugs were holding you back
Akil: I wasn’t doing them to perform better at track meets tho. I wanted to help myself forget
Krystal: Forget what?
Akil: What we did 2 years ago . . . The Incident.
Akil’s words, all the whispers within these walls, haunted my thoughts. But I couldn’t let my mind dig up the past, now. Not when there were so many other issues to deal with in the present.
Peter’s warning about Richard and David. Akil’s panic attack, his secret coming out. The Proctor’s next move.
And the worst part, the part I couldn’t even confide in my friends: my Diss Diary. After revealing our secrets, the Proctor would turn my own words against me to pin the blame on me.
Why were they doing this? Maybe it was all to avenge Jamie’s death. Or maybe the Proctor really thought we were the ones who’d killed her.
Or—were they the one behind Jamie’s death? If so, my friends and I were in over our heads. And there was no way out.
I stared down at the AP Chem exam paper in front of me. I was sitting in the school auditorium with fifty juniors and seniors spread out in alphabetical order over hundreds of seats. The whole place was silent except for the test proctor’s footsteps moving up and down the rows, and the scratching, the whispering, of number two pencils on paper.
Whenever I took a break from staring at the problems, I couldn’t help but notice how the banner above, everything around me carried the school’s motto. In inceptum finis est, labeled on the pencil shaft. In inceptum finis est, stamped on all the scratch papers.
When the exam was finally over, I let out a sigh of relief. I’d barely been able to concentrate, but it was done, leaving my brain fried.
The first thing I did was check my phone. A notification flashed, showing several missed group chat messages within the last hour.
Akil: Yooo you guys are still at school right?
Krystal: Yeah ofc, why?
Akil: So I’ve been putting my suspension to use, and I figured out the Proctor’s IP address
Krystal: DUDEEE WTF YOU’RE AMAZING
Akil: I’m coming to school so we can talk in person. Where will you guys be in like an hour
Krystal: Nancy and Alexander are taking the AP Chem exam rn, but that ends in an hour . . . and I’ll be coming out of AP Chinese. We’re going to the newspaper club after tho, so meet us there?
Akil: Dope, see y’all soon. Idk how to prepare to catch a psychopath but pls do that before we meet lol
Reading through the texts, I let out a whoop that caused a couple of seniors to stare at me. Finally, a piece of good news. I couldn’t wait to get to the newspaper room.
Nancy: Akil, you’re amazing!! I take back any mean thing I’ve ever said about you
Alexander: Dude, that chem exam destroyed me but this news brought me to life again
But first, I had to focus on the issue seated two rows in front of me: Alexander. I had to figure out why Alexander had lied yesterday.
Alexander was rubbing the back of his hair, stretching his arms as everyone around us filed out of the auditorium. I rose, but rather than following the crowd out, I went over to Alexander and tapped him on the shoulder.
He jolted, then turned around and smiled. “Yo. Looks like Akil didn’t even need my help cracking that IP address, eh?”
Wordlessly, I showed him my phone screen. Showed him the text from Mama last night.
Alexander’s expression collapsed as he registered the words. Registered what it meant for him. He groaned, closing his eyes. “Nancy, I—”
“Alexander, why did you lie to us yesterday? What are you hiding?” I interrupted. “I’m not mad. I’m worried. The Proctor already came after Akil. I can’t—” My voice caught. “I can’t watch them come after you, too.”
Couldn’t sit back and let the whispers win. Couldn’t watch the ghosts rise out of these dusty hallways to take us down.
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you,” Alexander said quietly. “Please don’t ask me.”
I stared at him. At his guilty eyes, at his hun
ched form. “All right,” I finally said. “All right.”
My phone dinged between us, and Alexander glanced toward it. A shocked look, a horrible look, crossed over his face. “Are you—is that text from—”
With a sinking feeling, I snatched my phone out of his line of vision. As I’d feared, there was a new text waiting for me, from him.
Peter: On ur way to newspaper?
Nancy: Yeah, give us 5
“Let’s go. We have to get to the newspaper room, remember?” I shoved my phone into my pockets. Heart hammering, face flushing hot. Alexander must have seen. Alexander couldn’t have seen. He couldn’t know.
Alexander’s eyes, piercing me. Sharp and calculating.
I held his gaze, a silent challenge. You don’t ask about my secret, and I don’t ask about yours.
After a moment, a century, Alexander nodded. “Let’s go.”
I opened the door to the newspaper room, and from the walls, a dark shadow lunged at me.
“Whoa!” I cried, jerking back and nearly colliding with Alexander. “What the—?”
“Akil,” Alexander gasped.
Akil grinned. He looked almost back to his normal goofy self. Back to the way he was before the track meet, before he lost his prospects of going to college as a recruited athlete. Almost, but not quite. Dark bags hung below his eyes. He’d lost a lot of sleep, like the rest of us.
“You’re sure you shouldn’t be at home resting?” I said.
“I’m fine, Mother,” Akil said sarcastically. “I feel fine. Good enough to catch the Proctor, anyway.”
That was what he said, but I had the sneaking suspicion that he was barely holding it together. I could see the cracks forming in his image. I saw those same cracks every time I glanced in a mirror. And it was the same way Jamie had looked before the end.
“It’s true I’m not supposed to be here, though, so lower your voices, okay?” Akil added.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve sneaking into school.” Alexander grinned.
“Well, this investigation can’t wait. I’ve been working on this all night, and I’ve finally tracked down the Proctor’s IP address. Here—come in. I’ll show you.”
When we entered the classroom, Isabel, Kiara, Mark, and Nishant sat at a round table holding a camera and notebook in the middle of the room. In the back, Louisa sat in front of computer monitors, absorbed in her typing.
My eyes were drawn toward Peter, who sat on the teacher’s desk. Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, swinging his legs, he looked more like a student than a teacher. “Welcome.” Peter smiled, his gaze lingering on me for a beat longer than the others. I turned away, my cheeks warming. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ve actually got to leave for a staff meeting, but I’ll trust you all to handle yourselves, especially since Akil here”—Peter nodded at Akil—“seems to know what he’s doing with this investigation.” With that, he departed. I watched Peter leave, trying to ignore the twinge of disappointment in my stomach.
I glanced back to find Alexander’s eyes boring into mine. I quickly dropped my gaze. Couldn’t drop the sense, though, that he knew, or at least guessed. I hoped I was wrong.
Akil pulled out his laptop from his backpack and booted it up, chattering a mile a minute at Kiara, who appeared fascinated by his every word. I joined the others crowding to look over Akil’s shoulders. He’d pulled up Google Maps onto his screen, and his mouse hovered over a dot that he was enlarging. “So here’s the place. It looks like a coffee shop.”
“The Green Bottle Coffee a few blocks down from our school,” I said. I passed by it every day. “No way. The Proctor’s been posting from there?”
“Looks like it.” Akil let out a low, long whistle. “We’re so close to catching them, I can feel it.”
“So . . . what exactly do you need our help for again?” Nishant asked.
“Okay, here’s the plan. Obviously, we’ve tracked down the Proctor’s IP address,” Akil said. Eyes alight, livelier than I’d seen him in days—months, even. “The four of us are going to need your help, your camera equipment and stuff, to find the Proctor and get evidence of who they are.” He nodded at the club members.
“You want us to come with you?” Kiara squeaked, looking both intrigued and horrified by the prospect. “What if the Proctor is, like, super dangerous?”
“We’re not even sure if they’ll be there. The odds are pretty slim,” Akil admitted. “We could wait until the next post drops, but I figured since we’re all here anyway, we might as well scope out the place now. And since I’m suspended, I don’t mind staking out Green Bottle Coffee on Monday if we need it, in case the Proctor comes by.”
Kiara gaped at him with reverence shining in her eyes. “Wow. That’s really brave of you.”
Akil sat up straighter. “And eventually, of course, you’ll write an article about the investigation, and—” He frowned and cast a glance around the room. “Hey, where’s Krystal?”
Somehow, in the excitement of Akil’s big breakthrough, I hadn’t noticed that Krystal hadn’t shown up.
“Uh,” said Louisa, and her jaw dropped as she stared at her phone. “I wouldn’t count on Krystal coming through today.”
Even before I grabbed for my phone and checked Tip Tap, I knew what had happened.
The first post on the app showed a picture of a young girl. A younger Krystal with a choppy pixie cut even shorter than the one she had now. Her eyes were lined with thick black eyeliner that made her look like a raccoon, and she wore black lipstick. She was dressed in all black. The girls in the picture with her dressed in black too, and wore matching angry expressions on their faces.
Jamie has four former friends. Each friend has a secret. One day, Jamie goes missing. Which friend is guilty and deserves punishment?
Correct answer: b) the one who ruined a girl three years ago
Explanation: We know K.C. as the queen of volunteering, the most selfless and fashion-forward soul in all of Manhattan. But who was K.C. before coming to Sinclair Prep? Definitely NOT Miss Volunteer Princess. Rumor has it K.C. was such a delinquent that she got shipped off to boot camp the summer before high school ’cause she almost killed someone in eighth grade . . . tsk, tsk. Not so goody-two-shoes after all, huh, K.C.? Don’t tell us that old habits die hard, and you killed a certain someone for real . . .
Two secrets down, two to go. Fess up or get messed up.
—The Proctor
CONFESSION ELEVEN
Aight I’m holding my funeral next week after the AP Calc exam destroys me, you’re all invited —Anon
*****
Louisa and Kiara immediately put their heads together, gossiping about Krystal’s troubled past. The others, though less invested, still gawked at their phones.
“Did you guys know about this?” Alexander asked, breaking the strained silence.
Akil shook his head. “Who did Krystal almost ki—?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I interrupted. “We’ve got to find her.”
But just as I rose, the door banged open. Krystal stood there, panting at the doorway, an apologetic smile on her face. “Sorry I’m late. My mom called me and I got held up.”
We all stared at each other.
Krystal wrinkled her nose. “What? I said sorry.”
“Um, Krystal,” I said tentatively, “have you checked Tip Tap?”
“No . . . should I?”
“No,” I said at the same time Louisa put in, “Probably.”
Realization dawned on Krystal’s face. She yanked her phone out of her purse. I cringed, not wanting to see the look on her face when she saw, when she knew what had happened.
“Oh,” came Krystal’s small, quiet voice. She shoved her phone back into her bag and, without looking up, mumbled, “I . . . I have to—bathroom.” With that, she turned on her heels and raced out of the room.
“Krystal!” Dimly, I was aware of my chair clattering to the floor in my haste to run after her, but I didn’t care.
I finally caught up to Krystal in the girls’ bathroom. She stood in front of one of the sinks. The place was empty, silent except for the sound of Krystal splashing water onto her face.
“Krystal.”
Splash. She raised her head, and mascara ran down her cheeks in black streaks. And her pale face twisted, twisted in the mirror. No longer Krystal.
There, a ghost of a girl. There, waiting in the cold, in the dark. Waiting for me.
I blinked and shook my head, and it was Krystal, I reminded myself—Krystal—in front of the mirror.
“Go away, Nancy,” Krystal sobbed. “I—I want to be alone.” She wiped the mixture of tears and water from her face, causing the mascara to smudge even more. “You saw what the Proctor said about me. Well, it’s all true, all right? All of it. I’m not . . . I’m not who I say I am.”
“Of course you’re who you say you are,” I said. “You’re Krystal Choi, aren’t you?”
“You know what I mean. I haven’t been truthful about who I used to be before starting school at Sinclair Prep. The person I am now is basically the opposite of who I used to be. I—I pretend to be good, but really I’ve done some awful things.”
Hadn’t we all? Done awful things to stay at the top. Horrible, twisted misdeeds, for the chance to have everything, everything this school had promised us.
“You’re not pretending to be good,” I said. Because I needed this to be true, needed to know that some of it was real. “You are good. It’s called character growth.”
Krystal released a laugh-sob, and turned around, finally, to look at me. Krystal, fashionista Krystal, makeup expert Krystal, like this. Broken. Unmade. It was unnatural.
“Back in eighth grade, I joined a gang.” Her voice was raspy, hoarse, as though she hadn’t spoken these words aloud in years, in centuries. “I wanted to prove that I was tough. I wanted to do something that would force my parents to pay attention to me. They were too busy at work, or networking, or out with their friends.”