Amelia Westlake Was Never Here

by Erin Gough

  How perfect for an illicit rendezvous. Is this where Will brings her boyfriend? She lifts two of the chairs off the stack and places them facing each other on the carpet.

  Of course. This is probably what she does with him. They probably put the chairs together, lie down together, and…

  But enough of these completely irrelevant thoughts. God, my collar feels tight all of a sudden. I undo the top button of my shirt.

  “What is this place?” I ask.

  “One of the PAC storerooms,” says Will. “Not that they’re using it to store anything right now. They shifted everything out about two weeks ago.”

  I gaze around. “How do you know the door code?”

  “I watched Mr. Tipper plug it in one time.” She sits down on one of the chairs. Her eyes become slits. “You don’t know who Mr. Tipper is, do you?”

  I rack my brain. Tipper, sounds like “clipper.” An image comes to me of a sailing ship. I wonder if he is a boatswain of some sort?

  “Of course you don’t. He’s the janitor.” Will gives me a scathing look.

  The intensity of her outrage sends a strange heat through my veins. It is vital that I change the topic at once. “You’ve heard about Coach Hadley’s suspension, I expect.”

  Will’s eyes widen. “They’ve suspended Hadley?”

  I try, somewhat unsuccessfully, to tone down the triumph in my voice. “He hasn’t been at school since Easter break.”

  Will looks thoughtful. “Of course, he could just be on extended holidays.…” She meets my eye. “But if you’re right about the suspension, it means Amelia Westlake really is getting the message across.” She pauses to glower at me. “What a shame you’ve just sabotaged the whole project.”

  “What are you talking about?” I cry.

  Will throws up a hand and slaps the air. “Nat is refusing to publish any more cartoons because she knows Amelia Westlake is a pseudonym because you posted that bloody Instagram profile.” She is staring at me again like I committed armed robbery.

  Her stare is making me deeply uncomfortable and short of breath, and undoing another button would be entirely inappropriate. So I attempt to appease her. “Okay. I made a mistake,” I say. “But for God’s sake. Your graffiti, Will? It practically announced Amelia Westlake is a hoax. Amelia Westlake woz here—or woz she??? If Natasha had seen that before she saw the online profile, it would have taken her three seconds to work everything out. Might I also remind you that vandalism is against the school rules?”

  She scoffs. “And publishing under a pseudonym isn’t?”

  I hesitate. “Fine. But signing up Amelia Westlake on those lists? Nominating her to play tetherball? Nobody wants to play tetherball!”

  Will exhales a long sigh, which stretches out into silence.

  “I’m sorry Natasha found the Instagram account. I really am,” I say at last.

  “I guess the whole Amelia Westlake project is over,” says Will.

  When I hear her declare this so casually, panic unexpectedly fills my throat. Amelia Westlake is potentially fraught and certainly extremely risky, but we are starting to see results. Hadley is possibly being pulled into line.

  And then there is the unanticipated—indeed, surprising—success of our partnership. Will’s and mine. Our creative partnership is what I mean, obviously. The breathless feeling returns. “Surely this is just a setback!”

  Will shrugs in a defeatist manner. “It’s a bastard, I agree. Just when everyone was starting to pay attention.”

  “We’ve got to be able to think of a way forward.”

  Will shrugs again.

  “Think!” I cry.

  “Okay, okay,” she says irritably. She stares at the blank wall behind me and jiggles around on her chair. She pulls her legs to her chest. She stretches them out again. She picks at a stray thread. She slams the chair base with her heel. She sucks at her bottom lip, grabbing it with her teeth and pushing it out again slowly.

  The room really is incredibly stuffy; are these storerooms even air-conditioned?

  She is rocking to and fro now.

  Clearly Will is getting nowhere fast. Luckily, an idea occurs to me. “Amelia Westlake doesn’t have to publish cartoons, you know,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I fold my hands in my lap. “She doesn’t have to publish anything.”

  Her forehead creases. “I don’t get it.”

  She really doesn’t. She is looking at me as if I’m speaking in Swahili. “What I mean is, we can leave Natasha Nguyen out of it altogether,” I explain. “It doesn’t matter that people know Amelia Westlake isn’t real. In fact, it will probably make them more interested.”

  “What are you suggesting we do instead of cartoons?”

  “Amelia Westlake can make a point about Miss Fowler’s marking practices in another way,” I venture. “One that will hopefully have even more of an impact than a cartoon.” I watch carefully for Will’s reaction.

  She studies me. “I’m listening.”

  I take a moment, remembering what got us into this trouble in the first place. “Before I tell you, I need to say something. If we’re going to keep this Amelia Westlake project going, we need some ground rules.”

  Will groans and slides down in her chair. “Priceless, you are.”

  Like I haven’t heard that one before. I forge on. “If we’re doing this together, neither of us can engage in any Amelia-related activity without telling the other one first. That will stop both of us from going off on a frolic that inadvertently undermines the common goal.”

  She sits up again. “Fine. I can live with that. But if we’re going to have rules, then I’ve got one, too. The enemy here is exposure. If anyone finds out we’re behind Amelia Westlake, the project’s dead. We’re dead, too, probably. Croon is already on my case. And now that Nat’s worked out Amelia’s not a real person, she’ll do everything she can to find out who’s behind her. Which means you’ve got to stop approaching me outside the newsroom. We’ve got to pretend things between us are the same as they’ve always been.”

  “You mean, in public we need to continue to act toward each other with indifference verging on outright hostility?”

  Will grins. “You should make jokes more often, Price.”

  I press a cool palm to my flaming cheek. Gosh, it is airless in here.

  “No contact outside this room, okay?” Will says. “We meet here and nowhere else. I’ll give you the room code. Other than to arrange a meeting, we don’t talk, we don’t text. We don’t even look at each other. Got it?”

  “Fine,” I say, my heart pounding.

  “Okay. So what’s your great Fowler idea?”

  chapter 11

  WILL

  Harriet may be a superior suck-up, but her idea is bloody brilliant. It makes me think of the time I saw one of Louise Bourgeois’s massive bronze spider sculptures in person. I’d seen a picture of it in an art book, but the picture didn’t do justice to the spider’s awesome scale, its dizzying breadth and height.

  It’s the same with this: If our Fowler cartoon was the picture, Harriet’s idea is the picture brought to spectacular life.

  After Duncan and Nat’s discovery of Amelia Westlake’s Instagram account, it takes less than a day for word to get out that Amelia Westlake isn’t an actual person. When it does, interest in her explodes, just as Harriet predicted. I hear “Amelia Westlake” mentioned in the corridors. She is a constant topic of conversation in the year-twelve common room. Amelia even makes her way into my art class the next morning when Mrs. Degarno is sick. When the substitute teacher asks our names so he can mark them off the roll, Janine Richter tells him that hers is Amelia Westlake, and the class cracks up.

  Harriet checks Amelia Westlake’s Instagram account on Wednesday and finds that she has more than a hundred followers. We arrange to meet in the PAC storeroom at lunchtime to work out what to do with our sudden popularity.

  “Who are all these people?” I say, scrol
ling through their profile pics once we’re settled in our chairs with the sunlight streaming in from the row of high windows.

  “Most are from our year,” Harriet says.

  “If the page is getting this much interest, I think we need to make some changes,” I tell her.

  My first priority is to remove the creepy silhouette Harriet has used as a profile pic. I find an arty picture to replace it of a girl wearing an animal mask at a fancy dress ball. We post a bunch of other pictures of girls with their faces obscured—a girl with a paper bag over her head, a girl holding up a sign so that it blocks her features, a girl on a beach with her back to the camera.

  Over the next few days, comments from Rosemead students pour in:

  Nice paper bag, Amelia.

  Is the animal mask a clue? Should we be looking for a cat person?

  Does this mean Amelia has brown hair?

  WHO ARE YOU???

  “Wilhelmina Everhart.”

  I’m sitting on a designer chair in Principal Croon’s air-conditioned office for the chat about my marks that she insisted upon. Around me are the spoils of her reign: fancy furniture, framed photographs of pivotal moments in Rosemead history with Croon in the foreground, and on the sideboard a porcelain doll, presumably a gift from our Japanese sister school. Croon is behind her wide desk.

  “With respect, Principal Croon, Miss Fowler undermarked my essay. I’ve brought it to show you.…”

  Croon waves the essay away. “I trust Miss Fowler’s judgment in these matters. She is the literature expert, not me. Your marks are consistently poor, Wilhelmina, which is not what I was led to expect when we accepted your transfer two years ago.”

  “I don’t know why my marks have dropped. I have honestly tried—”

  Croon silences me with a shake of her head. “It’s not just your marks I’m concerned about. They point to a broader malaise.” She pauses. “There was that horrific history-of-war video project you produced that left your classmates traumatized.”

  “But war is by its very nature—”

  “Not to mention the havoc you wreaked in poor Mrs. Lavender’s food technology class,” tuts Croon. “And need I remind you of the unauthorized refugee placard you erected on the Pacific Highway directly in front of campus?”

  Of course I don’t need reminding. It read BRING THEM HERE in meter-tall letters and took me a whole week to paint.

  “Your enrollment was conditional on the cessation of this type of activity. It was the basis upon which we agreed to help you settle in. As I recall, your mother was adamant about your needing help with settling in. Wasn’t she?”

  I mumble incoherently.

  “Sadly, the ways in which we can help you are limited if you are unwilling to help yourself,” Croon says. “Given that you’ve clearly made no effort to change your behavior, it is frankly very difficult to see any advantage for you or Rosemead in keeping you enrolled.”

  I dig my fingernails into the underside of Croon’s mahogany desk. Advantage for Rosemead? How about the hard-earned fortune in fees my mother is paying for starters?

  “We have a very impressive year-twelve final average and marks like yours bring down the reputation of the school. The way I see it,” Croon continues, massaging her fingers, “is you have two choices. One. You stop all this nonsense. You knuckle down, study hard, and improve your marks. Two.” She thins her lips. “Rosemead bids you farewell.”

  I’m going through the motions of nodding numbly when I wake up to myself. This is an outrage. Croon is considering expelling me because I’m bad for Rosemead’s bottom line. Never mind nurturing underperformers or encouraging independent thinking. If you can’t rise to the top of the pile, and in a suitable manner, the school has no place for you.

  I know she’d throw me out on the spot if I said any of this, so I grit my teeth and hold in the words. That’s when something on the top of Croon’s inbox catches my eye.

  “Oh yes,” says Croon, following my gaze. “I almost forgot the other matter I wanted to raise with you.” Delicately, she lifts a copy of the Messenger out of the tray and hands it to me. “The cartoon on page three. I’m assuming it is your handiwork,” she says. “Not to mention the others that have appeared since. I know from Miss Watson that you insulted Coach Hadley last term. And that you and Natasha Nguyen are close. Was this your idea of revenge, perhaps?” She fixes her gaze on me.

  I gaze back just as steadily. Does Croon really think she can get a confession out of me that easily?

  I shake my head. “Not mine.”

  “And what about the other cartoons?”

  “Believe me, I’d love to claim responsibility,” I say with fake disappointment. “Everyone knows Coach Hadley has a reputation.”

  Croon’s nostrils flare ever so slightly. “I understand that Coach Hadley is very popular.”

  “With some girls, sure. But others find him to be somewhat of a, um, sleaze.”

  Something flickers behind the principal’s eyes. “Well, I’ve had no complaints.”

  “Oh?” I swing one leg across the other. “I can think of three instances of inappropriate behavior off the top of my head.”

  Croon pushes back her chair and stands up. Clearly, this is my cue to leave.

  “You know what I’d do if I were you, Principal Croon?” I say, staying in my chair. “Get Nakita Wallis in to tell you what Hadley said to her. She’ll tell you how last year he actually took her by the—”

  Croon leans so far across the table that I can make out the impeccable condition of her nose cavities, and the smooth lines of her eyebrows. I wonder if she tints her eyelashes or whether they’re naturally that color.

  “As I said, Miss Everhart. You have two choices.”

  She holds the door open.

  chapter 12

  HARRIET

  Will and I agree that the best time for me to execute our operation is during my free period on Thursday. I leave math as soon as the bell rings and duck into the bathroom for some quick affirmations, which I always find helpful during tremulous times.

  “You are a winner!” I whisper to the mirror.

  “You are a success!”

  “You can do this, Harriet Gwendolyn Price!”

  I am about to begin a couple of energizing breathing exercises when Kimberley Kitchener and Palmer Crichton walk in.

  Kimberley skids to a stop in front of me. She has a notebook on a string around her neck. She flips the cover open. “Want to place a bet, Harriet?” she asks.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Kimberley and Palmer exchange a sly glance. “Don’t worry,” Palmer says. “It’s all above board. We’re just running a small gambling thing, that’s all.”

  “On who’s behind Amelia Westlake,” Kimberley adds. “Odds are currently four dollars for Beth Tupman, eight dollars for Nakita Wallis, five dollars for Will Everhart.…”

  I press a shaky palm against a tile. “How many people have bet so far?”

  “About half the year,” says Palmer.

  I am keenly aware that refusing might come across as suspicious. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll put my money on Nakita.” I draw out a few dollars from my purse and hand them over.

  Kimberley hands them to Palmer, who stuffs the money hastily into her bra.

  “And what does Amelia Westlake get, when it’s all over?” I ask.

  Palmer laughs. “Whatever she wants. She’s a total legend.”

  The two of them swing around and head out the bathroom door.

  Fortified by this exchange, I walk swiftly to the east corridor, where the English classes are held.

  When I arrive, Miss Fowler’s advanced year-twelve students are making a very slow job of leaving the room. We have decided to target this class rather than Will’s to reduce the chance of people connecting the activity to her. I am doubly pleased about this decision now that I know the odds Will currently holds in Kimberley and Palmer’s sweep. This way she will also have an alibi, sinc
e I am carrying out the entire operation during the time she will be in legal studies with Natasha.

  Will knows Miss Fowler’s modus operandi, and I know from Beth that her class has an essay due today. I pretend to be reading an educational poster as the class files past. I watch each student put her essay in a box by the door as they leave, just as Will said would happen. After the last girl files out, I walk casually past the doorway and glance inside.

  Miss Fowler is tidying papers on her desk and thankfully doesn’t see me. I wait half a minute more and walk past again. This time she is writing notes on the whiteboard.

  Carpe diem, I think giddily. I reach an arm around, pick up the box full of essays, and walk calmly away with it down the corridor.

  It is a five-minute walk from the east corridor to the PAC storeroom. I keep a steady pace even though my heart is racing. When I reach the storeroom, I enter the code Will gave me.

  The room is empty. I shut the door, relief sweeping through me. So far, so good. I take the essays out of the box and divide them into two equal piles, consulting a list Will and I have worked on together using a class roll I managed to obtain from Ms. Bracken’s office. In one pile are Miss Fowler’s pets. In the other pile is everyone else.

  On the front of each essay is a cover sheet. This is where students have written their student number to facilitate blind marking, a technique that requires each teacher to mark an essay before looking up which student correlates to which number. It is supposed to neutralize teacher bias.

  “Blind marking my left foot,” Will said when we talked about it. “You want to see the comments on my last essay? Here’s one: ‘Your arguments supporting Hamlet’s misogyny are highly questionable, Wilhelmina. See me after class.’”

  Although it makes me sick to think a teacher has failed to respect the school’s marking code, I hope Will is right. Our operation is premised on it.

  I carefully remove the cover sheets from each essay, making sure I keep the ones from the first pile separate from the ones from the second pile. Then I staple the sheets that have come from the first pile to the front of the second pile of essays, and the sheets from the second pile of essays to the front of those in the first pile. I gather the essays into a single pile again, and go through the essays one by one writing AW in small print—so small you would never notice it unless you were looking for it—on the back of each cover sheet in the bottom right corner.