She stumbled over Tartan, who scampered down the hall with Angeline’s filming ribbon between his teeth with as much pride as if it were a giant rat.
Cat quietly opened their bedroom door in case Angeline was filming. They’d spoken since last night, but they hadn’t spoken about last night. Now part of her was afraid to, like if they did, it wouldn’t happen again.
As Cat peeked inside, she saw Angeline curled around the angel pillow on her bed, video chatting.
“No, I’m not sorry I asked you,” Angeline said with an ache in her voice. “I already knew. Maybe I always did.”
“The IP address proves your sister was right all along,” Maxine’s voice said.
“I guess I should have listened,” Angeline said.
“Now what? Tell Schwartzy?”
“You think he’d get in trouble?”
“Oh no, you didn’t say that. Leo writes all that crap about you in The Shrieking Violet, and you’re worried about him getting in trouble?”
The Shrieking Violet.
Leo.
Cat’s fists clenched.
And her heart sank.
She’d known it in her gut, yet she’d hoped, same as Angeline, that she was wrong. Cat pictured her sister’s face when they’d gotten home from the hospital. Not just worried about Leo but lined with guilt. She could still feel Angeline’s fingers in her hair, remembered, despite all the years in between, her own trailing through Angeline’s wet strands that night she’d come home from their dad’s.
No matter what Angeline had done, Leo had gone too far. And Cat hadn’t gone far enough. She’d never once responded to one of the threads calling Angeline “Hothead Quinn.” She hadn’t defended her.
Angeline’s voice lowered. “Maybe I should just bow out.”
“Nuh-uh,” Maxine said. “You’re not dropping out. My polls have had you ahead this whole time.”
“And now?”
“Did I tell you my voting app’s nearly done?”
“Nice swerve. But, yeah, that’s what I thought about the polls. I’ve seen the comments on Leo’s Insta.”
“Voters are fickle. Which means you can get them back.”
Tartan ran across Cat’s feet, hit the end of the hall, and darted back. Just as his paw landed beside her foot, she dropped and tugged the ribbon out of his mouth.
It was chewed up and wet. But she tightened her hand around it.
* * *
In the newsroom the next day after school, Ravi drew his latest cartoon: Acedia as the Titanic, Angeline on a raft, each limb stretched out to save a Frankengirl who was dangling in the water, her phone in her hand videoing herself, and Leo, his back turned, partying on another boat. The influences of the exhibit at the Boston Public Library showed in the pop culture reference and the one-panel scale. But he’d made it feel entirely his own. She wanted to say that, to compliment him, but she didn’t want it to seem like she’d been spying.
She faced her computer, plugged in The Shrieking Violet’s website, and the urge to scream at Leo returned. She wanted to turn him in, but she didn’t want to make things worse for Angeline. The article on her birthmark had left her more embarrassed than #HotheadQuinn. Maybe it was because the latter didn’t have guys checking out her ass at every turn.
Cat would like to think the administration would discipline Leo, but even if it did, would some see him as a martyr? Would some claim Maxine, as the best friend, couldn’t be trusted? Could it all backfire on Angeline?
Yet Cat needed The Shrieking Violet shut down.
If she revealed the truth in The Red and Blue, maybe she’d be able to control the spin.
She considered texting Emmie, but they hadn’t been on the same page the last time, and besides, Ravi was right here. Maybe they could walk into the harbor and talk it through. Stop for frozen yogurt or scones or—
Ravi stood. “All right. That’s it for me. Unless you need anything?”
She lost her nerve. “I’m good.”
“See you tomorrow then, Chief.”
He left, and Cat promised herself that she wouldn’t stalk his feed later.
Reluctantly, she returned to the The Shrieking Violet:
It’s A-a-a-alive! Maybe Inside You!
Oh, do we have a tail to tell, dearies!
We at The Shrieking Violet love being green as much as the next information source. (Well, maybe not, considering said next information source still prints on paper! Gasp!)
And so it is with great sadness weighing down our shrieks that we must advise against being environmentally conscious and filling a reusable bottle with water from Acedia’s drinking fountains. For this is a green of the “ribbit” kind, one that will soon require a delivery of lily pads, which, come to think of it, might actually be trés chic and a substantial improvement in decor.
Absurdity had reached a new level. Tadpoles living in the school’s water fountains. Leo was more creative than she’d thought, she’d give him that.
Though he’d done the same thing with the vegan bacon, taking a kernel of truth and spiraling it into a story. Earlier that week, two freshmen had gotten sick in front of the water fountain outside the gym—after mixing twelve packets of energy powder into a gallon of water and daring each other to chug.
Cat’s mind churned with likes and comments and tadpoles and #HotheadQuinn and Leo and Ravi, and she needed air. She left the newsroom for the empty halls and almost immediately came upon a flash of yellow near the girls’ bathroom. Caution tape. Three strands wrapped around the water fountain. An itch crept underneath her skin. She kept walking. Down the west corridor to the boys’ bathroom and another water fountain, more yellow caution tape. That itch spread. She increased her speed and did a lap around the school.
More yellow.
More itching.
Every.
Single.
One.
By the time Cat had come full circle to the first, she wanted to claw her hair out. Every drinking fountain in the school had been covered in yellow caution tape. A petition signed by nearly a hundred students hung above each one, demanding the administration conduct testing and warning fellow students to avoid using until The Shrieking Violet confirmed the water was safe.
How was this even possible?
Leo had reach. Reach Cat didn’t.
She tore off one of the strands. Static cling attached it to her, and each turn only entangled it further. She spun out of it, flung it to the ground, and stomped.
Reach that maybe Cat never would.
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
Or maybe never would like this.
She pulled out her phone and texted Grady.
Cat: Up for some investigative reporting?
He responded instantly with a series of thumbs-ups. She asked him to come back to school and kicked at the caution tape one last time. Her mind begged for her to return her phone to her pocket, but her heart disobeyed. She swiped open Instagram. Not Ravi’s feed. Natalie’s. She was at Eggshell Beach, sharing a pint of orange-colored frozen yogurt with Ravi.
26
When Angeline Takes an Ice Bath
8 DAYS TO THE ELECTION
Angeline shook food into Tartan’s bowl. Cat was out, her mom had texted a thousand apologies that she’d be working late, and Gramps was watching the Red Sox at the Irish bar since none of them would curse at the umpires with him. Baseball was how Angeline had learned every bad word.
Every bad word now an adjective to describe Leo.
Tartan dropped the angel wing he’d taken as a toy and scurried to his bowl. Angeline grabbed a yogurt and reread back issues of The Shrieking Violet, now with the perspective of Leo as its creator.
The live-streamed streaking during homecoming had Tad Marcus written all over it. She’d seen his text begging Leo to help coordinate
it for last year’s junior prom. How had she not remembered that until now?
Jennifer Lawrence cousin? Sure. They’d watched the Hunger Games movies three times with Sammy, finding his crush totally cute. A descendant of George Washington? Angeline thought back to Leo’s random fact about him at the lighthouse. Totally fit.
And Angeline and Cat living outside the charter school region when they’d applied? Like Cat said, Angeline had been the one to tell him. The grill fire, the birthmark—it all made sense now in retrospect.
Her secrets, entrusted to someone she thought would protect them like they were his own. She’d misjudged. She wouldn’t do it again.
She clicked on the headline for The Shrieking Violet’s most recent story: “It’s A-a-a-alive! Maybe Inside You!”
At least Leo had learned a thing or two from her about how to write a headline that demanded to be clicked. She read the full story, which was ridiculous but also creative.
Super creative.
Super creative fiction.
Leo had written a fiction story for an ELA assignment last year. It had taken her about thirty seconds to realize that he’d ripped off an old X-Files episode they’d watched—and gotten the twist wrong.
She scrolled back.
“Student council is yours because your students.”
Leo might have needed editing help with his storytelling, but his grammar had always been rock-solid. The “your” and “you’re” mistake was unusual. As were the “its” not “it’s” and more than a handful of other errors and sloppy typos.
She dissected each article The Shrieking Violet had published with all of its sarcastically silly humor.
“Shriek with me, folks!”
Earnest, loyal, smart, that was Leo.
“Bacon from cows.”
Funny? Leo wasn’t this funny.
“Succubus, some percentage true.”
Leo wasn’t funny.
“The hard thing about doing nothing’s that you never know when you’re done.”
But his brother was.
* * *
Dammit, dammit, dammit. Seriously, what were these loafers constructed from? Thorns? Needles? Razor blades? Each step of her walk to Leo’s house brought a new and more brutal form of torture. She breathed through the pain and the nerves, unsure which was greater.
(The pain, it was definitely the pain.)
Leo’s house sat on the block behind Frontage Street, but a straight route required climbing two fences and trespassing through a backyard with a prowling Satanic mutt. Leo had done it a couple of times when he’d stayed at Angeline’s past curfew. She should have risked it if she was going to insist on wearing these damn shoes. She’d owed another endorsement and figured she’d get an action shot. Now it felt like she was being shot, over and over again. Less than ideal if her #ad came with a pic of her blood staining the gold fabric.
Angeline whimpered along until, finally, the slate-blue house came into view. Clapboard siding, black shutters, traditional neat and tidy New England colonial. The 1808 in black letters on the white placard by the door still instilled a sense of awe in her. The history of this town ran deep.
Yet glamorous it was not. Unlike NYC and London, where Evelyn split her time. It wasn’t trendy either like Nantucket or Mallorca, where Evelyn vacationed. As an influencer, part of Evelyn’s appeal stemmed from living—on full display—a life others wanted, so they’d want everything else she was shilling too. Her brand was her life.
If Angeline were to follow in her footsteps, this small town an hour from the nearest city couldn’t continue to be called home. Yet Angeline belonged here, where she could smell the salt in the air and hear the croak of seagulls and walk to three beaches within ten minutes. Like she and Leo had done together for the past three summers.
She knocked on the door.
Leo answered. “Ang? What are you doing here?”
“First, your parents home?”
He shook his head, and his dark hair fell into his eyes. “Just me.”
“Good.” She stepped inside the house and gingerly removed her shoes, gasping as the edges scraped her raw skin. Her hand flew out, and Leo caught it, steadying her.
“I swear it wasn’t me,” he said.
She breathed heavily. “I know.”
Confusion lined his face, and then his eyes widened in surprise, recognition, and guilt.
* * *
Seated on the edge of the bathtub, Angeline faced one way and Leo the other. Thanks to the four trays of ice he’d dumped in, her feet soaked in a freezing cold bath as she explained that the joke about doing nothing in The Shrieking Violet was the same one Sammy had made in the hospital. Which meant . . .
“Sammy all along,” he said, defeated.
She nodded and swirled her foot in the water, but it hurt to move, so she stayed still.
“I’m sorry,” they suddenly said in unison, to which Leo shook his head.
“Sammy’s all my fault,” he said. “He cracked his screen, and his phone’s been temperamental, so I’ve been letting him borrow mine.”
“With our texts.”
“And photos. Of skinny-dipping.”
“Oh God.” Angeline’s cheeks grew hot despite the cold numbing her lower half. “And he was there the night I told you about the charter lottery and going to my dad’s.”
“Faking sleep, it turns out.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe he did all of this.”
“He idolizes you. And I hurt you.”
“But that’s not a reason to do this. It’s so . . . elaborate.”
“Like Franken-donuts?”
“Not the same.”
“No, but maybe that’s why he thought it was okay.” Angeline realized the truth of this as she said it. “He thought he was helping you win. Which would help with your mom and everything at home.”
“An election isn’t going to turn our mother into someone she’s not.” He snorted. “Well, at least my election. Her own . . .”
Angeline didn’t laugh, though there was a time when she would have. “I’m far from her biggest fan, but maybe you should cut her some slack. A Latina woman running . . . can’t be easy.”
“You sound like my dad.” Leo breathed out a sigh.
The coolness of the porcelain tub permeated Angeline’s leggings. “Now what?”
“I drop out. End this.”
“Is that what you want?”
He shrugged. “Schwartz is right that things are getting out of control. This stuff with the Frankengirls kicked off something we didn’t know was happening.”
Angeline would have liked to have been able to say, “You didn’t know,” meaning the boys, meaning the administration that hadn’t been paying close enough attention. But that would have meant that Angeline knew, and the truth was, she hadn’t thought much about it before all this.
Leo picked up a bottle of eucalyptus bubble bath. “I said all that crap about not telling us what to do because it was the opposite of your strategy.”
Knew it.
He picked at the edge of the label. “Neither of us got into this because we wanted to change anything. I’d have bet on Schwartz walking through the halls with Slothy in a papoose before I’d have said this school would care about anything. But now I’m learning things I never knew. Like how that thing with Olivia’s phone has happened twice before. She told a teacher who said to laugh it off or it’d only get worse. And that Ash kid writing on your posters isn’t just a suck-up on your campaign because he likes you—he believes in what you’re saying.”
“How do you know this?”
“He made some comments on my Insta that weren’t mean or rude. Just real.” Leo gave up on peeling off the label and set the bottle down. “Like how not being able to afford a limo for prom doesn’t just make you feel left out and
embarrassed, but makes parents feel like they let their kid down. Then this other kid, a sophomore, he came to me and said he didn’t make the cut for basketball so now he has to stop playing. He asked how he’s supposed to get the practice to do better in tryouts next year. He’s not wrong. Other schools around here participate in an intramural league. Maybe leveling the playing field in a place that’s supposed to be about learning isn’t the worst thing.”
“But it’s not the real world.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be yet. And maybe we should have more of a say, like with your peer jury. I’ve been reading, and other schools do.”
“So why not Acedia?” Angeline said, without the sarcastic edge she would have a couple of weeks ago. “Though merging platforms would kind of throw a wrench into the whole Battle of the Exes thing.”
“Yeah, about that . . .” He sat up straight, his back muscles tensing beneath his thin cotton shirt. “Maybe I was following Tad so the guys didn’t think my balls were in your purse. But instead—”
“They were in Tad’s.”
“Which the current dress code wouldn’t let him carry, by the way.”
She smiled. While she’d been staring at the slope of his nose and the freckle on his earlobe and the side of his hair that needed a fresh buzz, he’d been fixated on the sink across from them. Now, he turned his head, and his eyes flickered between hers and her lips. She wanted him to kiss her as much as she didn’t. He leaned in, and she stood.
“I should go, before someone comes home.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Leo said with the tone of someone who’d just been rejected, which wasn’t what she’d meant to do. So much had happened between them, she just didn’t want to try to resolve it beside a toilet when they could be interrupted any second.
Is that really why?
She stepped out of the tub, and Leo eyed her claddagh ring. “I’ll talk to Sammy, I promise. But do you think . . . could you maybe not tell anyone? If the school or . . . anyone . . . learned it was him, he’d get in trouble, and he’s just a kid. He’s got everything before him.”
Sources Say Page 19