Change of Heart

by Norah McClintock

  I shook my head.

  “Even after the way I treated you? Even after I was such a ... a ...”

  “Bitch?” I said helpfully.

  She nodded tearfully.

  “I was thinking of Billy,” I said. “Besides, I knew you’d come around sooner or later. Billy isn’t a murderer. His biggest character flaw is that he loves you.” I meant it as a joke, but it didn’t make her laugh. Instead, it prompted another eruption of tears. I sighed and waited for her to calm down.

  “I made a big mistake, Robyn,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a sodden wad of tissue. “I never should have dumped Billy.”

  “Why did you?” I asked. “What happened, Morgan? Did you just suddenly fall for Sean?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then, “No. I mean, that’s not why it happened. I just—” She sighed. “You know Billy. He’s always doing something good. Rescuing injured birds, helping homeless people, protesting abuse of animals.”

  “He’s always been like that.”

  “I know. But he never expected me to be like that. It was always okay if I had different interests.”

  Like fashion. And shopping. Especially shopping.

  “He started talking about volunteering at a wildlife rescue place that’s just getting going. They want to get a sort of Habitat for Humanity project going to build the place. Billy thought it would be a fun thing for us to do. He said maybe we could spend some time there together. He said I’d learn all kinds of new things and that I’d really have fun.”

  “Maybe you would.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. That’s the thing. I don’t want to build an animal shelter. I don’t want to have anything to do with wildlife. Wild animals carry rabies and all kinds of other horrible diseases. They have sharp teeth. They’re wild, Robyn.”

  “So you told Billy no?”

  “I feel like I’m always telling him no. Or making excuses for why I can’t do things with him. It’s like we don’t have anything in common.”

  “So you didn’t like him anymore?”

  “Didn’t like him? I adored him, Robyn. He’s sweet and funny and considerate. It’s me. I’m the problem. I feel like a big fraud. I like leather boots, Robyn. I like chicken Caesars and BLTs. I like ice cream—the real kind, not the stuff made with soy or tofu. I love Missy.” Missy was Morgan’s dog. “But that doesn’t mean I want to be a volunteer dog walker and pick up after dogs I don’t even know. And dead birds?” She shuddered. “No way am I going to pick up a dead bird again—ever.” DARC, Billy’s bird-rescue group, picked up and counted birds that died after colliding with tall buildings.

  “Did you and Billy have a fight? Is that it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  “I just—he made me feel bad.” She looked at me. “No. That’s not true. I did that all by myself. I felt guilty all the time. And then I met Sean—and he didn’t care about anything except hockey and having fun, and ... I’m a horrible person, aren’t I? I dumped a guy who’s practically a saint, and I got dazzled by a jock.”

  “You got dazzled by Sean Sloane, the object of every girl’s desire.” Well, almost every girl. He didn’t do anything for me. “And from what I hear, he came on to you in a big way.”

  “The day after I first talked to him, he was waiting for me at my locker,” she said. “At first I thought he was waiting for someone else. But he smiled at me and stepped aside for me when I got there, and I thought, Wow, he knows it’s my locker. Sean Sloane actually knows which locker is mine.”

  “I didn’t know you were so impressed by him in the first place,” I said. “You never mentioned him before, and he’s a huge jock.”

  “I know,” she said, embarrassed. “But Sean—he was so hot, Robyn. Everyone thought so. I just never thought he would be interested in me. I mean, he had a girlfriend. And he was a senior. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t notice him. No way. And then one day there he was, stepping aside so that I could open my locker. He watched me while I got my stuff out. Then, when I closed my locker, he said, ‘Aren’t you even going to say hi?’ So I did. And the next thing I knew, he was walking me to class and telling me he’d been noticing me a lot in the halls. He said he liked the way I moved. He asked if I was a model.”

  I groaned.

  Morgan’s face flushed. “I know,” she said. “Can you think of a lamer line? But I fell for it. I was actually flattered. And it just kind of escalated from there.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “He was out to get you. He wanted to get even with Tamara—and with Billy.”

  “I feel like such an idiot. How could I have fallen for him?”

  “It sounds like you didn’t fall for him. You fell for the fact that he was different from Billy—and for his image,” I said. “You weren’t the only one, Morgan. He had a ton of fans. Everyone seemed to like Sean.” I was beginning to think that the emphasis should be on the word seemed. “He had all kinds of friends—from other jocks like him to nerds like Aaron Arthurs.”

  “Aaron Arthurs?” Morgan looked at me as if I were crazy. “Where did you get the idea that Sean was friends with Aaron?”

  “Aaron knows Sean’s locker combination. He lent Sean textbooks when Sean lost his or forgot them at home.”

  “Aaron knew Sean’s locker combination?”

  “I saw him open Sean’s locker. He was taking his books back. Why? Weren’t they friends?”

  “Not that I know of. Sean mentioned him a few times, but only to put him down.”

  “Well, Aaron seemed to think they were friends,” I said. “So there you go. You weren’t the only person to be fooled by him.”

  “If that’s supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t,” Morgan said. “No matter how you look at it, I fell for a guy who turns out to be nothing like what I thought he was. What does that say for my ability to judge character? What does it say about my character? I mean, I know I’m not Billy, but how superficial do you have to be to fall for an image instead of a real person?”

  “People do it all the time, Morgan. That’s what sells all those gossip magazines.”

  “Maybe. But I should have known he wasn’t everything he was cracked up to be. When he found out that I was an A student, he started asking me for help with his homework.”

  I remembered her in the library doing a biology assignment for him.

  “But he was getting good grades,” I said. “Why did he need help?”

  “He said it was a time thing mostly. He had so many games and practices. And he was always putting in extra time on the ice. Whatever else he was, he was dead serious about hockey. He wanted to be the best. But sometimes that meant he didn’t have time to do all his homework. So ...” She hung her head. “I bailed him out a couple of times.”

  “You did his homework for him?”

  She nodded. She looked thoroughly ashamed.

  “The first time, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I mean, like you said, he was getting good grades. He could have done it himself—he just ran out of time.”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  “The thing is ...” She hesitated. “He asked me to do some math homework for him one time. When I didn’t get around to it, he got mad at me. So I said, you’ve got time now. Let’s go to the library. I have work to do. You can do your math. But he said I’d promised to do it and a promise is a promise. I told him I was sorry, but he got really worked up. He said he didn’t realize I was the kind of person who broke promises. He was really angry. So ... I caved. I did his homework for him with him just sitting there watching me. And ... I don’t know, I just had this feeling. So I started screwing it up, you know, making mistakes on purpose while he was watching me. And you know what, Robyn? He didn’t even notice.”

  “You mean, he was distracted?”

  “I mean, I don’t think he understood what I was doing. Anyway, he backed off after that and stopped asking for my help.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I sai
d. “You said it yourself—he was getting good grades. He had to if he wanted to keep playing hockey. He was going to use his grades to convince his mom that he’d still be able to go to college later if his hockey career didn’t work out.”

  “I know what I said. I also know what I saw. If you ask me, Sean was cut out for hockey, not college.”

  “Did you help him a lot, Morgan?”

  She nodded slowly. “It was getting so I was spending more time on his homework than on mine. I spent a whole night doing an English project for him while he was at the arena practicing. He called me that night at midnight, after he got home, to make sure I e-mailed the assignment to him so he could hand it in on time.”

  “It didn’t bother you?”

  “To be honest,” she said, “I felt funny about it. But every time I decided to talk to him about it, he’d say something incredibly sweet or he’d start hugging me and, well, you know.” She let out a long, shuddery sigh. “I can’t believe I fell for him. I can’t believe I let him touch me.”

  We were silent for a few moments. Then, at exactly the same time, we looked at each other and I swear we both had the same thought.

  “If you were doing his homework for him for the past couple of weeks,” I said, “who was doing it before you?”

  H

  otshot, up-and-coming, popular, smart Sean Sloane.

  Sean Sloane, who was turning out not to be as nice as a lot of people thought he was—at least, according to Tamara Sanders and Jon Czerny.

  Sean Sloane, who was turning out to be not as smart as everyone thought he was—at least, according to Morgan.

  Sean Sloane, who, it seemed, was determined to get ahead and didn’t care how he did it. He had taken advantage of the publicity Tamara had been able to generate for him but had turned spiteful when he found out she was cheating on him. He had knocked Jon Czerny out of the team-captain spot. He had used Morgan to get back at both Tamara and Billy—for something that, in Billy’s case, had happened years earlier. He had even gotten Morgan to do his homework for him. Had he done his own work before then? Or had he charmed someone else into doing it for him?

  I looked up the number of the TV station where Tamara worked and ended up leaving a message on her voice mail. She called me back within the hour.

  “Academically?” she said in response to my question. “He did okay, I guess.”

  “Did you ever help him with assignments?”

  “We used to do homework together,” she said. “And, yeah, sometimes when he was jammed for time I bailed him out. But that goes back at least a year. After I got my part-time job at the station, I didn’t have as much time. I had enough trouble getting my own work done. Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said.

  “Sean was a smart guy,” she said. “He just had his priorities, you know?”

  And priority number one was Sean Sloane.

  “Morgan,” I said after I hung up. “Do you think Colin would let us look at the computer he, Sean, and Kevin shared?”

  “We can ask him,” Morgan said. “Come on. He’s at home.”

  Colin stood in the open doorway, staring at my black eye.

  “I felt someone grab me,” he said. “I didn’t know it was you. Is your eye okay?”

  “No permanent damage,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  I glanced at Morgan.

  “We need your help, Colin,” she said. She explained what we wanted.

  “I don’t know,” Colin said slowly. “My mom’s upstairs sleeping.”

  “We’ll be quiet,” Morgan said.

  Still Colin hesitated.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “What are you up to? The cops have the guy who did it.”

  “Please, Colin?” Morgan said, making her large eyes even larger and cranking her pouty charm up to maximum. “You’re probably right.” I stared at her. Did she really mean that? Did she still have doubts about Billy? “But Robyn and I have known Billy since we were kids. I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  Colin peered down into her eyes, and his face softened.

  “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “But you have to be really quiet. I’m not kidding.”

  Morgan promised for both of us, and we followed Colin up the stairs to Sean’s room. When he pushed open the door, Morgan stifled a gasp.

  “Nothing’s changed,” she said softly. The room was filled with hockey trophies, hockey posters, photos of Sean in full hockey gear—hockey, hockey, hockey.

  Sitting on a desk near the window was a computer.

  “Is it okay if I turn it on?” I said.

  Colin shrugged.

  When it booted up, it prompted me for a password. I turned to Colin, who merely shrugged again.

  “But you and Sean shared the computer, didn’t you?” I said. “Kevin, too. That’s what Sean told Mr. Dormer when his locker was trashed. He said that’s why he didn’t keep any of his essays on the hard drive—because you and Kevin always fooled with his stuff.”

  Colin looked down at the floor for a moment. I remembered that he had done the same thing when Sean had looked to him for confirmation the day his locker was trashed.

  “He lied to Mr. Dormer, didn’t he, Colin?” I said.

  It took a moment, but he finally nodded. He looked at me.

  “He never let anyone touch his computer.”

  “Why would he lie?” Morgan said.

  “Do you know if he wrote down his password anywhere, Colin?” I said.

  Colin shook his head.

  “Great,” I muttered. I glanced around the room again. There were at least a dozen full-color hockey posters on the wall. The only one I recognized was Wayne Gretzky. It was worth a try. I turned back to the computer, typed in Gretzky —and got an error message. I glanced at the posters again. “Who’s that guy?” I asked Colin.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Morgan said. “Even I know him. That’s Sidney Crosby.”

  “Show-off.” I typed in Crosby’s name—and got another error message. “So much for that. Anyone have any other ideas?”

  Morgan shook her head. “It was either on or off when I was over here. I never saw him turn it on.”

  I looked at Colin, who was gazing at the posters.

  “Try ‘The Greatest One,’” he said. “That’s how Sean always referred to himself.”

  I typed the words in. It worked.

  First I looked at his documents. Despite what Sean had told Mr. Dormer when his locker was trashed, there were plenty of school documents on his hard drive. I clicked into his e-mail and poked around, scanning the inbox and the outbox.

  “Well, well,” I said.

  Colin and Morgan leaned over my shoulder so that they could look at the screen.

  “Can I print some of these?” I asked Colin. He shrugged.

  “Does this mean what I think it means?” Morgan said.

  “Come on,” Colin said. “You think that guy killed Sean? No way.”

  I could see why he thought that. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you never know.

  “Let’s talk to him,” Morgan said. “Let’s find him and talk to him right now.”

  “We don’t even know where he—”

  “What are you doing in Sean’s room?” a sharp voice said behind us.

  I whirled around. Sean’s mother was standing in the doorway. Her hair was wild. Her eyes were hollow. Her face was pale.

  “Get out,” she said. “Get. Out.”

  “Mom, you remember Morgan,” Colin began.

  His mother pushed past me. She grabbed Colin by the arm and started to push him out of the room.

  “This is Sean’s room,” she said. “You know he doesn’t like people in his room, especially when he isn’t here.”

  “Mom, we were just—”

  “Get out,” she screamed. “You, of all people, get out!”

  Colin stared at her. For a moment it looked like he was going to say something, but in the e
nd he just turned and ran down the stairs. I heard a door slam at the bottom.

  Morgan started after him. I followed. As I left the room, Sean’s mother sank down on the bed. She took one of Sean’s pillows, held it up to her face, and inhaled deeply.

  We found Colin in the driveway, sitting in a navy blue Malibu that looked almost as old as I was. The rear bumper was decorated with hockey decals. A team pennant fluttered from a window fixture. Colin was in the driver’s seat, pounding his fists against the steering wheel.

  “It’s my fault,” he said, his voice muffled by the closed windows. “It’s all my fault.”

  Morgan circled around to the passenger side and got in. I saw her lips moving, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She touched Colin’s arm and then tugged it gently so that he looked at her. Suddenly he flung his arms around her and held her tightly. I saw his shoulders heaving. Colin Sloane was crying. Morgan stared at me through the window. I know she felt sorry for him, but I think she also felt awkward. After a few moments, they separated and Morgan waved to me to get in. I climbed in the backseat of what turned out to be the messiest car I had ever been in. There were notebooks and paper all over the backseat. The floor was littered with empty pop cans and fast-food wrappers.

  “I was just telling Colin that we’re going to get to the bottom of this, no matter what,” Morgan said. “We are, aren’t we, Robyn?”

  “What good will it do?” Colin said. “What good will anything do now? You saw my mom. What does it matter who killed Sean? Nothing is ever going to bring him back.”

  “It matters,” Morgan said softly. “It matters that the police have the right person. It matters that the person pays for what he did.”

  “You can’t pay for something like that,” Colin said bitterly. “The damage is done. Paying doesn’t change anything.”

  We sat there in silence for a few moments before Morgan reached for the door handle and said, “I want to find out what was going on. Maybe you don’t see the point to it, Colin. But I do. I want to know who did it, and I want that person to be punished.”

  “Even if it turns out that the cops are right?” Colin said. “Even if it turns out to be that guy you used to go out with?”