KATHY DAWSON BOOKS
PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Stephanie Tromly
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tromly, Stephanie, author.
Trouble never sleeps / Stephanie Tromly.
Description: New York, NY : Kathy Dawson Books, [2018]
Sequel to: Trouble makes a comeback.
Summary: When Zoe gets an invitation to attend the Prentiss School in New York City, she wonders what will happen to her relationship with Digby after his sister’s disappearance is solved.
LCCN 2017035203| ISBN 9780525428428 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698188754 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Missing children—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. |
Schools—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories.
LCC PZ7.1.T76 Tu 2018 DDC [Fic]—dc23
Jacket design by Samira Iravani
Boy’s face by Julia Malcher/Getty Images
Girl’s legs and hat by Michael Heffernan/Getty Images
All other images courtesy of Shutterstock.com
Version_1
Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* * *
• • •
“So this is what closure feels like,” Digby says.
We’re standing on the grassy patch where his little sister, Sally, was buried nine years ago.
“Closure sucks,” Digby says. “Now what?”
He isn’t asking for suggestions. He is telling me something I already know. The search for the truth about what happened to his sister after her kidnapping had been the basis of so many of our arguments, so much of the hurt we’d dealt other people, all the times we’d broken the law, all the times we’d broken our bodies. I’d gone along because . . . Digby. He needed to find Sally. But now, for the first time in a long time, Digby doesn’t have an angle to play. He doesn’t have his next move planned.
“What did I expect, right? It’s like they say. The truth is almost always disappointing.” Digby turns to me. “But . . . now what? Other than me, talking in clichés.”
I watch him wrestle with his paralysis and I think about how different my priorities have become since I met Digby eight months ago. I’d first arrived in River Heights wanting nothing more than to make some friends and have some normal high school fun.
And I did that. I made friends. I even had a boyfriend. But I blew all that up because . . . Digby. And now, with a trail of bad blood and narrowly avoided felony charges behind me, I perversely find myself dreading the end of the crazy.
Because it really does look like it is game over. Sally Digby is dead.
I know it’s selfish to wonder, but what does this mean for Digby and me? As a wise woman once said, relationships that start under intense circumstances never last.
“This isn’t the time to think about what’s next,” I say, putting the shovel back in his hand. “Now we keep digging.”
We are about to get going again when a pair of flashlight beams comes out of the main house’s back door and bobs toward us.
“Do we run?” I say. The anguish on Digby’s face makes me wonder if he can survive a late-in-the-game plot twist.
But, as usual, I’m starting at the end.
So here it is. One last time, from the top. Meaning, we have to go back to the night of Kyle Mesmer’s lake house party.
ONE
My awareness that Digby and I had been standing on the gravel road at Kyle’s house kissing for a long time came only from my feet turning into burning balls of agony. I wasn’t used to being jacked up on the five-inch heels of Sloane’s loaner boots. I tried shifting my weight, but the gravel and rocks under my feet gave way and all of a sudden, I was falling backward.
Only I wasn’t falling. Without breaking away from kissing me, Digby had scooped me up and was carrying me to the grassy field off the path we’d been standing on. When he set me down on the ground, I lay back and pulled him on top of me. I hated to compare, but I thought back to the times when I had to stop and ask my recently ex-ed boyfriend Austin to move this and move that so I could breathe. Digby knew just how to rest his weight mostly on his knees and elbows so I was exactly the right kind of breathless under him.
“Ready to have your world rocked?” Digby said. In one smooth move, he sat up, and then unzipped and pulled off my boot.
I’d started to laugh but the sensation of my liberated toes unfurling was so fricking sublime, I straight-up moaned. I even writhed a little bit. After Digby peeled off my other boot, I pulled him back down on top of me.
I felt his hand creep up my hip and linger on the bare skin of my midriff. It took me a minute to realize he couldn’t get any farther than that because the leather clothes I’d borrowed from Sloane were so binding.
“Forget about abstinence education. Let’s just start putting people in these sexbot outfits. Teen pregnancy rates would fall through the floor. Nothing’s getting past this.” Digby flicked his finger against my tight leather second skin. “And why are none of the zippers and buttons anywhere you’d think they’d be . . .”
Wardrobe malfunction or not, this was our champagne-popping moment. Just earlier that day we’d helped Henry get his football coach arrested for distributing steroids to some of the players. Austin had just dumped me to be with my (supposed) friend Allie and while that sounds awful, it was actually a blessed end to two weeks of agonizing over secretly wanting to be with Digby when I was officially still with Austin. Now that I was kissing Digby, it felt crazy that I’d ever considered being with anyone else.
And then, most importantly, Digby had just gotten our local oligarch and parody of an evil villain, Hans de Groot, to admit he’d kidnapped Digby’s sister, Sally. Even better, Digby had gotten him to promise to reveal what had ultimately happened to Sally—in exchange for what de Groot had kidnapped Sally to get nine years ago: Digby’s mother’s bionanotechnology research.
And with that thought came the memory of something Digby had said to de Groot. I pushed Digby off. “Wait a minute.”
“What? Too much?” he said. “Sorry . . .”
“You said you’d trade your mom’s research for the truth about what happened to your sister,” I said. “You plan to take it from inside your mom’s old lab in Perses?”
“Yep.”
I said, “But how? Won’t it be hard to—”
“Break into an unbelievably secure facility with federal clearance to manufacture sensitive defense-related assets?” he said. “Yep. It sure will be.”
I was confused by how calm he looked. “So how—?”
“Should I be worried you’re distracted here?” Digby gestured at our intertwined legs. “Because I’m coming at you with my A game.”
I tried to relax, but when we started kissing again, his conversation with de Groot continued to replay in my head. I could only get up to lukewarm in my response. Digby groaned and pulled away again.
“Really?” he said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“After eight months of frustration, we’re finally here on the same page and you want to talk about this?” he said.
“You said ‘inside job.’ What inside job?” I said. “Who do you know inside Perses?” I could think of only one possibility. “Besides Felix’s dad.”
Digby sat up.
“Oh, no.” I sat up too. “Wouldn’t that get him arrested? And put away for treason? Just like you were afraid your parents might have been?”
“I mean, it isn’t my plan for anyone to get caught,” he said.
I said, “Digby. You can’t—”
“Wait. Shh,” Digby said. “Do you hear that?”
“Don’t change the subject,” I said.
“No, really,” he said. “You didn’t hear that?”
I listened and then I did hear it too. It sounded like someone was in the bushes.
Digby jumped up and helped me to my feet. He waited for me to pull on my boots and then we headed into the tree line. We split up and looked around.
When Digby and I met up again, I said, “There’s no one here.” The truth was that there could’ve been twenty people standing two feet away from me and I wouldn’t have seen them. We were enveloped in pitch-black, far from the party’s lights and at least a hundred yards away from where Mesmer’s landscaping crew called it a day.
“But I definitely heard someone.” Digby pointed at the ground and said, “And look at these footprints.”
“Are you sure those aren’t our own?” I said.
He walked farther. “We were never over here.”
I followed him on the trail of the footprints. “Who do you think it was?”
“Best guess?” he said. “De Groot’s security guys.”
My phone rang. I couldn’t make out the image in the message until I turned up my screen’s brightness. “What the hell is this?”
“Typical evil scumbag move . . .” Digby said. “Make a deal with me and then immediately try to cheat me out of my information without having to give me his.”
When my eyes finally made out the image, I said, “It might not have been de Groot.”
“No, this was definitely de Groot,” he said. “This is exactly their MO.”
“Then their MO now includes carpet-bombing our school with pictures of us.” I showed him the grainy picture of Digby and me rolling around in the grass.
“Whoa.” Digby looked at the picture, patted his gut, and sucked in. “I better start getting my ten thousand steps in. Who sent this to you?”
“Charlotte forwarded it.” I took the phone back from Digby and typed in, “Where did u get this?”
A second image came through. This one was of us ugly kissing. Or, more precisely, it was a picture of me ugly kissing Digby.
“Oh, my God.” Whoever took the picture had caught me with my tongue sticking all the way out.
Digby laughed.
“Yeah, I see it. I have a freakishly long tongue,” I said. My phone beeped. “Charlotte just said everyone’s getting the pics. She doesn’t know who’s sending them. Let’s go back to the party. I need to figure out what’s going on.”
Our fingers brushed a few times as we were walking until finally, somehow, we ended up holding hands. But every time I got myself to relax and enjoy the fact that I was walking in the moonlight with Digby, my phone would alert me to another embarrassing picture of us that had been put into circulation.
When we were within sight of Mesmer’s house, Digby grabbed my arm and pulled me into the cover of some bushes. “Hey, Princeton. You know, we’re having such a good night.” He kissed me again. “We could just split. Deal with this tomorrow.”
I was about to agree when Digby burst out laughing and said, “Jabba the Hutt. That’s what that picture looks like.” He pretended to throttle himself with his own hands, wagged his outstretched tongue from side to side, and mimicked Jabba’s horrifying death rattle.
“That’s it.” I walked back to the party as fast as my high heels let me.
“Hey, Princeton, wait up,” Digby said.
“I’ll find you later. I need to talk to Charlotte,” I said. I crossed the lawn, wondering what exactly Charlotte had meant when she’d said “everyone” had gotten the pictures. I started to fear the worst, though, when the group of people smoking on the porch snickered as I walked past them into the house.
When I got to the living room I noticed a new, slightly hysterical edge to the party’s vibe. There was trash everywhere and I could see at least some of the walls would need to be repainted. A girl tripped right in front of me and didn’t manage to put her hands out in time to stop her face hitting the floor. People were getting sloppy.
I helped her to the couch and then bumped into one of Austin’s teammates on my way to the kitchen. “Hi, Pete . . .”
“Heeeey, Zoe . . .” Pete made sure I noticed how hard he was trying—but failing—to stop himself from laughing at me. The group he’d been standing with were all laughing at me too.
I finally found Charlotte by the keg in the backyard. “What’s going on?”
“Dude.” Charlotte led me away from the crowd. “This one’s going to be a meme . . .” She showed me the Jabba pic.
“It looks like the pics went up on the yearbook group chat?” I said. “And then they got shared?” When Charlotte nodded, I said, “Then it was Bill. Has to be.”
“Well, I mean, it was from an unknown user,” Charlotte said. “And tons of people are on yearbook. Including you and me.”
But I knew it was Bill.
Both our phones beeped.
“Oh, there’s more,” Charlotte said.
I looked down at my phone to see a shot of my face, scrunched up and unrecognizable in an ecstatic expression I’d never seen myself make. “Oh, my God . . .” That and the unfortunate camera angle of Digby between my legs pulling off my boots made the scene look much more sordid than it had actually been.
“Where’s Bill?” I said.
“Inside,” Charlotte said. “Crying like you made Digby leave her at the altar.”
“You know, I got dumped tonight too,” I said as I scrolled through the pictures. “This isn’t fair.”
No one was saying boo about Austin dumping me to be with my supposed friend who, actually, now that I was thinking about it, probably only hung out with me to get closer to my boyfriend. But more unfair was that my happy ending had lasted a grand total of a half an hour. A half an hour of rolling in the grass in exchange for death by social media.
“Look. Allie snaked Austin away from you. And then you snaked Digby from Bill, and if Bill had snaked a guy from someone else, then she’d be the home-wrecking slut we’re all talking about, but . . .” Charlotte pointed at me. “Right now, you’re it.”
“Home-wrecking?” I said. “Wait. Did you just call me a home-wrecking slut?”
“I didn’t,” Charlotte
said. “That’s just what the comments say.”
I went back into the house to find Bill.
TWO
Bill was in Kyle’s living room, blowing cigarette smoke out of an open window and looking pretty while she cried. Three girls were comforting her. I was just about to wade into her pity party when she broke away and walked to the bathroom.
I rushed over and got there in time to block her from closing the bathroom door. I muscled my way in after her, not realizing how aggressive I was acting until I saw her frightened expression.
“Bill,” I said.
“Zoe?” She took a big step back and would’ve fallen into the bathtub if I hadn’t caught her.
“Chill. I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I don’t think.”
“What do you want?” she said.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “I want you to stop sending out those pictures.”
Bill tried. “What pictures?” she said.
I grabbed her phone from her hand and found dozens of pictures in her album. I started erasing.
“Hey,” Bill said. She tried to snatch the phone back from me.
“I can either erase these pictures or just drop the entire phone in the toilet. Your choice.”
“Why did you say I could date him if you were just going to snatch him back anyway?” Bill said. “Was it for the extra challenge?”
“Bill, tonight wasn’t something I planned.”
“Oh, is that why you turned up in those clothes?” She pointed at my borrowed clothes. “This is like last year with you and Henry and Sloane . . . you and your love triangles,” Bill said. “Your whole deal is just so high school.”
That comment in and of itself wouldn’t have bothered me, but knowing that by calling me “high school,” Bill was giving me what she considered her greatest insult made me want to claw her eyes out. Luckily, someone started banging on the bathroom door before I could.
I yelled, “It’s occupied!”
“Zoe? You have to come out here. Now.”
“Felix?” I opened the door to find Felix hopping around outside the bathroom. “What’s the matter?”
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