Rated

by Melissa Grey

  “That … doesn’t sound healthy, Bex.”

  “It’s not,” she agreed, a little too readily.

  “Okay, so long as you’re aware.”

  She shrugged, like she hadn’t just confessed to being on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He wondered if she realized how close to the edge she sounded. Perhaps she’d been hovering on that precipice for so long that she didn’t even notice the drop. Bex reached into her backpack to pull out her tablet. She flipped open the case and swiped at the screen. It lit up, displaying a calendar packed with a dazzling array of colors.

  “Okay, so how about we order some milkshakes and make a plan to get you back on track. Might have to rearrange a few things, but I think I can make it work.” She gnawed on her bottom lip in a way that looked like habit, as her fingers flew across the screen. Her bottom lip, Chase noticed, was noticeably more chapped than the top.

  The waitress chose that moment to appear. She was new. Chase knew the staff of the Lucky Penny fairly well, but he didn’t recognize her. Her blond hair was piled in a sloppy bun and blunt bangs framed her face. The retro yellow uniform of the Lucky Penny clashed with her natural coloring. She popped a mouthful of gum as she approached their table, notepad at the ready.

  “What can I get for you lovebirds?”

  Bex was so engrossed in whatever she was doing on her tablet that she didn’t notice Chase sputtering at the word lovebirds. Or at least he hoped she didn’t notice.

  “Uh, two milkshakes, please? One black and white and one …”

  “Strawberry,” Bex supplied.

  “Comin’ right up.” The waitress sauntered away, but not before winking at Chase.

  He wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  “Do you have a notebook?” Bex looked up from her tablet, and Chase had a fleeting glimpse of what her future might look like. She already had the air of a professor about her. He wondered if that was where her life would take her, or if her regimented path led toward even greater things. Like maybe the presidency.

  “Uh, yeah.” The only one he really carried home with him contained notes about baseball and stats and training schedules, but she didn’t need to know that.

  He went digging into his backpack to find it, bypassing the still-crumpled letter lying at the bottom. If an inanimate object could express disappointment, the sad creases in that letter would be radiating with it.

  With a flourish, he yanked the beaten-up marble notebook from the depths of the bag. A red envelope fluttered out with it, landing at the center of the table like a splash of blood on the speckled Formica surface.

  He picked it up, looking for a name, but the only one on it was his own.

  The letter that had been stuffed into his locker. He’d all but forgotten about it, what with the threat of losing his scholarship and lifelong disgrace looming in his near future.

  “Two milkshakes! One black and white, one strawberry.”

  Chase jumped in his seat and blinked up at the waitress, who apparently traveled on silent cat feet and had the ability to make milkshakes appear in half the usual time.

  Bex pushed her tablet to the side so the waitress could deposit a tall, unnaturally pink concoction in front of her. Chase accepted his milkshake with a mumbled thanks and was almost relieved not to receive another wink in response, even if it did feel like the waitress’s eyes were lingering a little too long.

  His smartwatch buzzed. He glanced down at it to find that his rating had gone up a point. When he looked up, the waitress caught his eye and winked.

  Weird.

  Bex peered over the rim of her milkshake as she swirled the thick straw around the viscous deliciousness. She jerked her chin in the direction of the red envelope.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” Chase said. “Probably some secret admirer nonsense.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Bex, her voice a little strained.

  He glanced up at her. Her brows were drawn close together and her hand had gone still on the straw.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Look at the back.”

  Chase picked up the envelope. A sticker held it closed. A smiling jester grinned up at him, as if mocking his inattentiveness.

  It took him a moment to recall where he’d seen it before. “Holy crap.”

  “The stickers on the cameras at school,” Bex said.

  They leaned over their respective sides of the table, tutoring forgotten.

  “Open it,” Bex hissed at him. It was as close to a yell as a whisper could be. “What does it say?”

  Chase lifted the flap of the envelope, tearing the jester’s uncanny smile in half. He read the message out loud, his voice a low whisper. “ ‘On the day of the prophet false, one mustn’t dance a forbidden waltz. A copper found and a fortune told, all beside a box of gold.’ ”

  “Does that mean anything to you?” Bex asked.

  Chase shook his head. “No. Not at all.” He flipped the envelope over to look at the sticker once more. The jester leered at him, as if it knew the punch line to a joke Chase wasn’t clever enough to follow.

  “Any idea why they would send this to you?”

  That seemed like an awfully polite way to ask if he was somehow connected to the vandals who’d defaced the school.

  “No,” Chase said. “No idea. I had nothing to do with”—another glance at the jester—“whatever that is.”

  He turned the envelope back over so the sticker was facedown on the table. Chase didn’t want anyone walking by to notice it and jump to conclusions. That, and he was sick of looking at those creepy blank eyes.

  The shrill ring of Bex’s phone made them both jump.

  “Sorry,” she said, fumbling for it in her jacket pocket.

  “I didn’t know anyone under sixty used an audible ringtone anymore,” Chase said.

  “I’m an old soul,” Bex said. She swiped to answer the call. “Hey, Mom. I mean, hello.”

  Hey was too casual for her own mother? Now that was weird. While she spoke, he covered the cryptic letter with his palm. It seemed like the kind of thing best kept secret. He savored his milkshake, knowing it tasted better because he wasn’t paying for it, though for once he’d wanted to. He’d pick up the next one … somehow. Even if he had to wait for his dad to pass out so he could pull some cash from his wallet. Often the only money Chase’s father spent on his son was what Chase took for himself. It was messed up, and he’d probably need a lot more money to pay for the therapy he’d require in the future, but he didn’t want to think about it too hard in the present.

  Bex ended her call with a bitten-back curse. “I have to go. I’m supposed to be having dinner with my parents and I completely forgot.”

  A sudden, sharp sadness cut through Chase. “Oh. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  Bex put away her things, leaving her phone for last. “Can I text you? After dinner, I mean?”

  It was hard to tell if she was blushing, with the neon lights in the window skimming across her dark skin, but he thought she might be.

  “Sure,” he said. He took out his own phone—a clunkier model than the sleek one Bex held. It was the best he could get with his father’s rating. Access to the best phones was determined by ratings, and Chase’s father was in one of the lower brackets. Chase was glad they qualified for mobile phones at all, even if his wasn’t anything fancy.

  They exchanged numbers, ostensibly to set up a plan for Chase’s tutoring, but he had a feeling the mysterious letter was going to dominate their next conversation.

  Javi’s phone vibrated in his pocket. Phones weren’t technically allowed on campus. Students could carry them into the building, but they were to be left in lockers at all times. Javi had never once followed this rule. It was probably his agent, the same woman who managed both Team MCA and Javi as an individual. The newest Panthera peripherals bearing Javi’s likeness on their packaging had been flying off the shelves. The headset was the hottes
t-selling item, but the gaming mouse and keyboard weren’t far behind. The company had kicked him a nice two-part bonus: a check that went straight to new clothes for the twins (who stubbornly refused to stop growing) and four extra points to his rating.

  The buzzing was loud enough to be overheard, but the librarian was busy shelving books on the other side of the room. Javi slipped his phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen.

  There was a new message in the chat server his guild used to keep in touch outside Polaris. A private message.

  DMs usually meant one guild member gossiping about another, but there were seven in a row from Rouge, which seemed unusual. Javi swiped the chat window open. Rouge rarely ever indulged in idle gossip.

  Dude.

  Vulpes.

  Ping me.

  There’s some weird stuff going down and I think it would be relevant to your interests.

  Vulpes.

  V U L P E S

  Vuuuuuulpes

  With one eye on the librarian, Javi typed out a reply.

  What do you want, Rouge? I’m at school.

  The other day, you asked about weird graffiti.

  Javi glanced up from his phone. The librarian was still reading the spines of books and slowly placing them on the shelves where they belonged. Still, sitting at one of the computer terminals in the center of the room seemed like too much of a risk. It wouldn’t do to have his phone confiscated just when things were getting juicy.

  Javi stood and, as nonchalantly as possible, made his way to one of the stacks at the far wall of the room, near the end of the aisle. Maplethorpe was kept obsessively clean by a dedicated janitorial staff, but there was a musty smell about the shelves Javi had ducked between. There wasn’t noticeable dust on the books, but the smell seemed to come from the books themselves. A cursory glance at the spines revealed a few titles Javi recognized—The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye—but even more that he didn’t. They were old books, rarely assigned anymore in the school’s curriculum. Holdovers from before his time.

  If he bent down a few inches, he could see the librarian through the stacks, over the uneven spines of rows and rows of books. So long as he kept one eye on her progress, he’d be safe.

  He pulled his phone out and tapped out a reply to Rouge.

  Have you heard anything? More graffiti?

  …

  Javi jiggled his foot at the ankle as he stared at the blinking dots, which meant Rouge was taking her sweet time typing.

  His phone vibrated with the incoming message, but it wasn’t a text.

  Rouge had sent a picture.

  A redbrick wall, thick with ivy. The vines had been pushed aside just enough to reveal a line of text, painted in vivid red.

  THE RATINGS ARE NOT REAL.

  “What the banana bread?” Javi whispered before biting his lip to prevent any other renegade sounds from escaping. He’d developed a habit of replacing profane words with the names of various foods. His abuela had washed his mouth out with soap the last time he’d cursed in front of his younger siblings.

  Where was this?

  University campus, came Rouge’s reply. It was there for a few minutes before it was literally whitewashed away. Went into the student union to pick up some study snacks—ok, gaming snacks, but whatever—and when I came back out, it was there. Couldn’t have been inside for more than five minutes. I barely managed to snap a pic before they swooped in to cover it up.

  Any idea who did it?

  No, but I’m gonna poke around. See if I can dig something up.

  Let me know what you find. And be careful.

  Javi leaned against the wall and sank slowly to the floor, phone held tightly in both hands.

  It wasn’t an isolated incident. Whatever was happening at Maplethorpe was happening elsewhere. The Jester didn’t need to be a Maplethorpe student—or teacher, the thought had crossed Javi’s mind. It could be anyone. It could be numerous people, acting in unison.

  But why?

  “Are you quite all right, Javier?”

  Javi’s head jerked up to find the bespectacled—and judgmental—gaze of the librarian staring down at him.

  “Oh.” Almost as a reflex, Javi’s lips spread into the dazzling grin that paid his tuition and put food on his table. “Hi, Mrs. Russo. You look nice today. Are those new glasses?”

  “Nice try,” said Mrs. Russo. “I’m sure you know phones are not to be used on campus during school hours.”

  “I do, but …”

  Javi pressed the button on the side of the phone, locking it. He was 95 percent sure he could talk his way out of this.

  Mrs. Russo arched one thin eyebrow behind her horn-rimmed glasses.

  Okay, maybe 90 percent.

  “It’s my abuela,” he said. “She had a doctor’s appointment today. I was just texting her to see if everything’s okay and if she needs a ride home from the clinic. She always loses the number for the car service.”

  The librarian’s face softened, but not enough.

  “I usually go with her. It’s her hearing, you know. She doesn’t feel safe on the train these days, but the only appointment she could get was when I was in school and—”

  Mrs. Russo held up a hand, stemming the flow of his words. “I get it, Javier.”

  Almost no one called him Javier, but he let it slide.

  He held out the phone in a hand that trembled just enough.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m not supposed to use this at school, but I’m the oldest sibling and it’s just my abuela at home. There isn’t anybody else …”

  It was low. He wasn’t proud. But he went there anyway.

  After a moment of excruciating, silent deliberation, the librarian heaved a sigh. “You’re a good kid, Javier. But rules are rules.”

  She tapped at her smartwatch and a second later, his vibrated. His eyes darted to the small display on his wrist. A red −1 hovered next to his rating.

  A provisional deduction. Removed at the end of a twenty-four period, provided there were no other behavioral infractions.

  He fought the urge to grin in triumph. The grandma stories did it, every time. No one could resist a quivering chin and an ailing abuelita. No one was that strong.

  “Don’t let me catch you with that again,” said the librarian. “It goes back in your locker, or the deduction sticks.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.” Javi offered Mrs. Russo a jaunty salute, which made her smile. A little charm to seal the deal.

  With a good-natured roll of her eyes, the librarian left, returning to her cart of unshelved books.

  He shoved the phone back in his pocket. He couldn’t stay in the stacks much longer, not without truly incurring Russo’s wrath. It wouldn’t do him any good to have the phone confiscated now.

  Thankfully, his phone wasn’t the only way to access the chat server. The school’s computers were layered with firewalls to prevent students from looking at things they shouldn’t, but Javi had yet to meet an institutional firewall he couldn’t hop. It would take some finessing, but he could massage one of the school’s computers into giving him free rein of the internet without leaving a single shred of evidence that he’d done it. There was a computer lab on the fourth floor that would do nicely.

  He exited the stacks, sharing a small, sympathetic smile with Mrs. Russo before grabbing his backpack and leaving the library. He’d said he would deposit the phone back in his locker, and she’d watch him like a hawk to make sure he did so right away—or at least appeared to do so.

  But first, a pit stop. He’d had a large iced coffee that morning, and now it was yearning to be free.

  The door to the boys’ bathroom had barely swung shut behind Javi when he skidded to a stop.

  Standing at the sink farthest from the door was the boy with the camera. The one he’d noticed that first day of school, taking pictures of the graffiti and getting hassled by jocks. The boy who’d blushed so prettily when Javi had carelessly tossed him one of his trademark smil
es.

  Noah Rainier.

  Not that he’d dipped into the school records to learn his name—also hidden behind a firewall too short to stop Javi.

  That would be super weird. Not the sort of thing a normal, sane person would do.

  But something he absolutely would do.

  Noah’s eyes were red rimmed, the skin around them puffy, like he’d been scrubbing at it too vigorously. Like he’d been crying.

  Their reflected gazes met briefly in the mirror.

  Noah sniffed, rubbing at his nose with the navy sleeve of his Maplethorpe blazer.

  “Sorry,” he said, fumbling for the backpack he’d dropped on the floor by the sink. “I’ll get out of your way.”

  “Are you okay?” Javi asked, despite the fact that the other boy was very obviously not okay.

  Noah paused, his hand on one of his backpack’s straps. When he looked at Javi, there was something in his expression that made Javi reach behind him to flip the lock on the bathroom door. Someone pounded on the other side.

  “Hey, come on. Open up!”

  Javi rolled his eyes and shouted, “Ocupado, you soggy walnut!”

  Mumbled groaning faded away as the unfortunate soul left in search of more accessible facilities. Javi’s smartwatch buzzed against his wrist.

  Crud.

  Another infraction, even a peer-to-peer one, while he had a provisional deduction pending was sure to make the first one stick.

  But misery radiated off Noah in waves. Maybe there were bigger problems in that bathroom at the moment.

  “I’m fine,” Noah said. Obviously, a lie. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  Javi shrugged. “I’ll jump at any excuse to call someone a soggy walnut.” He took a few tentative steps toward the other boy, unsure of his welcome. But Noah didn’t back away.

  “What happened?” Javi asked.

  They weren’t friends. They’d never really spoken before that first day of school, and in the week since, their interactions had consisted almost entirely of stolen glances and averted gazes.

  “Nothing,” Noah replied. Another lie.

  “Sure, sure.” Javi leaned his hip against a sink, aiming for casual curiosity. “I find myself crying in bathrooms for no reason all the time.”