The Rivals

by Daisy Whitney

  “Yeah. Seriously,” he says, his brown eyes fixed on mine.

  “I don’t know. This is hard,” I admit, and when I do I feel lighter—just voicing some of my worries out loud makes them weigh on me less. So I unburden more. “It’s very trial by fire. I feel like I’m just making it up as I go along. Besides, how can you say I did great when you were all, Why are we having a meeting? Why are you bringing this tip to us?” I ask, imitating him.

  He laughs. “Is that what I sound like?”

  “Yeah. Totally,” I say, punching him on the arm.

  “Ouch.”

  “So. Answer the question, Martin.”

  “Because one does not preclude the other. I thought you did great, and I also didn’t agree with you. But then you convinced me.”

  “I think Parker was the one doing the convincing,” I say.

  Martin rolls his eyes. “Parker was fine. But you,” he says, and places his index finger on my chest, where my heart is. He pushes lightly. “You have what it takes in here.”

  I feel warm all over, but it’s not only physical. It’s deeper, and it comes from knowing he’s not just into me on the outside; he’s into all of me, and he sees all of me. I grab his hand, and with my hand on top I press his closer, imagining that he can feel how his words have turned the temperature up through every square inch of my body.

  “Maybe I should disagree with you more,” he says, moving his body closer to mine.

  “Let’s fight and make up.”

  “Over and over. Terrible fights, horrible fights,” he says, and buries his face in my hair. “The worst.”

  “Because it bothers you so very much to be beneath me in the chain of command.”

  “I’m so bothered by it, Alex. It makes me want to fight even more,” he says, then runs his hands through my hair the way I like. Everything he does is the way I like.

  “Mmmm…”

  He shifts me so I’m sitting on his lap. “Now I’m literally beneath you. So fitting.”

  I pretend to swat him, but he pulls up for another kiss.

  “I like you beneath me,” I whisper to him.

  “I like it too,” he says, and right now, in this moment, it’s just the two of us here. No one else is in my head.

  Then as soon as I think that, an image flickers by. Quick, fast, like a burglar outside a window. But I’ve spotted the thief and, try as I might, he keeps looking through the glass. So I shut my eyes and rest my head against Martin’s chest. He wraps his arms around me tight and holds me close. And now we are not Mockingbirds. We are just us. Just a boy and a girl trying to move beyond what happened.

  Chapter Six

  WORKING GIRLS

  When I was younger, I was a baseball fan. My father was a fanatic, a diehard, so he felt it was necessary and vital to take my sister and me to ball games. He taught us how to keep score, and by age seven I was tracking the number of errors and base hits and the batting averages for every professional baseball team. I know—it was an unusual habit for a piano girl. But I liked the numbers, the history, the strategy.

  Then I stopped.

  I went cold turkey when I learned about the sport’s modern history and how steroids had radiated across nearly all of professional baseball, touching virtually every player. The sport was tainted; they were tainted. Their records didn’t matter; their scores didn’t matter. I could sit there and tally up RBIs till the wee hours of the morning, but there would be asterisks next to their names.

  Because they doped up to get ahead.

  “You just don’t do that,” I told my dad. “So I’m not going to follow baseball anymore. And I don’t think you should either.”

  It broke his heart, but he agreed and joined in my boycott.

  I was just a fan, though. So while I understand the broader philosophical stance—success of any kind needs to come on its own terms, by its own merits—I also want to understand the personal one. I want to understand why Delaney’s so worried about a possible déjà vu that she’d seek me out the second school started.

  When classes end the next day, I head straight to her dorm.

  I knock and knock and knock.

  There’s no answer.

  The music is blasting from her room, so I bang louder. They’re probably rocking out to her tunes in nearby Connecticut too.

  “Delaney!” I shout as loud as I can possibly go.

  The music stops, and she yanks the door open.

  “What? Oh. It’s you,” she says.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m here to see you,” I say. “You came to find me yesterday. I came to find you today.”

  She narrows her eyes at me, looks me up and down, then scans the halls. She nods and lets me in, quickly shutting the door behind her.

  Her bed is piled with clothes, T-shirts upon jeans upon jackets with ironed-on patches all over them. Her floor is littered with suitcases and duffel bags. The one thing that’s neat is the row of nail polish bottles on her desk, easily twenty or thirty of them. I notice she’s holding the brush of one of them—a sparkly sea green. I glance down at her nails. Every other one has been painted sea green; they alternate with cherry red.

  “I like your nails,” I say.

  “Want me to do yours?”

  “Sure,” I say, and I sit down on her desk chair. She grabs another chair and pulls it up next to mine.

  “What color do you want?” she asks.

  “You pick,” I say.

  “Blue,” she declares, and reaches for a color the shade of a cloudless summer sky. “You are definitely a blue.”

  “You must be the Color Oracle. Yesterday you said I should do a blue streak.”

  “Yes, but that was because you told me you’d thought about dyeing your hair blue,” she says, correcting my memory.

  “True,” I say as she brushes on a daub of nail polish, spreading the color perfectly in one, two, three strokes. She continues across my right hand with the same precision and I say, “You’re like a pro. Wow.”

  “I am a pro,” she says. “I do this for a living back home. And on weekends at a salon down on Kentfield Street.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. Why? Does that bother you?” The raspiness in her voice is its own question mark.

  “No. Why would it bother me?” I ask, but I know why she’s asking. Because she has some sort of chip on her shoulder, some sort of defensiveness, like she did when I asked her about her hometown. She thinks it should bother me because it must bother other people, other students.

  “Because I have a job, unlike the rest of the students here,” she adds.

  “Then you should let me pay you,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “No. I offered to do your nails.” She reaches for my left hand. “Blow on your right,” she instructs, and I do as I’m told. With her practiced hand she applies the color to my left hand, and I realize Delaney and I are similar. We both work with our hands. We both have chips on our shoulders. She thinks people will judge her for her past. I think people will disrespect me for not having earned the Mockingbirds job. And maybe that’s the reason the Mockingbirds pay it forward, because when you’ve been through something yourself, it’s much easier to connect to someone else. Maybe that’s why I don’t need a leadership pedigree or a lengthy résumé of captainships. I’m here because I had my training by fire.

  “Delaney, is Theo involved in the cheating ring?” I ask as she finishes my pinkie.

  She keeps her head bent over my hand, not meeting my eyes. “Why are you asking about Theo?”

  “You’re dating him, right?”

  She shrugs. She’s uncharacteristically quiet.

  “Should I take that as a yes?”

  A nod.

  “So, is he the reason you reached out to me?”

  She looks up now, her blue-gray eyes behind her glasses meeting mine hard. “You think I’d rat him out, don’t you?”

  I stay
calm. “I didn’t say that. I just asked if he’s involved.”

  “I’m not a rat,” she says, her voice low but still full of smoke.

  “Hey,” I say softly, and I have this impulse to reach out and touch her knee to reassure her. But I don’t do it. “I know you’re not a rat. I would never think you’re a rat. I think cheating sucks too, Delaney. And if someone I cared about was doing it, you damn well better believe I’d try to stop him.”

  She looks up quickly, her eyes blazing at me through her silver-framed glasses. She points at herself. “You think I didn’t try to stop him? I tried, but he just totally denied it. Completely, one hundred percent denied it. And besides, I hardly know anything,” she fires off.

  “Can you tell me what you do know, though?” I ask gently, thinking of what Martin said last night, of how when I lead from the heart, I know what I’m doing. This is what I zone in on—just talking to her, just connecting.

  She breathes out hard, pushes her hands through her purple hair.

  “Yesterday I saw some of his e-mails. But I didn’t read them,” she says defensively. She takes a beat, then continues, “Okay, I mean I looked at them. But not like looked through them. They were just up on his screen, and I saw bits and pieces about”—she stops to sketch air quotes—“the plan.”

  “The plan to…?”

  “What I told you yesterday. I don’t have any more details. He was e-mailing other students; they were setting things in motion about competing again. That’s all I know. He said competing again.”

  “Like dance competitions? I don’t think Anderin helps you dance again,” I add.

  “No. It doesn’t. That’s why something else is going on and I don’t know what, because once I saw those e-mails I asked what was going on.”

  “What did he say?”

  She steels herself for the next thing. “To stop snooping.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told him not to leave e-mails up on his screen,” she says proudly.

  “So is he the one supplying?”

  “I don’t know. As you can imagine, he was kind of pissed.”

  “So why’d you come to us?” I ask, wanting to finish the conversation that was truncated yesterday, wanting to hear from her what we only surmised in the Knothole.

  “Because I told him to stop. I said whatever he’s doing needs to stop, but he just said he wasn’t going to talk about it. Wasn’t going to discuss it with me. And I can’t take a chance of this thing blowing up again. I’d never get into college then. Sure, it’s all fine and good that Matthew Winters apologized, but could you imagine what would happen if I’m even remotely connected, even through my boyfriend, to another accusation of cheating? I’d never get into college. Never. That’s why you can’t say it came from me. You can’t let on, okay?”

  “I won’t,” I say, reassuring her. I will protect her like the Mockingbirds protected me.

  “If people ask why I’m talking to you, I’ll say I’m a runner or something. I’ll say I’m in the Mockingbirds. But if you’re going to press charges against him or anybody for this, it won’t be from me.”

  “But you do want us to investigate him and see if we can figure out where it’s coming from and who’s behind it?” I ask, because I want to hear it from her. “Do you want us to help you?”

  “Yes. I want you to help. And I want you to stop it, obviously.”

  “Then I will. Look into it,” I say, and blow a long stream of air against the fingernails on my left hand. “Now, I have to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Are you involved?”

  Her eyes go wide. “No!”

  I hold up my hands. “I have to ask.”

  “I would never do that. I thought that was clear.”

  I give her a hard look. “I need to trust you. I need to know you’re not messing with us.”

  “Alex, I did your nails.”

  “And I love them. But I need to know you’re not playing with us. You want us to protect you, and we will. But we’re about to go out on a limb and investigate a far-reaching cheating ring because of what is effectively an anonymous tip. And I need to know we’re not being played.”

  “I swear I’m not playing you.”

  “Good. I’m glad,” I say. “You know, Delaney, I could give you a really good cover-up for being seen with me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it?” she asks warily.

  “Come sing with us at the Faculty Club in two weeks. I thought we could do something,” I begin, then pause for effect, “ironic.”

  She smiles. “Hell yeah.”

  “Good. We’re going to practice this weekend. I’m thinking subversive songs.”

  “How about protest songs?”

  “How about songs that rage against the man?”

  “How about ‘Another Brick in the Wall’?”

  I smile, nodding a few times, then I think of something better, something apropos for many reasons. I tell her my idea.

  “Perfect,” she says, and we shake hands.

  Chapter Seven

  THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

  And so the investigation begins.

  I spend the evening rereading notes on past investigations that the Mockingbirds have conducted. As I flip through pages in the notebook, it’s clear there’s not really a secret sauce to them, especially ones at such an early stage. The one rule—guideline, really—is to be respectful. Which means we aren’t supposed to cross lines. We aren’t supposed to trip people up or try to catch them on hidden cameras or go snooping through their things, their phones, their bags. If we did that stuff, then we’d be the bullies, we’d be the bad guys. So my job right now is just to find clues, and according to my sister’s own handwriting here in the Mockingbirds notebook, we’re supposed to do that simply by keeping our eyes and ears open for clues.

  Not easy.

  I shut the notebook and look at my watch. It’s eight at night, which means it’s way past midnight in Barcelona, where Casey is studying abroad for this semester. I want to call her and ask her what she meant by keep our eyes and ears open for clues. And could you be a tad more specific with this whole be respectful directive, big sis?

  My sister founded the Mockingbirds when she was a student here four years ago. She was consumed with guilt over the suicide of a girl in her dorm who’d been bullied. That girl—Jen—had tried to talk to Ms. Merritt but was roundly blown off. Jen went to Casey too. She didn’t tell my sister she was thinking of shuffling off her mortal coil, but even so Casey felt like she didn’t do enough. She felt responsible. So she created the Mockingbirds to give students options.

  Now it’s my job to live up to her legacy.

  And since it’s too late to ask Casey what this all means, I give Amy a call. She’s a junior here, and lives a floor below me. Her advice is simple, but it makes sense. “Just keep an eye on Theo and look for clues, signs, evidence. That’s all you can do right now at this early stage. You can’t cross any lines,” she tells me.

  “But what does that mean—cross a line?”

  “It means you can’t start following him around until you have something concrete on him,” she says. “You don’t want him to freak out and think he’s being tracked or about to be tried or anything. Because he could very easily not be guilty, and we don’t want students thinking we’re out there following everyone without cause. You need to have a reason to follow someone. I mean, we’re not the government, wiretapping and profiling and all. So, for now, you have to keep it casual, observe him in class or in the caf or when you see him in public places.”

  “So what you’re saying is keep an eye on him without letting on we’re keeping an eye on him, and hope I happen to find a clue?”

  Amy laughs. “Yeah, something like that.”

  I shake my head. “This isn’t easy.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  I say good-bye and look up Theo McBride’s name in
the school directory to see where he lives.

  Richardson Hall.

  The name itself makes me shudder.

  Richardson Hall is where Carter lives. Richardson Hall is where Carter date-raped me. I haven’t been there since that night. I’ve barely even seen Carter since the trial. After he was found guilty, he practically went radio silent for the rest of last year. It was like he was the one walking the long way to class, he was the one staying as far away from me as he could, because I hardly saw him.

  I like hardly seeing him. No. I freaking love it.

  So there is no way I am going to that dorm to keep my eyes and ears open for clues. No way am I setting foot in that building ever again. If the memories come crashing down when my boyfriend touches me, I’m not going to walk into the combat zone and let the flashbacks unleash a full-scale assault.

  Besides, I have boys for fellow board members. They can do it. They can stroll through Richardson Hall—dorms are open to all students—and keep their eyes and ears open. I’ll tell them in the morning.

  But when morning rolls around, I rethink the decision to send the boys. I feel weak. I feel afraid. I feel like I’m right back where I was last year. Afraid to go anywhere. Afraid to leave my room. Afraid to walk around my school.

  And I didn’t go to the Mockingbirds to be afraid.

  Because this is my school. This is my senior year. This is my life, and I took it back last year and I plan to keep it.

  So as I shower, I tell myself to snap out of it.

  As I get dressed, I remind myself I can set foot at the scene of the crime without this feeling that everything’s a drive-by shooting and I’m left with bullet wounds on the side of the road.

  As I grab my backpack and literally march across the quad to Richardson Hall, I repeat that I am not doing this for the Mockingbirds, for Delaney, for the greater good or anything like that. I am going to walk into Richardson Hall for me.

  I open the doors to Richardson Hall. Theo is in room 103, just a few doors down. I grit my teeth and push ahead, turning down the hall. There are boys everywhere; the place is teeming with them, and I feel exposed again, as if they all see the crime against me, as if they all look at me and think, There’s that girl who was date-raped. Or maybe they think of me now as Martin’s girl, his damaged goods, and feel sorry for both of us.