The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You

by Lily Anderson

  “Yes,” Meg said. “But it’s not an active aspect of her relationship with Cornell. We were their buffer.”

  Mary-Anne narrowed her eyes at us. “You guys weren’t going on dates with them, were you?”

  “Of course not.” I gagged, dropping my spoon. “They had a real relationship. They spent time together off campus. They loved each other.”

  “No,” Meg stressed. She flapped a handful of journals at me. “They didn’t. Every article I’ve read said that they didn’t. It was just a hormonal reaction misconstrued due to an aggrandized notion of their basic compatibility. If they loved each other, they wouldn’t have immediately broken up. Harper would agree that this is the only logical explanation for their failure as a couple.”

  I thought of Harper sitting in her flannel jammies, asking us whether either of us had heard from Cornell. She hadn’t been wearing her indignant Spock face. She’d looked hopeful—like she was checking her work for a misstep in the equation.

  “No,” I said. “She wouldn’t.”

  “She will,” Meg stressed. “After she’s had a chance to come to terms with her first failure. The shame of being expelled and being dumped—”

  “And being framed,” I said, raising my voice. “It’s not her fault that she got expelled and it’s not her fault that Cornell was too much of a coward to stand up for her.”

  “It’s not our place to assign blame,” Meg said, taking a generous bite of her sandwich. She covered her mouth as she chewed. “We’ll love her no matter what. Because our friendship is based on trust and—”

  “Wait,” I said. All of my synapses fired at once, filling my head with a furious white-hot light. “You’re talking like she actually broke into the homework portal.”

  Meg cut her eyes at Mary-Anne, who took another delicate nibble from her chopsticks.

  “Meg.” I must have yelled because the table of sophomores closest to us turned to look.

  Meg rolled her eyes. “Well, she never said that she didn’t do it.”

  “Yes, she did!”

  Everything that had happened at Harper’s house the day before played in front of my eyes at quadruple speed. Lunch, list making, going through pictures. Harper hiding her face behind a teacup. Harper hugging me before pushing us out the door.

  The clatter of plastic forks and laughing conversations and the soft tide of textbooks being opened and closed started to press in on me. All our friends had been folded into pockets—across the room, across the campus, across town. All of it was wrong. Peter and Ben and Cornell shouldn’t have separated. Mary-Anne shouldn’t have been the third person at our table. Meg shouldn’t have been staring at me with her blank therapist expression.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There should have been more voices, more help.

  “No,” Meg said softly. “She didn’t. I would prefer if it weren’t true, but from the leads we came up with, the evidence points to—”

  “Not her,” I shouted. I brushed my hands over my hair. Thoughts were pinging around my head with so much force, I would have sworn I could feel them boomerang off my skull. “I don’t believe you. Why would Harper risk everything to go up one place in the ranking? She never cared about making valedictorian. You, on the other hand, went up six places when she got expelled. You care so much about your stupid thought experiment. Do you care about creating your adult identity more than you care about your friends? Because, in case you forgot, one of your best friends got expelled for something she didn’t do and all you can do is sit there and dissect her relationship.”

  “I am trying to be prepared for whatever happens next,” she shot back. “But we can’t keep pretending that it’s all going to be fine. There is a strong chance that it won’t be.”

  I goggled at her. “Can you hear yourself? You sound like a robot.”

  “And you sound delusional.” She stood, sweeping all of her magazines into her arms and throwing her bag over her shoulder with a sniff. “I can’t deal with you when you’re like this.”

  “I’m always like this!” I shouted as she started marching toward the student council table.

  I put my head in my hands. A panic attack was creeping up my spine. My lungs went tight, working hard for the tiny molecules of oxygen polluted with perfume and soup steam.

  Mary-Anne set her chopsticks down and gave a quiet ahem to remind me of her presence. As though I could forget.

  “It seems fair that you should get to see my meltdown,” I said without raising my head. “I was ringside for you throwing salad at the junior officers.”

  She made a tittering sound that I belatedly registered as a laugh. “Well, I was right. That dance was useless. The cricket team is stuck in their old uniforms and the band sucked. It was a total waste of a dress. I thought Jack getting cleared would save it, but then he ran off with you.…” She swept a fingernail under her lashes, erasing some invisible smudge. “I don’t know why he keeps trying to make peace with Peter’s friends. I’ve been telling him all year that it’s a waste of time. He never listens.”

  My head popped up. “I didn’t know you talked to Jack.”

  She leveled me with a droll stare. “I’ve been talking to Jack since sophomore year. Classic on again, off again. My literary agent said it’s ruining my poetry. My last chapbook is apparently ‘unpublishable.’ No one wants to read about the prodigy having boy troubles. I’m supposed to be finding my adult voice, not pining.” She wrinkled her nose. “Don’t go blabbing about any of this. My shrink is on vacation and I have writer’s block. That doesn’t mean that I want everyone putting the pieces together. Some things are better when they’re private, don’t you think? Outside input gets so messy. Your friends judging you, making notes on you, comparing your rankings…”

  She batted her eyelashes knowingly at me. The soup in my stomach boiled as I thought about Ben and I sitting on opposite sides of the student council table. Oh, hell.

  “I don’t have anyone to tell,” I said. The truth of this was physically painful. “So, when Jack got suspended, did you think he’d actually cheated? From what people say about him, it sounds like something he’s capable of.”

  “Most of what people say about him, he started himself. He did a paper on gossip last year for social psych that got really out of hand. I don’t think he considered that the rumors would stick around. All that bullshit about making drugs and animal testing…” She rubbed her lips together in thought. Somehow, her lip gloss remained untouched by teriyaki sauce. “He could have hacked into the system, if he’d wanted to. He is a computer genius. But he’s been working too much this year to have time for petty vengeance. He jumped up twenty places in the ranking in two months. Whoever messed with his grades cut him off right before he broke the top ten. He’s trying to get a late acceptance to MIT to stay with Peter. It’s so sweet that it makes me want to puke. I assume that’s why he keeps trying to play nice with you all. Not that you’ve been very welcoming. He has this crazy idea that helping Peter’s friends will prove that it would be okay for them to go to college together. He’s been ignoring Brad and Nick all year. And me. Thus, our current off-again.” She sighed and fluffed the back of her hair as though thinking too hard had deflated it. “He showed up at winter ball, kissed me hello, and then started asking if you and Meg had shown up yet. He was so freaked out about Harper getting expelled and Peter thinking it was his fault.”

  “Really?” I hadn’t considered it at the time, but it had been strange that Jack had followed me out to the parking lot when I’d gone tearing out of the dance. Mendoza had pointed out that he had been risking a renewed suspension. Why would he have done that if he were guilty?

  If the hacking had to be mathematically and emotionally reasonable, then it couldn’t be Jack. Getting into the top ten wouldn’t have done him any good if it hurt his relationship with his brother.

  “Look, I know it’s a long shot since you guys are, um, not together right now,” I said. “But do you think that you
could get a copy of the code Jack used to find the source of the probations?”

  She flinched an unconcerned shrug. “Oh sure. At the very least, I could get a copy from Nick. He owes me a favor. I tutored him in French last year so that he could keep his scholarship. What do you think you’re going to find in the code?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I have to look for something that proves that Harper didn’t get herself expelled.” I looked over at the student council table where Meg had planted herself next to Peter. “Since, apparently, I’m the only one of our friends who’s worried about that.”

  Mary-Anne scoffed. “Meg’s hypothesis is inherently flawed. If Cornell valued his grades over everything else, he wouldn’t be trying to quit the student council.” She paused, giving me a brief, bright smile. “Congrats on making valedictorian, by the way. Please don’t let Ben get ahead of you. No one wants to hear that speech.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered. I hadn’t even begun to consider seeing my name at the top of the ranking list. It wouldn’t get posted until we came back from winter vacation. It was a tenuous reality, a Bizarro world that had been created the second I’d left the winter ball.

  Yikes. Even my inner monologue was making DC references. Everything was wrong.

  I stared down at my lunch. “Do you mind if we sit here in total silence until the bell rings?”

  “Sounds good to me.” She picked up her chopsticks again. “Same time tomorrow?”

  Why is Mary-Anne asking me to pass notes to you? Since when do you write notes to Mary-Anne?

  Think of it as analog texting. It’s old school. She’s emailing me a copy of Jack’s code. Do you want a copy?

  Also, if you’re going to start passing me notes, you should work on folding them. This looks like it got run over by a truck. Didn’t you see how tiny Mary-Anne folded hers?

  (see how nice it is when you can read someone’s handwriting?)

  I’m crap at coding. Let me know the results?

  I’ll look into the art of origami after finals.

  Can you get access to another storage closet?

  Check yes or no.

  Your initials are BMW? Hahahaha!

  You find a closet. That last one was gnarly.

  Your wish is my command. And my initials are classy as frak.

  26

  I’d convinced my parents to give me access to the Mess website after dinner by telling them that my Econ teacher had sent out a study guide for our final exam. Since I didn’t need the study guide—I had 104 percent in that class—the firewall would only show one download coming from my computer. If my parents were going to treat me like a common criminal, I had no choice but to act like one.

  So far, I’d put up with being grounded with mute vexation. I’d always hated TV shows where surly teens went around slamming doors and screaming, “I hate you!!!” As much as the idea of slamming a door was becoming more seductive, I bit back the impulse. I stood patiently next to the front door while my dad gathered all his papers together in the morning. I waited alone at the edge of the parking lot after school until it was time for Mom to come fetch me. I didn’t argue about what was on the radio or what they wanted to watch on TV after dinner.

  I went to scho ol. I ate lunch with Mary-Anne. I accepted the notes that Ben kicked under my desk in American Immigrant or slipped into my messenger bag as we passed in the halls. I came home and polished the final essays I’d started weeks ago and glanced at the review sheets that my teachers had passed out.

  It’d only been two days, but I felt like my vocal cords were going to atrophy.

  Not talking to Meg and Harper was hellish. I’d taken to sitting in the empty American Immigrant classroom before the bell rang rather than face the empty planter box at the front of the school. Meg had spent a day in the cafeteria with Peter, but then had disappeared into the library, probably to keep ignoring her homework in favor of her ongoing research into why Harper and Cornell had broken up.

  It wasn’t that Meg and I had never fought before. There’d been plenty of flare-ups in our group over the years. I’d spilled soda on her first copy of The Fountainhead and she’d given me the silent treatment until I’d ordered her an even fancier copy off the Internet. When we were freshmen, she’d told me I was too pudgy to wear Harper’s bikini—which had been true, but we’d screamed at each other about it anyway.

  This was new. This was a fight without Harper. Harper was always the deciding vote. Even if she hadn’t been locked up in her fortress of solitude, she couldn’t possibly have refereed an argument based on her.

  All I could do was try to clear her name. My parents and Meg and Peter and Cornell and everything else could wait.

  I turned up my TV. If my parents listened outside the door, they would hear the soundtrack to Battlestar Galactica and assume I’d fallen asleep while marathoning again.

  There was nothing glamorous about searching through the thousands of IP addresses that had cleared Jack Donnelly’s expulsion. From what I could tell, Dr. Mendoza had given Jack access to all the tracks of the senior homework portal. Every login, every piece of homework submitted, every email sent and where it went, all time stamped. There were no names attached, just line after line of student ID numbers and IP addresses.

  Jack really did deserve all the extra credit for finding anything at all in the slurry. My eyes started to water almost instantly as I scrolled through page after page. I found my own student ID number and cross-referenced every email I’d sent since September. With only one class together, Harper and I hadn’t used our school accounts for much this year.

  I grabbed a notebook and started writing down student ID numbers. The Fake Harper had done a lot of damage. They would log in at one address and then submit an assignment in another immediately after. That would account for all of the plagiarism accusations. It wasn’t clean work, but it was effective. The combination of school computers, home computers, and people checking their email from their phones meant that everyone’s account was cluttered with different codes. The Fake Harper could have been using multiple IP addresses without anyone ever noticing.

  I went back to my own account and checked the dates of each email I’d had with Cornell, Peter, and Meg. I fell into an easy patter, finding the student number of one of my friends, then tracing it in the list. Meg routinely submitted her homework from one address—the computer in her bedroom—and checked her email from another—her phone. Peter was the same. Cornell’s account had the occasional blip address, but when I checked them, they appeared in multiple accounts. That had to be the school computers. And then there were the logins that the Fake Harper had left before the website crashed.

  I sat back. Jack might have been able to delete any code that would have implicated himself or Peter, but he had no reason to cover for Meg and Cornell. Most of the Fake Harper’s time stamps were in the middle of the night, so that ruled out anyone using Real Harper’s computer to do the dirty work.

  Except for Real Harper.

  No. I couldn’t go back down that road. I didn’t care what Meg had said about Harper not denying Mendoza’s accusations. I knew that she couldn’t be responsible for this chaos.

  My cursor hovered on the screen, waiting to be directed to another student ID number. There was only one other person I emailed with regularly. Seeing the numbers, it was impossible to ignore. It was an almost daily barrage, one IP address on a loop.

  I’d already accused everyone else that I cared about. If I didn’t find anything, I’d never have to tell Ben that I’d searched his account.

  Don’t let me down now, hobo clown.

  I typed in his ID number and picked up my pencil, tapping it against my notebook as I ticked through his logins. There was a home account and his cell phone, just like Meg and Peter. In September, he’d written emails to Peter and Cornell semiregularly. He got an email every Tuesday an hour after the student council meeting—Mary-Anne sending the secretary’s notes. I quickly scanned her accoun
t. No sign of the Fake Harper. It was odd to be relieved by that. I’d never thought there’d be a day when I was comforted by Mary-Anne’s innocence.

  I scooted my chair closer to the screen. The last week of September, there was a random IP address logged in to Ben’s account. That could have been anomaly. But then the Fake Harper started logging into his account. It never submitted homework. It never wrote an email. It just logged in and logged out. Over and over again. Sometimes it happened to overlap with Ben submitting something to the homework portal from his own IP address. Sometimes it showed up early in the morning or in the middle of the night. On weekends. On holidays.

  I pulled up the calendar on my computer. The Fake Harper had accessed Ben’s account on Wednesday afternoons when I knew he’d been at Busby and Tuesdays when he was at student council meetings. It’d logged in the night of the winter ball when we’d been at the park.

  Fake Harper was spying on Ben West.

  * * *

  Dad turned on his blinker a split second before he swerved into the next lane. This was why I’d never learned to drive. I couldn’t risk letting my father pass on his stunt-driving gene.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the squeal of the windshield wipers. I wasn’t positive that I’d managed to sleep at all. There hadn’t seemed to be any reprieve from my own thoughts after I’d climbed into bed.

  Whoever framed Harper was spying on Ben. They hadn’t touched me and had only accessed Cornell’s account twice.

  This had to be what Harper meant when she’d said that even she’d believed she was guilty when Mendoza had shown her the code. The first, second, and fourth people in the ranking had been tampered with. Cornell’s grades had been shifted. Harper’s IP address was used. Ben was being watched. And my account was clean.

  “I talked to Greg last night,” Dad said, breaking into my thoughts.

  I opened my eyes. Ahead of us, there were watery smears of red neon brake lights. I swallowed as we came to a short stop behind a station wagon.