Tyler gritted his teeth and brushed the gravel away, and pulled himself up.
He looked back at the little yellow home. The curtains in the front window were closed and he could still hear Mr. Phillips’s voice, loud and angry.
Sticking around would only make it all worse.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been tossed forcibly out of a house.
But it was the first time he’d really needed to stay.
He started to walk. He lived almost two miles away. It would seem even longer with scraped palms and a red, raw knee that stung like a bitch. Stupid Mr. Phillips. He’d needed her. He’d needed someone.
She was so beautiful. And soft. And smart. And so weird. What was up with all of that stuff on her desk, anyway?
Maybe she wore a wire. Maybe she was some sort of undercover cop narc, like those kids who stood outside of liquor stores and tried to get unassuming adults to buy them beer and then when the adults brought it out—boom, arrested. He could see Kinley doing that.
He smiled to himself a little bit as he limped along. Somehow, Kinley was the realest girl he’d met in a while.
One thing was for sure: if she’d been wearing a wire last night, it all would have gone very differently.
For one second, he wished that she had been. He’d never tell. But maybe—just maybe—things would be better if he could.
Cade
Monday, June 15
Cade watched Mattie from his car.
The kid couldn’t handle it. Cade couldn’t help but think of him that way—a kid. Young. He was pacing, back and forth, up and back. His backpack bounced on his shoulders, and sweat beaded his forehead.
There weren’t too many people there. This was the first class since . . . since that night.
And only five of them knew that Stratford wasn’t going to show up. Their tests would remain ungraded. Their class would cease to continue as it was.
The students who had arrived were casting looks at Mattie. Cade groaned and pushed open the door of his Mercedes. “Dude,” he called to Mattie as he crossed the pavement. He needed to get to Mattie before someone else stopped to ask what the hell was wrong with him. Cade wasn’t sure what Mattie might say.
Mattie stopped pacing for a second, his eyes moving frantically around the parking lot as Cade neared. “Cade,” he said, and his voice was tight, like he was on the verge of tears.
Cade patted his back. “Calm down, man. It’s okay. Everything is fine. But you need to man up and walk inside with me. Sit next to me. We’ll figure this out.”
Mattie nodded. “Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
For about a half second, Cade understood as he walked into the room next to Mattie. He wanted to freak out too. They all did, probably, except maybe Kinley. She was cold. Colder than he was, probably.
And then, he started thinking. His mind had started working again, after that night of being blank and scared. He felt like himself again. Almost.
Cade surveyed the classroom. The others were already here. The other three, at least. Kinley was sitting in the second row, her notebook and three colored pens laid neatly in front of her. She was a tough one.
Tyler was in the back again, as a slacker should be. He was in his trademark pose: ass scooted forward to the front of the chair, pen in his mouth, and a cap that he shouldn’t have been wearing inside the school pushed down over his eyes.
And then there was Ivy. She looked . . . well, she looked a little rough around the edges, like maybe she’d done a couple too many shots the night before, but in that hot-girl way: her hair was perfectly coiffed, and her outfit hugged her curves in a way that said Look at me.
Cade knew how scared they all were.
But Mattie—Mattie was the only one showing it.
Mattie was the weak link.
Cade watched him from the corner of his eye. “Sit next to me,” he said. He was going to have to watch him. Make sure he didn’t go too crazy.
It was one thing to get a little stressed about test results. It was another thing to show something was really wrong. But Mattie was verging on a full-on breakdown, and Cade had to stop it.
This class wasn’t going to be easy.
Cade glanced around the room.
Someone had been in to clean. Probably the janitor. The board had been wiped. The room had the sweet-sour smell of the recently mopped. And the tests, which had been left in a messy pile on Stratford’s desk, had been straightened up very neatly.
There was nothing to show that Cade—with the help of his friends—had killed a man there.
Nothing to show that their professor had died on the floor a few days earlier.
Cade’s throat suddenly went strange and numb. He cleared it and coughed.
Mattie shot him a look, alarm in his eyes. “Are you okay?” he asked. Mattie was kind. Easy to manipulate.
It would be his downfall.
“I need water, I think.” His voice came out hoarse. Cade stood up, but Kip waved him down.
“Don’t do it, man,” Kip hissed. “Stratford’s gonna be in any second. Do you really want to be in the hallway?”
Cade paused. If Stratford were really going to show up, would he risk it?
No.
No, he wouldn’t.
Cade sunk back into his chair and reached for his book. “Hey, man.” Kip leaned over again. “What happened after class? Did Stratford flunk you?”
Cade shifted, and he felt a strange warmth in his stomach. He hadn’t been prepared to talk to people about what had happened after class. “Uh, I don’t know. He was a dick about it. He said I’d figure it out when I got the test back and then he just left.”
Kip whistled. “Cold, dude. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t catch him. I saw him in the teachers lot after I ran into you guys, but I just let him go. I froze. Dude is scary.”
Cade frowned, and Mattie’s head snapped toward Kip. Kip thought he’d seen their dead teacher in the lot? His stomach clenched. How long had Kip stayed after they’d told him Stratford had left, exactly? Had Kip seen something he shouldn’t have? Or did he actually believe he’d seen Stratford walking across the lot? If Kip actually believed what he was saying, then he was their best alibi yet.
Or was Kip just messing with his head? Cade narrowed his eyes. If Kip had stuck around, maybe he had seen Cade and his little group too.
“Stratford was in a bad mood,” Cade muttered.
Kip leaned back in his seat, a pencil flipping quickly between his fingers. “He’s always in a bad mood. How do you think he’s going to be today?”
Cade sighed. He could see Mattie still watching him. “I don’t know. How is he always?”
“A tool.”
“Then I’m going to go with tool.” Cade turned away from Kip. He was tired of talking. He glanced at the clock.
Stratford was officially late.
Five minutes late.
“What’s the rule?” Tyler asked. “Teacher isn’t in after ten minutes, we all get to leave? Scot-free?”
A couple of the students glanced nervously around the room, as if Stratford was going to pop out from under his desk or emerge dramatically from the supply closet.
He didn’t.
Another minute ticked by.
No one spoke. Cade could feel the others watching him. He could feel their eyes.
Mattie was sweating beside him. Cade shot him a look.
“What, dude? I think I screwed up the test, okay?” Mattie asked. “I blanked.”
Cade nodded. At least Mattie was playing off his nervousness as test-related. He wasn’t totally stupid.
“Me too,” confessed a mousy-haired girl who sat near the front. “I don’t know how I’m going to pass this class.” She paused. “Where is he, anyway?”
Cade stared up at the clock.
“Maybe he’s dead,” a freckled kid in the back joked. “Maybe we don’t even have to worry about the test.” He laughed, awkwardly. “Best-case scenario, huh?”
Kinley whipped around, her long braid wrapping around her. “That’s not funny.”
“Whoa,” the freckled kid said, holding his hands up. “It was a joke. Calm down, narc. Don’t go tell the principal, okay?”
Tyler bristled. He blew his breath out noisily, and then caught Cade’s eye. He looked left and right, making sure no one was paying him any attention, and lobbed a crumpled ball of notebook paper onto Cade’s desk.
He had good aim. Probably from years of passing dirty notes in elementary school. No one wrote notes anymore.
Cade quietly smoothed out the ball of paper.
Tell them.
He glowered at the paper, then the meaning hit him. Someone needed to tell the office Stratford hadn’t shown up.
Cade glanced at the clock.
Their professor was twenty-five minutes late now.
Twenty-five minutes.
He chanced a look at Mattie. Poor kid. He might not even make it through class.
He stood up, and cleared his hoarse throat again. “I’m going to tell the office Stratford didn’t show. Maybe they’ll let us leave.”
Kip scoffed, deep in his throat. “If Stratford walks in while you’re there, it’s your funeral.”
Funeral.
Cade hated Kip’s choice of words. He made a show of hesitating. He sat back down at his desk, and then stood up again.
The mousy-haired girl stood up and walked to the desk. She picked up the stack of tests, casting looks at the door.
She turned back the class, scowling, tests clutched in her hand. “He hasn’t even graded them,” she muttered. “We’re all waiting to see what happened, and he hasn’t touched them. Except Kayla’s—oh, Kayla. Don’t look, okay?” She slammed the tests on the desk and turned back to her seat.
“I’m not sticking around if he’s not coming,” Cade announced. He couldn’t stay in the classroom any longer anyway. He couldn’t take another second staring at Mattie, wondering if he was going to erupt. He shrugged on his backpack, left the room, and walked down the hall toward the office.
The evening receptionist, a black-haired girl with thick wire-framed glasses, looked up at him as she swung her purse over her shoulder.
“On your way out?” he asked. He wrapped his hands around the straps of his backpack and rolled up to his toes, then back to his heels.
Be cool, he told himself. Calm.
“Um, yeah. I don’t stay until your class gets out. I was just cleaning up a little.” She motioned at her desk, which was still covered in stacks of paper. A full mug of pencils sat to the left of her chair, which she pushed in carefully—a universal signal for I’m leaving right now.
“Uh, I just wanted to come by to say that Stratford never showed. We’ve been waiting for a half hour.”
“That’s weird. He lives two minutes from here. He’s never late. He just walks over.”
“Well, he’s late today. What should we do?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not even the real receptionist. Maybe everyone should just go home.”
“And if Stratford shows up after?”
“Your funeral.” She grinned at him.
There was that word again. He forced himself to smile back. He hated that word. “Funeral.” Would anyone show up to Stratford’s? Did anyone even care that he was gone? He couldn’t imagine Stratford had a family.
“Maybe I’ll go back for a little bit just in case,” Cade said.
“Cool. Have a good night, okay?” She smiled at him. “Fingers crossed that your professor doesn’t show up. You look like you could use a night off.”
Cade felt self-conscious. Was he wearing his stress so obviously? Like Mattie?
The receptionist winked at him. And then she was gone.
For some weird reason, she reminded Cade of his sister.
Ivy
Monday, June 15
“Mattie!” Ivy waved him over. “Hey!”
“Hey,” he said.
The other students walked around them like nothing was wrong. Like there couldn’t possibly be an evil explanation for why Stratford hadn’t shown. Like their lives hadn’t changed at all, other than a lucky break.
Ivy had heard them laughing on the way out. High-fiving. And she wished, more than anything, that she was one of them. That she could just be glad that Stratford hadn’t showed. Like she hadn’t been silently praying for him to impossibly appear in the doorway in one of his tattered blazers, angry and foul-breathed and ready to fail them all.
“Pretty cool we didn’t have class, huh?” Mattie asked. She shot him a half smile. She knew what he was trying to do. Act normal. Fit in.
Be like everyone else.
“Cool,” Ivy agreed dully. Together, they watched until the other students had climbed into their cars or onto their bikes and left, filing out of the parking lot like ants.
The others—Kinley and Tyler and Cade—didn’t so much as look at them when they walked out. Of course, Ivy didn’t want to look at anyone. Except maybe Mattie.
“Where’s your bike?” Ivy asked.
“I walked,” Mattie said. He didn’t quite meet her eyes.
“That’s way too far, Mattie. Seriously?”
He shrugged. “I guess I needed to blow off some steam.”
“Well, that’s crazy. Let me give you a ride home, okay?” Ivy put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Mattie. Get in. I’m not going to let you walk all the way back.”
“Okay.” Mattie followed Ivy to her hybrid Honda CR-Z. He opened the back door and shrugged off his backpack, tossing it into the seat.
He settled into the passenger side and breathed in deeply. “If I had this car,” he said, rubbing the dashboard, “I’d drive every single day.”
Ivy shrugged. “I don’t know. I hate driving. I don’t want the responsibility.” She turned the key. “I had this sort of nice Jetta, but my parents got tired of me relying on everyone else for a ride and leaving my car everywhere, and so they decided that if I had a better car then I’d want to drive, you know?”
“Did it work?” Mattie asked.
Ivy blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Well, I feel guiltier, but no, not completely.” She looked back and froze.
Her stomach went odd and cold, like she’d drank an entire bucket of ice water.
“What?” Mattie asked. “What is it?”
He turned back.
“It’s the car,” Ivy whispered.
The car from that night.
The rusted, screwed-up one that had turned into the parking lot as they left. Ivy could see it was a faint brown at one point, but now was smeared with rust.
The car chugged into the spot next to them, and the window rolled down.
“Hey!” said the woman driving. She rested one wrist on the wheel and leaned out, and Mattie rolled down his window. Ivy watched his face go pale and ghostly.
“Hi,” Ivy said, leaning over, pasting on a fake happiness. “Can I help you with something?”
The woman paused. She was older—perhaps sixty—and her hair was a wiry nest of brown and gray. Her teeth were a sick yellow color, like she’d been smoking all her life . . . and from the smell rolling out of the car through the open window, she had.
She was clothed in a gray-white tee that had been through the wash too many times.
“Maybe you can,” the woman said. “I’m Delilah Stratford. I’m just stopping by on my way back from the grocery store. I don’t suppose you’ve seen my husband?”
Ivy coughed. The ice-bucket feeling in her stomach surged and roiled. Stratford was married? Someone had actually looked at the man as they stood at the altar and agreed to love him forever? The knowledge was strange and powerful, and it struck her hard.
Stratford had family. A wife. He wasn’t the solitary type she’d imagined.
“No, ma’am,” Mattie interjected. “We’re his students. We were supposed to get our tests back today and he didn’t show up for class.”
“Well, he
ll!” the woman said. “I tell you, we get in fights all the time. And some days he just takes off. Sometimes he comes back an hour later, sometimes, it’s a damn week.” She cleared her throat.
“Have you tried him on his phone?” Mattie asked.
“Doesn’t carry one. Hates ’em, actually. He says he has enough phones with the ones his students carry.” She laughs, and it is gruff and clogged with phlegm. “He wouldn’t answer my calls now anyway, even if I knew how to reach the bastard.”
Ivy watched Mattie’s hand curl around the gearshift, his knuckles white. He was doing a good job so far, but he was about to freak out. Or maybe she was.
Maybe they both were.
“If we hear from him, we’ll tell him you’re looking for him, okay?” Ivy tried to smile at Mrs. Stratford, but her mouth wasn’t working right. Nothing was going right.
Mrs. Stratford flapped her hand at them. “Don’t bother, kids. He’ll get home when he gets over it. Don’t fan the flames, okay?” She chuckled. “Have a good night.”
And just like that, Mrs. Stratford threw her rust bucket into reverse and backed out of her space.
“Holy shit,” Ivy whispered at the steering wheel.
“I don’t know what shocks me more,” Mattie said. “That someone agreed to marry him or that that just happened. We almost got caught that night. Do you realize that?”
Her breathing shaky, Ivy began driving slowly, wordlessly, to her home. She’d realized something else, too.
There was already someone out there looking for Stratford.
Soon, there would be more.
Mattie
Monday, June 15
It was big and shiny and beautiful and it was sitting in the driveway with a big, glossy bow in the center of the hood.
He’d been staring at it with wide eyes ever since Ivy had dropped him off at the end of the drive. (She hadn’t noticed. But then, neither had he, until he saw the giant red bow.)
Mattie put his hands on both sides of his head. Was it for him? No. It couldn’t be. Guys like Mattie did not randomly get surprised with Audi A3s. They got ties from their overprotective fathers and kisses from their mothers, but definitely not cars.
Secrets, Lies, and Scandals Page 10