Dead Ringer

by Jessie Rosen

  “Wrong,” Charlie said. “I tried to stop her and she agreed, but then she took them anyway. Don’t you remember? I caught her at the table and snapped at her. The waitress came over to make sure we were okay.”

  Charlie watched Kit’s face fall as the memory registered. She looked absolutely heartbroken, a feeling he understood. He had been right all those weeks ago when he accused Amanda of being the one orchestrating the cruel pranks, and now she’d gone one incredibly creepy step further. The question was, why?

  Charlie sat down next to Kit and Miller. This was not going to be an easy conversation. Once again, the Band-Aid approach seemed best.

  “It’s Amanda,” he said. “She’s doing this to us.”

  “What do you mean us?” Miller asked.

  “I’ve gotten messages, too—all on VidBit, which Amanda is obsessed with. And Amanda claimed that she’s been getting weird stuff, too, but hers was nothing like this. Now that you have this, Amanda is the only person that makes sense. She took this photo and didn’t give it to anyone. She knows how to Photoshop another image into a picture—she’s constantly doing it for the posters and flyers she makes for school. And she knows where you live, of course. What did she say when you called her about this?”

  Kit couldn’t bring herself to answer. “She didn’t return the calls or texts,” Miller said.

  “And how long ago was that?” Charlie asked.

  “Same time I texted you,” Kit said, her voice small and sad.

  “Well, right before I got to your house she texted to say she was going in to school early and didn’t need a ride,” Charlie said, “so she’s clearly seen everything on her phone.”

  At that, Kit started to cry. Charlie looked over to find that she’d chewed her nails down so much that her fingers were bleeding.

  “This is pretty sick, Charlie. You’re saying she faked all that stuff about changing our passwords, too?” Miller asked.

  “I can’t figure out any other answer,” Charlie said.

  “But why would she do this to us?” Kit sobbed.

  Charlie’s response was almost instant, and it felt like it came from somewhere in his mind that he wasn’t controlling. “Maybe Amanda isn’t the person we think she is,” he said. His words caught Kit and Miller equally off guard. “Amanda has always had an unstable streak. Remember, everything that happened with Sarah was technically because of her.”

  Suddenly everything started to avalanche in Charlie’s mind. He hadn’t realized he fully believed Amanda was at fault until he’d said it out loud, but it all added up. There was what Amanda did to Sarah, and there was what Amanda did to him long before that. Amanda would say that neither was her fault and both were to protect their futures. But at the end of the day, she was at the helm both times. She had the ability to be not just unstable, but truly evil.

  Sasha

  Sasha tinkered with the earbud on her phone as she sat on the morning bus to school. It wasn’t that the sound wasn’t coming through loud and clear, she was just afraid that someone else might hear.

  She had debated traveling to Englewood since her plan around Kit and Miller fully came together. It was a huge risk—even compared to all the things she had done over the past few weeks—but it didn’t feel right to hire someone for that portion of the task. If an outside contractor were caught, they’d have no excuse for being in the places Sasha needed to go. If someone found her, she could easily fabricate a story that made sense. This was her problem, her responsibility.

  Creating the photograph had been cake. She hacked into the iPhoto program on Amanda’s laptop, which was conveniently already loaded onto her server in the iCloud, downloaded a picture that worked, and taught herself Photoshop in twenty-four hours so she could slip the image of Sarah into the shot. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the trick.

  The first reason for the journey to Englewood was to drop two things off at Kit Jacob’s house. The first was the envelope for Kit’s mailbox. Sasha wore a black T-shirt and a cap that she bought from Chicken Holiday, the famous fried-chicken place in town, so it would look like she was dropping off promotional flyers. The second task was not so easy. Planting a recording device that could track the conversation inside Kit’s basement was trickier.

  The plan had never been to start using actual surveillance equipment. Sasha was a hacker, not a spy, and those lines were never crossed according to the code of her online group. Syke was known to kick people out for confessing to using tapping devices or planted cameras. But this was getting too serious for Sasha to wait for slow drips of information from Charlie and his crew, and she had waited long enough. If she was going to finish the project, then she needed to move now.

  There was no way that Kit or anyone in her family would find the tiny recorder. It was two millimeters across and only as thick as a sheet of paper. After she put the card for Kit in the mailbox, Sasha pretended to drop a bunch of the fake Chicken Holiday flyers in the wind. Then she rushed around the Jacobs’ yard picking them all up. When she was sure no one was looking, she made her way over to the where the ceiling of the basement stuck out from the ground and stuck the microphone directly onto the storm window. The guy she bought it from online promised that it was powerful enough to record through the glass.

  Sasha had debated the location over and over before making her decision. Things could have unfolded in a million ways after Kit got the picture from the mailbox, but Sasha had done her research. In dozens of conversations between Charlie, Amanda, Kit and Miller, Kit’s basement was referenced as “the bunker.” It was the place where they watched movies, played games, and—Sasha hoped—shared their secrets. Kit would want everyone to meet there, especially if she was too scared to leave her house.

  That was phase one of Sasha’s research for this portion of the plan. Phase two involved some very heavy law textbooks and hours of reading.

  Hacking fell under the invasion of privacy; Sasha was already well aware of that fact. She had always been part of a group of hackers that did what they did for sport, not to steal anything or harm anyone. If they were ever found out, which was unlikely given how well they could hide inside the web and instantly destroy their digital footprint, they wouldn’t technically be responsible for any criminal activity besides stalking, which could be tied to victimization.

  But what Sasha was doing now was different. This was invasion of privacy that was causing mental distress. Kit could sue if she ever figured out who was behind the acts. The Jacobs could sue for trespassing if they ever found the recording device. Even Charlie or Miller could get involved by claiming that the acts harmed their physical or mental state. Sasha had stepped outside the limits of hacking, and there was no way around that fact.

  Right now, though, as she listened in on the conversation between Charlie, Kit, and Miller through the app connected via her phone, she didn’t care about what might happen if she was discovered. She had just uncovered more truth about Sarah Castro-Tanner’s death than any detective. Those four were physically with her on the night that she died, and that was because of some evil plan that Amanda concocted.

  The question that Sasha promised herself she would answer before the day she died was still a mystery: did Sarah Castro-Tanner commit suicide?

  But the second most important question was answered: who knows whether or not she did?

  Charlie Sanders, Amanda Hunter, Kit Jacobs, and Sean Miller.

  Chapter 7

  October 2

  Laura

  Laura didn’t like to admit it, but until Charlie, she’d never been on a real date. One time in eighth grade, she went mini golfing with Seth Cooper—a skinny redhead who lived on her block—but they ran into some of his other friends from school and ended up playing as a group. Then there was Andrew Raymond, her Camp Mackinaw crush from the summer before freshman year. Andrew had been her first everything—first real love, first confession, and first kiss. They spent all of their free time walking around Lake Copake or sneaking into town
to get black-and-white milkshakes from Nagel’s Deli. Those little adventures felt like dates, but they were wearing camp shirts and flip-flops, and they never even sat down to eat. With Charlie it was officially, undeniably a date.

  “So you’re really into sushi, right, Cali?”

  Laura was so surprised to hear Charlie’s voice that she almost slammed her own hand in her open locker. She didn’t know how he even found her, but there he was, asking a pretty leading question with a suggestive half smile on his face.

  “Yeah,” Laura said, “I love it, but it’s hard to find here.” She tried to tell herself to play it cool. Maybe this isn’t an invite, she told herself. Maybe he just wants a recommendation for a restaurant to go to with his mom.

  “Cool,” Charlie said. “A new place just opened up in Franklin Lakes. Want to go and show me what’s good?” Well, that question sounded very much like an invite to a date, but she wasn’t 100 percent sure.

  “I can handle that,” Laura said. “Did you want to tell me more things for the article? I think I have about enough, but—”

  “No,” Charlie interrupted,” I just want to hang out. I like talking to you, Cali. And—” Charlie stopped. Laura couldn’t tell if he’d forgotten what to say, or decided not to say it.

  “And…?” she asked.

  “And it would be good for me to spend time with some new people right now.”

  “Gotcha. Well in that case, I’m your girl.” Laura did a mini-victory dance in her head. “But are you going to embarrass me and eat your sushi with a fork?”

  “Oh…” Charlie said, “I was going to ask if we could go tonight, but now I need an extra week to learn how to use chopsticks.” There was a legitimately embarrassed look on his face. It made Laura’s heart melt.

  “I can teach you in five minutes,” she said, and Charlie’s face lit up again.

  “Excellent. Is seven o’clock okay? We have a game, but it’s at Chauncer—just two towns over—so we’ll be back by six unless we beat them by so much they call a mercy ending.”

  “Oh really. Well, you’re definitely going to lose now that you made that cocky statement!” Laura joked.

  “Sushi dinner says I don’t,” Charlie fired back.

  “Ugh…no deal,” Laura said with a smile. “I know I’m going to lose.”

  It wasn’t until she finally grabbed her backpack and closed her locker door that Laura noticed they were in plain view of two guys from the soccer team and Ashley Flemming, who was practically a Charlie-Sanders paparazzo. In other words, Amanda Hunter was going to find out about this date. Charlie said hello to all three of them as they walked together down the hall toward the parking lot. Apparently he didn’t care that they saw, which meant the rumors about Amanda and Charlie were true.

  As far as Laura could tell from the goings-on around Englewood High, the former senior class king and queen were more than over; they were at war. Laura had overheard a few details in a full-volume conversation between Ashley and Katie Allen before English the week prior.

  “I know she did something to him, and he’s pissed,” Ashley said.

  “You think it’s the same thing that broke them up freshman year?” Katie asked.

  “You mean sophomore year?” Ashley asked.

  “No, I mean when Amanda spent the summer after ninth grade doing that ‘Teen Tour’ around the country and Charlie acted like they weren’t together.”

  “Oh right, that. God, those two are messed up.”

  “Yeah, and this time Kit and Miller are involved. Yesterday at lunch, I heard Kit say that she didn’t want them to end up like Charlie and Amanda, but that she’d thought about it and she just could not side with them.”

  “‘Them’ who?” Katie asked.

  “I’m thinking Charlie and Miller, but it could be Miller and Amanda. I need to do some more digging.”

  That conversation happened one week before the sushi-date invite, which made the self-conscious side of Laura’s brain wonder if she was being used as some sort of pawn in whatever battles were going on between the foursome. It also made her wonder even more about the truth behind what Amanda said at Jeff’s party weeks ago. Charlie didn’t sound like the damaged one. Laura decided there was only one way to find out about it all, and an out-of-town date with one Charlie Sanders was not such a bad way to do it.

  Laura took a quick trip after school to Beacon’s Closet, her favorite vintage store in the area. She wanted a little dress with a wide belt and a flared skirt, just like the one Sabrina wears when she arrives back to New York from Paris in Sabrina. It was definitely too much for dinner in suburban New Jersey, but Laura didn’t care. She wanted to look and feel as beautiful and confident as possible.

  At 7:00 p.m. on the dot, Charlie’s car peeked around the corner of the street and made its way to the front of Laura’s house, top down. She had been watching from the living-room windows so that she could glide out the door the minute he arrived. Laura watched for a second as Charlie adjusted his favorite aviators in the rearview mirror. He looked a little nervous, too, which made her feel so much better. Then she saw him reach into the backseat, grab a cozy, white afghan and place it next to him on the passenger’s side, right where she would soon sit.

  Laura’s entire face crinkled into a ridiculously goofy smile; he brought her a blanket in case the car was too cold. It was, without a doubt, the sweetest thing a guy had done for her in her entire life. As far as first dates went, Laura was pretty sure that she’d won the lottery and they hadn’t even left the driveway.

  * * *

  Things got better and better. Despite Charlie’s miserable chopstick skills, he was the perfect date: sweet, thoughtful, adventurous, and funny. He opened every door for her, including the car’s, kept the convertible at a reasonable speed so her hair wouldn’t get too messed up, and ate live scallops even though he was clearly terrified. And then they hung around the restaurant for at least an extra hour talking about how weird high school can be, no matter what level your popularity. Laura decided not to dig into any of the stuff with Amanda or Kit or Miller. They were having too much fun, and she didn’t want to muddy the waters. As far as she could tell by how cozy she and Charlie were getting, there would be plenty of time for all that.

  * * *

  On the ride home from the sushi restaurant, Laura and Charlie had a very serious Bruce Springsteen impersonation contest. Charlie was obsessed with “The Boss”; Laura thought he was totally overrated. Charlie’s version was an homage to the rocker’s soulful, scraggly voice; Laura’s impression sounded like a bullfrog speaking a made-up language. When they arrived back in Laura’s driveway, they were laughing so hard that she couldn’t see—that’s how she missed seeing Charlie lean in and place his hands around her face.

  It was magic. He somehow managed to go from a laughing fit to a deeply passionate kiss while Laura was still mid-giggle. It caught her so off guard that she gasped, though in fairness that felt like the appropriate response regardless. Charlie held her head gently in his hands and drew her mouth tightly into his own. Then he masterfully wrapped his right arm around her waist and shifted her body down low in the seat so they could make out without anyone seeing into the car. Laura had no idea how much time had passed by the time they finally came up for air. It was like Charlie’s hands already knew every single trigger zone on her body. If they hadn’t been directly in front of her house in a car with zero privacy, Laura would have told him to put the top up on the convertible and not stop until morning.

  “Wow,” was all Laura could say when their lips finally parted.

  “Good,” was Charlie’s response. “I’ve been wanting to do that for awhile.”

  And then he got out of the car, came around to open her door, and with one more perfect kiss, said good-bye.

  Laura and Charlie spent all five out of the next five days together. On Sunday she brought him shopping at Beacon’s for vintage clothes and they found a T-shirt from the 1994 World Cup in California. On Mon
day they snuck in breakfast at Sweet Lew’s Diner in town before school. Tuesday was a late night screening of Nightmare on Elm Street at The Vista Theater in honor of Halloween. Wednesday they took advantage of the new off-campus lunch policy and grabbed juice and salads at Clover. And Thursday was another fancy dinner date, this time at Gusto—a tiny, candlelit Italian restaurant just a few towns over.

  But amazing as all that was, Laura noticed something about Charlie that she didn’t quite appreciate: he acted like her boyfriend every time they were alone, but like her friend when people at school were watching. They hadn’t had “the talk” yet, so Laura was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he thought she wanted to keep things under wraps until they were officially together? Maybe he didn’t want to seem too into it because guys never wear their hearts on their sleeves? But in her heart, Laura knew it had everything to do with what certain people in his world thought, and that made her feel like a fool. Her whole goal this school year had been to stick up for herself and be the person she wanted to be—a person who didn’t let boys walk all over her. Not even this boy.

  October 9

  Charlie

  Charlie threw his phone across the room and watched the blue, plastic Yankees case protecting it smash into a bunch of pieces. He was worried and scared, but more than anything right now, he was pissed. CO was back.

  Once again, the timing was awful. He’d just gotten home from picking up flowers for his date with Laura later than night. Charlie tried to be romantic when he remembered, but these were a please-don’t-be-mad gift. Laura was upset about something. She texted that they “needed to talk,” which was girl speak for "argue." Whatever her issue was, he had been prepared to solve it, but now his mind was focused on the anxiety of this latest intrusion into his life. Charlie had convinced himself that he could separate these creepy developments from all the amazing things happening with Laura, but the messages were getting more and more out of control.