Social Suicide

by Gemma Halliday

  Once I helped Mom upload her profile photo to Match.com (Though I drew the line at helping her come up with a “flirty” headline. Shudder.), I escaped to my room, and logged on to Twitter. I quickly found Sydney Sanders’s page and DMed her saying I was doing an article for the school paper and wanted to get her side of the story. Then, while I waited to hear back, I scrolled through her most recent tweets. Apparently being grounded gave her a lot of free time, as there were at least a dozen an hour.

  It also appeared, as I read them, that being grounded forever was really depressing. Each tweet was sadder than the last, starting out that morning with:

  my life sux.

  To that afternoon where she’d disintegrated to:

  i have nothing left 2 live 4.

  Drama much? Then again, Sydney did thrive on school social events like homecoming, and she had been in the running for queen, so maybe her life really was suckish to extreme.

  An hour later I was still waiting for a response and was beginning to fear that maybe Sydney’s parents had decided to take away her laptop, too. I was just about to give up and see what kind of vegan dinner I could beg out of my mom when a reply finally popped into my box. I clicked it.

  what do u want to know?

  Yes! I quickly typed back:

  how did u get the cheats 2 the test?

  A moment later her reply came in.

  can’t say.

  Crap. Though honestly, if she hadn’t told the vice principal how she got the answers under threat of losing the homecoming title, I knew the chances she’d tell me were slim. Still . . .

  i want 2 print ur side of things. it’s unfair u were suspended. u deserved to be hc queen.

  This time there was no pause.

  i know! totally unfair!

  can we meet? 2morrow?

  i’m grounded.

  This I knew. But I also knew that Sydney lived on Teakwood Court, which backed up to the Los Gatos Creek biking trail. Conducting an interview through her back fence wasn’t totally ideal, but if I met her there after school, at least it meant she wouldn’t have to breach her grounding perimeter.

  I typed my plan to her, and almost immediately I got a reply.

  k. c u then.

  I grinned. Now that was what even Chase would have to call real reporting.

  Chapter Two

  THE NEXT DAY, I WAS SO ANTSY TO TELL SAM ABOUT MY meeting that as soon as the fourth-period bell rang, I dashed toward the cafeteria. Stacks of trays and cartons of chocolate milk lined one wall, while rows of tables and benches filled the room. The floors were gray linoleum, the walls dull beige, and posters advertising our upcoming homecoming dance were plastered over every available space. I grabbed my tray, loaded up on pizza sticks, an apple, and a carton of milk, and quickly found Sam sitting near the back of the cafeteria with her boyfriend, Kyle Lowe.

  I hesitated.

  Okay, here’s the thing: I like Kyle fine. He’s a cool guy. I totally have nothing against him. But lately something was happening to Sam whenever she was around him. She was turning from a normal, rational, sixteen-year-old girl into a cartoon character with little pink hearts floating out of her eyes. Suddenly she was saying things like “my wittle wuv” and “I gots to has you,” getting so cutesy and grammatically incorrect it verged on embarrassing. I had yet to find a kind way to tell her this whole lovey-dovey thing was getting out of control.

  Sam looked up, saw me contemplating my seating options, and waved me over.

  Then turned to Kyle and gave him an Eskimo kiss with her nose.

  Oh boy.

  I made my way to their table and plopped my tray down, trying not to look as Kyle Eskimo kissed her right back.

  “Look what I made us,” Sam said right away, shoving her wrist toward me. On it was a pink friendship bracelet made of braided thread. In the middle was a pattern of a red heart.

  “Very cute,” I said.

  “I made Kyle one, too,” she told me, pulling his wrist out for inspection along with hers. “See? We match.”

  “Very . . . matchy.”

  She grinned. “Thanks.”

  I loved her enough that I didn’t tell her it wasn’t exactly a compliment.

  “So, did you get ahold of Sydney last night?” Sam asked.

  I nodded, digging into my pizza sticks. “Yeah. I’m meeting her after school.”

  “Meeting who?”

  Chase suddenly appeared at my side, dropped a tray on the table, and straddled the bench next to me.

  “What?” I asked innocently.

  “Who are you meeting?”

  I paused. Truth was I didn’t really want to spill who I was meeting with until I knew if she had anything useful to tell me. Even worse than not getting a unique story out of Sydney would be the look on Chase’s face if he knew I didn’t get a unique story.

  But before I could weigh my options, Kyle blurted out, “She’s got an exclusive with Sydney Sanders.”

  I shot him a death look.

  “Really?” Chase gave me a quizzical face, one eyebrow raised.

  Since the cat was out of the bag, I nodded. “Yeah. I’m meeting her after school.”

  “But she’s grounded.”

  “I have my ways.” I winked at him, doing my best secretive-reporter-type all-knowing smile.

  I’m not sure I pulled it off as his other eyebrow headed north.

  “You think you can get Sydney to spill how she got the cheats?” Sam asked.

  I shrugged. “I dun—” I stopped myself just in time from saying the forbidden word. “I’m going to try,” I amended.

  “What about Tipkins?” Chase asked.

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Mr. Tipkins? Your interview today?”

  I did a mental face palm. In my excitement over the exclusive with Sydney, I’d totally forgotten about my appointment with Mr. Tipkins. I looked up at the clock on the wall. I had only fifteen minutes before the end of lunch.

  “Shoot. I gotta go,” I said, shoving a pizza stick in my mouth and grabbing my book bag.

  I could have sworn I heard Chase call something like “good luck,” behind me as I jogged toward the precalculus room.

  Mr. Tipkins was sitting at his desk, a red pen hovering over a stack of papers. He was an older guy with thinning hair that was going gray at the temples. What was left of said hair was slicked back from his forehead in a way that said he stopped paying attention to current fashion decades ago. He had a bushy mustache that matched the salt and pepper up top and twitched intermittently like a nervous tic. His eyes were stuck behind thick glasses, and his clothes looked like they’d come from the Goodwill bargain bins. Brown corduroy pants, black tennis shoes, powder blue, short-sleeved dress shirt. A perpetual smear of ink stained the heel of his right hand from smudging words on the whiteboard.

  Even before the cheating bust, Mr. Tipkins had garnered a reputation for being one of the toughest teachers on campus. Sam had taken his summer school precalculus class and swore it took ten years off her life.

  “Mr. Tipkins?” I asked, approaching his desk.

  He looked up, blinking at me from behind his bifocals. “Yes?”

  “Hartley Featherstone?” I said. “From the Herbert Hoover High Homepage?”

  He nodded. “I know who you are. You’re late. I usually leave at lunch.”

  Due to budget cuts, our school could afford only a set number of full-time teachers who received benefits. The rest had to make do with part-time status, taking only four periods a day.

  “Have a seat,” he said, indicating a desk in the front row.

  I did, pulling out a micro-recorder from my book bag.

  “What’s that?” Mr. Tipkins asked.

  “Recorder. Just so I don’t forget any important points.”

  He frowned. “What’s wrong with taking notes? Your hand broken or something?”

  “Um. No. I just . . . This is easier.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Easier. God, t
echnology has made your generation so lazy.”

  I cleared my throat, not sure I had a response for that. Instead, I put my recorder away and took out a piece of binder paper and a pen.

  “Um, I wanted to talk to you about Sydney Sanders.”

  He nodded. “Another lazy kid.”

  “You caught Sydney cheating, correct?”

  Mr. Tipkins nodded again. “That’s right. She thought she was so clever. Can you believe she actually tried to tell me it was just the current fashion to paint letters on your fingernails?”

  I grinned, making sure I wrote that quote down. “So, she tried to deny it?”

  “‘Tried’ being the key word,” Mr. Tipkins emphasized. “Poor thing’s about as sharp as a sphere.”

  I blinked at him.

  “Because a sphere is completely round without any angles or edges?”

  I nodded. I knew. It was just the first time I’d heard geometry used in a simile. “So you caught Sydney, and she tried to deny it. At what point did you realize that Quinn was involved as well?”

  “About the time we hauled Sydney down to the vice principal’s office. When her parents showed up, she said the whole thing had been Quinn’s idea.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Ouch. Giving up your best friend like that was cold. “And did you confront Quinn?”

  He nodded. “Sure did. When I told her Sydney gave her up, she was about as discreet as a set of real numbers.”

  I wasn’t sure how discreet numbers could be, let alone fake versus real, but I thought I got the gist. “She confessed?”

  He nodded. “She said that it was her idea, but that Sydney had gotten the actual answers and painted both their nails with the letters.”

  “How did she get the answers?”

  Mr. Tipkins threw his hands up. “How should I know?”

  “They didn’t say?”

  He shook his head. “No. They wouldn’t tell us how they obtained the answers, so they were both suspended and the administration is looking into it.” He leaned in. “Honestly? We’ll probably never know.”

  Not necessarily. In fact, I hoped to answer that very question this afternoon when I talked to Sydney.

  “Tell me about the test,” I said, switching gears. “How hard would it be for Sydney to steal the answers?”

  “Very. I have four different exams for each section we study. I rotate them every four years, so that no student is ever taking a test that anyone else on campus has ever taken. Meaning no upperclassmen can give answers to lowerclassmen. No test ever goes home, even corrected ones. Before the start of every exam, all cell phones are collected to prevent anyone texting answers across the room. I tell you, I spend more time trying to make test answers secure than I do teaching.”

  I bit my lip. I had to agree he’d devised a pretty good system. “Where are the tests kept?”

  “Cabinet.” He pointed to a gunmetal gray file cabinet beside the whiteboard. “And I keep it locked whenever I leave the room.”

  I glanced at the thing. It looked about as old as Mr. Tipkins’s cords. I was no expert, but I had a feeling that anyone with a paper clip could break into that thing. Add to that the fact that most classroom doors were left unlocked, and it was hardly Fort Knox in here.

  “Are there any other copies?” I asked.

  “A master copy is kept in the teachers’ lounge, but,” he added, wagging a finger at me, “only teachers have access to the lounge. There’s no way a student could have slipped in there unnoticed.”

  This I knew for a fact. Teachers guarded the lounge, their one student-free haven, more heavily than the secret service protected the president. Not only did every teacher need a key to get in, but at any given time of day at least one of them was stationed inside at the coffeepot, standing sentinel over their sacred space. If Sydney had swiped the test, chances were she’d done it in the classroom.

  “How would Sydney know which test you were going to give out?”

  Again he shrugged. “I told you, I rotate them. I suppose someone could figure out what year we were on by asking around. But it wouldn’t be easy.”

  I nodded. “Just one more question. Are you planning to implement any new anti-cheating measures in light of this incident?”

  He nodded vigorously. “You bet I am. From now on, I will inspect everyone’s hands before I give them a test. Turning me into a warden more than a teacher,” he mumbled. “Are we finished here?”

  “Yep. Thanks for your time, Mr. Tipkins,” I said, getting up from the desk.

  He nodded my way, then pulled a sandwich that looked soggy and limp from a battered paper bag next to his desk.

  For a moment, I almost felt sorry for him.

  The next two periods dragged so slowly I thought I actually saw the hands of the clock going backward at one point. My mind was completely on my interview with Sydney, only halfway listening as Mrs. Blasberg explained inverse functions and Señorita Gonzalez conjugated verbs. By the time the bell rang, I was practically vibrating with the need to get out. I made a beeline for my locker, quickly shoving my books in and taking homework out. I was just slamming it shut when Ashley Stannic jogged up.

  “Hartley, did you read my article online today?” Ashley asked.

  “Um, no. Sorry. I’m kinda late—”

  “Ohmigod. I got like a total ton of hits! I wrote about Sydney Sanders losing the homecoming nom and who people might write in to fill her place, and everyone was, like, all over it with comments and stuff.”

  That stopped me in my tracks.

  “Wait—Chase told me the Sydney story was mine.”

  Ashley blinked at me. “Oh. He did? Well, I mean, maybe he changed his mind?”

  “Did Chase say you could write about Sydney?”

  Ashley nodded. “He edited the article this afternoon during study hall.”

  I felt anger welling in my stomach. “Where is he now?”

  She shrugged, her eyes still wide with innocence. “Um, the workroom, I guess.”

  I spun around, and marched toward the room. Sydney Sanders wasn’t going anywhere. My interview with her could wait. Chase, however, was going to hear an immediate earful.

  He had his back to the door when I stormed through it, his head hunched over some piece of paper that Chris Fret was showing him.

  “The cheating story is mine!” I announced. Loudly.

  So loudly, I think I saw Chris jump. Chase turned around slowly.

  “Hartley,” he said. His voice was super calm, which of course, just got me more riled up.

  “Ashley told me that she got ‘a total ton of hits’ from her article on Sydney Sanders.”

  Chase nodded. “Yeah. She did.”

  “I thought you gave that story to me.”

  Again Chase nodded slowly. “I’m expecting to print an article from you in tomorrow’s edition incorporating the interviews you’re getting today. But Ashley had an angle that was interesting, so I let her run with it.”

  “Just like that? She comes up with something interesting and she’s running with my story?”

  Chase frowned. “Hey, you come up with something interesting and I’ll print that.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you saying my articles aren’t interesting?”

  “I’m saying I can’t print nothing. You have to give me something worth reading. And the longer you wait, the better the chance someone else is going to beat you to it.”

  I opened my mouth, shut it, opened it again, realized I didn’t have a scathing response, and cursed the way my brain short-circuited at all the wrong times.

  “Fine. You’ll get your story. And it will be interesting!”

  I spun on my heels and slammed the door shut after me, stalking through the hallways toward the back exit. It took me until I had stomped all the way to the Los Gatos Creek trail before I could finally admit to myself that Chase was right. I didn’t have anything interesting. Something I seriously hoped my interview with Sydney would change.

  The
creek trail snaked behind the football field, down toward a row of condos below. According to Google Earth, Sydney’s house was situated just over a mile from the school, the third one down from Vasona Lake on the right.

  By the time her back fence came into view, the mid-afternoon sun had created a fine layer of sweat along the back of my neck. I stepped off the trail, carefully setting my backpack down in the grass, and tried to peek over the fence. Tried, because the fence was at least six feet tall and I top out at about 5' 2". Even on tippy-toe, I couldn’t see a thing.

  “Sydney?” I called, doing something between a stage whisper and an indoor voice.

  No one answered.

  “It’s Hartley?” I called again.

  I put my ear to the wooden fence, listening for a reply.

  Nothing.

  I squinted between the slats, but someone had done a crack job of installing this thing. I could only make out the tiniest sliver of the backyard beyond—just enough to see the blue waters of a pool and a pair of deck chairs.

  I looked around for something to give me a boost. On the ground was a collection of rocks, but none looked big enough to stand on. On the other side of the trail sat a large oak tree, but I’d given up climbing trees about ten years ago. I called out to Sydney one more time.

  “Hey? Sydney? It’s me. Hartley.”

  No answer.

  I looked across the trail again. Fine. Tree it was.

  I quickly crossed to it, narrowly missing a biker clad in bright yellow spandex. The tree was thick, tall, and definitely sturdy enough to hold all one hundred pounds of me. The only problem was the lowest branch was a good four feet off the ground. I grabbed on to it and pulled my feet up onto the trunk, but they immediately slipped back down, causing my palms to scrape against the branch and depositing me on my butt on the ground.

  Ouch.

  I picked myself up, trying not to be embarrassed as another biker went by. (Seriously, he was in neon spandex. I wasn’t the one who had anything to be embarrassed about.) This time I was able to scramble my legs high enough to lock them around the branch above me. I hung there a moment, like a pig on a spit, before I gathered enough strength to pull my torso up and around to the top side of the branch.