by Kate Brian
“Thanks a lot,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“That’ll just remind you that next time I tell you to stop doing something, you should stop doing it,” Noelle warned, crossing her arms over her slim-cut black jacket.
“Noted,” I replied.
My phone rang and I glanced warily at my bag. Noelle dug through it until she found my cell and turned the screen in my direction. A picture of Josh smiled lazily out at me.
“Hit ignore,” I said without hesitation.
Noelle arched one eyebrow, but did as she was told. She tossed the phone back into my bag and snapped the clasp. “Why are we not telling le boyfriend we’re in the hospital, exactly?”
Before rushing me to the emergency room, Noelle had told Ivy to call Josh, but I’d shouted at them, through my excruciating, mind-bending pain, not to. Since we were, at the time, limping away from the wreckage of the stage, neither of them asked any questions, but now that I had my stitches—four in the temple, two along the jaw—and my cast, I supposed it was time to fess up.
I looked at my two best friends, the words right at the tip of my tongue. I wanted so badly to talk to someone about this, but I didn’t want either of them to be suspicious or scared or even wary of Josh. He was my boyfriend and I loved him. It didn’t seem fair to start spouting off about him before I knew what was really going on. I used my thumb to fiddle with my promise ring and cast my eyes down at my lap.
“He’s just been really busy and stressed lately and I don’t want to make it worse,” I said.
“You do know he’s going to freak when he sees you and realizes you didn’t let him rush to your side all heroic,” Ivy said flatly.
I swallowed hard, suddenly recalling vividly how Josh had done just that for Ivy on the night she was shot.
“I know.” I picked at the thin bedspread underneath the dirt-stained leg of my jeans. “I’ll deal with it. But can we talk about what we really want to talk about here?”
Noelle and Ivy exchanged a knowing glance. “You mean why, exactly, did the stage collapse under you?” Noelle suggested.
“For starters,” I said, my pulse skipping ahead as I remembered the awful, swooping sensation of my fall. “Two days ago that thing stood up to the weight of more than a dozen people, but tonight it couldn’t handle just me?”
“Well, you were going Godzilla all over it,” Noelle reminded me, lifting her hair over her shoulder.
“But she does have a point,” Ivy said. She narrowed her eyes, leaning forward in her chair. “Did it seem at all unstable on Saturday?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I remember a couple of creaky boards, but that’s about it.”
“So the real question is . . . did someone tamper with it?” Noelle asked, sitting down on the edge of my bed, near my feet. “And if so, who?”
“And what about MT?” Ivy said.
“Exactly,” I said, turning up the palm on my good hand. “Did he send me there because he wanted me to find the banner and get rid of it before anyone else saw it, or because he knew the stage was going to cave in and he wanted me to fall?”
All three of us let the words hang in the air as we pondered the question. I felt sick to my stomach from all the uncertainty, all the not-knowing.
“MT . . . friend or foe?” Ivy said, adding a weak, sarcastic laugh.
I wanted to laugh too, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I had started to think I could maybe trust my mystery texter. They’d led me to Carolina. They’d let me know—too late, of course, but still—that my room had been violated. But now . . . now I didn’t know what to think. Had MT been trying to help me tonight? Or were they trying to kill me?
NOT ACCORDING TO PLAN
I stood outside the door to the Art Cemetery on Tuesday night and took a deep breath. Josh was inside, studying in seclusion, and I’d told him I might stop by for a quick break and snack. The moment he’d seen my cast and stitches that morning, he had, as predicted, basically freaked. He was my boyfriend. A girl was supposed to call her boyfriend when she was whisked off to the hospital. But I’d managed to calm him down, telling him I was embarrassed over putting myself in danger and that it wasn’t the biggest deal. He’d finally relented, and spent the rest of the day carrying my bag, running to get my food, and opening doors for me, even when it made him late for class.
Yes, he was the best boyfriend ever. And I felt like a disloyal jerk for ever thinking that he might have something to do with the Billings sabotage. Hopefully the chocolate donuts and super-caffeinated coffee would make up for that.
And then, once I had him lulled into a sugar coma, I’d tell him all about MT and the weird stuff that had been going on. He had a right to know.
I held the bag between my cast and my body and lifted my good hand to rap out our secret knock. Three knocks, three knocks, five knocks. Kind of to the beat of M-I-C . . . K-E-Y . . . M-O-U-S-E. His idea. I swear.
Josh swung the door open. “Hey!” His dark blond curls stuck up in the front and he had a bit of the crazy professor look about his eyes. He waved me in, peeked out into the hall, then quickly shut the door behind me.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
A quick glance around told me he’d been camping out here a lot lately. The ancient settee where we usually sat and, more often, hooked up, was covered with loose papers, a blanket I recognized from his room, and an Easton Academy hooded sweatshirt. There were a couple of take-out bags on the floor, stuffed with garbage, and My Chemical Romance blasted through the speakers of an iPod dock on the chair in the corner.
“Everything’s fine,” he said, hastily lowering the volume. “Why wouldn’t everything be okay?”
His hands were on his hips, the sleeves of his green rugby shirt pushed up to his elbows. I sat down carefully on the settee and put the bag down on the table next to his open laptop, trying not to disturb the note cards strewn around it.
“No reason,” I said. I pressed my lips together and cradled my cast with my other hand. I had to choose my words cautiously here. Clearly he was feeling hyper or tense or both. “Are you going to sit?” I asked, casting my glance down next to me. “I brought your favorites.”
Josh tucked his hands under his arms and took a few steps toward the settee, but still kept a good distance. “I just ate, actually, but I’ll save them for later. I’m really just wondering what you mean when you ask me if everything’s okay.”
I blinked. Instantly those nigglings of uncertainty started to bother my nerves again, and the stitches in my chin began to itch. Why was he being so weird? He’d been fine all day, but now he was acting like he’d been chugging Red Bull for the past twenty-four hours.
“I was just asking,” I said. “You seem a little tense.”
“No, I’m not. Where do you get tense?” he asked, throwing his hands wide. “I’m fine.” He walked over to the window and looked out across campus. Then he turned around so suddenly I almost jumped. “Did Graham say something to you?” he demanded. “Or Sawyer?”
I licked my dry lips. Out of nowhere my arm started to throb and then my head began to throb with it. “Something about what?” I asked.
“They did, didn’t they?” he said, anger filling his eyes. “God! I should’ve known.”
“Josh, just calm down,” I said, standing, still cradling my arm. “I came here tonight to give you a study break. Why don’t we just—”
“Calm down?” he said, laughing. “How am I supposed to calm down when my girlfriend, the one person who’s supposed to love me no matter what, is talking to other guys about me behind my back?” he blurted. “Especially when one of those guys hates my guts and the other one is clearly totally in love with her?”
I swallowed hard and found myself glancing at the door. This was a Josh I hadn’t seen since last year, since the night of his arrest.
“What?” he said. “Aren’t you even going to say anything?”
“No, actually,” I said, skirting the table and walking steadily towar
d the door. “I think I’m just gonna go.”
“Oh, that’s great. That’s just perfect,” Josh yelled, his green eyes flashing. “Fine! Go ahead and go! Maybe Sawyer’s waiting for you back in your room. Maybe you’ll talk to him.”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” I said, frustration and anger searing my veins. “I want to talk to you, but you can’t even chill out long enough to have a normal conversation.” I looked him up and down, my heart cracking slowly. This had not gone as planned. “Maybe when you calm down you can give me a call.”
Then I yanked open the door and stormed out, slamming it behind me before he could respond. As I tore across campus, I kept feeling like he was going to come after me, but I refused to look back. I didn’t relax until I got to the center of the quad and realized he wasn’t going to run up behind me and keep right on yelling. I let out a breath and dropped down on one of the stone benches. I went to hold my head in my hands, but my broken arm protested with an angry, painful twinge and tears filled my eyes. Lovely. I couldn’t even properly mope.
“Calm down, calm down, calm down,” I told myself, my heel jiggling beneath the bench. I needed to try to look at this whole thing through Josh’s eyes. Yes, he’d been acting freakish lately, but did he have a reason? How would I feel if I’d walked in on him, say, holding hands with Ivy? How would I feel if he was in a serious accident and didn’t let me know? Maybe he was just reacting the way any normal boyfriend would react when he thought his girlfriend was pulling away.
My teeth clenched and the fingers on my free hand curled around the edge of the bench’s seat. This was all Graham’s fault. If he hadn’t planted those suspicions in my mind, if he hadn’t called Josh a liar to my face, I wouldn’t be feeling this way. I wouldn’t be wondering so much about Josh’s mood swings. I would be able to just chalk them up to end-of-the-year stress, separation anxiety, fear of the future.
Wouldn’t I?
I let out a groan, tipped my head back, and looked up at the stars in the sky, wishing one of them would bring me some answers. Unfortunately, the stars weren’t talking tonight. They simply winked back at me, refusing to tell me who to believe in—refusing to tell me who to trust.
SOMETHING BIG
Even though I knew that watching the clock inevitably made it move slower, I spent the final fifteen minutes of my last class on Wednesday afternoon doing just that. I was supposed to meet Carolina and her camera crew for our first tour of the construction site and I couldn’t wait. My last few experiences at the site had been less than positive (understatement of the century), and I was eager to erase them with something good. I figured Carolina’s positive energy, and maybe the presence of a camera crew, would frighten off the bad mojo today. Plus, I was dying to see how things were coming along.
Two minutes left to go. As I dragged my gaze away from the clock, it happened to fall on Missy. She was staring at me, her eyes narrowed, and she didn’t look away. I swear, it was like giving me the evil eye had become her favorite pastime.
I rolled my eyes at her, just to show her how very unintimidated I was—even though my heart was now pounding—and pretended to focus on the end of the review.
After what felt like a hundred years, the bell rang and I was out of my seat before anyone else. The door opened just as I got there and I was stunned to find that Josh was the one who had opened it. Instantly, my chest filled with nervous butterflies.
“Hey,” I said, averting my eyes.
“Hi.” He fell into step with me in the hallway. He was wearing long cargo shorts and a blue crew neck sweater, looking like his normal, yummy self. But I couldn’t help remembering his manic body language from last night and the suspicious, slightly crazed look in his eyes.
“Where’ve you been all day?” I asked, walking quickly toward the end of the hallway.
“I have a paper due tomorrow, so I spent lunch and breakfast in the library,” he said, practically chasing me down the stairs. “Are you in a rush for some reason, or are you just that mad at me?”
I sighed half impatiently, half apologetically, as we reached the bottom floor. Josh followed me as I ducked around the corner into a less crowded hallway. I leaned back against the brick wall, adjusting the strap of my bag on my shoulder.
“I have my first tour of the construction site with Carolina,” I said, checking my watch. “In about two minutes.”
“Oh.” Josh looked at his feet. “Okay then. I’ll let you go.”
A flood of guilt rushed in and drowned all the butterflies in my chest. “No. I mean, it’s okay. They can’t really start without me. What’s up?”
Josh looked up at me through the mop of his hair. “I just feel really bad about last night. I kind of jumped all over you and I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay,” I said automatically, even as my pride burned at the mention of it.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “You know it’s not.” He looked away from me, toward the door and the sunlit quad beyond, as students rushed in and out, widening and thinning the shaft of light at our feet. “I’ve been so stressed out lately. You wouldn’t believe the amount of pressure I’ve been dealing with. I know it’s not an excuse, but it’s just . . . the way it is.” He met my gaze then, and my pulse skipped a beat. “There’s actually something I have to tell you . . . something big.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and took a step back. “But now’s not the time. You have somewhere to be.”
“Josh. Tell me,” I said, reaching for him. I touched his elbow and then my hand fell away, pointless. “I can be late.”
“No.” He shook his head. “We can talk later. I’ve been enough of a jerk lately. I don’t want to screw this up for you too.”
There was a lump in my throat the size of a soccer ball. He looked sad and almost scared, but determined. He wasn’t going to tell me his secret. His big thing. Not now anyway. No matter how much I wanted to know.
“Okay,” I said. “So . . . call me later?”
He nodded once. “I will.”
“Promise?”
“I swear.” He crossed his heart with his pinkie.
I turned slowly and headed for the door, giving him all kinds of time to change his mind and stop me, but he didn’t. As I made my way outside into the warm sunshine and down the steps of the class building, I felt as if I was going to burst wide open from the pressure of all the questions brewing in my mind. What did he have to tell me? How big was big? Had I been right all along and he was off his meds? Or maybe it was a good thing he had to tell me. Maybe he was MT and he had been trying to help me all along. Or maybe it was an even worse thing. Like maybe he was going to break up with me.
I gulped back a bubble of fear as I crossed the quad toward the new Billings. Josh didn’t want to screw this up for me by divulging whatever it was that had been bothering him? Well, I had news for him—I had a feeling he’d screwed it up worse by not telling me.
CURSED AGAIN
I tried to forget about Josh as Carolina and I followed Larry around the periphery of the now-finished foundation. It was easier than I thought, putting his aborted announcement out of my head, what with all the construction noise, the sun in my eyes, and Carolina’s camera all up in my grill. How she seemed so comfortable with the lens swooping in and out and the boom looming overhead was beyond me. But then, she did do this for a living. I supposed a person could get used to anything.
“I just want you to know, Miss Brennan, that we’re looking into the accident with the stage,” Larry assured me, walking backward past a couple of guys who were cutting wooden beams with a table saw. “I’m certain it was sound and secure for the ribbon cutting, so I have no clue what could have caused a collapse like that, but we’re gonna figure it out and make sure nothing like that happens again.”
All around us, construction vehicles ground and squeaked, beeped and churned. A crane lifted a pallet of red and gray bricks, moving them slowly toward what would be the front of the eventual building,
while a huge yellow truck backed toward us, carrying piles of two-by-fours. Even with all this activity, I felt perfectly safe—possibly because it was so bright out and I was surrounded by people who knew what they were doing. The camera swung around, taking in all the action, then swung back around to focus on us again.
“Thanks, Larry,” I said. Part of me wanted to tell him I was pretty sure that someone other than him and his crew was responsible for the accident—namely Missy Thurber or Paige Ryan—but that would inspire too many questions from both him and Carolina.
“But just so you know, not the smartest idea, climbing around a deserted construction site at night,” he told me. I looked up at him and he seemed to suddenly realize that I was, in fact, his employer. He cleared his throat and toyed with his wedding ring. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Miss Brennan.”
“Trust me, I know,” I told him in what I hoped was a comforting voice. I reached into my cast with my fingertips, trying in vain to scratch an itch on my wrist. I was starting to sweat, which was not going to cause good things to happen inside there, I was sure. “I promise I won’t be doing that again.”
No matter what MT tells me, I added silently.
We had just turned our steps toward one of the half-dozen trucks when I heard a loud and foreboding snap. Larry whirled around, startled, and my heart hit my throat. I automatically looked at the wooden planks beneath my feet, but they were laid on solid ground, only there to keep workers and visitors from tromping over the soil around the foundation too much.
There was another snap. Then a loud shout.
“Watch out!” someone cried.
“Heads up!”
“Get out of there!”
Carolina grabbed my good arm, but for a long moment, neither one of us moved. We had no idea what was happening or which way to go. And then, from the corner of my eye, I saw it. The pallet full of heavy bricks was above our heads, and two of its supports had broken. A third looked stretched to its limits. Two tons of jagged bricks were about to rain down on our heads.