by Kasie West
Amelia gave an excited bounce next to me. I self-consciously smoothed back my hair. Why had we decided to find him right after swim practice? He had track after school, so I figured there would be less people around, but I hadn’t thought about how I’d look. A piece of wet hair stuck to my temple. I tucked it behind my ear, feeling heat creep up my cheeks. It wasn’t like Robert hadn’t seen me like this before. But still, here he was after a month, looking amazing. I wanted to look amazing too. Or at least a couple steps up from awful.
“Hey, Robert,” Amelia said.
He gave my body a quick look up and down, as if checking to see if he had made the right decision. He must’ve decided he had because he didn’t even smile. “Hi, Amelia. Hadley.”
“So we were online the other day and noticed you follow Heath Hall,” Amelia spit out.
Wow. No buildup at all. Just straight to the topic. I widened my eyes at her. She just smiled. She totally got away with stuff like that because she was so cute, even with her wet hair and swim sweats.
Robert laughed. “He’s not the real one.”
I furrowed my brow. “There is no real one. He’s a movie character.”
Amelia elbowed me. “We were just wondering if you knew who he really was,” she said.
Robert met my eyes then and held my stare for a three count, my cheeks completing their transformation to red, before Amelia interrupted by asking again, “So? Do you know him?”
“Yes . . . sort of. He goes here.”
“That’s what we’d heard.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you. You have to figure that out on your own.”
“Figure it out?” I asked.
“Yes.” But that’s all he said.
I wondered if he would’ve told Amelia had she asked the question, if he was holding back the info because it was me who wanted to know. It wasn’t the best breakup. Even though he was the breaker-upper, it had been obvious that night that he thought I’d tell him that he was more important than swimming. That I’d beg him not to go, promise not to practice as much or that I’d spend more time with him or something. But I hadn’t. Because it wasn’t true. “Why is his identity some secret?”
A loud voice called from across the parking lot, “Robert!”
He whirled toward the sound, then let out a yodel. And without even a backward glance at us to say goodbye, he bounded over to his friend and they bumped chests.
I took in a deep breath and willed my body to return to its normal state.
Amelia ran the toe of her shoe along a crack in the asphalt and then, as if it was the one withholding information from us, looked up with a scowl. “That was useless. He only told us information we already knew.” She studied my face. “Your cheeks are red.”
I tugged at the neck of my hoodie. “I’m hot.”
She squinted her eyes and focused on something over my shoulder, probably Robert. Then her eyes lit up. “Do you still like Robert? Is that why you’re so flustered?”
“Can we walk away from his car before he comes back?”
“Of course.” We headed for her car, the only one left in the back row of the parking lot. “So tell me, what’s going on? If you still like him, I can come up with another good excuse to talk to him. Should I ask if he wants to go get hot wings with us?”
“Hot wings?”
“I’m hungry. Can we go get something to eat? I’ll ask him if he wants to eat with us.”
I grabbed her arm before she could go through with this plan. “He broke up with me. It wasn’t mutual. He said I had a one-track mind.”
“What? Hadley! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Shh.” I could hear Robert’s voice behind us still. I was sure he could hear us.
Amelia lowered her voice. “Sorry. But you should’ve told me. We could’ve bad-mouthed him together all these weeks.”
“I just wanted to forget about it. I felt stupid. I had liked him.” I obviously still did. But nothing had changed. If he didn’t like what was important to me, or at least understand why it was important, there was no chance for us.
“He should feel stupid. You’re amazing. Don’t let his blindness make you feel bad about yourself. You have a passion and you work hard at it.” She made a weird noise in the back of her throat that I recognized immediately as a noise Robert made. “So annoying.”
I laughed.
“Of course you’re too focused for him because he is a lazy pig.”
I smiled. “He’s not lazy. He’s on the track team.”
“Shhhh,” she said. “We’re venting.”
We reached her car and I dug out of my backpack the notebook we had been using the day before. I drew a line through Robert. “Okay, seventy-one more people to go.”
She started the car. “What do you think Robert meant by ‘figure that out on your own’?”
“I don’t know.” We both watched as his car backed out of the space and drove through the parking lot, like it would somehow answer our question. It didn’t . . . obviously. She took the list from me, ran her finger down the page and then ripped it in half. “Well, we’re going to figure it out together. We’ll divide and conquer.”
I took a deep breath and shoved my half of the list back into my backpack.
The next day, I stared at the names on my Who Is Heath Hall? list. I didn’t have to do this. What were the odds that he’d show up at my swim meet again this Friday? The image of him jumping into the pool made my shoulders go tense immediately. I growled. Apparently, I did need to do this.
I scanned the list. I’d start with the people I semi-knew, like Brady Thompson. Then I’d move on to the total strangers. Brady sat two seats to the left of me in math.
Five minutes before class ended, I packed my book away and readied myself to cut him off on his way out the door. I felt like I was planning some sort of attack. I wiped my hands on my jeans. The bell rang right in the middle of Mr. Kingston telling us our homework assignment. I stood, my movement making the chair scrape the floor.
“I haven’t dismissed you yet,” Mr. Kingston said.
I sat back down. He held us an extra minute, then finally let us leave. I caught up to Brady at the door and followed him several steps out of it before I said, “Brady, hi. Um . . .”
He looked around, then right at me. “Hadley Moore. Are you talking to me?” If it weren’t for the smile on his face, I might’ve thought he was being rude.
Even with the smile, I hesitated. “Yes. Can I ask you a quick question?”
“If I can ask you one?”
“Okay.”
“Where is your music today?” He pointed to my ears that were free of the headphones I normally wore between classes.
I patted my pocket where they were stashed.
“I see. Okay, go ahead.”
I cleared my throat. “I noticed that you follow Heath Hall online.”
“Not the real one.”
Was everyone going to point that out? “I know. But I was wondering if you know who he really is. Like, who wears the mask? He goes to our school, right?”
He laughed at this like he thought I was making some inside joke with him.
I waited until he was done to say, “So you don’t know who he is?”
“If you don’t, I’m not going to be the one to tell you.”
I curled my lip. Was this some kind of pact? First Robert, now Brady.
“I knew it wouldn’t last long,” he said.
“What?” I gave him a sideways glance.
He pointed at my hand that was clutching an earbud and getting ready to put it in my ear. “I guess we’re done.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks.” I pushed Play with my opposite hand and let the music drown out my thoughts.
“Do people think I’m a jerk?” I asked Amelia when I joined her at our usual table in the middle of the outdoor courtyard for lunch.
“Someone called you a jerk? Who?” She put her hands on the metal table li
ke she was ready to stand up and fight whomever I named.
“No. Nobody did. Just something Brady said today.”
“Brady Thompson? What did he say?” She moved her hands to under her chin, then let out a dreamy sigh. “And how did he say it?”
I smiled and opened my bag of carrot sticks. “He was surprised I was talking to him. Acted like I never had before.”
“Have you?”
“Well, not outside of class or anything . . . but that’s not the point. I don’t purposefully ignore him. I’m not rude or anything. Am I?”
“No . . . You just have your music on most of the time and walk down the hall like you know exactly where you’re going.”
“I do know exactly where I’m going. Doesn’t everybody?”
She pointed a potato chip at me. “But other people take their time getting there. You know, by talking to other students like they actually like them.”
“I like people.” I circled a carrot stick in the air. “I did that whole swim race thing with Jackson.”
“That had nothing to do with liking him and everything to do with the fact that you lost your race that night and you needed to win at something.”
I narrowed my eyes and bit into my carrot. “Fine, you’re right. But Robert! What about him? I dated him. And Miguel before him.”
“True. They were both confident enough to date someone as independent as you. Well, until Robert wasn’t, apparently. Have I mentioned yet today how stupid he is?”
I smiled, but these arguments weren’t proving my case at all. “DJ!” I exclaimed. “I talk to DJ.”
“Because you know he is unavailable.”
“So you’re saying that Brady is right? That people think I’m closed off?”
She sighed. “No. I mean, sort of. You’re just private. You like to keep most things to yourself. But you can be friendly, nice, when you want to be. We’re best friends, after all.”
Exactly. We were best friends. . . . Granted, I’d known her since second grade. I wondered if she would’ve given me a chance if we had met now, in high school. She was much more open than I was. Willing to let people in. Willing to give people the chance to have control over her emotions. It took a lot of trust for me to get there.
“You’re like the big swim star at the school, Hadley,” Amelia added. “You can be intimidating.”
“I am not intimidating.”
“You are. I thought that’s what you were counting on when you finally get to confront the masked man.”
“You’re right, it is.” She was right, why was I getting hung up on this? I liked my life. I liked my emotions safe. Who cared what Brady or anyone else thought, for that matter? They had no idea how I really was.
I glanced around the courtyard. “So were you able to check anyone off your list?”
She shook her head. “They aren’t talking. They won’t give him up. It’s frustrating. I even talked to some girls not on our list. A few said they’ve seen his posts but couldn’t care less who he is. One person swore it was Thomas Freeman and another said it was Liam Baker.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did you add them to the list?”
“I did.”
“You talked to a lot of people,” I said.
“How many have you talked to?”
“Just the one.”
She bit her lip, pulled out a pen, and crossed off several people. “I really only talked to three from our list and then added the two, so I’m only one down too.”
“We need to figure this out before Friday.”
“What’s Friday?” she asked.
“Our next swim meet.”
She pursed her lips. “We studied his pattern online yesterday and he usually doesn’t show up to the same place twice.”
“Until I taunted him, apparently. I can’t risk it. I have a winning record to maintain. Heath Hall will not ruin that.”
Seven
Dylan Sutter was next on my list. And as I left the science building and headed through the outdoor halls toward the pool, I saw him wrestling with a book at his locker. I stepped up beside him into the shade structure that covered the rows of lockers. “Dylan.”
His book fell to the ground with a slap. He started to retrieve it when he met my eyes with a stunned expression before dropping his gaze to my shoulder.
“I noticed that you follow Heath Hall online. I know he’s not the actual actor who plays him,” I added before he had the chance to inform me of that.
“Yeah.” He went back to trying to fit his book in his too-full locker.
“So who is he?”
“You don’t know?”
Obviously, I wanted to say but instead just said, “No.”
He shook his head back and forth several times, then slammed his locker, his hand barely making it out. He pushed on the door once more as though he thought the books inside were about to shove it back open. Satisfied, he straightened up, then glared at my shoulder. “Can’t tell if you don’t know.”
Holy crap, how did this guy get all these people to keep their mouths shut? This was turning out to be way more work than I had anticipated. “Dylan. Look. I won’t tell anyone. I just need to talk to him.”
“You can’t just talk to him. Well, I mean you can but you can’t.”
What? “What is he, the Godfather? Come on.”
Dylan adjusted his backpack on his shoulder and stumbled a little under the weight of it. “Can’t tell you if you don’t know,” he said again, then nodded his head at the ground and left.
I smacked Dylan’s locker as if it was the one that had refused to spill its secrets and I turned to leave, walking straight into Jackson. “Moore, I should’ve known it was you.”
I took a step back. “What?”
“What did you say to Dylan?”
“What?” Why did I keep saying that?
“Dylan.” He pointed behind him, where I watched Dylan glance over his shoulder once, see us looking, then nearly trip over his own feet before righting himself and continuing forward.
“I said nothing.”
“It didn’t look like nothing.”
“Are you spying on me?” I asked.
“I was walking down the hall. So yes, I guess that means I was spying. I thought maybe I could learn your secret swimming powers for the next time someone strands me on an island in the middle of a lake.”
“Strands you? That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? If you weren’t a strong swimmer, you shouldn’t have swum out there.”
“I’m a strong swimmer. I did beat you, after all.”
I started to protest, to tell him he only beat me because he cheated, but I stopped myself. That’s what he wanted me to do.
He bent down and picked up something off the ground by my foot. When he stood, I noticed it was my earbuds. I held out my hand for them. “Oh, thanks.”
He just tucked them into his pocket. “I better go turn these in to Lost and Found.”
“They’re mine.” I kept my palm outstretched.
“They were just sitting on the cement. They could be anyone’s.”
I sighed. “Jackson. They’re mine.”
He took them out of his pocket and held them over my hand. When I reached for them, he tugged them just out of my grasp. He laughed and did the exact same thing again. “You just have to grab them.”
“Why are you such a child?” Even his hair seemed to laugh at life. It was a curly mop on top of his head that he didn’t feel the need to tame.
“Why are you always so serious?” He dropped them onto my hand.
I wasn’t serious all the time. I had fun around the right people. Just not people who thought life was a big joke.
As if reading my mind, the smile on Jackson’s face disappeared. “Hey,” he said in a tone as sincere as his new expression. “I’m sorry if I offended you the other day. I didn’t think my joke out in the lake would scare you.”
“I . . .” wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence
. I was sure he was seconds away from laughing and saying, Just kidding.
“You . . . ?” he prompted.
“Yeah. No big deal. It didn’t really scare me.”
“I think what you meant to say was, ‘Jack, not only did you not scare me, I thought it was hilarious. You’re the funniest person I know.’”
A breeze filled with salty ocean air blew a piece of my hair across my face. I pushed it out of the way. “Why is it so important that I find you funny? The rest of the school feeds your ego enough.”
“You’re the last holdout.”
“I’m positive I’m not the last.”
“Really? Have you started a club?”
I smiled a little. “Maybe I should. The Jack-haters club.”
“I’d totally join that club.”
I shook my head. “I bet you would.”
He gave my arm a playful punch. “See you around.”
At home I opened my computer, ready to look for more clues. Surely Heath Hall had to have said something to give himself away at some point. Right away I zeroed in on his latest post. Heath Hall: I’ll be at the museum on Tenth Street this Thursday sometime between the hours of 7 and 10.
He’d given another location.
I pulled out my cell and dialed Amelia’s number.
She answered the phone with the words, “I saw. That’s Abby’s museum. They have a show this week. Do you think he’s trying to ruin it?”
“I don’t know if he’s trying to, but that always seems to be the end result. So are we going?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Ms. Lin would be so proud,” I said. Ms. Lin was the art teacher at school. I had never taken art, but she was my mentor teacher and was constantly trying to get me to change this fact.
“I know. That’s why we shouldn’t tell her. She’ll think we’ve decided to become artists after all.”
“She thinks everyone’s an artist waiting to find themselves,” I said.
“So do you think I should warn Abby?” Amelia said. “Or my brother?”
“Yes, you should let them know there might be a disruption at the museum.” If someone had warned me, it might not have affected me so much.
“You know, Heath Hall busted that museum heist and saved the priceless painting in movie number three.”