by Sarah Gailey
She ducked her head. “It’s really a cool test. I, um.” She glanced up at me, bashful. “I invented it.”
I stared at her. “Tabitha. Now you’re blushing.”
“So?”
“So, you usually hide it from me when you blush. With…” I waved my hands at her face, making wiggly fingers that were intended to convey the contraliminal whatsit of whatever.
The tiniest smile I’d ever seen tucked itself into the very corners of her mouth. “Yeah, well. I thought maybe I’d try not hiding for a change.” I didn’t know what to say—it felt like she’d spotted my attempt to get out of the conversation and had used my own momentum to flip me onto my back. Fortunately, the waiter intervened by bringing us another round of drinks and popcorn. “Hang on!” I said, not quite grabbing his arm. “I know for sure we didn’t order these!”
He flashed his teeth at me and winked. “They’re on the house, kiddo.”
As he walked away, Tabitha and I clutched at each other across the table.
“Oh my god,” she whispered, her eyes wide and delighted.
“Oh my god,” I whispered back, and we both failed to keep our laughter silent.
“You should go for it,” she said. I shook my head and traced my finger through the condensation on our table. “Come on! He’s cute, and I bet it’s been awhi— Ow!” She rubbed her shin under the table.
“No,” I said in an even tone, “I think I’m all set.”
“Are things that serious with Rahul?” I flicked more water at her, and she cackled at me, not giving ground.
“Things aren’t serious, I don’t know. I like him. There’s something there.”
“Ooooh, something,” Tabitha teased. “Come on, you’ve gotta give me better details than that. When did he tell you about the cheat-detection spell?”
The thought you probably shouldn’t tell her about this wandered through my mind and smashed into you’re pretty drunk and fuck it. Only fuck it survived the collision.
“He mentioned it earlier today. Before we made out.” We did some more giggling, and it occurred to me that neither of us was the giggling kind. This was a performance we were putting on for each other. It was a shadow play of female camaraderie. I found that I didn’t mind so much, as long as we were both pretending together.
“What were you talking about that made my little test come up?” she asked.
“Oh, he was telling me about Alexandria DeCambray,” I said.
Tabitha raised her eyebrows at me over her straw. “Is she a suspect?” She was still trying to keep up the performance, but her voice was a shade too sharp.
I shrugged. “Who knows? I mean, she’s just a kid. But he was telling me about this thing that happened with her last year.” I told her the story he’d shared with me—about Alexandria’s ambition, and her threat. When I mentioned Rahul’s shattered car, Tabitha’s face went grave. “What? What’s that face for?” She shook her head, but I pressed her. “C’mon, tell me.”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Tabby,” I said, a little sad. “You can tell me. Honest.” I wanted her to confide in me so badly just then. I wanted us to share something, some secret, like the time in second grade I’d helped her bury the shards of Mom’s favorite mug in the backyard. We’d both spit in the dirt to make it a forever-pact, because we were both too chicken to do a blood-pact. I wanted that again; I wanted us to be together in whatever it was that she knew.
“It’s just … well. It’s just something Sylvia told me about Alexandria.”
I leaned forward in my chair. The room tilted a bit, and I leaned back again. I should drink some water, I thought as I took another sip of my cocktail. “What is it?”
“I hesitate to bring it up, because it’s from right befor—” she said. “Sylvia said that she was … worried.”
“Worried?” I said. “Or scared?”
Tabitha made a scrunch-mouthed face. “Well, I guess Alexandria needed something. A potion.” She looked around, making sure no one could hear. She was reminding me of someone, but I couldn’t place who. She leaned in, sotto voce: “She needed an abortion potion.”
I nodded and answered, my voice too loud, “Yeah, I know. It wasn’t for her.”
Tabitha frowned, then nudged my water glass toward me. I drained it, thinking, What a good sister. It was the first time I’d ever thought that about her.
“Right, okay. So, then you know that she didn’t get it.”
I chewed on a piece of ice. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Tabitha continued. “She didn’t get it, because her friend was too far gone for the potion to work. Ten weeks. Sylvia said no. She told Alexandria that the potion wouldn’t work after ten weeks.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, remembering Mrs. Webb’s finger prodding my shoulder. That’s surgical.
“Anyway, I guess Alexandria wanted the potion. She thought Sylvia was saying no because of some moral objection. Sylvia told me that Alexandria showed up in her office and started making threats, saying that she was going to tell everyone that she’d seen us together if Sylvia didn’t hand over the potion.” Tabitha looked uncomfortable, glanced around again. A brief image of Courtney doing the same thing in the library flashed through my mind, too fast for me to hold on to. “Osthorne has a strict policy about staff fraternization. We would both have gotten fired. I would have lost my tenure and my professional reputation. Sylvia probably wouldn’t have been able to work in a school ever again.”
“I think … I think I knew that,” I said, squinting at my empty water glass. Tabitha stuck her finger into her own glass before pushing it across the table. I downed it before checking to see what color she’d turned it. It was clear, but just a little bitter. Too much gin fuzzing my taste buds.
“But Sylvia still said no,” Tabitha continued, as if I hadn’t interrupted her. “She said that it was just plain too late in the pregnancy. She said that it would endanger the pregnant student to take the potion. Alexandria insisted. She can be … forceful, but I guess Sylvia told her she absolutely wouldn’t budge. We were getting ready to tell Torres about our relationship—but then.” My sister didn’t fill in the rest of the sentence.
“So Sylvia said there was no way she was going to hand over the potion?” Something about this wasn’t fitting right, but I couldn’t quite remember. All of the interviews I’d done ran together, muddy in my drunk memory.
“Sylvia would never do anything to endanger a student, even if it meant risking both of our careers,” Tabitha said. “So, yeah, she said absolutely not about the potion. I thought of it right away when you told me about what happened with Rahul. It’s just that … well, it’s probably nothing,” Tabitha said, and I frowned at her. “Okay, fine! Fine. I just didn’t know about the last part of the Rahul thing, and it seems.” Eyebrows. “Well. Strange. That the last time Alexandria DeCambray blackmailed a teacher and didn’t get her way, she got aggressive. And then she tried to blackmail Sylvia and didn’t get her way, and now … Sylvia’s dead.”
The words sent a snap of clarity through my mind. “Say that again?”
“I said, it seems strange that the last time Alexandria DeCambray blackmailed a teacher and didn’t get her way, she got aggressive.” Her voice seemed to echo, and I realized that I was leaning across the table, staring into her eyes. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, Tabby, I think I have to call it a night. I didn’t mean to get this drunk.” I didn’t feel woozy anymore, but I felt caught in the strangest sensation. It was like I’d been hearing double. Tabitha just patted my hand.
“No worries, kiddo. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow anyway.”
I pressed against my temples with both palms—my head was ringing. Not my ears—my whole head. Like a tuning fork. How much did I have to drink? “That’s right, it’s Wednesday.” The word “Wednesday” seemed to have so many syllables in it, and I wasn’t sure I’d gotten them in the right order. My mouth was full of cotton. “Wensdenay. Wesnde
snay. Oh my god, wait, it’s Wesndesday! Are you going to be okay tomorrow?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, tapping her glass. It suddenly refilled with water. She stirred it with her finger, and I thought I saw two glasses separate and then merge. Shit, I thought, I’m wasted. “I have a high tolerance,” she continued, then drank her water with what felt like superhuman speed. “Let’s get you in a cab, huh? And remember: cheeseburger, liter of Gatorade.” She winked at me as she pulled out her phone. “Works like magic.”
The cab ride back to Osthorne was strange. I told the driver I had a migraine—it was the closest thing to the truth I could find. I didn’t feel properly drunk, but something in my head felt … wrong. Did that waiter slip me something? I wondered. I thought back to high school, senior year, when I’d snuck out of the house to attend a concert and wound up getting rescued by the bouncer. He’d seen someone drop something into my drink, and so he’d put me into a cab with one of my female friends. She’d told me later that she had spent the night taking care of me, shaking at the thought of what could have happened to me. I couldn’t remember how it had felt—couldn’t remember anything until the next morning, waking up on her bedroom floor with a raging headache and a wide, blank swath cut through my memory. Had it been like this? My head felt clear, but it was like a swarm of hornets was humming inside my skull.
I was so thankful that Tabitha was there for me this time. So thankful that it didn’t occur to me to wonder why she didn’t share the cab with me, where she’d gone—all that mattered was that she had been there, taking care of me, handing me water.
I got back to the school, paid the cab driver. Overtipped him because I couldn’t focus on counting out the bills properly. I stumbled across the grounds, missed the keyhole of my apartment door three times. My pants tangled around my ankles as I stripped on my way to the couch. I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I was okay. Sleep wouldn’t come. My brain felt swollen, itchy.
Finally, I got up off the couch, letting the duvet fall to the floor. I wandered into the bedroom, my feet feeling very far from my legs. I sat on the floor, my back against the mattress, and opened the journal.
I’m so close. I’m almost there. But with the news, it feels like there’s no time. I have to work harder. If I just work hard enough, I can do it. I can save her.
I sat up drinking glasses of water, then tea; as the sun began to lighten the sky, I switched over to coffee. The journal entries went from coherent to intense to manic. They focused on the same spell, the same equations over and over. They were desperate. I feel like I can bend my own feelings about this if I just apply the right angle of Theoretical Alkalinity, or maybe I should apply something closer to a clouds-in-water method? If I can just remove the emotional aspect I know I can eliminate fatigue, and if I can do that then I can work hard enough, I just need to work hard enough how can I work hard enough
I pulled my notebook out of my bag and started taking notes, scrawling interlocking circles and drawing lines between names and dates. I scribbled page after page, trying to capture everything that Rahul and Alexandria and Courtney and Mrs. Webb and Tabitha had told me—everything I knew about Osthorne, everything I knew about the case, everything I knew about Sylvia. But it didn’t scratch the itch.
I don’t know when I started writing on the wall. Not the wall itself, of course—that would be crazy. I wasn’t going crazy. I was still fine. But the letters—I annotated them, marking down the connections I suddenly understood. The connections that now made sense. I tore pages out of my notebook and added them to the margins of the letters, drew lines from my notes to parts of the diary. It was coming together. It was really coming together. I mapped the connections between everyone, drawing a spiderweb that spread across multiple walls. In the center of the web was that single bold phrase: It was positive.
In the space above and below those words, I marked the center of the spiderweb—the names of the two people who this whole case came down to: Dylan and Alexandria DeCambray.
As soon as I finished writing their names down, the ringing sensation in my skull faded away. It left exhaustion in its wake.
I stared at the pages strewn across my coffee table, flinching as the seven o’clock wake-up alarm on my phone went off. I turned the alarm off. It was over—whatever scrabbling creature had climbed into my brain was dead, and a steady wave of fatigue bloomed around its corpse. I turned my phone off and climbed onto the mattress, curling up in the center of it with the journal clasped to my chest. Sleep steamrolled me, and I sank into the dark like drowning.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
WHEN I WOKE LATE THAT morning, the sense of clarity I’d had the night before started to slip. I felt off-center. Something had slid out of alignment in the night. I looked at my notes on the wall, the connections I’d drawn, the notes and marginalia. It made sense in the same way that the whispers in the library made sense—there was something there, just out of the corner of my eye, that I knew would tie it all together. My memories of the frenzied hours of note-taking were slipping away from me like sand eroding out from under my feet at the beach, every hour a lapping wave that eased the details away grain by grain. By noon, all that was left was a masturbatory sense of shame and urgency. The clarity was gone.
I had to get it back.
I needed to be out of that bedroom, away from the wall. Away from the bare mattress. Away from the journal and the letters. Especially those. I felt certain that if I could get away from them for just a little while, I could find the thing I’d had a hold on the night before.
I ordered takeout, then spread out all of the case-related files on the living room floor. I spent the afternoon eating mediocre pad thai and reviewing everyone’s stories, even though I already knew them like a tongue knows the backsides of teeth. I reread my notes on my interview with Mrs. Webb, with Dylan. I wrote the words “WHY THE LIBRARY” in capital letters at the top of a notepad, and then failed to write anything else after that. I stared at the pictures of Sylvia’s body until I saw her whenever I closed my eyes. I couldn’t reconcile her staff photo with the journal with the crime scene pictures—she was so smiling and ethereal in the photo, so obsessive in her words, so heavy in death. It was as though she’d suddenly solidified, and in doing so, died.
I realized that I didn’t know anything about her. Not really. She was secondary to the case. I wondered if murder cases were always like that. Whenever I was tracking down an adulterer or following a dad who was behind on his child support payments, the person at the center of the case was also the one I spent all my time thinking about. But this was different. I hadn’t thought about Sylvia nearly as much as I’d thought about Courtney, and Dylan, and Mrs. Webb.
I grabbed Courtney’s school file, which Mrs. Webb had given me a few days before with strict instructions not to lose, damage, or copy any part of it. It was totally unremarkable. Everything there lined up well enough with what I would have expected of an upper-middle-class private-school girl—a couple of infractions for sneaking out, suspected drinking, fraternization with boys, decent grades. There was a referral from a guidance counselor, who recommended her for the same are-you-eating monitoring that Brea got; there was a letter from Courtney’s mother stapled to it, saying that she didn’t need the monitoring.
Dylan’s file, obtained the same way, was much thicker. It was full of reprimands and detentions and notes from his teachers on how promising-yet-troubled he was. There was an essay, flagged for administrative review, that briefly mentioned thoughts of self-harm. There were no notes on follow-up. There were his notes from the same guidance counselor, who was concerned about his “self-aggrandizing fantasies of a widespread conspiracy” and his obsession with the Prophecy. It was nothing special, nothing surprising. He was a Jell-O mold of a teenage boy, and he had tried to fill himself up with purpose but it just wouldn’t set.
If I’d been in high school at the same time as Dylan, I thought, I would have
adored him. I would have thought he was way ahead of me. I had been lost too, and I would have been drawn to his intensity like a wasp to a spilled puddle of Coke. Did it say something about the person I’d become that I felt something between pity and disgust when I looked through his file? Did it mean I’d grown?
I wondered what they would have thought of high school Ivy. Would I have been friends with any of these kids, or would I have floated along alone, forming only the briefest of alliances and counting down the days until I could escape everyone? If I’d been magic, if I’d gone to Osthorne, or even to Headley with Tabitha, would things have been different? Would I have been able to deal with my mother’s death the same way Tabitha had?
I sighed, rubbing my eyes, and tossed Dylan’s file down. It had been the last in the pile. I grabbed the stack of papers and flipped it upside down, so Mrs. Webb’s file was back on top. I picked it up, flipped it open, and started again from the beginning.
* * *
I woke up to the sound of my phone buzzing a few inches away from my ear. I startled, then slapped at my face. A Post-it note fell off—it had gotten stuck there while I was sleeping, curled up on the floor of the living room in the middle of a nest of notes and files. I had no idea what time it was, but it was already dark outside. Jesus, Ivy, I thought, you’re a mess. I resolved to go to sleep at a decent hour that night. And to take a shower. And to eat something other than slowly congealing takeout Thai.
I splashed water on my face in the little bathroom, squinting at the thin sunlight that streamed through the tiny casement window. I stared at myself hard in the mirror. I looked old, but I wasn’t sure if I looked older than I had at the start of this case, or if I just looked older than the high school version of myself I’d been dreaming about. In my dream, I’d been trying to talk to Alexandria DeCambray. She’d been taking pictures of me as I tried to tell her that I was in love with Sylvia, that she had to stop threatening her. Alexandria had been laughing and showing me the pictures; in the dream, my eyes were rimmed with the fat black crayon-eyeliner I’d worn throughout eleventh grade.