The silence continued after she finished; the rest of the room appeared to be waiting, as if the faucet of words might be turned back on full blast at any second.
“I’m done,” Neela said. “You can talk now.”
Kevin, shockingly, was the first to break the silence. “I don’t know what the fuck you just said, but I think I love you.”
“I’m also a lesbian,” Neela added quickly. “For the record. And I’m not just saying that because you expressed an emotional connection to me, even if it was only used for comic effect.”
“Duly noted.”
“Right,” Leah said, exhaling slightly as she turned to Mr. Yale, who still lounged on the sofa, nodding in and out of sleep. “Would you care to introduce yourself, Wes?”
“Nah,” he said with a yawn, too tired (or lazy) to bother covering his mouth. “You’ll do it better.”
Leah arched an eyebrow. “Wesley Song comes to us from right here in Las Vegas, by way of Yale….”
Wes laughed as if he were in slow motion, a grumbling noise that reminded Persey of an outboard motor sputtering to life, and she wondered just how much weed this guy smoked. “Not anymore. Institutionalized education is such a…”
“Necessity?” Shaun suggested.
“Privilège,” Mackenzie said on top of him, with perfect French pronunciation.
“Drag,” Wes said heavily. “I’m getting an advanced degree in life now, man.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Arlo asked. Her words, as always, sounded confrontational.
Wes sat up, and Persey could see that his eyelids were pink and puffy. “You know. Living? Do you even know how to do that? Like really do that?”
Arlo stared at him, unblinking. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re really ‘living.’ Your parents must be rich as fuck to facilitate your first-world male-privilege bullshit.” She turned to Leah. “How the hell did he get invited?”
“Now look,” Leah said, clapping her hands again like a schoolteacher to gather everyone’s attention. “You all have one thing in common. One reason why you deserve this invitation.” Leah folded her arms across her chest. “You scored the highest of all participants in the Hidden Library escape room.”
Grumbling rippled through the group, and Persey caught snippets and words: “audition,” “not real,” “now it makes sense.”
“The Hidden Library was the most difficult escape room ever created, an update of last year’s Prison Break challenge, which was supposed to be the first unbeatable room.” She paused, lips pressed together as if remembering something horrible. “Updated and improved with one purpose in mind: to find the most talented code breakers, pattern identifiers, and puzzle solvers in the world.”
“I.e., us,” Wes added.
Leah’s poise never faltered. “Exactly. Which is why most of you received invitations to participate. We wanted to ensure that the brightest minds got a crack at this room, and we were not disappointed. You all scored the highest aptitudes in your attempts to solve the Hidden Library.”
Riot whistled through parted lips. “That thing was tough.”
“Thank you,” Leah said, accepting Riot’s words as a compliment. “It was designed to be unbeatable, and it almost was.”
“Almost?” Shaun asked. “It was my understanding no one had actually beaten it.”
“No one had. Until two weeks ago.” The explanation should have come from Leah, but it was Arlo who had spoken the words. She looked (glared) right at Persey. “By her.”
MACKENZIE SPUN TOWARD KEVIN, WHO STOOD BEHIND PERSEY. “You mean him.”
Seriously?
Kevin was (too) quick to make sure he wasn’t getting any undo credit. “Man, I wish.”
“How did you know?” Shaun asked Arlo. Persey was wondering the same thing.
Arlo rolled her eyes. “Don’t you guys follow the Escape-Capades feed? There’s a photo of her win.”
Persey sucked in a breath. I shouldn’t have agreed to do this. “There is?”
“Yep,” Arlo said. “I mean, your hands are up in front of your face all hiding-from-the-paparazzi style, but I recognized you.”
“She solved the Hidden Library?” Mackenzie said, eyebrows knitted together. “I don’t believe it.”
“Totes true!” Kevin said. “I was there to see it. Lemme tell you, that thing was impossible. The freaking ‘Pardoner’s Tale’? That’s a deep-ass cut.”
Riot sucked in a breath. “Fuuuuck. ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ ‘If that ye be so leef to fynde Deeth, turne up this croked wey,’” he said, quoting the same passage as Professor Rohner. It was like the Canterbury Tales sound bite. “I’m a freaking idiot.”
“‘And gladly wolde he lerne,’” Neela said, “‘and gladly teche.’”
Riot held up his hand to her for a high five. “Nice.”
“‘No empty-handed man can lure a bird,’” Mackenzie said, not to be outdone.
“Not the Middle English,” Riot said, wiggling his hand from side to side to denote he thought her quote was iffy. “But I’ll allow it.”
Can everyone on the planet quote Chaucer but me?
“But the images in the final scramble,” Shaun said, refusing to be derailed by a Chaucer quote-off. “They were nonsensical.” His brows knitted together, wrinkling the area above his nose ever so slightly. It was the first hint of emotion he’d shown since Persey arrived. “Even unscrambled, there was no way they would form a cohesive picture.”
“You had to use the mirror,” Kevin explained. “They were all backward.”
“I see.” Shaun clearly didn’t.
“Are you serious?” Wes sat up, staring at Kevin as if he didn’t quite believe him. “How is that even possible to solve?”
Kevin shrugged. “I dunno. Ask her.”
Persey groaned, the weight of eight sets of eyes boring into her as everyone in the room focused on her. She tried not to blush, to let her eyes drop to the floor, to flee in abject terror—all of which were signs of weakness. If she was going to do this thing, really do this thing, she needed to project strength. Confidence. Even if it wasn’t real.
Fake it till you make it.
“You just had to see the whole thing in reverse, I guess.”
“Wow,” Neela said under her breath. Which made Persey smile despite her extreme discomfort.
“Then what’s he doing here?” Shaun asked, nodding toward Kevin without actually looking at him.
Kevin held his hands up before him, palms out—the universal symbol for I didn’t do it. “I’m just a lucky loser, my man.”
Arlo looked skeptical. “Loser, maybe. But lucky?”
“Wow. You are charming,” Kevin said. “I’m just here because of her. We were randomly paired up as teammates, and she wouldn’t agree to participate unless I did, too.”
That is not how it went down.
“Well, isn’t that precious?” Mackenzie sneered.
“So she did have help,” Arlo said with a smile.
“No, she didn’t.” Leah meandered around the room as she spoke, snaking through the different contestants. “Persey is the only person out of one-point-four million participants who has been able to solve the Hidden Library. And she did it single-handedly.”
Arlo and Mackenzie closed in on Persey immediately, shooting rapid-fire questions at her with such ferocity that she couldn’t even tell which of them was talking.
“How many escape rooms have you done?”
“You got lucky, didn’t you?”
“Did you talk to someone who’d done the room before?”
“How many times did you try it?”
“Did you get some insider information?”
Persey’s head whipped around toward Mackenzie, who had asked that last one. “Why would you think that?”
“Pretty sure she’s referencing the scandal from last year,” Kevin said. “She doesn’t think you could actually solve it yourself unless you stole the secrets from someone at Escape-Capades.”
<
br /> Wes sat up straight, his sleepiness either forgotten or discarded, depending upon whether it was real or feigned. Persey wasn’t sure which. “Is that what they think? That someone bought info on Prison Break?”
Bought? Persey was pretty sure that wasn’t what Kevin said. “Prison Break? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“The. Fuck.” Mackenzie threw up her hands. “You can’t be for real.”
Riot, still gripping the copy of the Voynich manuscript Leah had pulled for him, joined the half circle that had formed around Persey. “You’ve never heard of the Prison Break escape room scandal? The prize money. The secret that was leaked and ended up all over the Internet…”
“The owners of this company,” Kevin added, “who went bankrupt because of it and decided to take their own lives rather than deal with the consequences?”
“It was covered on the national news approximately twenty-three times between May and July of last year,” Shaun added. “You must have seen it.”
Kevin blinked at him. “Did you actually have that statistic at the tip of your tongue, or did you make it up?”
Shaun’s gaze was as flat and emotionless as ever. He would have made an amazing poker player. “I do not make up statistics.”
“You’re a weird dude,” Kevin said after a pause. “Like an android with less personality. Gonna call you Shaun-bot.”
“Please, don’t,” Shaun said, sounding very much as if he didn’t really care either way.
“Too late, Shaun-bot!”
Meanwhile, Mackenzie and Arlo were still circling Persey, like a pair of mean-girl sharks swarming before a kill. “How is it that you solved the single most impossible puzzle in the world,” Mackenzie began, “and yet you’ve never heard of Derrick and Melinda Browne?”
Persey wasn’t entirely sure what those two things had to do with each other. “I’m not online much.”
“If you’re into escape rooms at all,” Arlo continued, “you must have heard of Prison Break. My blog covered it extensively.”
Right. Because it was just a given that everyone in the room followed Arlo’s blog. And though her first instinct was to apologize, Persey once again reminded herself that she needed to project strength and confidence, especially in this moment, at the very beginning. Persey knew from experience that if she didn’t assert herself right here, right now, she’d be prey to these bullies for the rest of the day.
She’d learned that lesson the hard way. With her dad.
So Persey decided to say the one thing that was sure to piss off Arlo, Mackenzie, and pretty much everyone else. Or at the very least, unbalance them.
She’d tell them the truth.
“Hidden Library was my first escape room.”
Arlo raised her hand. “I call bullshit.”
“Are you still in high school?” Shaun asked. “I bet she’s still in high school.” He was assessing her again, only somewhat less dismissively than before.
Wasn’t he only, like, two years older than her? “I graduate this June.”
“Where from?”
“And where do you start college this fall?” Riot added.
“I’m…” The words “not going to college” were on the tip of her tongue when she realized she was oversharing. That was a mistake in a game like this, especially since Leah hadn’t outted any of her educational information as she’d done with the others. Best to leave them guessing. “I’m pretty sure that’s none of your business.”
Wes rolled off the sofa, suddenly alert. “You beat the unbeatable. Mensa members, renowned PhDs, cryptographers, and mathematicians from all over the world have tried to solve that thing. So, yeah, if you tell us you’re at Exeter or Harvard-Westlake, or that you’ve got a full-ride scholarship at Oxford next year, it’s going to make more sense than if you’re a nobody from some local public school in Bumfuck, Nowhere.”
I’m a nobody at some local public school.
Mackenzie eyed Wes closely. “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of his diamond-encrusted bed this morning.”
“You were thinking the same thing,” Wes snapped.
If she was, Mackenzie wasn’t about to admit it. “Not everyone gets to go to boarding school, then drop out of Yale.”
How does she know he went to boarding school?
“Um, I believe the bias toward private school education in America is not founded on actual statistics.” Neela spoke even more rapidly than usual. “Based on a recent study of college preparatory test scores, there is very little evidence to suggest significantly higher achievements among the top ten percent of students in either environment, suggesting that intelligence, in an academic sense at least, is independent of the grade—no pun—of one’s education.”
“I still think it’s sketchy,” Wes said.
“Maybe her win was accidental,” Shaun suggested. Clearly that was the only thing that made sense to Shaun-bot, who could not compute that a nobody like Persey could do what he could not.
“Shaun, I can assure you that Persey’s win was legitimate, intentional, and not in the least bit accidental,” Leah said, attempting to regain control of the room. “As were all of your scores.”
“Fine,” Shaun said. His face was so unreadable Persey couldn’t tell if he bought the explanation or not, but Wes was more obvious (disdainful) in his disbelief.
“Sure it was.”
Leah turned to him. “If you would like to review Persey’s win, I have the full video footage of it upstairs in my office.”
Persey cringed at the reminder that video footage from the Hidden Library existed.
“And after the All-Star Competition is complete,” Leah continued, “you are more than welcome to see it.”
“Just might.” Wes turned away, flicking his black hair out of his face as he mouthed, Watching you, in Persey’s direction. For creepy emphasis.
That’s when something inside Persey snapped. All these privileged, egotistical assholes were judging her, doubting her. They couldn’t believe that she, an escape room newbie, a social media nobody, who had flunked out of private school and was definitely not going to college, had managed to solve something they could not. They weren’t any better than she was—just contestants in this game, there for the ten-million-dollar prize.
They were all the same. Even playing field. And she wasn’t about to let this douche make her feel inferior even for a second. She squared her shoulders and met his stare with narrowed eyes.
Oh yeah? Well, I’m watching you too.
PERSEY HUNG BACK FROM HER PARENTS AS THEY SEARCHED the quad for her brother. It was a dizzying sea of blue graduation gowns—most still creased as if they’d been taken out of their plastic packaging just moments before the ceremony—and matching square hats, yellow tassels dancing around the faces of the 125 former Allen Academy seniors as they cried and hugged and laughed their way through the throng of family and friends flooding out of the auditorium.
She’d spent only one semester at the Allen Academy before the lofty tuition no longer made up for her poor academic achievement and the headmaster suggested she transfer to the local public school to finish out her freshman year, as it would be “more appropriate” for her level. No donations from her dad, no promises of improvement, not even her brother’s status as star athlete and valedictorian candidate could save her, and so Persey had started as a transfer freshman at West Valley High School, where she knew no one and her last name meant nothing to anyone.
Entering the West Valley campus that first day, Persey had smiled voluntarily for the first time in months.
Her dad had refused to speak to her during the drive to school, which was actually pretty perfect. They’d barely exchanged a dozen words since midterms, so she was used to the silent treatment. Besides, it gave Persey a chance to compose her thoughts. After months of being the stupidest girl at her fancy private school—population five hundred—she was looking forward to just being the stupidest girl amongst the twenty-five hundre
d West Valleyians. Where no one would notice.
She didn’t mind the loneliness: being at school with no one to talk to was actually a helluva lot easier than being at home with no one to talk to, because at least at school there was a practical reason for it—no one knew her. At home it was just her dad’s pettiness, her mom’s drunkenness, and her brother’s absence that accounted for the silence. There had been a two-week stretch over Christmas break while her brother was off skiing with friends in Gstaad where Persey had gone fifty-seven hours without saying a single word.
There was no way West Valley could be that bad.
Being back in the Allen Academy quad, even under completely different circumstances, was enough to heighten Persey’s stress level, but as much as the buildings and the outdoor spaces and the perfectly poised students themselves reminded her of the misery earlier that year, she clearly didn’t jar anyone’s memory. No one’s eyes flashed in her direction or lingered confusedly on her face as if trying to place her. She was a nameless nobody today, and that was just the way she wanted it.
Unlike her brother, who she finally spotted in a large circle of friends, all congratulating one another as if they’d just won the championship game. He, as always, was in the middle. The most popular of the popular.
He had everybody wrapped around his finger. It was tough to watch.
“Hey, Boss! How does it feel to be a high school graduate?” Persey’s dad asked, slapping her brother on the back in a display of machismo that felt appropriately staged. A this is how guys act, right? kind of gesture that was just 100 percent her dad.
Her brother immediately turned on the charm. “It feels like the beginning of the rest of my life.” He flashed his thousand-kilowatt smile.
“You’re going to love Columbia,” Dad continued. “And I’m not just saying that because you chose my alma mater. Being in the New York financial community will give you so many business contacts. I’m glad you picked it over Harvard.”
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