Every Single Lie

by Rachel Vincent

  “We have to hold another Key Club meeting and vote on some charities. And with this much money, I’m thinking we should hire someone to manage it. I mean, if it keeps coming in, this could be way more than a single donation. It could be an endowment.”

  “What’s an endowment?” I ask. And immediately I wish I’d just kept my mouth shut and googled it later, to avoid looking like an idiot.

  “It’s, like, instead of giving all the money to a single charity, you put the money in the bank and draw interest from it, so you can donate to that charity for a long time without ever touching the principal.” Sophia shrugs. “My uncle sets things like that up, at his job.”

  “How did this happen?” Amira’s still staring at Sophia’s phone. The number’s gone up by another one hundred thirty dollars since we’ve been watching it. In small donations from people in California. And Georgia. And Wisconsin. And New Mexico. “This is crazy.”

  “It’s the news. CNN ran a feel-good story about our GoFundMe last night, and donations skyrocketed.”

  “Holy crap,” I breathe, still watching the numbers change on her screen.

  “Yeah. So I’m calling another emergency meeting of the Key Club during tutorial, and it’d be great if you could each come up with a charity or two to suggest. For us to vote on. Oh!”

  Sophia stops walking again, and I really hope she’s done consuming caffeine for the day.

  “Beckett, can you find out how soon we can have the funeral? When they’re going to, um . . . release the body?”

  “The coroner released his report two days ago, and there’s a ninety-six-hour hold, unless a relative comes forward to claim her before that. But I’m not sure when that hold began. Or if it even has. I’ll ask my mom.”

  “Okay. That’s four days. Since we have the money now, maybe we should hold a vigil, while we wait for the ninety-six hours to run out.”

  “Why?” In retrospect, I realize that sounds a little harsh.

  “Because people are invested in this!” Sophia looks shocked by my reluctance. “Our town has lost a citizen we didn’t even know we had! We’re in mourning, and this will bring the community together!”

  “This will bring weirdos from all over the place,” I tell her.

  She scolds me with her disappointment in my community spirit. “It will bring well-meaning people in support of our town.”

  But that’s easy for her to say. None of those “well-meaning people” are currently threatening her online with a “retroactive abortion” or chasing her down the street with a camera.

  “You’re right,” I say, because I’m already the #babykiller and the girl who cursed at an old woman on camera. Standing in the way of a vigil will not improve my standing in the community. “Just tell me how I can help.”

  Kill ’em with kindness. That’s what my dad advised in nearly any situation.

  Sophia smiles again and darts ahead of us to spread the word on her way to English.

  Twenty minutes into our English midterm, a red light begins to blink on the landline on Mrs. Eagleton’s desk. Mrs. Eagleton hurries toward the front of the classroom—she’s been wandering around during the test—and picks up the receiver.

  “Hello?” She listens for a moment, and her face pales as most of my classmates look up from their test packets. “Okay. Yes, thank you.” Then she hangs up.

  “Guys, I need you to listen carefully and follow my instructions exactly and immediately.”

  Suddenly she has everyone’s attention. There’s something in her voice. A slight tremor, maybe. Or perhaps it’s the fact that her desk phone hasn’t lit up once since school started in August.

  “What’s going on?” There’s a line pressed into Colin Trent’s cheek at an angle from where he fell asleep on his desk, right on top of his test packet. “Is something wrong?”

  “School is being dismissed immediately. Leave your testing materials on your desks. Drivers are to go straight out to the parking lot. Everyone else is to head out front, where you’ll be loaded onto buses and taken to a safe location.”

  “What’s wrong with this location?”

  “Should we call our parents? Where can they pick us up?”

  “What’s going on?”

  Mrs. Eagleton holds one hand up for silence. “There’s been a bomb threat against the school. These things are almost always just stupid pranks, but we have to proceed as if the threat is real, for obvious reasons. So, again, you’ll either be heading straight to the parking lot, where the officers from the Clifford PD are on hand to direct traffic out both the entrance and the exit, or you’ll go straight out the front doors of the school. Do not stop at your lockers or the restroom. Do you understand?”

  Twenty-eight heads nod. For a moment, this feels like elementary school, which was the last time I remember all of us ever cooperating fully, without complaint.

  “On your way out of the classroom, you’re to tell me whether or not you’re a driver. I’ll be turning in both lists of names, so you can be checked off whether you leave from the student lots or on a bus out front. Got it?”

  Another series of nods.

  “Good. Let’s go!”

  We all stand and grab our things. Sophia scoots into the line behind Amira, who’s behind me, and she leans forward to whisper, as we shuffle quickly toward the door, where Mrs. Eagleton has her class roster clipped to a clipboard.

  “Since this is definitely just a prank”—Sophia’s wide eyes say she’s much less sure of that than she’s trying to sound—“and we’re basically getting a free day off, want to meet at my house and start planning the vigil?”

  “Sure,” Amira says. “Otherwise, I’d just be home alone.”

  “Um . . . ​let me make sure no one called in a threat at the middle school,” I tell them. In which case, I’ll probably have to pick up Landry.

  “Beckett?” Mrs. Eagleton says as I step to the front of the line.

  Beyond her, I can see people hurrying in a surprisingly orderly fashion, either toward the parking lot exit at the back of the main building or toward the three sets of double doors up front, by the office.

  “Driver,” I say, and she writes a cursive D next to my name.

  “Amira?”

  “Driver,” she says, and I guess that’s close enough to the truth; she comes to school with her mother.

  “I’ll text you both my address,” Sophia says. Then she heads quickly toward the exit.

  “Let me check in with my mom; then can I ride with you?” Amira asks.

  “Yeah. I’ll be in the parking lot.”

  We split at the next hallway, where she heads toward her mother’s class in the math and science hall, and I keep going straight, toward the main rear exit into the student lot.

  I’m sure the bomb threat is no more credible than the online threats to my life have been. And I’m equally sure that this bomb threat is about me. Or at least that it’s coming from some psycho who read about our school, thanks to Lullaby Doe. But even if there’s no real danger here, it feels oddly unnerving to be evacuating the school during first period, everyone filing quickly and quietly through the exits.

  What if this is real?

  There are cop cars parked at both the entrance and the exit of the main parking lot, and Doug Chalmers is one of the officers waving cars out onto the street. A third cop stands in the middle of the road, stopping traffic to let all the student cars out onto the street.

  Organized chaos. It’s actually kind of impressive.

  “Hey.” Jake falls into step with me, even though he parks in the band and athlete lot. “This is nuts. Think it has something to do with the baby?”

  Considering that in my two and a half years at Clifford High, we’ve never had a bomb threat before? Yeah.

  “I think that for the past week, everything has had to do with the baby. She’s really brought the wackos out of the woodwork. And I’m afraid that’s only going to get worse. Sophia wants to hold a vigil.”

  He
follows me down one aisle, then between a rusted Taurus and a ten-year-old Altima. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “No. But it’s not like I can say, ‘Wait, let’s not rally around this poor dead baby.’ I’m the last person who can say that.”

  But the truth is that a vigil won’t help Lullaby Doe. The only thing we can still do for her is find out who she is. Give her a headstone with her real name on it.

  “That doesn’t seem fair.” Jake leans against my hood while I unlock my car. “You’re still getting threats.”

  “I know. Landry saw them, and I think it really freaked her out.” I unlock my car with the key fob and open the driver’s door. “I told her those threats aren’t credible. And I’m sure this one isn’t either,” I say with a glance at the school, where kids are still pouring out the back door.

  “I don’t think we can really be sure of that anymore.”

  “Beckett. Jake,” my mother calls, and I look up to see her crossing the parking lot toward us, the badge on her hip half-concealed by her blazer. Her focus slides from him to me, and her brows rise in silent question. Because I haven’t actually told her that we’re kind of sorting things out. “You two need to go home.”

  “Amira’s riding with me to Sophia Nelson’s. She wants to plan a vigil for Lullaby Doe,” I say, and for the second it takes my mother to shield her thoughts, I can see that she feels the same way I do about the idea of a vigil. “Unless there was a threat at the middle school? Do I need to pick up Landry?”

  “Nothing reported against the middle school so far.” My mother props her hands on her hips beneath her blazer. “You can go to Sophia’s, but send me the address, so I know where to find you. Just in case.”

  She’s never told me to do that before. She must be a lot more worried about this than she’s letting on.

  “So, what’s going on? Is this threat legit?”

  “We have to assume it is, until the bomb squad has cleared the building for occupancy.”

  “What bomb squad?” Jake asks.

  “Jackson PD is sending one. Now, I need you two to clear out of here. Penn’s already left to check on Daniela. She’s still out with the flu.”

  Jake gives me a quick kiss. “’Bye, Mrs. Bergen,” he says, walking backward away from us.

  “Detective Bergen,” I mumble, unable to feel as irritated as I sound, when I can still feel the ghost of his lips against mine.

  “Hey, Detective Bergen,” Amira says as she comes to a stop in front of my car, with no idea she’s just read my mind. “Is it okay if we—”

  “Yes, yes, it’s fine. Just clear the parking lot, please.”

  “See you tonight,” I say to my mom as I slide behind the wheel. “I’ll pick up Landry, unless I hear otherwise.”

  “Thanks.” My mother closes my door, and as I start the car, she waves me toward the exit, where Doug is still directing traffic.

  Sophia Nelson lives in Briarwood. Naturally. Her mother is Clifford’s only divorce attorney, and her father is an orthodontist with an office in Daley.

  Small-town police detectives don’t make a ton of money. Neither do small-town firefighters. But we were doing pretty well when both my parents had full-time jobs and my dad was a part-time reservist. “Pretty well” in Clifford, Tennessee, means that my parents had a mortgage instead of paying rent. It means that they each drove a vehicle that was less than a decade old.

  When my dad deployed with his reserve unit, he collected full-time military pay, and when he got back, he would always do something big for us with that extra money.

  Once, that something big was a trip to Disneyland. I wish Landry had been old enough to remember it.

  When my dad lost his job at the fire station, our lives changed. Our income was cut nearly in half. And rehab wasn’t cheap.

  We’re doing a lot less “pretty well” now, even with one fewer mouth to feed. But even when we were a two-income household, our idea of “pretty well” looked nothing like Sophia Nelson’s.

  Her parents aren’t home enough to have time to clean, so they use a cleaning service from Daley. Which I know because there are still two ladies in khakis and blue polos vacuuming her living room and scrubbing her guest toilet when Amira and I arrive.

  Sophia hands out cold sodas and ushers us up to her room, where she plops down on a fuzzy pink rug and leans back against the padded white footboard of her full-size bed. Then she pulls a shiny laptop from her backpack and starts typing, while Amira and I stare around in awe.

  Her bedroom looks like a TV set. Or a picture in a magazine, about how teenage girls’ rooms are supposed to look. Maybe her bed is only made up today because the cleaning service made it up. Maybe that’s the only reason her windows are free of grime and her rug is spotless.

  But somehow, I think her room probably always looks just like this.

  In a million years, I would never have figured out, on my own, how to organize a vigil, but Sophia is in her element, and Amira is a quick study. By lunchtime, we’ve gone through several more sodas and applied for a permit to assemble in the park tomorrow night. We had to have an adult’s signature, so her dad agreed to stop by city hall on his way to lunch so he could sign and submit the form she emailed him.

  We pile into Sophia’s car to pick up burgers—her treat—and by the time we get back with our lunch, her dad has already texted to tell her the permit has been approved.

  While we eat, Amira and I use her desktop computer to design posters, while Sophia calls every Walmart within a fifty-mile radius and solicits donations of white candles. All three of them promise us free candles once they hear what we’re doing.

  Thanks to Amira’s graphics skills, the posters look amazing. Classy and respectful. Sophia emails them to a print shop in Daley, then we drive out to get them—the print shop donated them—and while we’re out, we grab as many of the candle donations as will fit in her car.

  That afternoon, I pick up Landry from the middle school, and she insists on coming with me to Sophia’s house to help. When we get there, I discover that our three-woman operation has become a large group effort; Sophia has recruited the rest of the Key Club. And somehow, that reporter from WBBJ in Jackson has come to watch and film our efforts.

  “Okay, everybody make sure you tweet the link to the event site!” Sophia calls as she ushers us into her huge kitchen, which has become an assembly line for candle drip protectors made from plain white paper plates. “We only have twenty-six hours until the vigil, so we want to give people as much time as possible to plan to come! Cameron, can you take a group to staple up the posters in town?”

  Sophia finds Landry a seat at the end of her long kitchen bar and sets her up with a pair of scissors and a stack of paper plates. My sister digs into her task, sneaking the occasional wide-eyed glance around the room at all the high schoolers, and to my relief, most of them return her shy smile.

  Even if they still think I’m the #babykiller, they evidently aren’t going to take that out on my little sister. Not while there’s a television camera in the room, anyway.

  “Hey!” Sophia tugs me aside before I can grab a paper plate and get started. “So, I met this reporter while we were distributing some of the posters downtown, and she said she could help us get the word out if I let her film the prep work for the vigil. And she asked if you were going to be here, so . . .”

  I look over her shoulder to see that the reporter currently directing her cameraman to pan around the open kitchen/dining/living area is in fact the same one who chased me down the sidewalk two days ago.

  “So you told her I would be?”

  Sophia shrugs. “Well, I wasn’t gonna lie. Anyway, she’s hoping to get an interview with you. You know, since you’re the one who found poor Lullaby Doe.”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to the press,” I tell her, but Sophia is already waving the reporter over.

  “Well, you don’t have to agree to an interview. But you should at least hear her out. Since sh
e’s already agreed to do a story about the vigil.”

  “Sophia, there will probably be lots of reporters there. She’s not doing us a favor. She’s doing her job.”

  But by then, the reporter is just feet away.

  “Sorry,” Sophia tells her. “Beckett is camera shy.”

  “No problem. And she’s right. This is my job.” The reporter sticks her hand out for me to shake, and I only take it because her cameraman is still aiming his lens in the other direction. “I’m Audrey Taylor, WBBJ on-scene reporter.”

  “Yes. We’ve met.”

  Fact-Check Rating: Half-true. Really, she just came into the salon and started shouting questions at me last time.

  “You aired footage of me cursing at an old woman. Yet you didn’t manage to capture what she’d said to deserve it.”

  In retrospect, that was probably a good thing. The last thing my family needs is to have our name dragged through the mud on television.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that,” Audrey says. “Airing that wasn’t my call.”

  “But it was your call to submit the footage?”

  “That’s WBBJ policy. Producers have the final say on what airs.” Yet she does look like she feels a little guilty. “But this is your chance to control the narrative. To put your best foot forward.”

  “I’m not supposed to be speaking to the press.”

  I turn to make sure Sophia has heard that too, but she’s already snuck off to open a box of cookies and set more cold sodas on the counter.

  “But the criminal case is over, right?” Audrey pulls my focus back to her. “No crime, no case. So what’s the harm in speaking to me now?”

  I gape at her. “I’m getting death threats!” I hiss, lowering my voice to keep from causing a scene. “My school got a bomb threat today! The footage you aired of me hasn’t made any of that better, and more publicity will only bring even more psychos out of the woods.”

  “You’re getting death threats?” She pulls her phone from her pocket and begins typing one handed. “When did that—”

  “Stop! You can’t report that. It’s off the record.”