Strange Lies Page 9

  Either way, there would be consequences.

  Room 202, 1:15 p.m.

  Skylar Jones read the poem in a flat, monotonous voice:

  “. . . toward heaven till the tree could bear no more. But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” He slammed the book closed and slumped back down in his desk.

  “Thank you, Skylar!” Mrs. Hope said. “That was wonderful.”

  Virginia rolled her eyes. It definitely had not been wonderful. But Mrs. Hope was one of those teachers who believed that even morons should have self-esteem.

  “So what is Robert Frost saying in this poem? What is a ‘swinger of birches’?”

  Her question was met by a long, customary silence. None of them ever knew what the hell any of these old cheeseballs from a century ago were talking about. It wasn’t like Calvin’s poems, where maybe they weren’t traditional, but at least you could see the passion and pizazz.

  “The birch is a tree that grows in New England,” Mrs. Hope explained. “And children would swing on the long, white branches. It represents escapism, and the poet’s lost sense of childlike wonder.”

  “Why do we have to read about a Yankee tree?” Big Gabe piped up. “Why can’t we read about a Southern tree?”

  There was a smattering of agreement: “Yeah!” “Why not!” “Why not a Southern tree?”

  Mrs. Hope tried to suppress the revolt: “I’m afraid the great movements in American poetry all occurred in New England. The Fireside Poets, the Transcendentalists, the Romantics . . .”

  Virginia was barely listening. Every minute that passed, she felt more and more tense. At any second, the fire alarm would start blaring its deafening, high-pitched tone. It was like waiting for a jack-in-the-box to pop.

  What are you waiting for, Benny?

  The debate about Yankee trees versus Southern trees was heating up. Mrs. Hope always let her classes get hijacked by dumb discussions. “Let’s hear some different voices,” she was saying. “Virginia?”

  “Hm? What?”

  “Would you like the poem better if it were about a Southern tree?”

  “Um, I guess . . .” In a halfway decent world, the alarm would have gone off right then. But it didn’t, so Virginia was forced to go on, “I mean, it’s hard to relate to some old dude’s nostalgia for a tree that we don’t even have down here.”

  Mrs. Hope’s face looked like she’d been electrocuted by happiness. “Virginia, what an astute point!” She immediately told everyone to get out a piece of paper and rewrite the poem by replacing the birch tree with something precious from their own childhood. Virginia stared at her desk, praying the alarm would go off before her turn to share.

  “One could do worse than be a watcher of NASCAR.”

  “Excellent, Gabe!”

  One could do worse than be . . . Virginia didn’t know. It was dumb to dwell on your childhood. As her stepdad Esteban always said, “He who looks behind him gets a crick in his neck.”

  “One could do worse than go to Disney World the same week Kylie Jenner was there!”

  “Very poignant, Beth! Virginia? Your turn.”

  Virginia took a slow breath. “One could do worse than be . . . a . . .” Come on, Benny!

  BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP.

  “Walk calmly! You know the drill!” Mrs. Hope was shouting. “No stopping, leave everything!”

  Virginia covered her ears. Christ. She’d forgotten just how hellishly loud these alarms were. She stood up and maneuvered herself to the end of the line out the door. When Mrs. Hope’s back was turned, she slipped into the river of students away from her class. She knew exactly where to go: first floor, room 114. Trevor had Marine Biology (the “dumb” class). It would be easy because she could just flow down the stairs with everyone else; it would be hard because once she ducked into the classroom, the huge windows would expose her to anyone walking past outside. She’d have to work very quickly.

  BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP.

  Virginia covered her ears as she snuck into the room. Most teachers at Winship made everyone drop their phones into a basket at the beginning of class. Sure enough, a large plastic bowl with cartoons of fish and dolphins sat on Mr. Howe’s desk, full of sleek black phones. Then Virginia felt her stomach sink.

  Shit.

  She hadn’t thought about how she would actually determine which phone was Trevor’s. This wasn’t fifth grade; no one used cute name labels anymore. Outside, a group of students led by a frantic-looking teacher passed. Virginia crouched behind Mr. Howe’s desk. She picked up a random phone and pushed the button on the front. She’d never had a cell phone, but she’d seen other kids using them.

  ENTER PASSCODE.

  Shit!

  She threw it down and picked up another. It also had a passcode. The earsplitting tone of the fire alarm made her feel like she was going insane. Maybe she could just take all the phones and figure out which was Trevor’s later. No, Benny would hate that, she knew. Fifteen vanished phones would be a huge deal, and make it immediately obvious that the fire alarm had been a ploy.

  BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP.

  It felt like the alarm was personally attacking her. She went through six more phones until she finally found one without a passcode. She swiped it open and went through the contacts. Please have Trevor’s number. Please have Trevor’s number.

  “Yes!” She pressed and waited. After an agonizing moment, one of the phones lit up—a surprisingly crappy one—and she heard the tinny sound of its “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” ringtone. She shoved the phone into her jacket pocket. Then she threw the other phones back into the bowl and put the bowl on the desk. If she heard that obnoxious BEEP one more time, she was going to seriously lose her mind. She covered her ears and ran out into the hall, not even bothering to check if the coast was clear first. She felt so stressed out and harassed she wanted to explode into a million pieces.

  BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP.

  She burst through the front doors. The second she was outside, the volume of the alarm dropped about a million decibels. She hurried away from the building. A pair of sandy-haired guys saw her and quickly got out of her way.

  “Your Highness,” one of them said, bowing.

  She shot him a sideways look. Why did people keep calling her that?

  “Virginia. Virginia!”

  She turned and saw Benny. He was standing at the edge of the crowd of students being herded into the courtyard. He looked pale and nervous. Without thinking about it, she ran over to him and flung her arms around his shoulders. An immense wave of relief washed over her. She’d gotten the phone, and no one had seen her.

  “Oh my god,” she said, her voice half muffled by his sweater. She could feel that Benny had stiffened. He patted her shoulder like a humoring grandma. Virginia rolled her eyes. I need a hug. Deal with it. Just as she started to detach herself, Benny’s arms relaxed and it seemed like he might actually hug her back. But it was too late; she was already pulling away. Whatever, she thought. She was way too frazzled to deal with Benny’s fraught internal struggle to hug or not to hug.

  “Did you get the phone?”

  Virginia grinned and patted her pocket. “Yep. God, you look like a ghost. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I was just worried.”

  “About getting caught?”

  “About you getting caught.”

  “Oh.”

  They stood there awkwardly for a moment. Virginia didn’t know if Benny expected her to give him the phone, or if she was allowed to hang on to it herself. The last time she’d been responsible for a piece of evidence, Zaire Bollo had managed to steal it from her and destroy it. Now would be the time for Benny to bring that up. But he didn’t.

  “I better go sign in with my homeroom,” she said.

  “Yeah. Can I come over later? To your room?”

  It was a normal question. Virginia knew he just wanted to look at the phon
e. But something about the way he’d asked felt . . . different. The fact that he’d asked at all was new. Usually Benny just barked orders and Virginia obeyed.

  “Sure,” she said. “Come over at four?”

  Benny nodded and started walking back to his homeroom. “See ya.”

  “See ya.”

  The alarm was still blaring inside the building, screaming of a nonexistent danger. All around Virginia, students were loudly fretting about the school burning down and whether they’d ever see their Michael Kors backpacks again. Virginia looked up at the sky, where a bunch of puffy, slow-moving clouds hung above their heads. It was hard to believe how peaceful the world was up there, when down here it was such a clusterfuck of insanity. Not that she’d prefer to live in the clouds. It was like in Bible class when they learned about Heaven: supposedly it was a bunch of angels sitting around singing God’s praise for eternity, which sounded soul-crushingly boring to Virginia. She’d rather have her feet on the ground down here.

  What was heavenly about Heaven if you had to miss out on all the action?

  The fountain, 1:40 p.m.

  Yasmin Astarabadi was slowly going insane. Actually, she was quite quickly going insane. She couldn’t tell if the last twenty-four hours were going perfectly or horribly for her. On the one hand, if DeAndre Bell was hurt so badly he had to miss a bunch of school—that wasn’t such a bad thing for her. It meant Yasmin would get to fill in and add student body president to her resumé for at least a semester. But on the other hand, if he was only hurt badly enough to be forced to drop his sports teams—well, shit. That just meant he’d use extra time to study harder and possibly surpass her academically.

  And now someone had pulled the fire alarm, which also was either a blessing or a curse. Her English class had been scheduled for an in-class essay, which would now be postponed till tomorrow. That meant she’d have a whole evening to improve her answer, but then again, so would everyone else, which would ruin the curve. And besides, every hour of today was already accounted for. She didn’t have time to squeeze in extra prep for an essay that was postponed because some fucktard was bored and wanted a break from Remedial Dum-Dum class.

  All around her, people were chatting and laughing and wasting their lives. A group of boys were kicking a hacky sack. Though it was chilly out, all the girls were holding their jackets instead of wearing them, and counting all the goose bumps on their arms.

  “Every goose bump burns a calorie,” Angie Montague informed all her friends. “So we can eat an entire poppy-seed muffin after this!”

  Have fun with that! Yasmin thought icily. She grabbed her SAT flash cards from her pocket, refusing to allow her path to glory to be derailed. If she was going to be stuck out here, she was going to use the time to memorize ten new vocabulary terms to have at her fingertips for the leadership luncheon in December. Governor St. Martin was never going to forget Yasmin Astarabadi, the girl with the vocabulary of a PhD candidate.

  She wandered to the thicket of bushes and trees at the edge of the courtyard, away from the hubbub of the crowd. She chose an isolated tree and leaned against it. The fire alarm was still beeping faintly from the building. Who knew how long this was going to take.

  Chicanery: the use of trickery to achieve a political or legal aim. From the French meaning “to quibble.”

  She heard a pair of muffled voices behind her. She looked over her shoulder. Two people were standing in the clearing between the trees about twenty feet away. Their tall, matching frames were unmistakable: it was Headmaster Harker and Calvin. And it was immediately obvious that something was off.

  There had always been stories that the Harkers were aliens, which everyone pretended to believe as a joke. The alien comparisons came easily: both were freakishly tall, and freakishly smart. Yasmin had never seen either of them laugh. She’d never seen either of them eat. Calvin’s long absence from eighth grade had created a stir of jokes that he’d returned to his home planet. But when it turned out he’d been in the hospital and had almost died, the jokes stopped. Yasmin hadn’t heard anyone call him “Martian Boy” in years.

  But suddenly the alien thing seemed creepily apt. Yasmin found herself staring. They were standing across from each other, about two feet apart. The headmaster was holding Calvin’s neck, his long arm outstretched. The scene was tense and silent. It was like they were speaking telepathically, or waiting to be beamed up to an orbiting ship. Yasmin didn’t have a brother, so she didn’t know much about fathers and sons. But she didn’t think fathers went around gripping their sons’ necks like that. It was spooky.

  Suddenly, as if they’d heard her thoughts, the headmaster and Calvin looked right at her. The headmaster’s hand immediately dropped from his son’s throat.

  “Sorry!” Yasmin called out. “Sorry! I didn’t see anything . . .” She held up her flash cards feebly, as if they were an excuse. The Harkers just stared at her. For a second she felt afraid they might actually pull off their faces to reveal green Martian scales and menacing red eyes.

  “Sorry!” she said a third time. Then she walked away. Don’t look back, she commanded herself. Was this going to screw up her goal of getting the headmaster to recommend her for Harvard? Scoring the headmaster was the ultimate prize in teacher recs; she didn’t want some stupid thing she accidentally saw during a fucking fire alarm to affect her college ambitions. But then again, maybe this was a good thing. Like everything else lately, it could go either way. Maybe Headmaster Harker would do whatever she asked now, to keep her from telling anyone what she’d seen.

  Which was . . . what exactly? She didn’t even know. But she didn’t think it was normal.

  The Boarders, 4:15 p.m.

  Trevor Cheek’s text history was the most boring reading material in the English language. Virginia scrolled through an endless exchange with Winn Davis that was mostly pictures of dachshunds and GIFs from The Avengers. It was kind of cute, actually. Winn and Trevor seemed so huge and intimidating (They were juniors! They had cars!), but really they were just boys who liked dogs and movies. There was a short conversation with “Crissy” (Chrissie White, Virginia presumed), the extent of which was Trevor asking “can I see yr nips?” followed by a picture of boobs clearly taken in the dingy Boarders bathroom mirror.

  “Anything interesting?” Benny asked. He was sitting at her desk and messing with a figurine of a mermaid.

  “Chrissie’s boobs,” she said. “Where’s the camera app on these things?” She held out the phone toward him.

  Benny averted his eyes. “Can you—please—”

  “Oh, sorry.” She tried to swipe closed the picture of Chrissie’s boobs, but it didn’t work. “Ugh, I don’t know how to use this.”

  Benny grabbed the phone and made a big deal of closing his eyes while swiping the photo off the screen. Virginia flopped back on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She wondered if boys would text asking to see her nips if she had a cell phone. Let me see your dick first, she imagined saying. Except she didn’t actually want to see a dick. Which made sexting kind of a losing proposition.

  “I think you’re right about the golf team,” Benny said.

  Virginia sat up. “Oh yeah?”

  “I don’t know if you want to see this. It’s a lot of . . . butts. Boys’ butts.”

  Virginia burst out laughing. “Oh my god! Let me see!”

  Benny reluctantly handed her the phone. The first photo was of a golf tee at night. The sky was black, and the camera flash turned the grass a ghastly shade of green. Virginia assumed it was the Beau Ideal Driving Club, a very exclusive country club in Midtown where the golf team practiced.

  “Swipe left to see the rest. No, left.”

  The next photo was of a group of juniors appearing to sword-fight with golf clubs. In the next, they were swigging from a Jack Daniels bottle. And then there was the first butt. It was someone with their pants dropped, mooning the camera. There was nothing sexy or raunchy about it; it may as well have been the butt of a rasca
lly fifth grader. She swiped to the next photo.

  “Ew!” she shrieked, though what she saw wasn’t gross, necessarily—just unexpected. It was a close-up of a butt. A tan, manly butt with tight, sculpted muscles clenching a pristine white golf ball. A golf ball! In his butt! Virginia wondered if the butt was Trevor’s. It was a really nice one, she decided. But at the end of the day, you could be a man with the nicest butt in the world and it was still the part of the body you sat on a toilet. It wasn’t like women’s butts, which somehow managed to be beautiful.

  Virginia swiped to the next photo, not wanting Benny to think she was excessively interested in dudes’ butts. But the next photo had three butts, all clenching golf balls like the first one.

  “There’s Calvin,” she said.

  “Wait, where?” Benny leaned in to look.

  Virginia pointed to a grainy figure behind the trio of asses. He was hunched over a golf club, fully clothed. “He’s golfing.”

  The rest of the photos were more of the same. The boys—no girls—running around the golf course pantsless, red-faced and laughing in various stages of drunkenness. There were about twenty photos in total, the Jack Daniels bottle becoming increasingly empty in each one. Virginia searched them all for Calvin and found him in four. In three he was golfing—pants on. In one he was looking at the camera, his unsmiling face slightly out of focus.

  “Where’s Craig?” Virginia said. She went through the photos again, looking for him. “And where’s Trevor?”

  “Well, obviously Trevor took the pictures, so that explains why he’s not in most of them.”

  Maybe Craig is the amazing butt, Virginia thought. The idea made her laugh. Craig’s body type was more like Benny’s: thin and kind of scrawny. But then again, that was the thing with boys—you never knew what they were hiding in their pants. Maybe Benny had the butt of an Adonis and an eight-inch sausage in there!

  “What’s so funny?” Benny asked. “Can we please be adults here?”