17

“Marisa?” my mother asked, looking up from her magazine as I overturned a couch cushion. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t find my phone anywhere.”

“Did you leave it in the bathroom? I know you’ve had…a lot on your mind.”

In other words, she still felt bad about dropping the Lehigh bomb.

I doubted I’d find my phone in the bathroom, as I wasn’t a fan of toilet-texting, but with everything on my mind lately, I wouldn’t have put it past me. As I retraced my steps, I heard Nick talking: “Right, because if other kids’ grades are going up, then they’re getting the answers from somewhere. But where? And who?”

I pushed open the door to his bedroom and mouthed, Are you talking to Charlie?

He waved me inside and pressed a button on the phone. “Hey, Char? Marisa’s here. I’m putting you on speaker.”

“On my phone.”

“You left it unattended. You’re lucky I felt like playing secretary.”

“Hey, Marisa.” Charlie’s tired greeting preempted my sarcastic reply.

“Hey. What’s going on?”

“I was telling Nick that I overheard two guys in my chem class talking about drop-off points, like they were comparing. They were whispering, so I couldn’t catch their whole conversation. The only other thing I heard was ‘What’d you pay?’”

Nick looked at me. “We think whoever hacked the laptop is selling the teacher’s answer keys. Mob style, with supersecret drop points and shit. That’s why the school hasn’t picked up a paper trail.”

My eyes bulged. “Holy smokes. Who does something that diabolical in high school? Your parents must be flipping.”

A small laugh fluttered from the phone. “You’re right—they are. I’m suspended from the cheerleading squad and the recruiting team for the honors program. My mom’s been threatening defamation lawsuits and every other legal angle she knows. I think it’s the only reason I’m still in school.”

“Yeah, well, I’m flipping too,” Nick said. “What if the asshole who came up to me at the football game thought I was there to buy test answers?” He punched the surface of the desk he was leaning against. “I had him right there and I didn’t even know it.”

“Nick, you don’t know that,” Charlie said. “It might’ve had nothing to do with it.”

But it made sense, I had to admit. What didn’t make sense was if the person who’d approached Nick and the one I saw TJ talking to in the parking lot were one and the same. TJ didn’t go to Templeton anymore, so he had no reason to buy test answers. That still left the questions of who he was talking to and why—and did it even matter?

A scuffling noise came through the phone, followed by Charlie yelling, “Be right there, Mom!” She told us she had to finish her homework, and we hung up.

“So you and Charlie have graduated to phone conversations?” I flopped onto his bed and caught my cell when he threw it at me. “What does that mean?”

Nick turned his desk chair backward and straddled it. “That we’re both capable of dialing a phone and speaking into it.”

“More like she’s capable of dialing a phone and you’re capable of ganking it.”

“Nice language skills. Just because a word’s in the Urban Dictionary doesn’t mean it’s real.”

“Ever planning to use your mad language skills to ask her out?”

“When I’m ready.”

“Chickenshit.”

Nick grabbed a baseball-patterned stress ball off his desk and winged it at me. “Says the girl who was tearing the house apart looking for her phone so she won’t miss the next crack of Shitty Friendall’s whip.”

I lobbed the ball back and hit him in the shoulder. “Take that, biatch. So maybe it’s good if someone is selling the answer keys? There has to be some way to trace the sales, right?”

Nick rubbed where the ball had bounced off him and rotated his shoulder. “It’s good because they’re letting Charlie stay in school while they investigate. The longer it takes to prove she didn’t do it, the more time it buys her.”

I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. “Jordan said he’d try to talk to his mother. Something tells me he’s not trying very hard.”

“You know, Marisa, if you weren’t friends with Charlie, I’d think you were a magnet for people who suck.”

As if on cue, my cell phone chimed with a text message. I looked at the screen and sure enough, it was from Kendall.

He turned me down for Friday. You’re up.

• • •

I was way more nervous about asking TJ to hang out than I thought I would be. It still felt wrong to ask, no matter how casually I’d planned it in my mind. What if he thought I was out of line? What if the only person he wanted to hang out with less than Kendall was me? What if—

“Marisa? Did you hear me?”

My pencil stilled where I’d been drumming it against my desk as TJ’s voice brought me back to the yearbook classroom.

“Sorry. What?”

TJ smiled. “Off in Narnia?”

I managed a smile back. “Something like that.”

“I asked if you wanted to use a different picture next to Mr. Leroche’s interview. The one we have looks like a mug shot.”

“Oh. If you wouldn’t mind getting another one, that would be great.”

He slid his chair back to his computer and I turned my attention to my own screen, trying to ignore my racing pulse and the clamminess of my palms. Why did asking him to make plans feel so huge? It wasn’t a date. It was so not a big deal.

Screw it.

I scooted my chair over a bit. “Um, TJ?”

He looked up at me.

“Speaking of Narnia…would you mind teaching me how to make some of your stuff? I’d love to make my own, and if you have time one day, I’d like to come back to the barn. Whenever it’s good for you, I mean, it doesn’t have to be tomorrow or anything, I—”

TJ broke through my babbling with a huge grin. “I’d love to teach you. No one’s ever asked before.”

My internal organs promptly resumed normal function. “No way. I don’t believe that.”

“Really. Most people like my work but chalk it up to a weird hobby. I’ve never had a student.” He beamed at me.

Now for the real test.

“Great! Are you free this weekend? Maybe Friday after school?”

For a second, his smile faltered. I waited for the hammer to drop. Then:

“I’m working after school. But I can do Friday night.”

The word okay came out of my mouth, but in my mind it sounded a hell of a lot more like oh shit.

I couldn’t believe he’d actually chosen me over his own girlfriend.