40

Before I knew what had happened, TJ threw open the car door and bolted.

Jason and I exchanged the briefest look before we did the same. Eli barely had five seconds to react by the time he heard TJ’s footsteps pounding toward him. His face still registered surprise and he hadn’t yet removed his hand from inside the mailbox when TJ pounced on him.

Eli’s hood slipped from his head as TJ grabbed fistfuls of his sweatshirt and shoved him against the car.

“You’re the one behind this? All this time it was you? You fucking let me blame Kendall?” With each question, he rammed Eli into the car.

“It’s not what it looks like, man!” Eli tried to duck away from TJ’s grip. TJ slammed him so hard that his head ricocheted off the car.

“It looks to me like you’re taking money for stolen information while someone else gets the blame. Sound familiar, Eli?”

In a flash, Jason stood between them, his forearms the only thing preventing TJ from beating Eli to a pulp. “Calm down, T. It’s not worth it.” He locked an arm against Eli’s neck and, with a menacing expression I never would’ve imagined him capable of, got right in his face. “I always knew you were a fucking weasel,” Jason spat.

“Marisa, call the cops,” TJ said. I’d been standing there, frozen, terrified, almost like I was watching the scene from someone else’s body. When TJ spoke to me, I startled. I was actually here, watching this happen. I snapped one last picture before dropping my camera on its strap around my neck and fumbling for my phone.

“No!” Eli called. “I-I’ll go the school board and testify. I’ll make them take it off your record. Don’t get the cops involved!”

I looked at TJ, phone in hand, waiting for him to tell me what to do.

“All this time you’ve been letting me think you were trying to help me,” TJ seethed. “Making me meet you all over Monroe to give me bogus information and tell me you hit another dead end and making it sound like we couldn’t get Jason involved because he hates you.”

Jason’s glare remained unyielding. “That part is true.”

“I’m sorry, man.” Eli grimaced against the weight of Jason’s arm. “My mother paid good money to make those charges go away. I couldn’t let you find out anything else about what happened.”

“What?” TJ strained and bucked against Jason’s arm. “You were accused too?” He shook his head and corrected his error. “You were caught?”

“I knew something funny was going on!” Jason said. “You’re running a fucking underground cheating ring, and you went running to Mommy about the stupid graffiti prank?” He shoved Eli against the car and pinned him with his elbow. “This kid’s mother is like Mommie Dearest meets Norma Bates dipped in Judge Judy. Such loving fucking additions to our household.”

“I didn’t get caught,” Eli said, as if Jason hadn’t spoken at all. “Someone ratted me out. Someone who still hasn’t admitted to it.” He threw Jason’s elbow off his chest. “I thought I could help myself while I helped you.”

TJ rammed his hands through his hair. “Except that you were never helping me. I had my ass handed to me at a hearing, and you were in the clear because your mother shopped you a deal?” Before Eli could get a word out, TJ exploded. “You destroyed my relationship with Kendall, you know that?” As he spoke, a flash of headlights came into view down the road. “You made me think I couldn’t trust her and the whole time I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

A sharp twinge pierced my chest. The pained look on TJ’s face as he talked about his relationship with Kendall being destroyed stung worse than the winter cold. After all, if his relationship had stayed intact, he never would’ve met me. I’d never stopped to think he’d been happy with Kendall and wanted to stay that way. Tears pricked my eyes. Maybe he wasn’t over her. Maybe I’d stumbled upon the real reason he kept hesitating with me.

Jason loosened his grip as headlights approached, still keeping a hand on the shoulder of each boy but in a less threatening way. He was probably thinking the same thing I was: if the passerby saw them fighting, we might end up with cops on the scene regardless.

Eli straightened his sweatshirt and flipped the hood back over his head. A snakelike smile spread across his face as the car slowed to a stop on the other side of the street. The fact that he looked so smug when the rest of us were so confused made my stomach writhe.

“You give Kendall way more credit than she deserves, man,” he said.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Because the person who stepped out of the car was none other than Kendall Keene.

• • •

She emerged slowly and stood by the door, holding on to it like she thought she might need to use it for protection.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, her eyes darting from me to the boys.

“You tell us,” I said.

Eli strutted over to Kendall. “She’s here to collect her half of the money.” He tried to wrap an arm around her shoulders, but she promptly shoved it away, causing the smug smile to drop off his face. “Because God forbid if she’s seen talking to me in school,” he added bitterly.

“You—you two are in this together?” TJ stammered. In the moonlight, he looked pale.

Eli made a sweeping gesture toward Kendall. “Ladies and gentlemen, meet my lovely partner.”

Kendall shut the car door with a weak, defeated click.

“Partner?” TJ spit the word out like a mouthful of blood. He threw his hands up. “Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“TJ,” Kendall whimpered as she crossed the street. “I never meant for you to get involved in this. I swear.”

“And what about Charlie?” I asked.

“She deserved it,” Kendall snapped.

“She what?”

Kendall looked at me and then back at TJ. “You know how hard it was for me when I transferred to Templeton.”

TJ jerked his shoulder away from Jason’s hand. “No kidding. I was the one who had your back every time someone made you cry, remember?”

“I know. You were so good to me, but everyone else was awful. Horrible. There were mornings where I made myself sick crying because I didn’t want to go to school and face whatever those jerks were planning to put me through.” Her voice cracked and she turned to me. “And your perfect, know-it-all Charlie was one of them.”

I clenched my teeth. “I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, believe it. Ask her about the time her bitch squad took my bathing suit top and my clothes while I was getting changed for swim class. Or the time they stole a dissected cricket from the bio room and left it in my notebook. Or maybe she’d like to tell you about the rotten little present they left in the trunk of my car.” Her bottom lip trembled and she took a jagged breath, but I still couldn’t believe a word out of her mouth. Wouldn’t believe it. “I know she was jealous. My test scores were better than hers for the honors program, but the school still wasn’t going to let me in for senior year. They insisted all the spots were full, but I knew they were playing a bullshit game of favorites. Everyone at Templeton was determined to see me fail.”

“Why does that matter?” TJ asked. “It evened out in the end. You got in when someone dropped out.”

And then it clicked. I’d been accepted into the honors program. I’d waited until the last minute to decline my spot in the hopes that my parents would change their mind about sending me to Templeton. Kendall had gotten in because I dropped out.

“I got in, but I needed to stay in!” Kendall cried. “I had to prove that I wasn’t some squeaky wheel who’d been a waste of grease. But I started having trouble with my schoolwork. I’d never been the best at math or science, but the classes were impossible and I was drowning. I needed to get back on top somehow, to prove to everyone that they weren’t better than me. I was terrified of failing.”

Terrified of failing were the exact words TJ had used to describe Kendall. But he didn’t appear to have much sympathy as he said, “So you took my keys and stole Mr. Katz’s lessons?”

Kendall shook her head. “No. Eli did.”

All eyes turned to Eli. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. “I needed the grades,” he mumbled. “It was nothing personal, man.”

“Nothing per—right. Okay.” TJ ran his hand through his hair. “This keeps getting better.”

“How did you get one of my hearts?” I broke in, gesturing toward his car. The door was still wide open with the interior light on, and the undecorated heart hung in plain view.

Eli exchanged a look with Kendall. “I found it in the trunk of Pace’s car.”

“You broke into Jordan’s car?”

Kendall didn’t look at me when she added, “Eli didn’t trust me to get what we needed.”

“The system wasn’t always so complex,” Eli said before I could respond. “The first time around, I swiped a list of student phone numbers from the guidance office. I sent blocked texts to a bunch of Mr. Katz’s students, anyone with less than a C average. I gave all of them a problem from the next test to prove I was legit and told them they could buy the rest. They’d leave the money in an unused locker in B wing, and I’d drop the answers in theirs.”

“I caught Eli making a pickup one day,” Kendall continued. “And I told him I wanted in, or I’d rat him out—”

“Which you fucking did anyway,” Eli muttered.

“You have no proof of that,” Kendall snapped.

A smile slithered across Eli’s face. “You know what they say, doll. Keep your friends close…” He didn’t need to finish the saying: keep your enemies closer.

Kendall turned back to TJ, desperation in her eyes. “I needed the grades for the honors program, and on top of it, my dad had taken a big cut in pay when we transferred back. He wanted me to get a job and start paying for some of my own expenses, but I needed to concentrate on my grades. It seemed like the perfect solution.” She twisted her fingers together. “I had no idea you’d end up getting the blame, TJ, I swear.”

“But when I did, you never came forward.”

Kendall looked at the ground. “I was finally starting to pull myself up from the bottom of the barrel. I couldn’t go back. I’m sorry, TJ. I never meant for you to get hurt.”

TJ swallowed hard. “Is that what you told yourself when you used Jordan Pace to sleep your way to the top?”

Kendall’s head snapped up and she looked at me, wide eyed.

I folded my arms across my chest and glared at her. “Yes, we know all about it, so don’t even bother trying to say it wasn’t what it looked like. Jordan gave you a tour of the school; you gave him a tour of your pants. Now what we need to know is why.”

Kendall’s face crumpled and she covered it with both hands. Her shoulders shook with great, heaving gasps. “I was s-scared. Scared of being a nobody. I needed something in my back pocket, s-some kind of insurance that I’d still come out on top, even if I was dirt on the bottom of everyone’s shoes. I needed to know someone could still love me, because I was so afraid TJ didn’t anymore.”

I rolled my eyes. “So you pretended to care about Jordan, got him to hack his mother’s laptop, and then framed Charlie for the whole thing?”

Jason whistled. “This is fucked up.”

Kendall dragged her fingertips across her cheeks, leaving mascara-tinged streaks in their wake. “I overheard Charlie saying that she’d fixed Mrs. Pace’s computer. Up until she said it, I’d never intended to frame her, but she made it too easy. I didn’t want to be the only suspect if things went wrong again. So I told Eli we’d keep splitting the profits if he made the drop-offs. We moved them off-site to keep from getting caught.” Her face puckered with a defeated sniffle. “And here we are.”

I glared at her. “So when you asked for my help, you never really thought TJ was cheating. You suspected he knew about you stealing the tests and used me to see if he was getting close to the truth.”

She nodded. “Yes. I also suspected that Eli was playing both sides of the fence.” She shot him a dirty look. “Then you told me someone had shown up at the barn while you were there, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The day you jumped on me like a wild beast and asked if I had anything to do with Charlie getting in trouble, I knew I was right.” She punched Eli’s shoulder. “You were supposed to keep TJ off our trail, not cover your own ass while you sent him after me.”

Eli rubbed his shoulder and cursed at her under his breath.

“Kendall.” I said her name in the most condescending tone I could muster, complete with a saccharine smirk. “You can punch whoever you want, point fingers at anyone—whatever makes you happy. It doesn’t change the fact that you made your bed and now you’d better change the sheets.” I never thought one of Charlie’s insane sayings would come in handy, but it fit and I liked it. I held up my camera. “Otherwise, these will be everywhere.”

For a second, her mouth formed a stricken O and her pallor grayed. Then she straightened and struck back. Or tried to. “Marisa, you can’t. There’s no way to undo this, not without getting me and Jordan in serious trouble.” She mimicked my smirk. “And we both know Jordan holds a very special place in your heart.”

“Mmm.” I rested my camera on my shoulder and pretended to contemplate her statement. “Yeah, not as special as you think.” I focused the camera lens. “So I guess I still have one more question.”

Kendall’s lips pressed into a thin line and she folded her arms across her chest. “What’s that?”

I lined up my shot. “How did it feel to have my leftovers?”

The camera clicked, preserving her priceless expression forever.