Although I didn’t for a moment forget that he was the enemy general, the cunning, unscrupulous Arthur, I was kind of grateful for this gesture. Even Henry, who had no problem about sitting alone with an outcast like me, seemed glad of the company. I was sure he hadn’t forgotten all the lies his former best friend had told, not to mention that nasty business in the mausoleum, but when he grinned at Arthur now, I knew he felt, like me, that this was nice of Arthur. We couldn’t be friends again, but at least we’d settled on a kind of truce.
The other two boys, Gabriel and Eric, couldn’t have cared less what I’d done. They didn’t know Mr. Snuggles, they weren’t interested in plants, and they thought Secrecy’s blog was silly, girly stuff, so they never read it. I liked them both. On principle, Persephone adored all boys on the basketball team, so she joined our table again. (And for half an hour, she entirely forgot Jasper, far away in France.) To be honest, lunch was more fun now than it used to be with Florence and Emily.
It was only Grayson I missed. Not just at lunchtime. I missed our little conversations beside the coffee machine in the morning, or when we were arguing over who got the bathroom first in the evening. He was avoiding me and said only the bare essentials, if that, when we met. Instead he looked at me sadly, as if he couldn’t put his feelings into words.
It was worst at home—where of course Florence also avoided sitting at the same table as Mia and me. She left the room without a word as soon as one of us came in. Mom, Ernest, and Lottie sighed when that happened, but they were full of understanding for Florence’s feelings, whereas they didn’t show any sympathy at all for the reasons behind our butchery in the Boker’s front garden.
We’d tried hard to justify ourselves by listing all the horrible things the Boker had done, the unforgivable remarks she’d made, and, yes, they agreed that now and then she hadn’t behaved too well, but they always ended up asking why poor innocent Mr. Snuggles had to pay for it. The crazy thing was that by now I myself didn’t understand how we could have done it.
Mia did not feel the same. She still thought the whole thing would have been really cool if we hadn’t been caught. And that brought us to the heart of the matter: Where the hell did Secrecy get her information? Mia and I hadn’t even had time to tell anyone—and there it was in her blog already.
No one but Henry had known. But we’d had that conversation in my dream, where no one else could have been eavesdropping. Or could they? Maybe someone had slipped through the doorway with Henry disguised as a breath of air? Or an amoeba?
Of course it had occurred to me that Henry himself might have been the security leak, but I had suppressed the thought quickly—if I couldn’t trust even Henry, then who could I trust? No, he wouldn’t do a thing like that to me. At the very most, he might have passed on the information without knowing it would reach Secrecy. When I tackled him about it, for once he hadn’t been amused but rather annoyed. And then he’d sworn that he had not told anyone about it, even by mistake.
I believed him.
Lost in thought, I scratched my ear with my hind leg. Of course I believed him, I loved him! Without Henry, the last week would have been unbearable. Mom’s deeply disappointed glances (“I thought you two realized how important this relationship is to me”), Lottie’s horror (“This isn’t like you girls at all—you normally wouldn’t hurt a fly!”), Grayson’s bafflement (“I just don’t understand why you did it!”), Florence’s contempt (no words for it), and Ernest’s efforts to blame it all on adolescence (“You’re still children. Only the other day I read that when the brain is developing during puberty, short circuits are preprogrammed”)—well, all that hit me much harder than I liked. If I could have turned time back by sacrificing a part of my body, I’d have done it like a shot.
When I told Mia so, she looked at me, shocked. “Are you serious? You’d give a toe for it never to have happened?”
I nodded. “Or a kidney. Or an ear.”
“You’re crazy,” said Mia. “We wanted to pay the Boker back, and we did. If it hadn’t been for stupid Secrecy, we’d feel like heroes now—and the hell with that silly bird. I’m going to crack down on Secrecy. Sooner or later she’ll give herself away, and then I’ll nab her.”
So far, unfortunately, that didn’t look likely—at least, Secrecy didn’t live in Elms Walk, as I had been assuming. In fact, not a single student from Frognal Academy lived in Mrs. Spencer’s neighborhood. We’d checked all the addresses.
As if all that wasn’t punishment enough, Mom insisted that we must apologize to Mrs. Spencer and offer her financial compensation.