I lean in to kiss her one last time, but I don’t answer her question. I don’t know how to.
When I arrive at the office, lunch is over, and the halls are clear. I pause at the receptionist’s desk, leaning over to announce myself, but before I can say anything the door to Principal DeGroot’s office swings open.
It’s not the principal who steps out. It’s Sasha.
It looks like she’s been crying. Her cheeks are pink and blotchy, and she has a balled-up tissue in her hand. When she sees me there, she pauses in the doorway for just a moment. Then she shakes her head, and hurries past me to the hall.
I watch her go, my heart thudding painfully in my chest.
Now Principal DeGroot fills the doorway, a heavy-jowled brick wall of a man. I’ve never had any run-ins with DeGroot before—the few times I’ve gotten in trouble have been minor enough to be handled by a detention or two. But Irene’s been in his office so often she might as well have a plaque on the door herself, and according to her, DeGroot’s a hard-ass, big on order and discipline, but not unwilling to listen.
“Mr. Jiménez?” I nod, trying to stay calm.
“Yes, sir.”
DeGroot opens his door a little wider and gestures for me to step in.
The room is dimly lit, the overhead fluorescents off and a handful of table lamps lighting the small room. A large tapestry on one wall depicts Waterloo’s rearing-mustang logo. The desk is almost spartan, empty except for a half-full coffee mug, a computer, a digital camera, and a bronze football-shaped paperweight. DeGroot moves behind his desk and lowers his bulk in a chair that looks way too small for him. It groans under his weight.
“Please, have a seat.” He nods to one of the simple wooden chairs on the far side of his desk. I sit down.
I can’t hold back any longer. “Is everyone okay?” I blurt. I’m on the edge of my chair, clutching at the sides of the seat with both hands. DeGroot, who’s still settling in, goes motionless.
“That’s an interesting question,” he says. “What makes you think someone might not be okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought maybe . . . maybe my family . . .”
The principal seems to be studying me carefully, his brow slightly furrowed. “So you have no idea why you’ve been called down here?” he asks. I shake my head.
For a long moment, the principal doesn’t say anything. I get the feeling he’s trying to wait me out—letting the moment drag on so I might say something. I shift my weight, unclench my fists from the sides of the chair and rest them in my lap as calmly as I can.
Finally, DeGroot picks up the camera. It’s an older model, large and heavy-looking. He starts pushing buttons. Then he holds it across the table toward me, screen-first.
I take it almost numbly. When my eyes adjust to the screen, my whole body gives a jerk of horror.
It’s a picture of a locker, hanging open, the door dangling by one hinge. The first thing I see is red. Red, dripping down the inside of the door. A red, pulpy mess, lumped on the bottom. On the small screen it looks like a pound of flesh. I stare down at it, my eyes trying to make sense of what I’m looking at, trying to parse out the image.
“What . . . what is this?”
DeGroot leans forward, clasping his fingers together. “I don’t know, Mr. Jiménez. Why don’t you tell me?”
I look up at the principal, shaking my head. The man’s face is hard to read, a slab of blank stone, but his voice is low and serious. After another long, silent moment, he reaches under the desk and pulls out a crumpled scrap of paper. It’s flecked with dark red, the same dark red as in the picture.
I don’t want to touch it. But when I lean closer to inspect it, I can see that the blood is fake. The color is spot-on, but the viscosity of it isn’t quite right; it looks like the concoction Irene and I once made out of corn syrup and food coloring, fake blood for a short horror movie we filmed together and put on YouTube. I had played a hapless victim of Bloody Mary, the demon who lived inside the mirror, and I can still remember how gummy the blood was, how it felt drying on my skin over the course of the long afternoon.
The note is short, scrawled in untidy pencil.
STAY AWAY FROM ME AND MY FAMILY YOU BITCH OR ELSE.
“It’s fake,” I say, looking up at the principal. “The blood.”
The principal’s expression doesn’t change. Talk about a poker face. “If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be here talking to me. You’d be talking to the cops.”
I shake my head. “But I didn’t have anything to do with this. I don’t . . . I don’t know what this is about.”
“That’s not what Sasha Daley says,” says DeGroot.
I stare back at the picture. Sure enough, now I can see it—the picture of Zayn Malik she’d taped inside her locker, now running with fake blood. And that’s her Mustang Sallys warm-up jacket—torn to shreds, but still identifiable. It’s Sasha’s locker. And I realize suddenly that I’m the one who supposedly vandalized it.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I say, pushing the camera back across the desk. “I’d never do something like this.”
DeGroot’s eyebrows lift slightly, but other than that he betrays no real surprise. “Ms. Daley says you two broke up recently.”
“Yeah, we did. A month ago,” I say. “But this is crazy. Why would I mess up her locker? I just want her to leave me alone.”
DeGroot nods. “I see. Ms. Daley also said there was a misunderstanding last week. She spent some time with your family, and you reacted pretty badly to that.”
My skin gets hot with anger. “She didn’t ‘spend time with my family,’ she kidnapped my little sister. She took Vivi without telling anyone she was going to do it. Yeah, I reacted badly. Who wouldn’t?”
The principal takes off his glasses and sets them upside down on the desk in front of him. He pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment, and then sighs.
“Look, Mr. Jiménez, I know that breakups can be difficult. There are a lot of emotions running high.” He clasps his hands in front of him again. “But harassment is a very serious problem, and we don’t take it lightly at Waterloo. No matter what happened between the two of you, this is not an acceptable way to react.”
“But she’s the one harassing me.” I can’t help it. The words burst out of me in a blast of justified outrage, but they sound nasty as soon as they’re out, defensive and entitled.
“I don’t care about the he-said, she-said,” says DeGroot, holding up his hands with a placating motion. “It doesn’t matter anymore who said what, Mr. Jiménez. The fact is, I can’t prove you had anything to do with her locker, so all I can do is issue the following warning. This is a learning environment. This behavior is disruptive. Whatever has happened between you and Sasha in the past, you need to steer clear of one another now, do you understand me? Stay away from her. Don’t talk to her, don’t look at her. If she tries to talk to you, just walk away. Because if I catch wind of anything else like this, I will be forced to get the police involved, and I don’t think either of you want that.” He leans back in his chair. It groans under his weight. “Am I being perfectly clear?”
I slap my hands on my legs in frustration. “So tell her to leave me alone.”
DeGroot looks at me, unflappable. “I have. And please control your temper while you’re in my office. I won’t be yelled at.”
I stare at him for a moment. I’m seized by a desire to argue, to make the principal understand that I’m innocent. But I can tell that DeGroot thinks this is some kind of tit-for-tat, back-and-forth spat between me and Sasha. That the locker is a vengeful prank gone too far. I wonder how Sasha played it. Dabbing her eyes, telling in a choked voice how she’d found the locker broken open and destroyed. Mentioning her volatile ex-boyfriend, how upset I’d been that she’d dared speak to my family after the breakup.
“Am I being perfectly clear?” DeGroot asks again.