Wrong question, I guess. Bronwyn swallows once, then twice, trying to keep herself together. “He doesn’t want me to. His mom says he’s … okay. Considering. Juvenile detention’s horrible but at least it’s not prison.” Yet. We all know Eli’s locked in a battle to keep Nate where he is. “Anyway. Thanks for coming. I guess I just …” Her eyes fill with tears, and Cooper and I exchange a worried glance before she blinks them back. “You know, I was so glad when we all finally got together and started talking about this. I felt a lot less alone. And now I guess I’m asking for your help. I want to finish what we started. Keep putting our heads together to make sense of this.”
“I haven’t heard anything from Luis about the car,” Cooper says.
“I wasn’t actually thinking about that right now, but please keep checking, okay? I was more hoping we could all take another look at those Tumblr posts. I have to admit, I started ignoring them because they were freaking me out. But now the police say Nate wrote them, and I thought we should read through and note anything that’s surprising, or doesn’t fit with how we remember things, or just strikes us as weird.” She pulls her ponytail over her shoulder as she opens her laptop. “Do you mind?”
“Now?” Cooper asks.
Maeve angles her screen so Cooper can see it. “No time like the present.”
Bronwyn’s next to me, and we start from the bottom of the Tumblr posts. I got the idea for killing Simon while watching Dateline. Nate’s never struck me as a newsmagazine show fan, but I doubt that’s the kind of insight Bronwyn’s looking for. We sit in silence for a while, reading. Boredom creeps in and I realize I’ve been skimming, so I go back and try to read more thoroughly. Blah blah, I’m so smart, nobody knows it’s me, the police don’t have a clue. And so on.
“Hang on. This didn’t happen.” Cooper’s reading more carefully than I am. “Have you gotten to this yet? The one dated October twentieth, about Detective Wheeler and the doughnuts?”
I raise my head like a cat pricking up its ears at a distant sound. “Um,” Bronwyn says, her eyes scanning the screen. “Oh yeah. That’s a weird little aside, isn’t it? We were never all at the police station at once. Well, maybe right after the funeral, but we didn’t see or talk to each other. Usually when whoever’s writing these throws in specific details, they’re accurate.”
“What are you guys looking at?” I ask.
Bronwyn increases the page size and points. “There. Second to last line.”
This investigation is turning into such a cliché, the four of us even caught Detective Wheeler eating a pile of doughnuts in the interrogation room.
A cold wave washes over me as the words enter my brain and nest there, pushing everything else out. Cooper and Bronwyn are right: that didn’t happen.
But I told Jake it did.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Bronwyn
Tuesday, November 6, 7:30 p.m.
I’m not supposed to talk to Eli. So last night I texted Mrs. Macauley a link to the Tumblr post that Addy, Cooper, and I read together, and told her what was weird about it. Then I waited. A frustratingly long time, until I got a text back from her after school.
Thank you. I’ve informed Eli, but he asks that you don’t involve yourself further.
That’s all. I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I’ll admit it; I spent most of last night fantasizing that Addy’s bombshell would get Nate out of jail immediately. While I realize that was ridiculously na?ve, I still think it deserves more than a brush-off.
Even though I can’t wrap my brain around what it means. Because—Jake Riordan? If I had to pick the most random possible person to be involved in this, it still wouldn’t have been him. And involved how, exactly? Did he write the whole Tumblr, or just that one post? Did he frame Nate? Did he kill Simon?
Cooper shot that down almost immediately. “He couldn’t have,” he said Monday night. “Jake was at football practice when Addy called him.”
“He might have left,” I insisted. So Cooper called Luis to confirm. “Luis says no,” Cooper reported. “Jake was leading passing drills the whole time.”
I’m not sure we can hinge an entire investigation on Luis’s memory, though. That boy’s killed a lot of brain cells over the years. He didn’t even question why Cooper was asking.
Now I’m in my room with Maeve and Addy, putting dozens of colored Post-its on the wall that summarize everything we know. It’s very Law & Order, except none of it makes sense.
Someone planted phones in our backpacks
Simon was poisoned during detention
Bronwyn, Nate, Cooper, Addy & Mr. Avery were in the room
The car accident distracted us
Jake wrote at least one Tumblr post
Jake and Simon were friends once
Leah hates Simon
Aiden Wu hates Simon
Simon had a thing for Keely
Simon had a violence-loving alter ego online
Simon was depressed
Janae seems depressed
Janae & Simon stopped being friends?
My mother’s voice floats up the stairs. “Bronwyn, Cooper’s here.”
Mom already loves Cooper. So much that she doesn’t protest all of us getting together again, even though Robin’s legal advice is to still keep our distance from one another.
“Hey,” Cooper says, not the least bit breathless from bounding up our stairs. “I can’t stay long, but I got some good news. Luis thinks he might’ve found that car. His brother called a buddy at a repair place in Eastland and they had a red Camaro come through with fender damage a few days after Simon died. I got you the license plate and a phone number.” He searches through his backpack and hands me a torn envelope with numbers scrawled across the back. “I guess you can pass that along to Eli, huh? Maybe there’s something there.”
“Thanks,” I say gratefully.
Cooper runs his eyes over my wall. “This helping?”
Addy sits back on her haunches with a frustrated noise. “Not really. It’s just a collection of random facts. Simon this, Janae that, Leah this, Jake that …”
Cooper frowns and crosses his arms, leaning forward for a better look at the wall. “I don’t get the Jake part, at all. I can’t believe he’d actually sit around and write that damn Tumblr. I think he just … blabbed to the wrong person or something.” He taps a finger on the Post-it with all our names on it. “And I keep wondering: Why us? Why’d we get dragged into this? Are we just collateral damage, like Nate said? Or is there some specific reason we’re part of this?”
I tilt my head at him, curious. “Like what?”
Cooper shrugs. “I don’t know. Take you and Leah. It’s a small thing, but what if something like that started a domino effect? Or me and …” He scans the wall and settles on a Post-it. “Aiden Wu, maybe. He got outed for cross-dressing, and I was hiding the fact I’m gay.”
“But that entry was changed,” I remind him.
“I know. And that’s weird too, isn’t it? Why get rid of a perfectly good piece of gossip that’s true, and replace it with one that’s not? I can’t shake the feeling that this is personal, y’know? The way that Tumblr kept everything going, egging people on about us. I wish I understood why.”
Addy tugs on one of her earrings. Her hand trembles, and when she speaks, her voice does too. “Things were pretty personal between me and Jake, I guess. And maybe he was jealous of you, Cooper. But Bronwyn and Nate … why would he involve them?”
Collateral damage. We’ve all been affected, but Nate’s gotten the worst of it by far. If Jake’s to blame, that doesn’t make sense. But then again, none of this does.
“I should go,” Cooper says. “I’m meeting Luis.”
I manage a smile. “Not Kris?”
Cooper’s return smile is a little strained. “We’re still figuring things out. Anyway, let me know if the car stuff is helpful.”
He leaves and Maeve gets up, crossing over to the spot near my bed that Cooper just vacated. She shuffles Post-its on the wall, putting four of them into a square:
Jake wrote at least one Tumblr post
Leah hates Simon
Aiden Wu hates Simon
Janae seems depressed
“These are the most connected people. They’ve either got reason to hate Simon, or we already know they’re involved in some way. Some are pretty unlikely”—she taps on Aiden’s name—“and some have big red flags against them.” She points to Jake and Janae. “But nothing’s clear-cut. What are we missing?”
We all stare at the Post-its in silence.
You can learn a lot about a person when you have his license plate and phone number. His address, for example. And his name, and where he goes to school. So if you wanted to, you could hang out in the parking lot of his school before it started and wait for his red Camaro to arrive. Theoretically.