I exhale in a rush. “Thank you.”
“Sure.” There’s a pause, and then Stacey drops her gaze. “I’m glad you dropped by, actually. I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. What’s going on with you?”
Immediately, my heart does that thing again where it beats so hard, it makes me want to throw up. Is my guilt that obvious? “What do you mean?”
Stacey purses her lips. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look really bad, like something my cat chewed and then played with and then puked up.”
“How am I not supposed to take that the wrong way? What’s the right way of taking that?”
“Okay, you know what I mean. How much have you been running? Are you eating okay? You look so pale and like, I dunno. Kind of scrawny.”
Oh. That. I sag with relief. She doesn’t know after all. Then I look down at myself and frown.
It’s true that I’ve barely eaten since Mr. Werner’s death, because every time I put food to my lips, I feel the warmth of his legs as I try to drag him up the hill, and then bile rushes up my throat, and I just. I can’t. I need a bit more time before I can feel normal again. Until Stacey pointed it out, I haven’t realized just how much weight I’ve lost, but now I see it’s true, the way my jeans are hanging off me, the way my legs feel so brittle, like they can hardly hold up the rest of me.
“I’m just tired,” I say. “Between my boyfriend’s uncle dying and, you know, said boyfriend grieving, I haven’t been able to get much sleep.”
“Oookay. As long as you’re taking care of yourself.”
Tears prickle my eyes. I want to tell her so badly.
I look away. “I am.”
Stacey exhales. “Okay.” Obviously not okay, but she’s fine with letting it go for now, and I want to hug her and thank her for not pushing. She reaches into a drawer and throws a protein bar at me. “Eat,” she orders.
“Fine,” I grumble, but I smile as I open the packet. It feels good to have someone nag me into taking care of myself. It feels like home. I take a bite of the protein bar and grimace when my shriveled taste buds burst into life. When was the last time I ate something?
“Anyway, let’s go. We’re late.” She stands up and grabs a brown paper bag from her desk.
“Where are we going?”
“To the river. I’ve got stale bread for the ducks. Those fuckers get vicious if I don’t feed them for over a day.”
Welp. That’s…unexpected. I follow in a bit of a daze. Going from talking about computer hacking to feeding vicious ducks is quite the jump, but the more I find out about Stacey, the more I like her. We walk in silence, but it’s a comfortable silence, kind of like slipping into your favorite coat. For a while, I feel almost at peace. Then guilt comes hurrying behind me and catches up, sinks its little claws into my flesh.
“What if Danny hires a hacker to help him? Would they find traces of the virus? Are you able to remove absolutely one hundred percent of the virus?”
“Dude, where’s he going to find another hacker? 1–800-HACKERS? We’re rare creatures who like to hide from the sun.”
“You’ve just described vampires.”
“And you know how hard it is to find those. Relax, okay? It’s going to be fine. No one here knows how to do what I do, and I’ll create a nice little cleanup program tonight. Danny won’t find out a thing.”
I could practically kiss her.
Chapter 24
Danny is obviously tired, but he looks glad to see me. His whole face, pale and thin, breaks into the kind of smile little kids get when you surprise them with a cookie. I always forget just how good he looks, not just because he’s so handsome, which he is, but because seeing him makes me feel…I don’t know. Like I’m whole again. Wow, that’s cheesy. But it feels like all the holes ripped out of me from the past few months are being filled out, and I’m okay. I’m okay.
Except I’m not, because I’ve come here to betray him even more than I already have. Guilt squirms its way through my stomach, and I have to remind myself that the cops are on the case and I need to do this now.
“You have no idea how good it is to see you,” Danny says. We kiss, our lips moving, searing hot against each other’s, then he takes my hand and leads me into his room, and suddenly I’m so nervous, my legs forget how to walk. I know how stupid it sounds, especially when I think about the reason I’m here in the first place, but I can’t ignore the feeling of this moment. It feels official somehow, like we’ve crossed something, some chasm, and we’re on the other side, and suddenly I’m acutely aware of the fact that I’m in my gorgeous boyfriend’s room. And god, I wish so hard that we were just two normal teenagers with nothing to hide from each other. When I look at Danny, all I see in this moment is a boy. A boy I’m pretty sure I’m falling in love with. And it hurts so bad. I reach out toward him, drawing him close to me.
Calm down please, hormones. Focus on the task.
My phone rings, and the moment breaks. We jump away from each other, and I can’t decide whether I’m disappointed or relieved. Maybe both. I clear my throat and answer.
“I’m freezing my ass off out here. Are we doing this or not?” Stacey says.
Heat bursts in my cheeks, and not the pleasant kind that just happened, but the fire-ants-biting-with-tiny-sharp-incisors kind. I jump to my feet, every muscle taut. “Yeah,” I say hurriedly and hang up. My gut churns. I can’t believe now I’m about to con Danny into leaving his room, moments after we were about to—uh. Whatever we were about to do. What were we about to do? I can’t meet his eye.
“You okay?” Danny says, sitting up and pushing his hair out of his face.
“Yeah. I just—um, I’m really hungry.” The lie flops out of my mouth like a live snake. Surely he can sense that I’m not being honest. “Can we go get some food?”
“Now?” He frowns, chews his bottom lip. “You don’t wanna—um. Stay?”
My face is burning. Literally burning. “Maybe next time. Let’s go grab something to eat. Maybe off campus?”
When I had talked about the plan with Stacey this morning, it had seemed so simple: I distract Danny while Stacey slips inside his room and installs the cleaner in Mr. Werner’s computer. To do this, I’ll have to make sure: 1. He leaves his door unlocked, and 2. He stays outside of his room for at least fifteen minutes.
But now that I’m actually doing it, every part of me is fighting against it.
“Yeah, okay. That’s a great idea, actually,” Danny says, and I have to stop myself from sagging with relief. He gets up and grabs a jacket, then pauses. “Hey, I just wanna say…I’m sorry if we were going too fast. I just—um—I got carried away, and—”
“No!” I can’t let him think he scared me away. Not like this. I catch his hand, pull him close, so close, I can see each stupidly long eyelash. “I loved it. And I want to. With you. One day. Soon?” Who knew how hard stringing words into a complete sentence is?