“Miss Czinski, I’ll see you now.”
Dylan makes a sound in his throat as I walk by, but I ignore him and follow Mr. Warick into his office. The room is filled with books and quasi-motivational posters. He has a laptop open on his desk, tilted so that I can see he’s been looking at the videos I posted. I take a seat across from him, waiting for him to speak.
“It appears we have a situation. You allege that Dylan Smith followed you from work, threatened you, revealed certain painful secrets about your past in order to ruin your reputation and humiliate you in front of your peers.”
“It’s true. It happened.”
“What possible reason could Dylan have for singling you out in such a way?”
“I threatened him first,” I admit. “Because he was picking on my friends.”
Now the principal looks slightly alarmed. “You mentioned that in your vlog, but you didn’t say how.”
Even now, I’m not willing to do what he did, at least not in a public forum. But this is a private conversation. So I say, “I saw you kissing his mother.”
Make no mistake, Principal Warick is very married. He has two children in elementary school up the road. So there’s a reason he looks ill.
But he still tries to bluff. “Perhaps you misinterpreted what you saw.”
“Your hand on her ass, hers in your hair, and—”
“That’s enough,” he cuts in. “You realize these allegations could ruin my reputation.”
I nod. “I wasn’t going to say anything. But I needed Dylan to leave Shane and Lila alone. He said basically that he doesn’t like to lose and I could expect him to do something horrible to make me sorry. And he did.”
“Which led to the altercation with Mr. Cavendish.”
“Someone wrote ‘psycho killer’ on my locker. Do you wonder why my boyfriend got mad?”
“In fact, I do not.” Warick sighs heavily. “What is it that you’re trying to achieve with these videos, Miss Czinski?”
“I just want people to know the truth, I guess. It’s not fair that Shane’s taking all the blame when Dylan and I did terrible things, too.”
“So you own your part in the conflict?”
“Yeah. I guess you could even say I started it, although if Dylan would just stop harassing people, it wouldn’t have been an issue.”
“What do you mean by ‘harassing’?”
“Pushing them, knocking their backpacks out of their hands, calling them names, starting rumors that aren’t true.” I could go on, but I don’t. He already knows that Dylan followed me from work with the express purpose of scaring me.
“Do you have any witnesses?”
“Sure. I can think of two off the top of my head.” I can count on Lila and Ryan to tell the truth. “Oh, and I asked Mr. Johannes to help once. He’ll confirm what he saw.”
“Then I’ll open an investigation. If the situation turns out to be as you’ve described, then we’ll deal with Mr. Smith accordingly.”
I have no idea what that means so I just nod. Maybe I can’t get Shane released, but I can make sure people know he had a reason for what he did. It’s better than nothing.
“You’ve put me in a delicate situation,” he says quietly.
“Because of what I know?” No point in pretending.
“Precisely. Can I count on your discretion?”
“If I was going to spread rumors, I’d have done it already. But Ms. Smith deserves better. Your wife and kids do, too.” I startle myself by being bold. Apparently, the new Sage speaks her mind and she doesn’t fear the shadows.
To my surprise, he flinches. He doesn’t acknowledge what I said, but he opens the door, looking like he’s got a heavy weight on his shoulders. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Since I know, he must be wondering if other people do, too. And if so, how long before this explodes in his face?