Kip whistled. “Cold, dude. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t catch him. I saw him in the teachers lot after I ran into you guys, but I just let him go. I froze. Dude is scary.”
Cade frowned, and Mattie’s head snapped toward Kip. Kip thought he’d seen their dead teacher in the lot? His stomach clenched. How long had Kip stayed after they’d told him Stratford had left, exactly? Had Kip seen something he shouldn’t have? Or did he actually believe he’d seen Stratford walking across the lot? If Kip actually believed what he was saying, then he was their best alibi yet.
Or was Kip just messing with his head? Cade narrowed his eyes. If Kip had stuck around, maybe he had seen Cade and his little group too.
“Stratford was in a bad mood,” Cade muttered.
Kip leaned back in his seat, a pencil flipping quickly between his fingers. “He’s always in a bad mood. How do you think he’s going to be today?”
Cade sighed. He could see Mattie still watching him. “I don’t know. How is he always?”
“A tool.”
“Then I’m going to go with tool.” Cade turned away from Kip. He was tired of talking. He glanced at the clock.
Stratford was officially late.
Five minutes late.
“What’s the rule?” Tyler asked. “Teacher isn’t in after ten minutes, we all get to leave? Scot-free?”
A couple of the students glanced nervously around the room, as if Stratford was going to pop out from under his desk or emerge dramatically from the supply closet.
He didn’t.
Another minute ticked by.
No one spoke. Cade could feel the others watching him. He could feel their eyes.
Mattie was sweating beside him. Cade shot him a look.
“What, dude? I think I screwed up the test, okay?” Mattie asked. “I blanked.”
Cade nodded. At least Mattie was playing off his nervousness as test-related. He wasn’t totally stupid.
“Me too,” confessed a mousy-haired girl who sat near the front. “I don’t know how I’m going to pass this class.” She paused. “Where is he, anyway?”
Cade stared up at the clock.
“Maybe he’s dead,” a freckled kid in the back joked. “Maybe we don’t even have to worry about the test.” He laughed, awkwardly. “Best-case scenario, huh?”
Kinley whipped around, her long braid wrapping around her. “That’s not funny.”
“Whoa,” the freckled kid said, holding his hands up. “It was a joke. Calm down, narc. Don’t go tell the principal, okay?”
Tyler bristled. He blew his breath out noisily, and then caught Cade’s eye. He looked left and right, making sure no one was paying him any attention, and lobbed a crumpled ball of notebook paper onto Cade’s desk.
He had good aim. Probably from years of passing dirty notes in elementary school. No one wrote notes anymore.
Cade quietly smoothed out the ball of paper.
Tell them.
He glowered at the paper, then the meaning hit him. Someone needed to tell the office Stratford hadn’t shown up.
Cade glanced at the clock.
Their professor was twenty-five minutes late now.
Twenty-five minutes.
He chanced a look at Mattie. Poor kid. He might not even make it through class.
He stood up, and cleared his hoarse throat again. “I’m going to tell the office Stratford didn’t show. Maybe they’ll let us leave.”
Kip scoffed, deep in his throat. “If Stratford walks in while you’re there, it’s your funeral.”
Funeral.
Cade hated Kip’s choice of words. He made a show of hesitating. He sat back down at his desk, and then stood up again.
The mousy-haired girl stood up and walked to the desk. She picked up the stack of tests, casting looks at the door.
She turned back the class, scowling, tests clutched in her hand. “He hasn’t even graded them,” she muttered. “We’re all waiting to see what happened, and he hasn’t touched them. Except Kayla’s—oh, Kayla. Don’t look, okay?” She slammed the tests on the desk and turned back to her seat.
“I’m not sticking around if he’s not coming,” Cade announced. He couldn’t stay in the classroom any longer anyway. He couldn’t take another second staring at Mattie, wondering if he was going to erupt. He shrugged on his backpack, left the room, and walked down the hall toward the office.
The evening receptionist, a black-haired girl with thick wire-framed glasses, looked up at him as she swung her purse over her shoulder.
“On your way out?” he asked. He wrapped his hands around the straps of his backpack and rolled up to his toes, then back to his heels.
Be cool, he told himself. Calm.
“Um, yeah. I don’t stay until your class gets out. I was just cleaning up a little.” She motioned at her desk, which was still covered in stacks of paper. A full mug of pencils sat to the left of her chair, which she pushed in carefully—a universal signal for I’m leaving right now.
“Uh, I just wanted to come by to say that Stratford never showed. We’ve been waiting for a half hour.”
“That’s weird. He lives two minutes from here. He’s never late. He just walks over.”