After a few more moments, the voice on the other end stops.
“It’s n—it’s not Juniper,” Olivia says. Her voice is a hoarse whisper. “This is Olivia Scott. Is this . . .?”
Silence. I trade a baffled look with Matt. “What’s going on?” I ask.
“Dunno,” he says.
Olivia’s voice rises. “Who is this?”
The rest of us flinch, except Valentine. Still staring at the mess of vomit, he has a look of dread on his face.
“Valentine?” I say. He doesn’t move.
The voice on the other end comes back to life. Olivia says quietly, “Is this Mr. García?”
The air in the room gets thick and stifling. “Oh my goodness,” I say, realizing exactly what we’re witnessing. Kat’s and Matt’s faces go as blank as Valentine’s.
A surge of sound comes from the other end of the phone, but Olivia, turning deathly pale, shakes her head hard. “I can’t—I have to go,” she says.
I catch one word as she takes the phone from her ear. “Wait—”
She drops the phone onto the bed, taking a step back from it as if it’s about to spit poison. Disbelief washes over me. I hardly believed the rumor was real, let alone that I’d know the culprit. How can it be Juniper Kipling? Claire never stopped talking about how perfect she was, how she had her ten-year plan figured out to the week, how levelheaded and rational she was . . .
“Well. That’s that,” Valentine says. He sounds like we’ve just heard a weather report, not discovered the school scandal of the century.
“Hang on. You knew already?” Matt asks, pointing at Valentine. “You knew! What the fuck?”
Valentine gives him the most withering look of all time. “Of course I knew. Why else would I be here?”
“Jesus, I can’t believe it’s her,” Kat Scott says.
“Is it that surprising?” Valentine asks.
“Dude, hello,” Kat says. “Megapopular valedictorian girl, God’s gift to humanity or whatever? Banging a teacher is kind of breaking the pattern.”
Valentine clears his throat and says, “First of all, she’s salutatorian if anything. I’m valedictorian.”
Jeez, Valentine. I nearly laugh.
“Whatever. That is not the point.” Kat tugs a hand through the tangle of her ponytail. “We’re turning them in, right?”
I nod, looking around. Olivia nods hard, looking like she’ll be sick if she opens her mouth. The others nod, too—except Valentine. Doubt tugs his thin lips downward. “Are you sure we should?” he says.
“I mean, we should turn García in, at least,” Kat says. “He’s a friggin’ statutory rapist.”
Everybody avoids one another’s eyes at the word rapist. It sounds like TV-cop-show talk, something for a crime scene, not for five kids trying to clean up after a party. It forces the image of Juniper and García together into my head, and I blink it away.
After a second, Valentine takes his phone out. “How old is Juniper?”
“Seventeen, pretty sure,” Kat says, and Olivia nods.
After a minute of typing, Valentine tucks the phone back into his pocket. “Then it isn’t statutory rape. The age of consent in Kansas is sixteen.”
Olivia speaks up. “That doesn’t make it okay,” she says sharply. “Just because there’s some arbitrary number they pick for consent doesn’t mean he can’t be pressuring her.”
“Did he say they’d had sex?” Valentine asks. “Did she? Did anybody describe to you the level of their sexual involvement?”
“I mean, no, but—”
Valentine folds his arms. “Then we need to at least talk to her.”
“Dude,” Matt says, “why are you trying to put this off?”
Valentine shoots back, “And why are you so avid to indict Juniper? Look: telling anybody about this has as much of an impact on her life as on his. We don’t know nearly as much as you all seem to think, and if this is happening, I presume it’s been happening for a while now. So what difference does a few days make? Not a lot in time, but vast amounts in terms of the information we could learn by, oh, I don’t know, talking to either of these people.”
Valentine’s outburst leaves a heavy silence behind. His face turns red, that complete red that reaches up to the roots of his hair.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re right. We should wait.”
Valentine glances up at me, and I catch a split second of gratitude in his eyes.
“I . . . okay,” Olivia says helplessly. “I’m so worried, though.”
“Well,” Valentine says, “the best course of action is not to ruin her life while she’s got a tube up her nose in some hospital bed.”
Always the picture of tact, Valentine. I raise my hands, aiming for a gentle intervention. “It’s going to be okay, Olivia,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “We’re going to figure this out sometime when it’s not one in the morning, all right? Once she gets out of the hospital and rests up a bit, you can talk to her, and we can go from there. Sound good?”
She half smiles. “Thanks, Lucas.”