Emma had shrugged. “That’s what grandparents do,” she said. “They die.”
Ainsley had considered telling Emma about the woman who came to the reception and slapped her mother, but Emma can’t be trusted with that kind of story. She either wouldn’t care or would care too much.
“What’s up with you and Teddy?” Emma had asked at lunch. “Did you two fight?” Teddy was, for the first time ever, sitting with the baseball team at lunch instead of with Ainsley and Emma.
“I’ll tell you later,” Ainsley said. “I don’t feel like getting into it now.” She looked across the cafeteria at Candace, who today was wearing a pink silk button-down, a pair of white AG Stilts, and nude Tory Burch flats. Her mother, Steph, used to be big into braiding Candace’s hair or doing half ponytails, but now Candace wore her hair straight and shiny. It pained Ainsley to admit it, but Candace was pretty. Her clothes were stylish and effortless. Her skin was clear. Her eyes radiated the pureness of her heart.
Except that she had stolen Ainsley’s boyfriend.
Now, drunk and stoned and alone, Ainsley calls Emma. “Are you ready to hear what happened?” she asks. Emma isn’t good at offering comfort or support—but revenge? Revenge Emma excels at.
Ainsley is sitting in third-period English. Her paper on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is six and a half pages long instead of ten. It is poorly written, repetitive, and untethered to the text because Ainsley didn’t read a single page of the book. She had tried the night before, but the dialogue is written in the southern vernacular, which might as well be a foreign language.
Candace and Teddy are both in Ainsley’s English class. Ainsley is sure that they have turned in ten-page papers using appropriately annotated selections from the book to back up their thesis statements and have probably also supported their arguments with quotations from Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis, the way Mr. Duncombe suggested. Candace and Teddy don’t speak, they don’t even look at each other, but Ashley can see the pearlescent waves of true love shimmering between them. She only has to suffer this particular hell for a few moments, however. Before Mr. Duncombe can even start in on how important the literary voices of the marginalized are, the intercom buzzes. Ainsley sucks in a breath. Ms. Kerr asks for Candace Beasley to be sent down to the office.
By lunchtime, it’s all over the school: a nearly full bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a baggie holding what appeared to be cocaine residue were found in Candace Beasley’s locker.
“Wow,” Maggie says as she and Ainsley move along the salad bar. “I remember when Candace was a total goody-goody. Don’t you?”
Ainsley shrugs. “I do. But people change.”
“Most of the time it’s the good kids you have to watch out for,” Emma says. “They’re so good that one day they just snap and become really, really bad.”
“She’s facing a possible three-day suspension,” Maggie says. “Her parents came in and everything.”
Three-day suspension, Ainsley thinks. She has three days to get Teddy back.
“I’m surprised she’s not facing legal action,” Emma says. “I mean, alcohol is one thing—but cocaine?”
“She says it isn’t hers,” Maggie says. “She told Dr. Bentz someone must have planted it in her locker.”
“That would be what I would say if I were her,” Emma says. “‘Wasn’t me; someone planted it.’ She didn’t ask my advice, but if she had, that would have been my suggestion.”
“Still, how would someone else get into her locker?” Ainsley says. “Unless she gave someone the combination. The last person who had that locker graduated, like, two years ago. And they’re impossible to break into.”
“Impossible,” Maggie says in agreement.
Ainsley is both buoyed and terrified for the rest of the school day. The news about Candace is everywhere: the school is on fire with it. Candace Beasley, a straight-A student and an altar girl at Saint Mary’s, brought a bottle of gin and maybe also cocaine to school. It’s so outlandish that Ainsley expects to be yanked out of class at any moment. But Emma had promised Ainsley that the plan was foolproof. Back in November, Emma had been tardy for school for the fifth time, which required her to meet with the principal, Dr. Bentz. She was asked to wait in the room outside his office by herself until Dr. Bentz returned from a Rotary Club breakfast. There was a fire drill; the school emptied out, but Emma stayed put. That was when she started snooping. She found teacher evaluations (boring), ninth-grade MCAS scores (boring), and the combinations for every locker in the school. The list of combinations she kept.
So infiltrating Candace’s locker was easy. Ainsley was the one who had left an anonymous note for the school nurse saying there was a “rumor” going around that Candace Beasley had been bringing “hard drugs” to school and telling people it was for “medicinal purposes.” The school nurse, Mrs. Pineada, was fanatical about preventing student drinking and drug use. A search of Candace Beasley’s locker had immediately followed. Bam.
As Ainsley is leaving school, someone grabs her arm. It’s Teddy.
“Ainsley,” he says, “I need you.”
Ainsley practically falls into his arms. She must be in love with him. How else can she explain the searing pain in her heart, the longing, the fervent desire for simple affection—a kiss on the cheek, a squeeze of the hand? Ainsley loves his blue eyes, his freckles, the way his red hair curls under his ball cap, the hollow at the base of his neck.
I need you. This is what Ainsley wants to hear, right? And yet she feels insidiously guilty about what she and Emma have done to Candace. Ainsley should have won Teddy back by cleaning up her act and showing him that she can be good. But she had followed Emma down the dark path, as always. They had made Candace look bad. It felt like tripping Candace up in a footrace instead of simply running faster.
“What’s up?” Ainsley asks. She decided in history class that the best tack with Teddy is to play dumb. Or if not dumb—he wouldn’t believe that Ainsley hadn’t heard about Candace—then at least calm and unemotional. If Candace Beasley has been caught with booze and drugs, what concern is it of Ainsley’s?
“Can you come to the cubby?” Teddy asks. “Do you have time?”