“Right. Sign me up. How can I help?”
And it’s weird, because in the face of the first nonfamilial support I’d had all day, even though I remembered a thousand things I liked about Ailey, I suddenly remembered the things I disliked more. How she reeked of insecurity and clinginess. How every decision was wracked with anxiety—Ummm, I can’t decide. Which burrito are you getting? And the worst, how fawning she was around the in crowd.
My mom still held my breakup with Ailey against me, but at the time, detaching from Ailey had felt like shrugging off a bad mood. I had refused to feel sorry about it.
Until now. Within two minutes Ailey had been more supportive than the girls had been since we left Prep. Other than being looped into our ongoing group thread—which continued to make my Doc hum with pics of food we needed to eat and funny animal vids—no one had individual txted me even once since I left Sharma’s. I sank down onto Ailey’s desk chair. Someone believed me. Suddenly having a friend who liked me too much didn’t seem like such a terrible thing.
But alongside my realization, Ailey had one of her own.
“Oh,” she said softly. “I just clicked replay. You said you came here to figure out who made it. You didn’t come for my help, did you? You came to blame me.”
“I think you should go.”
Ailey made a sad face. Not like the pantomime of an emote, but a genuinely sad expression, and I knew right then that she couldn’t be anything but innocent.
“Ailey…”
“No. That’s okay. I understand why you’d think it’d be me, I guess. But I still think you’d better go.”
I didn’t move.
“I’m sorry, Ailes.” The nickname erased her frown lines and brought her shoulders down an inch. “But logically speaking, if it’s not you, I couldn’t think of anyone else who might have it in for me. I mean, other than maybe Jessie Rosenthal…”
Ailey made a face. “Yuck. Jessie. Ellie, for some reason, adores her. I think she’s all-caps SO pretentious. And, just, so weird. I tell Ellie all the time that Jessie’s not right, but she won’t listen to me.”
“Not right?” I asked as I scrolled my contacts for Jessie’s info. “How do you mean?”
“Ellie told me Jessie keeps these ‘human projects’ on her Doc. They’re, like, collections and videos of these people that Jessie stalks around the city. Ellie said there was one of this man who always eats alone at the same diner every night. This woman who feeds the birds in the park. Jessie woofers them, so now she knows everything about them. ‘Human projects.’ It gives me the creeps. You don’t think…”
I shivered. Weirder than Jessie’s human projects was that in thirty seconds of searching, I’d found zero ways to reach her. No e-mail, profile links, Doc digits, nothing. How was that possible? Thanks to Park Prep’s alumni breeding program, my Doc was constantly updating my classmates’ contact info. I could txt the entire student body, going back twenty years, if I wanted. Yet for Jessie all that came up was a physical address in Brooklyn Heights. What good was that?
Also, there was her Quip stream. It said she hadn’t logged in for two months. Still I sent her a private Quip asking her to txt me, then sighed and tossed my Doc on Ailey’s desk.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“So you came here?”
“I just thought maybe you were still mad at me for—”
“Scraping me off like something nasty on the bottom of your shoe?”
“I wouldn’t describe it like that.” I laughed. “Okay, maybe I would. But I mean, people grow apart, Ailey.”
Ailey was fidgeting with her bra strap, a lacy lime-green number, way fancier than anything she’d owned when we were friends. The Amundsens’ household was like a thousand degrees. I took off my hat, scarf, and then, after another second, unsure how long I really wanted to stay, my coat.
“You think we grew apart?”
“I dunno. I mean, I guess we just grew different. I’m sorry, Ailey. Chalk it up to being fourteen?”
Ailey flapped a hand, waving away my transgressions.
“Of course. Forget it. That’s all nothing now, for real.”
It was then, as we sat there, not meeting each other’s eyes but uncomfortably smiling in each other’s direction, that I realized something strange. Ailey wasn’t on her Doc. And Ailey was always on her Doc. I’d checked mine at least twenty times since I’d been there, and I wasn’t nearly as Doc-dependent as Ailey. In fact, I didn’t see her Doc anywhere. She must have stashed it somewhere when I came in. But why would she do that?
I popped out of my chair and opened her walk-in closet just like I used to, pretending I wanted to admire her boring shoes and sweaters. Ailey got stuck with the smallest bedroom in the brownstone, but glass half-full, it had the largest closet. When I was out of sight, I checked the floor and along her shelves. No Doc.
“Oh holy gosh,” Ailey squealed. “I know who it is. Who’s the one person who could get their hands on video-editing tech like this?”
You? I wanted to say, but instead guessed, “Reed Winters? He’s doing that internship with Magnus Pictures.”
“No.” I could hear Ailey shake her curls with exasperation. “Don’t get frowny face, but it’s Sharma. It has to be.”
“Sharma?” My head rocked back in surprise. “Why would she do something like this?”
“Because she equals the fourth friend. Like Abel in Twilight Girls. Nobody cares about Abel. Who needs more motive than that? I mean, how much do you trust any of the girls, for that matter?”
Ailey said it innocently enough, but it was still trash talk. And nobody trash-talked my girls but me. Before I could stop myself, I snapped, “Sharma isn’t the fourth anything. We’re all integral.” Then I lied, “Plus the girls are outraged about this. They have my back, always.”
“Of course they do,” Ailey said quickly. “Sorry. I was just thinking out loud.”
This was pointless. Ailey’s closet was identical to Ailey: long, slim, and hiding nothing. I went back into her room and began to gather my stuff.
Above her desk she still had her Wish Board. A rinky-dink corkboard that always held dozens of cutout images of cars she liked, houses she wanted to live in, and boys she had crushes on. It had dwindled over the years as printed materials became harder to come by. Now the board was filled with photos of her and Ellie Cyr. Actual printed photos. Apparently, they did everything together. Ball games, Coney Island, the ballet, sleepovers.