Randall looked at Kittredge, who looked at Tom, who looked at the girls who’d come in with the girl on the floor. Everyone waiting for permission to do the shitty thing, and leave.
“Just go,” Lena said from the corner. I hadn’t seen her; she was sitting silently on a folding chair in the corner, flanked by the rows of bikes on the wall. She had her top hat on, the one she always wore to parties, but tonight it made her look like a sort of sad clown. “I’ll stay. If you’re so sure Jamie’s done it, then he can wait here for the cops too.”
“Sherringford School?” The girl was saying to the 911 operator. Everyone else filtered out, whispering. “Carter Hall. We’re underground. Yes, the access tunnels, how did you know—” She followed them out into the hall, presumably so she didn’t have to keep looking at my face.
Lena leaned back in her chair. “Fun party, huh.”
“They decided it was me pretty quickly.”
“You’ve been, like, so much fun recently and so awesome to hang out with, I think it’s obvious why.”
“Thanks,” I said, sourly.
“Anytime.”
It was a good space for a party, I thought, industrial and strange, made entirely of metal and bike wheels. Someone had set up a poker game in the corner by a broken-down ATV, but now the little piles of cards were kicked out, scattered on the ground. Beside me, Lena’s shampoo-booze bar had been organized according to what looked like bottle color. I started pulling them off the table, intending to toss them out.
“Stop,” Lena said. “I’m sure they’ll want this for evidence.”
“You’re really leaning into this whole getting-suspended thing, aren’t you.”
She shrugged. “They won’t suspend me.”
“Your family are major donors, then.”
“You knew that,” she said. “But yeah. Short of killing someone, I think I’m fine.”
I could hear the scrap of Anna’s voice talking to someone in the hall, almost as though this was our cell and she was our warden.
“Elizabeth got an email telling her to be here,” I said, finally. “From my email account. But I didn’t send it. That’s what I was doing in the hall, talking to her. This was planned. This was going to happen, or something like it was.”
Lena sat up a little straighter. “I heard about your laptop from Tom.”
I frowned. I hadn’t told him about the soda explosion, though maybe Elizabeth had. “Well. I guess I’m saying that I’m not surprised. She had a baggie of pills with her—brightly colored, they were shaped like stars, moons. This money thing is so vague, I wonder if she meant to hang me with those, and then found them missing, and went for something else instead?”
“I don’t know, Jamie.”
Outside, Anna’s voice fell silent. “Hold on,” I said, and opened the door. “Can you come back in, so I can ask you a question?”
I got a good look at her, then, for the first time. She was wearing bright colors, a choker around her neck, her hair long and straight and blond and glossy, and the look on her face said she’d rather eat a box of scorpions than talk to me a second longer.
“No,” she said.
“That’s fine. We can do it here.” She was trembling a little, and while I didn’t really want to frighten her, a part of me was glad someone else got a turn at being scared. “How long have you been taking money from Lucien Moriarty?”
Anna set her jaw. “You’re crazy.”
“No? Let’s try this. How long have you been taking money from someone—anyone—to ruin my life?”
I could feel Lena draw up behind me. “Jamie,” she murmured.
I whirled on her. “She dropped the bag in front of me. On purpose. With witnesses. You’re sure you don’t know this girl? I thought this party was invite only. Did you know her friends? Have you even seen them before?”
“I didn’t know any of them,” Lena said, and to my surprise, she sounded furious. On my other side, Anna was inching away from me like I had pulled out a gun. “But I wasn’t going to throw out some poor freshmen in front of everyone. Jamie—you should probably, like— You should go. You brought this with you, didn’t you? There was shit going on with you and you came to this party and—”
“And I had to do my English homework, and you wouldn’t give it to me, and fine, maybe I should have said something to you but what, exactly, that didn’t sound crazy? ‘All these bad things are happening to me but they have loads of plausible deniability’? ‘If it seems like I’m really clumsy lately and an asshole, I’m actually not’?”
To my surprise, she said, “How about, ‘Hey guys, I think I have PTSD,’ or ‘Hey guys, more of that messed-up shit is happening to me which obviously isn’t pretend because you’ve seen it for real when it happened to me before.’ Maybe we could have helped you.”
“We who? You and Tom? What could you have done? I didn’t want to drag you into it. And Tom? Seriously? Since when does Tom want to get involved in my shit?”
“Well, I would have! I was in Prague, Jamie. I was in Berlin. I watched you get taken away on a stretcher—I bought all that goddamn art!” To my shock, Lena shoved me. Not hard. Not to hurt me. Just enough that I staggered backward into the hall. “I could have done something. Maybe gotten you to do some therapy. Tom goes to therapy! Tom could have talked to you about it! But you just pretend . . . God, you’re just selfish. You think you’re the only one who misses her.”
“This isn’t about—”
“Don’t pretend this isn’t about Charlotte!”
“Why the hell does it matter to you, Lena? I was her best friend!”
Lena stared at me, eyes dark and angry. “Well, she was mine.”
“I can’t— Lena, there’s only so many come-to-Jesus moments I can have in a single night, okay?”
“Guys?” Anna cleared her throat. “I have literally zero idea what you’re talking about.”
Lena took her ridiculous hat off her head and swept it under her arm, like we’d come to the end of a performance. “Jamie, you, like, don’t want friends, you know that? You just want to float in your little misery bubble alone. Then you walk around being all like I’m miserable, I’m so alone. Well, you do it to yourself! I’ve seen what this Lucien guy is like, okay? I was there. We would have believed you.”
The police would be here soon. There would be questions, and handcuffs, and an interrogation room, and questions from the dean, calls from parents who thought I was a thieving scholarship loser, a killer, a boy who stuffed jewels down girls’ throats, and I had put on so much speed in the last year that I had thought I’d left this all behind me. Now I’d been suddenly slammed into reverse.
And fine. Fine. If it came to that—I missed her.
God, I missed her. Especially now.
“Yeah,” I told Lena, and she was right, she was right about all of it, and it didn’t matter, because maybe I didn’t want any other friends. Maybe I didn’t want anybody but Charlotte. I couldn’t cure the poison with anything that wasn’t also poison. Missing her was sick, and pathetic, and made me a fucking fool, and maybe I hated myself so much for it that, even now, I couldn’t look Lena in the face. “Yeah, that’s totally how it went down the last time.”