“My petty little . . . ” I gritted my teeth together, clenched my fists, and prayed for patience. “Paige, this isn’t a joke. Where the hell is Noelle?”
“She’s not here?” Paige said blankly, jerking her head to look behind her. Her auburn curls twitched around her face.
A cold sense of realization washed through me. I was utterly and completely wrong. Paige had no idea where Noelle was. Had no idea she was even missing. There was no way she was a good enough actress to fake this level of cluelessness. She thought that I’d merely summoned her here to tell her I was giving up the BLS—that the lame-ass threats she and her fellow alums had made against me and my sisters had worked. This whole undertaking was pointless.
“I have to go,” I said, brushing by her.
“Wait. You have
got
to be kidding me,” Paige said. “That’s it? You have nothing else to say to me?”
I turned on my heel to look at her, my face aflame with anger, frustration, and despair. “Yeah. The next time you’re visiting the prison down in Virginia, tell your mom I said ‘Hi.’”
Then I turned and stormed out into the cold, not even bothering to cover up this time. The Billings Alums didn’t have Noelle. Or
if they did, they hadn’t told Paige about it. So who the hell had done this? And where were they keeping Noelle?
I emerged from the tree line, the stone buildings and winking lights of the Easton campus spread out below me at the bottom of the snow-covered hill, as if all were right in the world. Then I heard a jingle. My breath caught and I paused. Nothing. It was just the wind playing tricks on me. But then I heard it again. It was my phone. I was so riled up that I didn’t even recognize the sound of my own phone. Biting down on my tongue, I fumbled in my pocket for my cell, nearly dropping it in the snowdrift. Snowflakes clung to my eyelashes and the wind bit at my nose as I narrowed my blurred eyes and tried to read.
THE GAME BEGINS NOW. IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE NOELLE ALIVE AGAIN, YOU WILL HAVE TO COMPLETE FOUR ASSIGNMENTS. DO EXACTLY AS WE SAY AND TELL NO ONE. ASSIGNMENT NUMBER ONE: HAVE GRANDMOTHER LANGE SIGN A LETTER EXCUSING NOELLE FROM SCHOOL FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. NO FAXING, TEXTING, OR E-MAILS ALLOWED. GRANDMOTHER LANGE MUST BE APPROACHED IN PERSON. THE LETTER MUST BE AN ORIGINAL, WITH AN ORIGINAL SIGNATURE. NO FORGERIES ACCEPTED. WE’LL BE WATCHING YOU.
My lungs completely emptied out, ice-cold dread seeping through my body. I glanced over my shoulder at the snow-laden trees. Could Paige have sent this text? She’d had her phone out when I’d walked away from her. Maybe she
was
screwing with me. If someone was watching
me right now, it had to be her. She was the only one out here.
Or was she?
I closed my eyes against a crippling stab of terror and told myself to breathe. No one else was out here. No one even knew where I was other than Josh. The kidnappers were just trying to scare me. And I was not going to let them.
When I opened my eyes again and looked around, all I saw were trees, snow, and the campus below. Paige could not have sent the text. I had to go with my gut. The girl knew nothing. She knew less than nothing.
A gust of wind knocked me sideways and I reached back, pulling my hood over my head. Huddling against the wide trunk of an old elm tree, I bent over the phone and read the message again. This made no sense. Okay, yes, I understood why the kidnapper wanted Noelle excused from school. If she wasn’t, the faculty and administration would get suspicious and start asking questions—especially at Easton, where they had been trained by experience to be severely paranoid. But why would they want me to get a note from Grandma Lange? Noelle had two parents, alive and well. Shouldn’t they be the ones to get her excused from school?
I gritted my teeth. It didn’t matter whether it made sense. It was my task, and I had to complete it. Noelle’s life was on the line.
I put my phone away, ducked my head, and started the long trudge back to campus, trying all the way not to look back over my shoulder. Trying to ignore the sinking sense that someone was, in fact, watching my every step.
“Reed! Oh my God! You have to stop them!”
Amberly Carmichael accosted me the second I speed-walked through the door to Pemberly, and as tense as I was, my heart practically vaulted up my throat and out my mouth.
“Stop who?” I said, clenching my fists to keep from bursting into flames or tears or just screaming my head off. I inhaled slowly then exhaled, trying to calm my frayed, paranoid nerves.
“Them!” Amberly threw her hand out toward the lounge. That was when I saw that she was not alone. Kiki Rosen, Astrid Chou, Vienna Clarke, and Tiffany Goubourne were all seated on the old, fading brocade couches, coats off, Coffee Carma cups on the coffee table before them. “They’re totally plotting against Noelle.”
My head went light as I stepped into the room.
Join the club.
Tiffany rolled her brown eyes toward the ceiling. “We’re not plotting against her. We just want our revenge,” she said with a conspiratorial smile.
The door slammed behind me and I jumped.
“Revenge on whom?” Ivy asked. She’d just come in from outside and was now hovering behind me in her white coat. She tugged her black leather gloves from her fingers and gave me a questioning look.
“Noelle,” Astrid replied, popping her gum.
Ivy laughed, her eyes bright. “I’m
so very
in.” She walked over to the nearest couch and sat down next to Tiffany.
My stomach twisted itself up like a cats’ cradle, changing formations every two seconds. I lowered myself into an empty chair, weak from the many scares of the past ten minutes. “Revenge for what?”
“For that ridiculous prank she played on us last night,” Vienna said, like it was so obvious. She flicked her thick, highlighted hair over her shoulder and crossed her skinny-jeans-clad legs at the knee. “I mean, I practically had a heart attack.”
“I think I
did
have a heart attack,” Amberly said, touching her fingertips to her neck. She walked up behind my chair. “See? My pulse is
still
elevated.”
“Then I don’t get why you won’t let us use you,” Kiki said, lifting her legs and dropping her feet, one at a time, atop the coffee table. Her heavy black boots each came down with a bang. The coffee cups jumped.
“Because! I think what you’re planning is unusually cruel and besides . . . it’s Noelle,” Amberly said, flouncing around my chair and sitting down on the arm.
“So you’re just afraid of Noelle,” Astrid said. “You’re a patsy, is what you’re saying.”
The other girls snickered.
“I’m not afraid of her,” Amberly pouted, sliding her long blond hair through her fingers over and over again. “It’s just that she’s been one of my best friends for, like, ever.”
Tiffany and I exchanged a look. We both knew Noelle didn’t think of Amberly as a friend so much as a lap dog.
“I don’t want to do this to her,” Amberly added.
“Do what, exactly?” I asked wearily.
Tiffany sat forward at this. “We were thinking that when she gets back, we should tell her that Amberly’s in the hospital. That the whole ordeal fried her delicate nerves and she had to be medicated.”
“Vienna’s boyfriend’s brother is interning at Easton Hospital and he said he could get us an empty room and hook up some machines to beep and stuff. Make it look real,” Astrid added.
“We could even put her in a straitjacket,” Kiki said with a smirk, eyeing Amberly. “That would be awesome.”
Amberly paled. My face screwed up in disgust. “That’s sick!”
“And scaring the shit out of all of us by pretending to be kidnapped is, what? Normal behavior?” Vienna snapped.
“You guys, just no. You can’t do this,” I said, standing up so fast I almost knocked Amberly over. “You don’t know . . . you don’t understand . . . . ”
“Understand what, Reed?” Astrid asked. “That Noelle thinks she can get away with anything? I thought we were all equals now. If we get her back it’s like—”
“It’s like proving that we are,” Kiki said. “Equals, I mean.”
I paced around the back of the chair, my pulse pounding in my ears, my very hair follicles sizzling with anger and fear and frustration. They had no idea where Noelle really was right now, what she was really going through. This whole thing was so wrong, so petty, such a huge, stupid waste of time. Why was I even here? Why was I even listening to this when I had more important things to do?
Like saving Noelle’s life.
But I couldn’t say any of this. Couldn’t tell them what I was really thinking or feeling. The frustration was such agony, I wanted to punch something.
I glanced over at them and saw that Ivy was watching me very carefully. Almost like she could read my mind, or at least my mood. I grabbed on to that glance, held on to it for dear life, silently begged her to just help me.
“Reed’s right. It’s no good,” Ivy said.
“What?” Vienna blurted, crossing her arms over her chest. “I thought
you’d
jump on the bandwagon like your pants were on fire.”
“I can see why you’d think that, but I don’t know,” Ivy replied, looking me right in the eye. “Noelle had to go home for a family emergency, right?” she asked.
I nodded mutely, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.
“So isn’t it kind of cruel to attack her right when she gets back?” Ivy asked. “I mean, who knows what she might be dealing with right now? We’re supposed to be her friends.”
I could tell it took some effort for her to mention herself among Noelle’s friends, and I was beyond grateful for it.
“Yeah, but—”
“Besides, I hate to point out the obvious, you guys, but your prank kind of sucks,” Ivy said, standing and gathering her things. “I mean, we all know Amberly’s a delicate flower, but going catatonic in a mental ward because of a prank? Noelle would never believe that, even if you had Dr. Phil come in here and swear to it.”
“It’s not
that
bad,” Astrid muttered, sitting back in her chair, her cheeks pink. Clearly it was her idea.
“Yeah. It is,” Ivy said bluntly. “You guys give me a couple of days and I promise I’ll come up with something way better. Something we can pull on her later when she least expects it,” she said, giving me a steady look.
Thank you,
I said with my eyes.
She gave me a small smile in return. She was doing this for me, not for Noelle. But either way, I didn’t care.
“Agreed?” I asked the crowd, my voice a croak.
“Agreed!” Amberly chirped, jumping to her feet.
The girls all looked at one another. “Agreed,” they said reluctantly.
Relief flooded my veins. I had never loved Ivy more.
“Wow. So, you’ve done this before,” Josh joked as he stuck his head through the basement window of Hull Hall. I had just shimmied through the narrow space and dropped to the floor without hesitation, landing easily and soundlessly on my feet.
“Kind of,” I replied.
I’d done it last fall when Noelle, Ariana Osgood, Kiran Hayes, and Taylor Bell had dared me to as a way to prove myself to Billings. I’d done it again with Dash McCafferty when we’d been trying to figure out who’d killed Thomas Pearson. And I’d done it a few times last month with my friends, when we’d held the first secret meetings leading up to the initiation of the Billings Literary Society.
If the whole Ivy League thing didn’t work out, I was going to have to consider a career as a cat burglar.
Josh turned around and slid through the window feetfirst, his long legs dangling for a moment before he got up the guts to drop down.
When he hit the cement floor, his knees buckled and he fell into me. I caught him awkwardly with my arms around his back and his face pressed into my shoulder.
“Well. That was emasculating,” he joked, his green eyes shining as he straightened up.
I smiled, giving him a placating pat on the shoulder. “No worries,” I whispered. “I still love you.” We both blushed. We didn’t throw the word “love” around lightly or too often. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
Together we crept over to the door. Josh held up a hand—taking the lead in an attempt to regain his manliness, I guessed—and opened it himself, wincing when it let out a loud creak. He peered into the hall then motioned for me to follow him. I smiled and shook my head at the huge streak of white paint across the back of his right pant leg. I’d told him to dress in all black, but I could never trust my artist boyfriend to wear any piece of clothing that wasn’t marred by paint.
If someone was, in fact, always watching me, they could have spotted both of us by a country mile with that streak glowing in the dark. A chill shot straight through me and the smile dropped from my lips. At least now we were safely inside, away from prying eyes.
The back stone stairwell was even colder than the air outside, and we quickly raced up the steps, taking them two at a time. Once in the main hall, we stayed close to the wall until we got to the bottom of the wide oak staircase. Josh looked both ways and nodded. We flew up to
the second floor, sprinting noisily down the hall to the headmaster’s office at the very end.
“Hang on,” Josh whispered, placing his hand on the old brass doorknob. He rested his ear against the thick wooden door and listened.
“No one’s in there,” I said. “It’s after midnight.”
“I don’t know about you, but Double H has always struck me as a workaholic,” Josh said. Double H was the nickname we had for Headmaster Hathaway, Sawyer and Graham’s dad, who had taken over as the head of the school at the beginning of the semester. When Josh, Graham, and Sawyer had been at St. James Academy together, Mr. Hathaway had been the headmaster there, too, so Josh had more experience with the man than I did. And he had a point. The man had “work is my life” written all over him.
Slowly, carefully, Josh opened the door and looked inside. The outer office was dark, so we slipped in and closed the door behind us. Luckily, the entryway to the headmaster’s office, which was directly across the room, was open too. Moonlight shone in through the tall, wide windows.