The Rivals (27 page)

“I’m glad you like,” I say.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asks, and points to a chair.

I tip my forehead to the laptop on her desk. “You like Diana Krall?” I ask, since the torch singer’s voice is oozing out of the computer’s speakers.

Jamie’s brown eyes light up like stars. “I love love love her. And I love Ella and Rosemary and Billie and all the first ladies of song.”

“Favorite song?”

“Oh, definitely it would be ‘These Foolish Things’ by Billie Holiday,” she says, and then hums the first line or so. “God, I
love
that song so much. I love Billie and I just love those lyrics. They’re so like one of those 1940s movies where there’s an overhead fan just slowly turning and this woman in a slip walks across the hardwood floor and she’s just missing this guy, some guy she was never supposed to be with in the first place. But she can’t help herself. She loves him,” Jamie says, and she’s lit up like a sparkler. I wouldn’t be surprised if she twirled right now, like a preschooler.

“That’s what I picture too when I hear the song. That kind of rose-colored old-time wistfulness for the one who got away,” I say. Then I add, “It’s a good piano song too. You know, Jamie, it’s not the same as a cappella, but would you want to sing while I play?”

She presses her palms together, a plaintive yes. “Like a duet! This is exactly why I wanted you to be my senior mentor!”

“Let’s go,” I say, and we hit the music hall. I settle in at the bench, and Jamie stands next to me. As I play the first few notes, something changes in her. She stands taller, her face settles into an almost brooding expression, and she sways her hips ever so slightly as I play.

The torch singer. She is the torch singer.

Who’d have thought this wide-eyed freshman could be a torch singer? Because when the lyrics start, it’s clear she’s got a serious set of pipes. I expected a standard musical-theater soprano to come out of her, but her voice is all edge, smoky and sexy. I see her in a slinky wine-colored dress, pouty red lips, her black hair high and teased, the lone microphone in her hands the conduit between her and a gauzy, hazy, jazz-club audience.

“You sure can sing,” I say when the song ends.

She smiles bashfully. Now she’s Jamie again, perfect white teeth, big brown eyes, shining, simply shining. Then the smile fades to black.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Jamie asks.

“Because you went through a lot, Jamie. We put you through a lot. And we owe you a lot.” Her face sinks again when I say that. I quickly add, “But I’m not doing this because I owe you. I actually really like hanging out with you.”

She grins now. She tries to contain it, but she can’t. “You do?”

I nod. “Yeah, I do. And I think you deserve a nice time right now too. An easier time than we gave you.”

The next day is Saturday. The debate team returns from Dallas. They lost the Elite, and word in the cafeteria is that Beat Bosworth performed poorly. I have a feeling it was intentional. I overhear someone mention that Theo’s back on campus too. I want to know the details of both of their performances, but I’ll have to find out later because we have our first meeting with Jamie right after lunch.

“The big question we want to get at, Jamie, is what could we have done differently?” I ask as we settle into the Knothole in the back of the basement laundry room, Jamie next to me, Parker and Martin across from us.

“Um,” she begins, and shifts uncomfortably on the pizza-stained couch. She looks down, eyes fixed on her fingernails. “Well, I guess I didn’t really like having my name in the book,” she says. Then she picks at the skin on her left index finger. She is determined to remove an errant cuticle.

“Do you think there is a better option than writing names in a book?” Martin asks carefully.

She shrugs. “Um…”

“Well, obviously the better option would be if we didn’t have to have an underground justice system at all,” Martin adds with a laugh, to lighten the mood.

“Yeah,” Jamie says, pulling at her fingernail, trying to turn her other nails into makeshift scissors.

“Do you think we should wait until verdicts are decided to write the names in the book?” Parker asks, now taking his turn. The thought crosses my mind that I haven’t seen Parker and Anjali flirting or hanging out since T.S. told me about that night. I wonder what the story is there.

“I guess,” Jamie says as she finally snags that hangnail. But then her finger starts bleeding at the cuticle. She makes a fist with her left hand to hide it and pushes against the skin to stop the blood. I reach into my backpack and riffle around for a tissue. I find one and hand it to her. She nods her thanks and then wraps the tissue tightly around her index finger.

Maybe it’s the room. Maybe it’s being in the courtroom again that’s throwing her off. Because she’s not the same Jamie she was last night when she was singing with me.

“Maybe we just shouldn’t have trials altogether,” she says.

“Maybe,” I say.

“That, I think, is what we all aspire to,” Martin adds.

When the meeting ends, I walk out with Jamie, leaving Martin and Parker behind. I put a hand gently on her back. “Are you okay, Jamie?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“What’s wrong? Was it just hard being there and kind of having to talk about what it was like?” I ask, because now I’m thinking how crummy she must have felt the whole last month. Having her name smeared into the book, having her fragile, barely formed reputation on campus merge with the one we created for her—that of a drug dealer, a shady, nefarious, opportunistic mastermind at the center of what might have been the next big school scandal. When she’s simply a young girl who got framed.

“C’mon. I’ll walk you back,” I say as we cross the quad.

“Alex,” she says in a tiny little voice.

“Yes?”

She doesn’t respond right away. We keep walking and now we’re nearing her dorm. I notice a sheet of paper taped to the door. In fact, all the dorms have sheets of paper taped to their doors.

“I have to tell you something,” Jamie says.

I look at the paper closely as I wait for her to talk. It’s that dog again. But now it’s holding a gavel. A smiling cartoonish gavel. Like the one McKenna drew for her student council.

Images fly by: a movie montage, flashes, photos, scenes. Every click, every frame, they lock into place, and the audience knows who did it.

I turn to Jamie, but before I can speak, she does.

“It was my sister. She’s behind it all. She was the one who set up the Mockingbirds.”

It takes a minute to fully register that McKenna Foster is the one who set us up. But when it does, it makes perfect sense, dating all the way back to the start of the school year, when McKenna
swooped
in to save me from Natalie—a known enemy. She wanted to make me think she was on my side.

It worked. I believed her.

Other details that seemed off fall into place—how McKenna asked me to be Jamie’s mentor. McKenna must have planned that, must have wanted her sister close to me. And why would she want that? I snap my fingers, realizing McKenna must have wanted someone she trusted on the inside. And who could she trust more than her own family?

Pieces are coming together, but there are details I need to know for sure, so I point to the music hall. When we’re inside, I begin. “You were always the one who was supposed to be tried, right? She set it all up to look like you. She put all that evidence together to look like you. But it was never you, right?” I say, the words coming out like lashes of hard rain.

“It was never me. It was Theo, but she made it look like me,” she says, wincing, like she’s biting into a bar of soap, like the admission tastes that bad.

I want to pound my fist against the wall. I always knew it was Theo because of Delaney, then because I saw his pills, then because I saw him deal. Now I know where he was getting them from—from McKenna, who had access, who was forging the scrips from her parents.

“She set it up with him over the summer after his knee injury. McK said she’d keep him in anything he wanted as long as he’d sell to the team,” Jamie says, and I jerk my head at the sisterly nickname, pronounced like “McKay.” “As long as he’d get himself on the debate team. He was her
point person
. That’s what she called him.”

Another puzzle piece shifts into place—those e-mails Delaney saw must have been between McKenna and Theo as they plotted this over the summer, as they planned to hit the ground running the
second
the school year started. That was the blueprint, the road map, and Theo’s job was to get himself on the debate team, then convince the others to start using Annie too. The team didn’t need much convincing to get hooked, not when Ms. Merritt was harping about the Elite. It never takes much convincing here at Themis. We are all preprogrammed to win, win, win.

I bet McKenna protected Theo too. I bet she was his shield, making sure he was never implicated, always getting people to point fingers at others at just the right time. But never at him.

“What about all the evidence it was you? I bet you planted the evidence for Calvin to find. He said he saw it in plain sight in your room. You did that on purpose so he’d come to us, right?”

“Yes,” she admits in a broken voice, and I feel like a total sucker. Because every move I made played into McKenna’s hands. I sought out evidence, I solicited it even, and she served it right up. All to make her sister look guilty. And there’s only one reason you want someone to look guilty who’s not—so she can be found innocent and get inside. Which is where her sister is right now.

“She wanted you to be in the Mockingbirds as her spy?”

“I never wanted to do it. I swear I didn’t. But she asked me and she begged me to and then just said I had to. And then you and I hung out and you were so nice to me, and I can’t do this. I can’t be her person on the inside.”

But why would she want someone
on the inside
so badly that she’d engineer a whole case? I hold those words in front of me—
on the inside
—lasering in on them, and then it hits me hard in the gut. The creepy cartoon dogs. The rival justice group. The fake case was a means to an end. The drug ring was supposed to be the means to
our
end—a ruse designed to take the Mockingbirds down and lift her group up, with its creepy cartoon gavel and dog.

No wonder McKenna loves government; no wonder she loves studying how power is assembled. She figured out how to systematically undermine our power by turning everything that was good about us against us. By using everything we tried to uphold to take us down—our checks and balances, since we give board posts to people we wrongly accuse. But she’s not the only one who wanted to take us down, I’m betting. Because Beat clearly played us. As I remember his pitch-perfect performance in the laundry room, I can picture McKenna recruiting him early, knowing he’d want revenge against us.

“She lined up Beat, didn’t she?” I ask, assembling the rest of the pieces.

Jamie’s voice is strained as she coughs up more details. “He was at our house a few times this summer. He even got himself a real prescription from a real doctor in his hometown so he’d look like he really had ADHD.”

“I bet he loved every second of that performance,” I say. I bet he relished walking into that doctor’s office and playing the role of a teenage boy suffering from ADHD. I flex my fingers, digging them into my palms, as if I have to restrain myself from slamming my fist into his nose even though he’s not here.

“Is Natalie Moretti involved?” I say, thinking of all the bumps and bruises she unleashed on me.

“She’s the heavy. McK brings her along when she needs to get people to agree.”

“She’s building her own mafia, your sister,” I say.

McKenna is the godfather, the don, the head of the family. Fat and happy, smoking a cigar, counting her money, directing her underlings to carry out her wishes. She never dirties her own hands.

“Who else? Who else is working for her? And if you say Delaney, so help me, God, they will hear my screams in the next solar system,” I say, praying that my decision to trust her was not in vain.

“Not Delaney. McK can’t stand her because she was always telling Theo to stop. Plus, McK hates Delaney’s hair.”

I give Jamie a curious look. “She hates her hair? Her purple hair?”

“Yeah. She thinks it looks stupid. She said one night she wanted to shave it all off. And her eyebrows too.”

“Her eyebrows too?”

Jamie just shrugs.

“Tell me who else is involved,” I say insistently, but before she can say a word I hold my hand up. I know who it is. It’s the girl who talked to Theo after English class, the girl who said Jamie would be at the chess party, the girl I wanted for the third board slot. “Anjali.”

A final nod.

McK has a lieutenant on the inside.

So much for instinct. So much for anything.

I don’t even have to ask why. I don’t even have to wonder what Anjali’s motivation is. The fact that I am instantly sure of her motivation says nothing about Anjali but everything about us. She was dying to be a board member and she wasn’t chosen—another flaw in our system. Mockingbirds start as runners, then some move to council, then even fewer to the board. Most council members never graduate beyond their roles on the juries, though. Most council members never get to lead, choose cases, or investigate. Those are all the things that, frankly, are
cool
about the Mockingbirds. But only a select few members can do them. The rest fall off like damaged parts on a conveyor belt, dropping down to the factory floor to be swept away.

One of our soft spots.

McKenna poked and prodded until she found
all
our soft spots. She turned every weakness into her advantage. She will make a great campaign strategist someday, a magnificent advisor to a world leader.

“Do you want me to resign?” Jamie asks quietly. “You probably don’t even want me to resign. You probably want to fire me or kick me out.”