I text “Merry Christmas” to Tacey, Manny, Hadley, and Connor. I think about Nick, but I decide to wait. God knows I might need the cheering after dealing with my parents.
A couple of messages flurry back.
From Manny:
Aunt C. made rum balls! Y weren’t U at yearbook thing? Shit went down!
And then Hadley:
Merry Christmas! Connor is wearing a ridiculous sweater. I’m sending you pictures.
And she does. Somehow he manages to look cool and classic at Hadley’s family breakfast table, despite the giant reindeer stitched across his chest.
Tacey doesn’t answer. Weird. I didn’t hear from her after the meeting I missed either, which means she’s probably really not happy with me. Can’t fix that now though.
I put my phone in my pocket and stare at my bedroom ceiling. I can’t pretend to sleep forever. I will have to go downstairs and open presents and pretend that I didn’t hear them. We’ll play this up all day, this little act of being the perfect, happy family. And I don’t really get it, why we do this. There isn’t one person left who actually believes it.
I stomp out of bed and the voices below go silent. Terrific. I throw on my robe and brush my teeth, staring long and hard at myself in the mirror.
“Let the games begin,” I say.
I come downstairs to my parents sitting on either side of the couch. They wish me a merry Christmas and I wish it back, and we all pretend we don’t know what’s really going on. We eat cinnamon-banana pancakes and drink freshly squeezed orange juice and then we open presents with Irish Christmas music in the background. None of it is bad, but none of it feels right either.
As soon as the last present is opened, my dad disappears to his studio and Mom heads into the kitchen to do the dishes. Back to life as usual, except that I want to cry a little. My phone buzzes with a message. Nick’s name appears on the screen and I smile for the first time all day.
Merry Christmas.
I flop down on my bed to reply.
Merry Christmas back.
Did you get everything you want?
For one second, I think of telling him all the things my parents so desperately want me to believe—about my wonderful Christmas and my perfect family. But then I remember the feel of his chin on my head, his throat against my cheek. I can’t ruin that trust again. I won’t.
I wouldn’t list it among my best holidays this year.
Would a drive-by guest help?
My heart does obnoxious fluttery things. I ignore it and text him back.
How soon can you be here?
Thirty minutes. I have to be quick though.
I slip upstairs to trade in the penguin pants for a pair of jeans and a blue sweater. Since I normally spend the entire holiday in pajamas, this sudden makeup-wearing, hair-fluffed version of me isn’t lost on my mom when I head into the kitchen.
“Nick’s stopping by,” I explain.
Mom’s dishrag pauses on a plate. She tries to hide her smile, but I can hear it in her voice. “That sounds lovely.”
“What sounds lovely?” Dad asks as he walks in.
“My friend Nick—he’s going to stop by for just a minute.”
Dad tugs the hem of my shirt. “That explains the sweater.”
I heave a sigh. “Dad, please don’t make a big deal. Please.”
It feels like forever before he nods, but then everything is fine. They clean up wrapping paper, and he warns me that he’s not getting out of his flannel pants, incoming boy or no.
When the doorbell rings, Dad acts like he’s going to get up, but Mom clears her throat in a way that warns of imminent death, so he sits back down, sulking.
I force myself to take a couple of deep breaths before I walk over and open the door. He’s standing on the porch with a plastic tub full of cookies and a sad-looking spruce branch held high above our heads.
I grin. “That’s not mistletoe.”
He smiles back, pink-cheeked and looking like a Christmas card in his black wool coat and red sweater. “It’s the closest thing I could find.”
“Well, it works for me.” I pull him in before he can say more. His coat is scratchy and the cookies are getting crushed between us, but it’s still magic. Warm and sweet, and God, he shouldn’t be able to make me forget everything else this fast. But he does.
Until he pulls away, much, much too soon.
“No more texts?” he asks.
“Not yet.”
“Good. Maybe that’ll be the end of it.”
My mother calls from inside, “Piper, stop keeping poor Nick in the cold!”
We grin, still clinging to each other. Then he holds up the cookies. “I’m sorry, I really can’t stay. My mom only let me out of the house on delivery duty.”
I take the cookies and invite him in. I feel annoyingly warm and soft when he holds my hand and wishes my parents a merry Christmas. He apologizes for being so brief and Mom tells him she knows how busy holidays can be. Dad just looks at our joined hands with an amused smile—probably trying to reconcile this hulking giant with the thin, emo boys I normally date.
And then we’re back outside, and he’s hugging me good-bye, his lips at my jaw. I feel him slide something into my pocket. A box.
“But I didn’t get you anything,” I say.
“Yeah you did,” he says, and then he kisses me again, letting it linger just long enough to make my head spin.
“I have to go,” he says, striding down my walkway.
I pull out the small box he left in my pocket as he makes his way back to his Jeep. There’s a keychain inside the box—a silver figure with a funny jester’s hat and a stick by his mouth. Kind of cool but not really making much sense until I turn it over to see the detail better. It’s not a stick; it’s a flute. Because he isn’t a jester. He’s a piper.
I float back inside on a bliss-fueled cloud, feeling lighter than air and warmer than a May afternoon. For a crap Christmas, it might be one of my favorites.
Mom sees me playing with the keychain after dinner. She leans in, pressing her shoulder into mine. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s just a keychain.” My grin makes it obvious it’s a lot more than that.
“I really like him, you know.”
A denial waits on my lips. An argument about my possible West Coast future. About how this is the wrong time for me to like anyone. But I push all of that down with a deep breath.
“I really like him too.”
I curl myself into bed somewhere near midnight, leaving my alarm off. Tacey still hasn’t texted. It’s bugging me. I just got over the weirdness with Manny. I don’t want things to be wrong between Tacey and me now too. For a second I think of texting again, to apologize for missing the meeting. Maybe to see if I can swing by tomorrow morning with her present. But it’s late. And it’s Christmas.
If we’re going to fight, we can wait until tomorrow.
I fall asleep with my fingers around my piper keychain. I wake to my mother’s hand stroking my hair and more winter rain pattering my window. I blink open my eyes, but the sky beyond my window is still charcoal gray. It’s too early to wake me on Christmas break.
Something’s wrong.
I roll over to see my mom looking down at me. The clock beside her reads 6:56.
“Baby,” she starts, but her voice catches before she can say more.
She’s pale. And she never calls me baby. I sit up, the rain suddenly chilling me to the bone, drenching me in an icy fear I can’t even name.
“What is it?” I ask, my voice still gravelly from sleep.
“It’s Tacey.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Please let her be all right.
Please.
“You’re scaring me, Mom.”
She nods, smoothing my hair
back from my forehead. “Tacey’s fine. She’s not…hurt.”
“Okay,” I say, but it’s not okay. Something’s obviously really wrong.
“Tacey’s mom called just now.”
“At six in the morning?”
“She knows I’m an early riser. She asked me if you’d ever mentioned anything about Tacey acting oddly or being involved in any sort of…”
Her look seems to ask me to fill in the blanks, but there’s nothing but blanks here. I scoot back to my headboard and pull my knees up but keep them under the covers. “Any sort of what?”
“Drugs,” she says. “Tacey’s been using drugs.”
I laugh. Because it’s laughable. Unthinkable. Tacey on drugs is like me in a cheerleading skirt. Not possible.
“Piper, I know it sounds a bit odd—”
“Odd? No, Mom, it doesn’t sound odd. It sounds ridiculous. Tacey is on the antidrug committee for God’s sake! She did that extra credit video essay reviewing heroin documentaries last year.”
“Honey, I know it sounds out of character, but she was caught red-handed. She confessed.”
“Confessed to what?” I’m practically shouting, but I can’t seem to stop myself. “Shooting up in the library? Come on!”
My mother presses her lips together and looks at her lap. “No, Piper. Not those kind of drugs.”
I stop then, holding my breath as I wait for her to go on.
“Tacey’s little sister, Tara, is on ADHD medicine. They found her pills in Tacey’s purse. Someone knocked it over at the coffee shop the other day. The bottle fell out and I guess a bunch of kids saw it.”
The yearbook meeting. The meeting I was supposed to go to.
I shudder at the memory of Manny’s text about something going down. But there’s more than that. Tacey’s endless energy. The lost weight. The way she never, ever seems to slow down. Or even sleep.
No. No, don’t go there.
A cold, panicky feeling crawls through my middle, and I can barely find my voice. “Maybe she was holding it.”
It sounds pretty desperate, even to me. My mom puts a gentle hand on my knee, and it’s all I can do to not pull away.
“Honey, I told you. She confessed. She told them what she was doing.”
“I want to see her,” I say.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”
“I don’t care if it’s a good idea. She’s one of my best friends, and she’s hurting and—”
“I think she needs some time, Piper. Their whole family probably does.”
“Why are you telling me all of this? To scare me away?”
“I told you because I didn’t want you to hear it some other way. With the way news spreads in your school, you could have found out through some random text message from a stranger!”
Some random text message from a stranger.
Oh God.
My cheeks ache and my stomach rolls. I close my eyes and bring my hand to my cold, clammy forehead. That yearbook holiday thing was on Thursday night. And then on Friday I decided to be smug—to call his bluff.
No. Please, no.
“Who told her parents?” I ask, voice shaking.
“I don’t know.”
“They didn’t say?”
Mom’s brow puckers. She can barely keep up with me. If I don’t ease up, she’s probably going to check my bag for a bottle of pills.
“They didn’t give a name and Tacey’s parents didn’t recognize the phone number,” she finally says. “Piper, who told is not the issue here. You know that, right?”
“Yes,” I say, but she’s wrong. Who told is the whole issue. I eye my phone on my nightstand but look away quickly. I don’t want her spotting it, deciding to take it away before I try to call Tacey.
But I don’t want to call anyone. I want to check my messages.
“What can I do for you, sweetheart? How can I help?”
I close my eyes and take a shaky breath. “Could I just have a few minutes alone? To process.”
I feel the gossamer brush of her lips on my forehead. And then the mattress shifts as she gets up, crosses my room, and slips outside.
I scramble for my phone the instant the door closes. The screen blooms to life and I see the message. The too-familiar number. I pull it up, holding my breath.
You should have given me a name.
• • •
Mom was right about Tacey’s parents. Her mom wouldn’t even let me in to drop off flowers. So I text Manny, hoping he’s home from his aunt’s place. He is. He answers the door wearing a giant hoodie and seriously dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you drive through the night?” I ask.
“Ten hours straight.”
“You probably need sleep.”
“Yeah, well my phone’s been blowing up with this Tacey stuff.”
“What happened?”
Manny heaves a sigh and rubs his eyes. “Come in.”
Mr. Raines is snoring softly in his recliner. It smells like oranges and boys in here. The citrus is probably thanks to the fruit basket on the table. I see a red scarf on the back of Manny’s chair. It’ll probably end up around my neck within a week. The Raines boys are not scarf people.
I follow Manny into his room and kick some of his shoes out of the way so I can sit down on his bed. He moves straight to his computer, pulling things up before I even ask. I have a feeling I’m not going to want to see whatever he’s looking up. But it’s time for me to do a lot of things I don’t want to do.
Like telling Manny about the vigilante stuff?
Maybe. Probably.
“We were all at the coffee shop—everybody but you and Connor. It was a total waste of time. The typical holly-jolly crap we do was a lot less enthusiastic after Ms. Collins used half an hour and a lot of fifty-cent words to tell us the website isn’t coming back. And then she tried to dig for information about who had access to what and if we knew anyone that might want to put the tape up.”
“You think she wants to break this thing open?”
“Makes sense, right? She wants a real teaching job, not the part-time advising crap. Saving the school’s morality or whatever seems like a good bet.” Manny yawns. “Anyway, Ms. Collins got up to leave and knocked over Tacey’s purse. Those stupid pills flew halfway across the room.”
“Okay, but not that many people saw, right?”
“Eh, I wouldn’t say that. Aimee was the one who picked them up—she tried to be discreet, but Candace was there. It might have been okay if Tacey hadn’t freaked out, which made everything really obvious.”
It probably wouldn’t have mattered. Candace is more effective than an emergency broadcast system.
I’m so shocked I can barely find the words, but Manny doesn’t look so shocked. He picks his thumbnail and looks at the wall like none of this is unexpected.
“Manny, did you know about this?”
He shrugs. “I figured. She’s been antsy, running a hundred miles an hour and outperforming everyone. Plus, Tara hates taking her meds. What, you didn’t even suspect?”
“No.” Because I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve been so wrapped up in fixing the world that I didn’t see. She needed me. My friend needed me, and I was too busy playing vigilante games to notice.
“So the whole school knows?” I ask, voice cracking.
“It’s a little bigger than that. Check out the website.” Manny rolls away from the computer and stretches out on his bed, face-first. “They got it down, but Connor sent me this screenshot. It was already over fifty thousand visits then. It’s on the screen if you want to look.”
I don’t. The three steps to that computer feel like three miles. But I sit down anyway. Adjust the monitor so I can see the image. Wish I could burn it out of my eyes just as fast as I take it in.
>
It’s a social profile page, but it’s not Tacey’s. It’s her name and picture, but the rest of it looks like it’s been peeled off of someone else altogether. The background is graffiti-embossed black, with cannabis leaves in the corners. The Things I Dig section includes flying and tripping, and there’s a life quote about how good and free she feels with the needle deep inside. And the pictures? Heroin, crack, every awful thing you can imagine.
I close my eyes, revolted. “That’s…that’s not Tacey.”
“She’ll survive it. It’ll be all right,” Manny says, his words muffled by his pillow and slurred by his exhaustion.
I shake my head because he’s wrong. Nothing will be right now. It’s my fault this happened. This will affect everything. Her position in the antidrug group. Maybe even her spot on the yearbook committee. All the things that matter to her—I stripped them away. Guilty or not, she would have never been a target if picking her wouldn’t have hurt me.
And no one would have picked her if I had swallowed my fear and turned myself in. If I had done the right thing.
I’m back to Nick’s words. Back to finding the place where it all went wrong. I don’t even know if I’ll ever find it. Every layer I peel back reveals a new stain.
Like best friends keeping big secrets.
I square my shoulders and close down the screen on Manny’s window.
“Manny? I need to tell you something.”
He’s quiet and still on his bed. I stand up and walk over, nudging the mattress with my knee.
“Manny?”
The mattress makes a rustling noise, but Manny doesn’t move. He’s dead asleep. I look down to see a wad of papers sticking out from between the mattress and the box spring. It doesn’t look like the kind of thing a boy keeps under his mattress. It’s graph paper. A thick stack of it folded in half. Curiosity picks at my fingers, whispers in my ears.
I shouldn’t.
God, I know I shouldn’t. But one more soft nudge of my knee and the papers fall out, unfolding like an invitation.
I look down at the kind of evidence that warrants expulsion. Maybe worse. Names, payment amounts, student ID numbers. And the worst part of all. Job descriptions. It isn’t much. Tardies for Dean Jiminez. English and history for Shawna Welsh. Which means he didn’t just mess with attendance. He somehow did grades too.