7 Clues to Winning You (11 page)

I steadied myself and tried to focus on my idea rather than where Luke’s eyes had just gone. “My plan,” I said, “is to take the Senior Scramble underground. With your journalistic integrity and experience with
Buried Ashes
, you become the communication hub. We set up a private forum with anonymous members. The juniors sign up with fake names. We’d be the only ones who knew everyone’s real identity. People would drop off the scavenger hunt items at a secret drop-off point. Or maybe just upload pictures of the item. But you’d verify each one and send the information for the
contestant’s next item. Then you could update stats on the forum so everyone knows who’s in the lead and post reports on the status of the hunt. It’d almost be like journalism. You’d be sort of a war reporter. It’s not a replacement for
Buried Ashes
, but at least it’s something.”

Luke pursed his lips together for a few seconds. “Why can’t everyone just register under a fake name without using their real identity at all?”

I stepped an inch closer to him. “Because there wouldn’t be a way to keep someone like, oh, let’s say … my father or Vice Principal FINKler, excuse me, I’m terribly sorry, I mean Hinkler, from creating a profile.” I caught a flicker of amusement crossing Luke’s face when I insulted the VP. I liked it.

“They could easily sabotage the hunt or set a trap for the other contestants,” I explained. I knew it was possible to sabotage the hunt because I had thought about doing that myself, last week. “We even could have each junior hand you a pencil or a scrap of paper or something the day after they sign up to prove that he or she really was that person who’d applied.”

“Not necessary,” Luke said. “I have a program to track IP addresses. It’s accurate down to the latitude and longitude of the router. I can check the locations against the student directory.” He still looked unconvinced, though. “Won’t the winner’s identity be blown when they get the prize?”

“The seniors would hold a fake drawing for the exact same prize,” I said. “You guys could call it a gift to the junior class in lieu of the scavenger hunt. The winner of the hunt becomes the winner of the fake drawing, obviously.”

“And your dad doesn’t have to go back on his solid-gold word. He gets to stay respectable as principal.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if Luke was being sarcastic or not, but I answered him with the truth. “Exactly.”

He shifted his weight and nodded thoughtfully. “I’m not sure the entire junior class would be willing to risk suspension.”

“We’ll be the only people who know the players’ real identities. If we don’t tell, no one else can know.”

“No offense, Blythe,” Luke said, “but my trust in you isn’t exactly rock solid.”

Crap. I hadn’t considered that. I’m trustworthy, and I automatically assumed Luke would see it. How naive of me. “Okay,” I said. “How about this? I don’t have to know anyone’s real name. You’d be the only person who knows. If you don’t tell, then nobody gets caught.” Luke said nothing but appeared more satisfied. I noticed that his rosy lips were parted slightly, and I could see his bone-white teeth behind them. He must have seen me staring because he snapped his mouth shut.

I continued. “But there’s one condition: if we get discovered, I take the full blame. I become you. I’ll say that I’m the only person who knows the identities. I won’t reveal them, obviously, because I can’t. I’ll deny that you were involved at all. And don’t even think about getting all chivalrous or being some tough-guy hero here because this is non-negotiable. I won’t jeopardize your graduation.”

Luke tapped a rhythm on the steel locker door. “Principal Mac would have to suspend his own daughter. How would that look for him?”

“I don’t care about getting suspended, and I don’t care how it would make him look,” I said, surprising even myself. “My sole objective is to get the hunt going again.”

Luke reached up and cradled his jaw with one hand. His index finger rubbed against the light stubble on his cheek. He studied my face. “I just don’t see what you’d get out of it. What’s in it for you? Credit for bringing back the hunt?”

Don’t hide,
I told myself.
Don’t mask the real reason with some flowery, fake adornment. Let him see.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to start over here. But I can’t start over until I undo the damage I’ve done. I have to take care of that first.” I stood there, open and honest. I let Luke Pavel scrutinize me. I wanted to know if I’d managed to change his assumptions about me. I wanted to know if he thought I held potential.

The bell rang.

Luke slapped once on the steel locker. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and strode off into one of the classrooms.

I lingered there, knowing I was already late for homeroom. There’d be a tardy on my report card. An imperfection. A flaw.

I was shocked at how little I cared.

I finally got moving. As I turned into the hallway of the junior wing, I passed Cy and Jenna heading out. Jenna was wearing her puffy hooded coat over her outfit of a tartan pleated miniskirt with striped leggings. Cy was wearing his black army coat with black pants, but that was basically what he wore all the time. “Where are you guys going?” I asked.

“Ditching,” Cy said. His shoulders were slack and his
hands were deep in his pockets. He didn’t have his normal impish countenance.

Jenna looked at Cy but spoke to me. “Told you he’d get in trouble for lunch yesterday. For the yogurt? He got two weeks of detention. He watches his little sister after school. Now his mom will have to rearrange her shift at work, and her boss is a dick.” Cy shot a look at her, telling her to shut up.

“What?” I cried. “Cy, you were defending me! Did you tell my dad that?”

“We saw the vice principal and the lunch monitor, not your dad,” Jenna answered. “Just now.”

“Did you at least tell them that the guy had been throwing food at me first?”

Jenna shook her head, no. The sideways glance she gave Cy told me that she didn’t quite agree with keeping silent.

“We’re not snitches,” Cy said. He circled Jenna’s shoulders with his arm and tugged her along to walk with him.

To hell with that,
I said to myself. I decided to take a little detour to the main office. When I got there, I gave Gladys a slimy smile and knocked on my dad’s door. It was halfway open, and the smell of fresh coffee drifted through it.

“Come in,” he said. “Oh, Blythe. Hi.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “How come you’re not in class?”

I ignored his question. “You know how Cy Mason got detention for dumping yogurt on some kid’s head?”

He wove his fingers together and leaned forward on his desk. “Yes. Vice Principal Hinkler mentioned it just now. Why?”

“The reason Cy did it was because he was defending me.
That kid was throwing food at me and had nailed me in the chest with a Tater Tot covered with ketchup. All over my clothes.”

“Someone was throwing food at you?”

“Yes. Some jerk with a neckless head like a Weeble. His whole table thought it was just hysterical.”

Dad’s eyebrows squeezed together. “I’m sorry about that, honey. You should have said something yesterday.”

“Well, I’m saying something now. So can you override the vice principal’s authority and cancel Cy’s detention? He babysits his sister after school.”

Dad picked up his mug of coffee and leaned back in his chair, which squeaked. “No, I’m sorry, I won’t do that.”

I couldn’t tell whether I was feeling disbelief, disappointment, or embarrassment. “
Won’t?
Why not?”

He sipped his coffee and didn’t answer me for a moment. “Because that’s not how it works. Cyrus Mason committed an act that requires discipline. It doesn’t matter why he did it. I’m sorry about his sister, but he should have thought of her before acting. Look, even if I had a problem with how Vice Principal Hinkler handled the situation, I wouldn’t override her authority. Student discipline is her jurisdiction. I trust her to make the right choices.”

I crossed my arms and glared at him. “And the jerk who threw food at me? He’s getting detention too, right?”

Another sip. Another silence. “I can ask the lunch monitor about it, but she never mentioned anything about it to VP Hinkler, as far as I’m aware, so I doubt she saw anything.”

“Isn’t my word good enough?”

He set his mug down on the Formica desktop in a spot that already had several coffee rings on it. Dad was nothing if not methodical and predictable.

Or so I thought.

“To be honest, Blythe, I think I’ve played all my favoritism cards with you on the Senior Scramble and the yearbook.”

“But the kid was—”

“I’m sorry, but that’s my decision.”

He shut me down, and that was that. He was perfectly fine with punishing Cy for something but not punishing some egghead moron for the same thing. Unbelievable. I’d always thought that my father was the epitome of reason and high standards. That he was more interested in justice and fairness than in his appearance and reputation. Apparently, I hadn’t been looking closely enough.

Oh, and guess what else? He didn’t even give me a late pass to homeroom.

If I had any doubt that it was the right thing to take the Senior Scramble underground, the rest of that day wiped it out. The snickers and pointing from my first day at Ash Grove were nothing compared to the treatment I got for ruining the scavenger hunt. Nobody called me “booger girl.” Instead, they called me “bitch.” They told me to get the hell back to Meriton. I sat alone in the cafeteria since Cy and Jenna ditched. I doubted even they would’ve sat with me. Grapes were on the menu, and all through lunch they whizzed by my head and pelted me in the back. In the hallways, people slammed into my shoulder as they passed. Knocked my books out of my
hands. They were sly enough to do it when no teachers were looking, too. What could I do? Go crying to daddy again? No way. I just took it. But I had no idea what I’d do if Luke said no. I wasn’t just embarrassed or humiliated; I was genuinely scared. Luke had to say yes.

I didn’t get an answer from him until after school. He called to me as I was hiking across the vast, pitted, asphalt wasteland otherwise known as the student parking lot. Most of the sludge-stained patches of snow had melted, but the sun still had the iron quality of winter.

“Blythe!” Luke called. “Hold up!”

When I heard him call my name, I immediately spun around. The way he half-jogged toward me showed that he was more athletic than he’d seemed at first. I caught myself doing the supermodel runway walk in his direction. I’m sure Mom would have advised me to be coy and wait for him, but that would’ve been phony.

When we finally reached each other, the crisp wind gusted and we both ran our hands through our blowing hair simultaneously.

“Okay, so I asked around,” he said, “and everyone thought it was a good idea, even if it came from you. You’re going to do the hunt yourself, right?”

“Of course. Don’t worry; there’ll be plenty of blood on my hands too. Lady Macbeth will have nothing on me.”

A quizzical look and a half smile were on his face for a fleeting moment. He swiped a strand of hair out from behind his wire-framed glasses and straightened them. “How do you know nobody’s going to turn you in?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I have to take that risk.”

“Well, if they turned you in, the hunt would be off again, so it doesn’t make sense that anyone would.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty sure some of the juniors would do anything to get me kicked out. Or just kicked. It was rough today.”

“I bet it was,” he said. “I’m not surprised, though. Ash Grove isn’t Meriton, Blythe. Once word gets around that the Senior Scramble’s back on because of you, it’ll die down.”

“Does that mean you’re in?” I asked. Luke winked and it shot right through me. His blond curls bobbed in the wind. My long hair whipped around my face. I let it go. There was no use in trying to keep it in place.

“I’m in if you’re in,” he said. “Two things, though. The list of items and clues for the hunt took forever to put together. The seniors who compiled it say they can tweak it to work online, but there’s no time to make a new one. They’re worried that if word gets out that the underground hunt is using the original list, they’ll be implicated. So if that happens, they’ll just say the list got stolen.”

“If they get in trouble, I’ll blow my cover and say I found it somewhere at school,” I told him.

I thought for a second he was going to object, but he just said, “Cool. And second, I can’t monitor the site twenty-four seven, so a couple of my closest buddies are going to take shifts. I’ll make it so that they can’t see any of the real identities.”

“Okay,” I said. “I trust them if you do.”

“I’ll set up the forum tonight. I figured we could incorporate that Sherlock Holmes ‘The game’s afoot!’ quote.”

Oh my God, Luke Pavel was actually a geek. In a kind of adorable way. He was also wrong. “That wasn’t Sherlock Holmes,” I said.

“Yes, it was.”

“Not originally.”

“Of course it was.” His tone clearly indicated that he thought I was an idiot.

“Oh yeah?” My tone told him to prepare for an intellectual smackdown. “Want to bet?”

He cocked his head slightly and narrowed his eyes at me. “Something tells me I shouldn’t. But my honor and masculinity say otherwise. What do you have in mind?”

Don’t do it,
I told myself.
Don’t say something even remotely personal or quasi-flirtatious, Blythe. Say something inane like a pack of gum or a dollar. Say a dollar, Blythe! A dollar!

“An apology,” I said. “An apology for being rude on Monday and calling me ‘kid’ and ‘McMussolini’s daughter.’” There was teasing in my voice and he could tell, so I pushed it a bit further. “And for hiding behind the First Amendment like a coward.”

His face was bright, his mouth half-open like a comma on its side. He crossed his arms and shifted his weight to one hip. “Fine. And what do I get if I’m right?”

I took a step closer to him and coyly mirrored his crossed-arm posture. “You’re not.”

He slid both hands into his back pockets. “Prove it.”

I pulled out my iPhone and opened the web browser.