Down to the Liar (6 page)

It’s D-day, and the only ones who know it are me, Tog, and the mark. I contacted Tog last night after my talk with Sam about changing the error message. I also sent another Facebook message to the mark saying that the web link I’d sent before was broken, that I’d fixed it and it was set to expire by noon today. The classic shutout: a ticking clock. The bait is ten times more tempting if it’s a limited-time offer. But it’s risky. I won’t be able to use the same trick on the mark twice. Hopefully, I won’t have to.

I’m not concerned about the mark at the moment, though. I’m standing outside a nondescript apartment building in Chicago’s March drizzle, waiting for a chance to make amends. The rain complements my mood, so I don’t mind it. And this time I’ve got an umbrella.

“What are you doing here?” Dani asks as she walks up to me.

It’s a fair question. I’ve been loitering outside her apartment for twenty minutes now waiting for her to come out, and I’m skipping school to do it.

“It’s raining,” I say.

“Is it.”

I hand her the umbrella, and she takes it without moving her gaze from mine.

“I’m not really any good at this,” I say, hating how awkward I feel.

She’s not smiling, but she’s not scowling, either. She seems curious to see where I’m headed with this. Well, so am I. I didn’t exactly come with a speech prepared.

“I need you. I mean, I know that you already know I need you. But the part you don’t know is that
I
know that I need you. I know it. I don’t say it. And I keep myself from asking for your help because I—because I’m afraid of needing you. Or rather, of admitting I need you and then losing you, too. So I don’t say it. But I do know it.”

Dani’s expression turns completely unreadable. Her guard is so good that I feel like I’m always knocking at the door with her, when, with most other people, I just open the door and waltz right in.

“Dani…” I feel like I should kneel or something, which is just weird. “Will you help me?” Pretty sure there should be a
please
in there somewhere. “Please?”

She doesn’t answer right away, so I keep going like an idiot. “I—I mean, obviously you’ve been helping me all along, and I’m grateful. I’m just officially, you know, asking—for myself. Ugh, damn it, I’m messing it all up.”

She smiles, shaking her head, and hands me the umbrella. “Get in the car. I will drive you to school.”

By 11:54, I’m tapping my foot and checking my phone every two seconds. Ms. Shirley knows something’s up. For one thing, I’m actually sitting in my chair instead of meandering the halls like I usually do during study hall. For another, my eyes are permanently glued to the clock above her desk.

Promptly at 11:55, the bell rings for fourth period. Everyone files out except for me and Ms. Shirley. There’s no fourth-period class in the computer lab, so I slip into the back and wait. If anything’s going to happen, it’ll be in the next five minutes.

Students do trickle in to check their email and such in between periods, so there’s enough cover for Skyla’s attacker to risk exposure if the lure of the pictures is tempting enough. I’m not sure what I’ll do if this doesn’t work. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility for it to fail miserably. The wire game is a difficult con under the best of circumstances, and these circumstances are more like a sack of fireworks than circumstances.

Murphy strolls in and finds me in the back. He nods when he sits in the chair next to me, but he doesn’t say anything. We’re both strung as tight as piano wire.

The door opens whisper soft. I see Ms. Shirley look up and down again. A student, then. Someone she’s used to seeing. But I can’t tell who it is right away. The monitors are blocking my view.

Then I see her. And it’s like taking a wrecking ball between the eyes.

Skyla.

My first thought is she’s going to ruin everything. Her attacker’s not going to show up if she’s sitting right in the middle of the room.

My second thought is much worse.

Murphy starts to stand, but I clamp my hand on his arm, stopping him with a look. He sinks back into his chair without a sound.

Something about this isn’t right. Something about this job has been irking me from the beginning.

I’m not strong like you or Bryn.

We watch as she pulls up the Facebook account, as she navigates to the message I sent with the honeypot URL, as she clicks the link that leads to nowhere. We watch as she tries to destroy herself.

“What the hell?” Murphy murmurs.

I stand and walk slowly to Skyla. She’s facing away from me, so she doesn’t see me at first. When she does finally catch sight of me, she jumps up and makes a break for the door. Murphy blocks her exit, and she whirls to face me.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Ms. Shirley asks from her desk.

“She deserves it,” Skyla says. “She’s a conniving slut. She doesn’t deserve him.”

I keep my voice as calm and nonthreatening as possible. “Who deserves it?”

“You can’t make me say her name. I know your tricks.”

Her eyes are wild, and…different. It’s like she’s seeing me and not seeing me at the same time. She recognizes me, but she’s not acting like Skyla.

“Please, tell me. Who deserves it? Who are you talking about?”

Murphy’s face is ashen, and I’m sure mine is just as bloodless. Something is very, very wrong here.

“Skyla Wood-bitch. She’s just using him. She’s a bad, bad girl. She needs to be locked in the dark. She needs to die.”

She pulls a razor from her bag and slashes at us with it. Murphy and I jump back. She manages to snag Murphy’s forearm anyway. A trickle of blood drips down to his hand, but he ignores it. Instead he leaps forward, grabbing her wrist. But then Ms. Shirley hurtles into the mix and hijacks the razor from Skyla’s grip.

Skyla passes out in Ms. Shirley’s arms. Sort of. Her eyes are still open, but she doesn’t seem to be seeing any of us.

“You can let go, Murphy,” Ms. Shirley says. “Can you please get the dean?”

He leaves, and I stand there shaking like a leaf, trapped in visions of somebody else’s blood, somebody else’s vacant eyes staring up at me.

“Julep.” The emphasis in Ms. Shirley’s voice leads me to believe she’s said it more than once.

“Yes?”

“Are you okay?”

I shake my head. “I’m fine.”

“Please have a seat. And breathe for me, okay?”

I do as she says, though I have no conscious thought of locating a chair.

“What happened?” she asks.

I tell her the whole story from front to back. I don’t leave out anything. All the names, dates, and places. I’ll have to tell it again to the dean, and probably the police officers, and maybe some kind of social worker.

But I actually don’t mind. This is beyond my ability to help. I can’t fix this. I can’t fix this for her. I’m going to have to give her a refund.

The incongruous thought sparks a laugh. It’s small and hysterical, and nothing about this situation is funny, but it comes out anyway. And to be honest, I much prefer it to the tears I can feel hovering like an anvil in the back of my throat.

The rest of the day is a blur of interviews, debriefings, questions and answers that go around and around and nowhere at the same time. And all I can think is that she was right in front of me the whole time, begging for me to help her. And I didn’t hear it. I wasn’t listening.

When Mike finally manages to pry me free from the chaos, he drives me back to his house in silence.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” is the only thing he says to me, for which I’m profoundly grateful. He gets me, I’ll give him that.

But before I crawl into bed, knowing the terrible nightmares I’m going to have, I kneel on the floor and offer up the first real prayer I’ve ever said.

…Our Father, I pray that through Your intercession of St. Nicholas, You will protect the children…

The whole school is still on fire with gossip Monday morning. A lot of heads are turned toward me, but nobody’s asking me anything. I almost skipped, but when Dani showed up this morning to drive me, I was too grateful to see her to play sick.

Bryn looks wrecked and Murphy has hardly left her side all day. He walks her to and from all her classes, which is sweet. I actually try to think of a person who owes me a favor that I like enough to force them to walk me to and from all my classes, but I can’t think of anyone. So I walk the halls alone.

When I saw Bryn before school, she told me about the crates and crates of journals they found in Skyla’s room, all of them filled with half normal diary entries, half jumping-off-the-crazy-train entries, which proved that Skyla’s mental illness has been years in the making.

I’m not sure how no one’s caught on before now, but Bryn’s guess is that Skyla’s dissociative state manifested only when she was alone or felt threatened. Which means she must have used her laptop at Garrett’s house to access that first link when he wasn’t around.

The really odd thing is that Skyla has no memory of the times when she’s in demon-Skyla phase. She can’t even physically see the diary entries her crazy half wrote.

I can’t imagine how terrifying all this must be for her. But Garrett’s being a champ about it. He’s staying with her in the hospital until her parents show up. If they show up.

After school, Murphy and Bryn meet me in the student parking lot. Murphy leaves Bryn in my care while he wraps up some loose ends with the tech club. He’s agreed to disable the spyware for me, minus the one on the dean’s computer, so I can sleep at least a little better at night.

“How are you holding up?” I ask Bryn as Murphy heads off toward the computer lab. Her eyes trail after him in a bereft sort of way.

“I’m all right,” she says without looking at me. “I’m just worried about Skyla.”

“I am, too,” I say.

She arches an eyebrow at me, finally turning her head my direction.

I glower back, though not as heatedly as I might under normal circumstances. “She may not be my BFF, but I care about my clients’ well-being.”

“You saying that is not the strange part,” Bryn says. “The strange part is that I believe you.”

I watch classmates chatting around their cars, joking and bickering and bonding like nothing has changed. Like Skyla isn’t broken. Like Tyler isn’t dead.

“What happens now?” I ask, though I don’t want to know.

Bryn fidgets with her bag strap, shifting her weight uncertainly. “Now she goes through a ton of tests and a lot of therapy, and hopefully, she can come out of this in one piece. But she’ll have the best help money can buy.”

“The best help would be her parents’ support,” I point out.

“Like I said. The best help money can buy.”

We stand in glum silence for a moment, and I think of last October and all the ways we sabotage ourselves and the people we love.

“Do you think we’re doomed to repeat our parents’ mistakes?” I ask out of nowhere. I’m not the heart-to-heart type, and even if I were, I wouldn’t do it with Bryn, of all people. But it’s too late now.

To her credit, though, Bryn doesn’t immediately smack me down. She actually thinks about her response before answering, which just shows how distraught she is. “I think we’re doomed to make our own mistakes, whether they relate to our parents or not.”

“Great,” I say. “So we’re doomed
and
it’s our fault.”

She actually smiles at me. A half of one, but I’ll take it. It’s a rare feat to make Bryn smile.

“Want a coffee?” I ask.

“You paying?” Bryn snaps back. She’s already starting to sound more like her old self.

I start moseying in the direction of the Ballou. “Well, I’m officially broke now, since Skyla’s in no position to pay me for the job I didn’t quite do, and Tog’s still expecting his fee.”

Bryn bumps me with her shoulder in an almost friendly way. “You did make the posts stop,” she says quietly. And I nearly trip over the thank-you behind her words.

To distract myself from the surreal feeling of Bryn being nice to me, I change topics. “I probably owe Garrett an apology. I called him a psychotic, abusive loser.”

She rolls her eyes. “He’ll get over it. Besides, he has bigger problems right now.”

I push back thoughts of all the people who have left me when I say, “Skyla’s lucky to have him.”

Bryn shrugs. “He loves her,” she says, as if it’s that simple.

I shake my head. “People say ‘love’ like it’s the answer to every question, but love is just another wire game. It sets you up with a tale about something that doesn’t exist. Then it shuts you out, just to drive you crazier for it. The second you go all in, it takes you for everything you’re worth, leaving you with nothing.”

Bryn stops walking and turns a sulfuric glare on me. “Bullshit,” she says.

I blink at her in surprise. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard her swear.

She tosses her head. “You think because you can manipulate people that you know everything there is to know about love?”

I never said I knew everything about anything, but she’s waiting for an answer.

“Maybe I don’t know everything about love,” I admit. “But I do know that it usually causes the problems I end up having to fix.” Like hypersuspicious fiancés, for example. Or my own ruined heart.

Bryn’s expression morphs into something that looks suspiciously like pity. But she lowers her voice so I’ll listen.

“Murphy buys me mint-chocolate-chip-flavored gum every time he sees it, because I once said I liked it. I have an entire desk drawer at home full of gum now. I open it sometimes just to look at the piles and piles of gum he’s given me over the last few months. Because
I
know what love is, Julep Dupree. And it’s not some two-bit con.”

I drop my gaze to the sidewalk. The sad thing is, I envy her.

She storms up to the door of the Ballou, her heels clicking on the pavement. She grabs the handle but turns back to me before pulling it. “Maybe Tyler’s death made you jagged-edged and bitter. But love didn’t kill him just to piss you off. And if you really believe that crap you just said, then you didn’t care about him at all.”