High and Dry (23 page)

“Uh, come in,” I said.

Dad, looking for all the world like he'd brokered the happiness I was currently experiencing—and maybe he had, by letting Ellie stay for a while last night—said, “Lunch is ready, and Ryder's eating it, so you might want to skedaddle. Need any help getting downstairs?”

“I'm good,” I said. “Thanks. See you in five.”

I grabbed my cell phone off my desk and felt my chest expand with warmth at the sight of a text from Ellie.

It was time-stamped two hours ago: “Money's on the dresser, doll.”

I grinned and texted back: “First taste is free.”

Ellie, two seconds later: “Damn. I'm already hooked.”

Me: “That's how we get you.”

She'd clearly been keeping her phone close, waiting for me to text back; her responses were that immediate. It was strange, knowing I had the advantage now, probably for the first time since we'd started dating. I considered making her wait and second-guess herself. I could go downstairs for lunch, hang out with Ryder, and text her at random intervals throughout the day, just to show her how it felt to be at the emotional mercy of someone else.

Instead, I decided to call her. Why play games?

I'd be lying if I said the urge wasn't there, though. Just for a second. The urge to punish her.

“I'm your doll, huh?” I said when she picked up.

“I think I get why people smoke cigarettes now. I almost stopped for some on the way home,” she said.

“As long as they weren't cloves,” I said. “You'd have to join the drama kids.”

“You know what I remember most? Besides the obvious?” she asked, her voice low and secretive and pleased.

“What's that?” I asked, smiling, happy I'd manned up and called her. My groin was kind of happy, too. Her voice seemed different to me now, because I'd heard it having sex. I knew what it was capable of doing. Why would I want to miss out on the morning-after banter? We only had one chance to get it right.

“The way you draped your arm across my body afterward.”

I pictured us the night before, spent, Ellie on her back and me on my stomach beside her, our eyes closed, my arm curled over her slender waist as we surged and reached for breath.

“Yeah? Why's that?”

“It was like the safety bar on a roller coaster. Holding me in, but not too tight, just enough to keep me safe.”

“We operate twenty-four hours a day. No lines,” I said.

“Do you have plans tonight?”

“Yeah, I'm going to get to the bottom of the flash drive situation. Kinda boring, but I want to be done with it.” I didn't give her the details because I figured she'd disapprove and I didn't want to find out if I was right.

“Speaking of the flash drive, I meant to tell you something about Mr. Donovan.”

“Yeah, hot, talk Donovan to me,” I teased. “How do you mean?”

“He's a Ziploc washer. I saw him one time in the chem lab when I had to stay late, and he didn't know right away I was there. It was miserably awkward.”

Mom used to make me do the same thing with my bagged lunches in grade school. It embarrassed me, saving them and carefully turning them inside out to brush off the crumbs over the trash can while the other kids cavalierly tossed theirs away. Only people on tight budgets (or people like my mom, who remembered what it was like to be on tight budgets) would think to do such a thing. Donovan and my mom were part of the same tribe.

Ellie's memory jogged one of my own. I'd seen Donovan at the Goodwill store last summer when I'd dropped off a bag of clothes. He'd been browsing, finding a cheap pair of corduroys and a buttondown. His tweed jacket with the elbow patches didn't seem
like an affectation anymore. It seemed like the best he could find.

“He's not changing the grades for monetary gain,” Ellie finished. “If he's making a bonus, he's not keeping it. So. I think I was wrong about him.”

“Good to know,” I said. But it didn't actually make a difference to me, and I knew it wouldn't make a difference to BM, either.

Someone was going to pay tonight at the auction, and pay big.

Ellie and I reluctantly hung up after realizing we wouldn't be seeing each other until Monday. She was taking Jonathan to Maxwell Park and Wildwater Kingdom tomorrow as a reward from their parents for being eligible to skip a grade.

I hobbled down to the kitchen and saw that Ryder wasn't the only person at the table. He was sitting next to Deputy Thompson, and they were … getting along. It was weird. Granddad was there, too, looking friendlier than he had last night.

“I told them about Steve,” said Ryder, glancing at Thompson. “We can go after him for what he did to your foot, but it might be tricky because it's basically your word against his, or we can go after him for drug trafficking, which carries a minimum sentence of three years.” Ryder practically bounced in his seat. “Right?”

“Right,” said Deputy Thompson, digging into his turkey sandwich. Whatever qualms he'd once had about breaking bread in our household were long gone.

“Drug trafficking?” I sputtered. Cokehead-looking Steve was a cokehead! A book and its cover were never better matched.

“Yeah, he's Griffin's distribution for Agua Dulce. Steve's got
a whole team of dealers fanning out from there to Van Nuys. Tonight's the buy, under the 14 Freeway. It's a desperation sale, so Griffin can recoup some of his losses from the game. If the LSD's still bad, or has strychnine or something in it, we can't let it hit the streets.”

If I'd had any doubts about Ryder's loyalty, I didn't anymore. Griffin was the dangerous animal, not Ryder. Ryder was trying to put a stop to it all. He looked positively giddy at the thought of sending his brother away. I couldn't exactly blame him, but then, I'd never had a sibling try to force-feed me bad LSD. Being an only child had its perks.

I thought about Ryder and Griffin's mom then, and whether she knew about the Shakespearean-level betrayal about to go down under her own roof. Whether she would wonder about her own part in the story. Then I got to wondering whether Ryder blamed her as much as he blamed Griffin; she was supposed to protect him.

I wanted to join them on the bust, but it wasn't happening till after sundown, and I had another engagement. Also, Deputy Thompson didn't want to take any unnecessary risks; he needed Ryder along to point out the exact location of the meet, and to ID his brother, but I would get in the way. Besides, Mom and Dad wanted me to rest.

I did convince them to let me go to a “study group” in Quartz Hill a few hours later. After all, I only needed my right foot to drive.

We sat in folding chairs, in a circle in Granddad's vacant living room, like we were playing Russian roulette. I couldn't figure out which one of us was the triggerman, and then I realized that meant it was me. I didn't exactly cut an imposing figure, what with my black eye and my foot in a special shoe that made me lopsided, but maybe the combination made me seem either dangerous or crazy, and both worked to my advantage. The only man you don't mess with is the man who's got nothing to lose, because what he's got, he doesn't value. I had something they all wanted, but the dirty tests meant nothing to me, so I could negotiate all night and into next week if I had to.

Everyone was glancing nervously at me and then glancing away just as nervously, like they weren't sure if making eye contact would help or hurt their respective causes.

Mr. Donovan sat to my left, fidgety and anxious; Bridget sat to my right, huffy and puffy. Maria Posey sat directly across from me, looking like she was about to go clubbing afterward, or possibly like she already had gone clubbing and the evening had been a disappointment because the band member she'd messed around with the week before hadn't dedicated a song to her.

We couldn't start till BM arrived, though. I'd decided to give him the opening bid.

“Indulge my curiosity for a minute,” I said, twirling a pencil in my hand.

“We're here for one reason, and it's not to indulge your curiosity,
Charlie
,” snapped Maria Posey. Ever since I learned about Maria
Salvador's coma yesterday, I couldn't refer to either girl by their cutesy nicknames anymore. Calling Maria Salvador anything other than her real name diminished her and diminished what had happened to her, so from now on they were Posey and Salvador, the way they always should've been.

“Well, I don't happen to like the way you say my name,
Miz Posey
, so until you tell me what I want to know, nobody gets the flash drive. Got it? Start at the beginning. Tell me what happened to make you all go after this poor girl. Did you really want her out of the way just so you could get a damn concert solo?”

“The solo?” Posey sputtered. “The solo had nothing to do with it. It was always about the tests.”

Bridget snorted, and Posey sent her a death glare.

“It was a pleasant side effect, though, wasn't it?” I said. “How'd you find out about the tests?”

Posey sighed and flipped her hair. “She
told
me. She thought I'd be angry and, like, storm the next school board meeting with her, demanding Donovan's resignation.”

If Mr. Donovan was miffed at the lack of “Mister” ahead of his name, he gave no indication of it. He gave no indication of anything, least of all that he was here, now, in the room with us. No, he was someplace else entirely. The room he was in probably had soft classical music playing and an iced-tea dispenser in the corner, and no chance of pitting him against his students for the right to own a cover-up.

Posey had no right to share a name with the person she'd
damaged. Posey must have noticed her identity had shifted in my head, because she sought to recapture my attention. Head songbirds didn't like being dismissed. She wanted center stage even in this absurd venue.

“I'd just gotten my early acceptance letter from Barnard! It was like, are you kidding me? You want me to call the admissions office and confess? To something I didn't even do?”

“I get it,” I said, my words dripping with poisoned honey. “You had no choice but to put her in a coma. No other options whatsoever.”

“Hey,
West Side Story
Maria agreed; when I told her how many lives it would wreck, she came around and said yes to the payoff. She didn't feel right screwing other people over when it wasn't their fault, when no one else knew about Donovan. It was a bullshit move, changing her mind like that at the last second.”

“I get it,” I said again. “She couldn't be bought, so she had to be silenced. You drugged her.”

Posey wheeled on her former consigliere. “It was Bridget's idea!”

“
I said, ‘Get her drunk
,'” Bridget screeched. “I didn't want her
silenced
.”

Posey stood up. “It
wasn't
my fault.”

“You kissed her,” I said. “You shoved your sugary tongue into her mouth and forced her to go on the drug trip from hell.”

Mr. Donovan blinked a few times and opened his mouth to speak but then didn't say anything. He may have peeked through the door from his room to ours, but he wasn't ready to walk inside.

“I didn't mean for that to happen,” Posey insisted. “That wasn't supposed to happen. Ryder said—”

“Ryder said what?”

“That it goes away the second you fall asleep. He said being on LSD is like dreaming while you're awake, so once you
do
go to sleep, and start dreaming for real, it knocks the drug right out of you.”

“Or maybe it makes it so you
can't
sleep,” I snapped. “Ever think of that?”

“But then Ryder wouldn't give me any LSD anyway, so—”

“You're the one who called Griffin,” I said, suddenly realizing it.

“He knows how much the flash drive's worth. He wanted to help, didn't even charge me for the tab.”

“Because he didn't know if the LSD was any good. Are you following along here? Do you get how serious this is yet? He gave you a free tab because he needed to know if it was any good.”

“Well,
I
was fine. I tripped for a few hours and lay me down to sleep,” Posey insisted. “It wasn't a bad batch.”

“Have you even visited Salvador in the hospital? Because when I saw her, she hadn't slept in forty-eight hours. If she wasn't crazy before, she is now.”

“Why are you yelling at me? For the last time, it was
her
idea!” Posey turned and pointed a long, bony, shaking finger at Bridget.

“I said ‘Get her drunk and take embarrassing photos.' I
didn't
say give her LSD!”

“Embarrassing photos?” I asked.

“For leverage. Thought we could dummy up a Facebook page
and send the link to her college of choice so they'd reject her for underage partying. Something to force her to hand over the flash drive.”