The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (334 page)

“What was I thinking last night?” Josh said into my hair. “No pizza is good enough to make me miss this.”

“Yep. Pretty dumb move if you ask me.” I smiled, turning to the side so I could see him better. I felt a pang when I saw the guilt written all over his face. “I’m just kidding. It’s okay. It was just one date. Actually, it wasn’t even a date, it was a hang. You missed one datelike hang. No big.”

Surprisingly, I realized I actually meant what I was saying. Josh had told me he was sorry so many times over the past twenty-four hours that
I
was starting to feel guilty for being annoyed about it in the first place—not to mention more than a little clingy. Couldn’t the guy go out for food with his friends without me getting all jealous about it? I wasn’t the only one he was leaving behind when he went off to school. Pretty soon the guys he hung out with every day wouldn’t be there. Every time I thought about not seeing Noelle and Ivy every day, it made my spirits sink.

“One datelike hang too many,” Josh said under his breath.

He leaned down to kiss me and I looped my arms up and around his neck. We half-lay there like that and kissed and kissed and kissed until I forgot we were in the middle of a crowded room.

“Yeah! Take it
all
off!” Gage Coolidge shouted at us.

Josh and I broke apart and a bunch of people applauded, hooting and hollering and shouting more gross crap—enough to make me blush. I glanced at Josh sheepishly. Oops.

“I think we’re making people sick,” Josh said with a smirk. “Or possibly turning them on.”

“Either way, not my problem,” I said, even though my skin was on fire.

I leaned back into the crook of his arm again and sighed happily. This was definitely the most perfect moment of my week so far. I was not going to think about Billings or Thursday’s board meeting or what the future might hold for me and Josh. I wasn’t even going to think about MT, about whom Josh was still in the dark. I wanted to tell him,
but after the awesome meeting with Carolina that afternoon, the last thing I wanted was a lecture about how I shouldn’t trust anonymous texters. I’d get around to telling him eventually. Just . . . not tonight.

Tonight I was just going to sit here and think about this. About us. About how his arm was warm on top of mine, how I could hear his heartbeat through his polo shirt, how he smelled of evergreen soap and paint and cherry lollipop.

Lazily, happily, my eyes scanned the room full of students, none of whom could possibly have any clue what it felt like to be as content as I was at that very moment. Some of them gazed at us dreamily, others were oblivious to my existence, and some, like Gage, were still mocking us from afar. But I didn’t care. Everything was utterly peaceful and perfect.

Until suddenly, abruptly, my eyes fell on Graham Hathaway.

He stood diagonally across the room, alone, and he was staring right at me. Glaring, really. His hands were tucked under the lapels of his suede jacket and he had dark circles under his eyes, as if he either hadn’t slept in days or had suddenly discovered hard drugs. He held my gaze and kept right on glowering until my heart felt like it was going to pound out of my chest.

But what the hell was his problem?

Then Missy and Paige walked over to him from the Coffee Carma counter, and Missy handed him a coffee. All the little hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Paige was
still
on campus. And now the gruesome twosome from lunch yesterday had morphed into a gruesome threesome.

“What’s she doing here?” Josh asked, following my gaze.

“Who knows,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’m starting to think she has no life.”

Graham chatted with the two girls happily as they sipped their drinks. Just like that he was back to being smiling, jovial Graham. He pointed to a table being vacated by a klatch of teachers, and the three of them made a beeline for the coveted seats. I watched them for a while as my pulse began to cool, wondering if I’d just imagined it. Wondering if he’d look my way again.

But he never did. And before long I found myself thinking I’d somehow imagined the whole thing.

Headmaster Hathaway was starting to squirm. Clearly I’d been right about him not wanting Billings rebuilt after all, because as soon as things started to sort of swing my way at the board meeting, he’d begun clearing his throat at odd intervals and he kept shifting his weight in his chair, making it squeak and squeal.

Oh well,
I thought, feeling betrayed as I watched him tap his pen against the long table behind which he and the rest of the board members sat.
Sucks to be you.

When we’d first arrived, my hopes had not been high. Probably because the first people I’d seen upon entering the Great Room at Mitchell Hall were Missy, Paige, and her twin brother, Daniel, who appeared to have gathered an anti-rebuilding contingent near the front row. Plus, even though most of the student body was present, gathered behind me in chairs and along the walls of the room, neither Josh nor Noelle was there. Josh had told me he’d be stuck at
the library finishing a paper, and I hadn’t exactly expected Noelle to come, but it would have been a nice surprise. Still, I wasn’t about to let their absence distract me. I had a mission to accomplish here, with or without them. Over the past hour, not only had Carolina and I managed to answer each and every one of Mr. Hathaway’s objections, but we had already started to turn the crowd to our side. I credited Carolina’s charm and my seemingly bottomless bank account for the change in tide.

Of course, now Hathaway had brought out the big guns. Speaking at the podium was Mr. Thatcher Phillips, a representative from the county development committee, who had come armed with a laundry list of complaints he had just finished reading aloud. He reminded me of the creepy guy who played Mr. Potter in
It’s a Wonderful Life,
a movie I saw at least part of every Christmas season. He just had this air about him like his main goal in life was to suck any and all joy out of it.

“So you see, Miss Grant, Miss Brennan, all of these plans will need to be revised, which will surely mean weeks of additional work for your architect,” he said haughtily, folding up his list and tucking it into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. He pushed his bifocals up on his bulbous nose and folded his hands over his ample belly. “I’m afraid that means a delay to the start of the project of at least two months.”

Behind the long table on the dais, Mr. Hathaway smiled into his hand. Is it wrong that I kind of wanted to smack him? What no one seemed to understand was that two months was not an option. In two
days
the entire Billings community was going to be descending on Easton, expecting to see some ribbon cutting. There was no way this weekend was going by without me wielding a giant pair of scissors.

“Actually, we have the revised plans right here,” I said, pushing my chair back and standing. Mr. Hathaway sat up straight as Carolina handed me a hard blueprint carrier, which I brought up to the podium. “In both paper and digital format.”

Mr. Phillips’s waddle quivered and he appeared, for a moment, flummoxed. “Yes, well, we’ll still need to review these and the process could take—”

“I’m willing to pay the admittedly exorbitant fee to rush the documents through,” I said, smiling even though my heart was pounding nervously.

You’re a Lange,
I told myself.
You know you are. Make
them
believe it.

“And since your very own staff architect oversaw the drawing up of these plans yesterday, I can’t imagine there will be any objections to our starting the project this weekend, as scheduled, with his good-faith approval.”

I turned and smiled at the county’s architect, Jack Lagos, who sat just behind Carolina. He was handsome in an older, rugged kind of way, with his frayed jacket and chin scruff. Carolina had called him on Tuesday evening and he, like almost everyone else she met, had been unable to resist her enthusiasm. The two of them had worked with her design team all day on Wednesday, through the night, and most of today.

“Of . . . of course,” Mr. Phillips said. “If you’re willing to pay the fee and if Mr. Lagos approves . . . ”

“I do, sir,” Jack said, pushing himself halfway to standing. “You’re not going to find any fault with those plans, I assure you.”

“All . . . all right, then.” Mr. Phillips cleared his throat. “Then I have nothing further.”

As he turned back toward the dais, holding the blueprint roll, he looked at Mr. Hathaway and shrugged helplessly. I returned to our table as Carolina rose from her own chair. She surreptitiously gave me a very low high-five, then tugged on the lapels of her white linen jacket, which she wore over crisp jeans and a yellow T-shirt. It was amazing how she managed to look businesslike, casual, and pretty all at the same time.

“Esteemed members of the board, we have now competently answered each of your concerns, from the problem of privacy to the safety of the site to disruption of classes to the county’s admirable green initiatives,” she said firmly. “But if I might add one last point of interest?”

Mrs. Whittaker, my friend Walt Whittaker’s grandmother, leaned forward in her seat, folding her gnarled fingers together atop the table. “Go ahead, Miss Grant.”

Carolina paced out from behind our table, looking much like a chic lawyer from some procedural crime drama. “It’s no secret to any of us in the Easton community that our school has had some . . . setbacks over the past two years.”

There was much squirming and squeaking of chairs at this reference to our school’s serious run of bad luck, but no one said a word.

“Time and again we’ve seen our good name splashed in the headlines and dragged through the mud,” Carolina continued, pacing before the board. “Some of the things that have been written and said about this place are, unfortunately, true, but many of them are not. This has unfairly tarnished our image in the private school community, not to mention the world at large.”

At this point she turned dramatically to face the board. “I submit that the
Go Green!
experience will go a long way toward reversing this negative publicity trend and putting Easton back on the map as a progressive, forward-thinking, community-driven school where the faculty and staff care not only about the students, but about the environment as well.”

A few of the board members began to murmur with interest and the crowd rippled with excited whispers.

“Just think about it,” I put in, standing again. “Front-page photos, not of crime scenes, but of students pitching in together to rebuild something that was lost.”

“Exactly!” Carolina said, snapping her fingers. My chest welled with pride. “Headlines not about murder and mayhem, but about the county’s noble efforts to protect our environment, and Easton’s particular role in leading the fight.”

“We’ll be supporting not only green businesses, but local businesses as well,” I said, standing next to Carolina. “The opportunities for positive publicity are endless, and will cost the school nothing.”

“Not one cent.” Carolina smiled.

“Honestly? I think we’d all be fools to let an opportunity like this
one pass us by,” I said boldly, looking Headmaster Hathaway in the eye.

Behind me, Vienna and London let out a whoop, and the left side of the room—the side where most of the students were sitting—erupted in applause. If my MT was among them, I hoped he or she could tell how grateful I was to them for helping me score this huge victory. Without the mystery texter, I never would have known that Carolina existed. I grinned out at the crowd, and it was all I could do to refrain from taking a bow.

“All right, all right,” Headmaster Hathaway said, sitting forward and gesturing for quiet. “Enough with the propaganda, Miss Brennan.”

I felt the sting of his insult, but let it go. It was his last-ditch effort to make me seem foolish, and it wasn’t going to work. I could already tell by the smiles and the confident nods in my direction that we’d turned the board in our favor. Headmaster Hathaway was going down.

Mr. Hathaway took a deep breath and blew it out through his mouth, his chest deflating considerably.

“We will now put it to a vote,” he said reluctantly. “All in favor of allowing Miss Brennan and the people at
Go Green!
to go ahead with the Billings reconstruction as scheduled, say ‘aye.’”

There was a loud chorus of “ayes” from the board. The students cheered loudly. I think most of them were just psyched at the possibility of seeing their faces on TV, but that was enough for me. I suddenly couldn’t stop grinning.

“Those opposed?” Mr. Hathaway asked pointlessly. He looked up and down the dais as silence reigned.

“The ayes have it,” he said flatly. “Congratulations, Miss Brennan. I sincerely hope you know what you’re doing.”

The large hall erupted in applause. The headmaster stared me down from the front of the room as my friends gathered me in a group hug.

“Omigod, Reed! That was so awesome!” Amberly trilled.

Just as I stepped back, Paige, Missy, and Paige’s twin, Daniel, stormed down the aisle. Daniel passed so close to me his jacket brushed my hand. I recoiled like I’d been burned, his violent temper tantrums down on St. Barths all but seared into my memory.

Paige and Missy barreled on, but he stopped, looking me up and down like I was vermin. “You’re in way over your head, Podunk,” he spat. Then he yanked his jacket closed and followed his twin outside, letting the door bang shut firmly behind him.

Twilight was just descending on the Easton campus as I sat down on one of the many stone benches dotting the quad. The air was warm and scented with honeysuckle. It was the kind of evening that made me want to take a deep breath and just be.

Unfortunately, my cell phone had other ideas.

“Hello? This is Reed Brennan,” I said, answering the fifth call in as many minutes. As much as I wanted to cling to the high of our victory at the board meeting, the world wasn’t about to let me. My many bags, papers, and poster rolls slipped out of my hands and tumbled to the ground at my feet. One of the posters bounced off and came to rest under a nearby birch tree. I sighed and just left it there.