The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (34 page)

The Legacy. My conscience and my desire had been at war ever since dinner the night before and neither one had yet waved the white flag. I was not prepared for this. What was I going to say? What was I going to do? Somewhere in one of the rooms above, someone was practicing the violin. Something fast and manic. It didn’t help with the thinking.

“I was wondering if you would do me the honor of being my dinner guest on Friday night,” he said.

Wait. His what? Where was my plus-one invite? And, hold on, he’d already asked Constance to sit with him at dinner. What was he doing, throwing out these invites like they were bath water?

“Whit, we already sit together at dinner every night,” I pointed
out. A stiff breeze blew past us, filling my nostrils to bursting with the pungency of his evergreen-scented aftershave. I held my breath and tried not to cough.

Whittaker chuckled. “No, no, no. Not here. Off campus,” he said. “You see, Friday is my eighteenth birthday. I’ve been granted permission to dine off campus, and I’d like you to be my guest.”

There were so many things wrong with this proposal that I didn’t know where to begin.

“How did you get permission?” I said finally.

“My grandmother. She’s on the board of directors and she’s not above occasionally pulling the odd string,” he said with pride. “She’s granted you a pass as well. We don’t need to bring a chaperone.”

The word
chaperone
made me shudder.

“But, Whit, what about everyone else?” I said. “I mean, it’s your eighteenth birthday. You don’t want to spend it with just me.”

His expression told me that this was exactly what he wanted. This was very not good. Clearly Whittaker was even more serious about me than I had estimated. He could be here, on campus, ringing in his eighteenth year with a drunken party in the woods with Dash and Gage and the others, but instead he wanted to whisk me to some off-campus restaurant.

“Say yes, Reed. We’ll get dressed up; we’ll go for a drive. I know this incredible little Italian place in Boston—”

“Boston?” I croaked. I had never been to Boston. I had never
been to any city other than Philadelphia, and that was just for one day on my eighth-grade field trip.

“Of course. You didn’t expect me to celebrate my eighteenth at one of the three decent restaurants here in Easton,” he said with an incredulous exhale. He reached out and caught my hand in both of his, looking me deep in the eye. “Say you’ll come.”

My heart actually responded to that plea. He sounded so sincere, how could it not? So there I was. I could say no and crush this sweet guy and also obliterate any chance of being asked to the Legacy and seeing Thomas, or I could say yes, go to some fancy restaurant in Boston, and keep the hope of seeing Thomas alive.

In the end, it was no contest, really. My conscience took a dive.

“Okay,” I said finally, nearly choking on my dry throat. “I’d love to.”

My entire life I had always found brushing my teeth to be a soothing activity. It was the perfect time to ponder the events of the day in privacy. To go over the things I might have said or done differently. To pat myself on the back for the things that had gone well. Unlike the parents of every other kid on the planet,
my
parents had often been forced to yell at me to
stop
brushing my teeth. Fifteen minutes would pass while I zoned out. Half an hour. It was amazing I had any enamel left.

That night I was somewhere into my second quarter of an hour, my mouth full of foam, when the bathroom door banged open behind me. I nearly choked on my own spit.

“How’s it going?” Natasha asked, folding her arms over her sizable chest and leaning against the doorjamb. She glared over my shoulder at my reflection in the mirror.

I leaned over the basin and emptied my mouth into the drain, then slowly filled the cup with water and tipped it into my mouth. After sloshing it around for a half a minute, I spit again. Let her wait. She was only waiting for nothing.

“Fine,” I said finally, wiping my face with a hand towel. “I had a great day, how about you?”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking,” Natasha said. “What have you found?”

Let’s see: a refinery’s worth of sugar, evidence of serious psychological self-abuse, and some Skinamax-worthy photos. Oh, and a secret, hidden computer with a password-protect program.

I folded the towel, hung it on the towel ring next to the sink, and turned around, heaving an exasperated sigh. “Nothing,” I said. “I’ve found nothing.”

I might have told her about the computer if I had thought that the information would get her off my back, even for a moment, but I had a feeling it would have the exact opposite effect. I had a feeling it would only make her turn the screws tighter. And they were plenty tight already, thank you.

“You can’t be serious,” she said as I brushed by her into the room. “You really expect me to believe that after a week and a half you’ve found nothing?”

“You can believe whatever you want to believe,” I told her, sitting blithely on my bed. “This country was founded on that principle.”

Natasha clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. She pressed the heels of her hands into her forehead like I was giving her a migraine. Good. She deserved mind-splitting pain. That’d teach her to blackmail me.

“What’s the problem here, Reed?” she asked me. “Was I not explicit enough when I told you exactly what I would do if you didn’t help me?”

“No. You were plenty explicit, thanks.
Star
magazine explicit,” I told her. “The problem is that if they are hiding anything, they’re hiding it very well. This is Noelle we’re dealing with here, remember? You really think she’s going to leave incriminating evidence out on her bulletin board?”

Natasha unclenched a bit at this. Not even she could argue with that logic.

“Just . . . be patient,” I said, wondering how long, exactly, it would take a person with zero computer experience to crack someone else’s password. I picked up my copy of
Beowulf
, which we were reading for English class—at least, everyone else was, while I had yet to have time to crack it—and leaned back on my denim husband. “I’m doing everything I can.”

I settled in and opened to page one.

“Well, do it faster,” Natasha said.

Then she flicked off the light before I could get past the first word.

After two full mornings of typing in everything I knew about Ariana into her password screen and getting nowhere, I was at a complete loss. I needed help. I needed someplace to start. I needed to pick someone else’s brain and get some ideas.

But how was I supposed to do that without anyone knowing
why
I was doing it?

This was the question bouncing around in my brain as I walked into the library one rainy afternoon. I had a plan, but I had very little confidence that it would work. Unfortunately, it was all I had. I knew that the junior class had a huge history exam coming up and half of Billings and Ketlar would be there studying. I made a beeline for the very back of the stacks, where I knew the girls from my dorm normally set up camp.

Bingo. At one table I had found Kiran, Taylor, Rose, London, Vienna, Josh, and Gage. They were all bent over their books, some taking notes, others whispering to each other in low tones. There was a single empty chair at the end of the table.

I took a deep breath. Here went nothing.

I walked over and sat down with a frustrated huff, placing my books on the table. Everyone looked up, happy for a distraction.

“What’s the matter, Reed?” Taylor asked.

“Nothing. It’s just this current events paper for modern civ,” I said. “I have to write eight pages on that whole hacking scandal.”

Kiran and Taylor exchanged a look. They weren’t buying it. There was no way they were buying it. And why would they? It was a complete fabrication.

“You mean that thing at that high school in New York?” Josh said.

“I heard about that!” London put in, excited. “Someone hacked into all the students’ computers and posted a list of all the illicit Web sites they were looking at. So scandalous.”

“Those poor bastards had all their porn deleted,” Gage said. “That’s not scandal. It’s a crying shame.”

“Well, there are about a million articles on it and it’s ridiculous trying to sift through it all,” I said, lifting out a Xeroxed page. “Plus it’s scary. Did you guys know that ninety percent of high school students use something obvious for their password? Like a boyfriend’s name or a birthday?”

Everyone just stared at me. Was I the worst actress ever, or what?

“I would never use something that lame,” Gage said.

“Yeah. You just spell curse words backward,” Josh said with a laugh.

“Dude!” Gage complained, whacking him with the back of his hand.

“I would never use anything that obvious,” Rose said, turning the page in her history book. “I just use random characters.”

So not what I wanted to hear. If Ariana was using random characters, I was screwed.

“How do you remember them?” Vienna asked.

“I just force myself,” Rose said. “I repeat it over and over until it’s in there. Four, dash, dollar sign, eight,
J
, star. Four, dash, dollar sign, eight,
J
, star.”

“Nice one! Now we all know your password!” Gage said.

Rose turned beet red. “Well, that’s not my password
now.
”

“Yes, it is! Yes, it is!” London trilled, bouncing up and down in her chair, her long earrings slapping her in the face. “We know your password! We know your password!”

“Oh, yeah? Repeat it back to me,” Rose said flatly.

London cleared her throat and looked at the ceiling. “Four, dash, dollop of . . . A . . . J . . .” Everyone laughed and London lost steam, slumping. “Crap.”

“It’s okay,” Vienna said, patting her back. “It’s not like Rose has anything good on her computer.”

Rose shot Vienna a
bite me
look and got back to studying.

“Personally, I always use song titles,” Kiran said, lifting a shoulder. “I think a lot of people do that. Like book titles or movie titles or poems . . . CDs—”

Titles. That sounded like something Ariana might do. I made a surreptitious note in the margin of the Xeroxed article.

“You know, Reed, I read somewhere that some huge percentage of people actually write down their password and keep it
somewhere close to their computer,” Taylor said. “They jot it down on a special day in the calendar or something. You know, just in case they ever forget it.”

“Really?” I said, intrigued.

“Yeah. I bet I could find the article if you want me to,” Taylor said. “I save
everything.
”

Like I didn’t know that already. Of course, she had no way of knowing how much time I had already spent under her bed.

“Don’t worry about the paper too much,” Kiran said, returning to her own work. “Mr. Kline has a very lax grading system.”

“There’s a theory going around that he only reads the first page of everything anyway,” Josh said.

“That’s good news,” I said, feigning relief.

Everyone returned to their books and I realized that the conversation was closed. There was no way to open it again without looking completely obvious. But at least they had given me a few places to start. Now all I had to do was put these new theories to the test.

I should have been studying for my French quiz. I should have been taking notes for my history test. I should have been reading
Beowulf
. I should have been asking Kiran if I could raid her closet for an outfit to wear out to dinner with Whit. I should have been doing any one of these things. Instead I was at Natasha’s desk with the Easton Academy website open on her computer, bent over a notebook, brainstorming potential passwords for Ariana’s computer.

Taking a cue from Kiran, I had started scouring old issues of the Easton literary magazine, the
Quill
, online. If Ariana’s password
was
in fact a title, then I figured it might be the title of one of her very own poems. Unfortunately she had published at least three and sometimes as many as seven poems in each and every issue of the
Quill
, going back to her freshman year. My list of poem titles already filled an entire page.

I sighed and closed the window containing last year’s final
Quill
issue and double clicked on the latest one—published only last month. I knew that Ariana had at least five poems tucked
inside its pages. I opened the table-of-contents page and jotted down the titles:

“Transparency”

“Endless Fall”

“The Other”

“Scarecrow”

“The Dark Age”

Ariana was a very lighthearted, carefree girl.

Suddenly the door to my room opened, sending my heart into unhealthy spasms. It only got worse when Ariana walked in, followed closely by Noelle and Taylor. I slapped my notebook closed and reached for the laptop’s screen, but realized it would look far too suspicious. Besides, they were already behind me. Noelle placed a paper bag on the floor near the wall. I had a feeling I didn’t want to know what was in it.

“Using Natasha’s computer, huh?” Noelle said, leaning both hands on the back of the chair so that I tipped slightly backward. “Hope you asked or she might turn you in to the Gestapo.”

“Looking at the
Quill
, are we?” Ariana said, hovering behind me. “Getting ideas?” she asked, her eyes dancing.

My heart completely stopped. For a second my life flashed before my eyes. She knew what I was doing. She was actually psychic.

“Ideas? For what?” I choked out.

Ariana smiled slowly. “Well, your writing, of course. I know you’re a big reader. I always wondered if you might be a writer as well.”

“Oh! Right!” I said, all the blood in my body rushing to my face. Of course she didn’t know what I was doing. How could she
possibly? “I
am
a writer. I’m actually thinking about joining. You know, the
Quill
.”