The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (35 page)

If it hadn’t been for self-preservation purposes, I might have been alarmed that I was getting so good at lying.

“That’s great. We’d love to have you,” Ariana said with a small smile. She looked at Noelle, who was, for some reason, grinning as well. “What do you write?”

Now I reached over and clicked the laptop closed, mostly to stall for time. I hadn’t written anything creatively since first grade, when I’d written a short story titled “Animal Crackers” that had been universally panned by all the six-year-olds in my class.

“Uh . . . essays, mostly,” I said. “But lately I haven’t really had much time.”

Thanks to you guys,
my tone implied.
You and your chore list are so the reason my muse has gone missing.

“And you’re about to have even less,” Noelle said happily.

Everything inside of me slumped. “Why?”

“It’s the windows,” Taylor said, her expression bordering on apologetic. “They’re a disgrace.”

The windows? Didn’t Easton employ a maintenance staff for this kind of thing? “What windows?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“All of them,” Noelle said, taking my notebook out of my hands. I snatched at it, but she tossed it on my bed. She reached into the paper bag and produced a bottle of Windex and a stack of fresh rags. “And you can start with mine.”

“It’s going to rain,” Ariana said, turning her blue eyes toward the roiling sky the following evening. “We should hurry.”

I wrapped my scarf around my neck and scurried down the library stairs after her. The last hour had been spent listening to Ariana and her fellow
Quill
editors discuss the merits and flaws of various submissions for the latest issue. Since, in my moment of panic, I had expressed an interest, Ariana had invited me to come along and see what it was like. Now, having listened to these pretentious people tearing apart one another’s work, I could sum it up in three words:

Not for me.

Still, I was touched that she had asked me. It meant that she thought I was worthy of sharing one of her favorite things. If only she knew that whenever I had started scribbling in my notebook during the meeting I hadn’t been taking notes on the poems but jotting down new ideas for her password.

That morning, while I was supposed to be scrubbing floors, I
had searched Ariana’s room for a calendar or a date book, hoping to put Taylor’s theory to the test, but had found nothing. If Ariana had a planner, she kept it with her at all times. After that failure, I had spent half an hour rapidly typing in every potential keyword I could come up with, flinching at every creak of the floor and every chirp of a bird outside the window. None of them had worked. Now I was on a mission. I had spent too much of my time on this already. I had to crack that password, if only to be able to tell myself that I had succeeded.

So I had spent most of my classes brainstorming more and more potential passwords and writing them down in my trusty notebook. At this rate I was going to flunk out of school, but at least I would know whether or not the Billings Girls had gotten Leanne Shore thrown out. Yeah. It would all be worth it.

Ha.

“So, what did you think?” Ariana asked me as we speed-walked along the cobbled paths. “Did you enjoy it?”

“It was interesting,” I said in a noncommittal tone. “I don’t know if I feel comfortable tearing apart people’s poems, though.”

“Why?” Ariana asked.

“Well, those are their most personal thoughts and feelings. It has to take a lot to put that out there,” I said. “And you guys just sat there throwing out words like
pathetic
and
pedestrian
and
cliché
. That one girl was on the staff and you said she had no original thought. Right in front of her.”

“I know. It’s not easy,” Ariana said, shaking her head. She
hugged her notebooks to her chest and curled her slim shoulders in against the wind, her chin tucked down so it was almost hidden behind the books. “But if you’re going to put something on a page and ask people to read it, you have to be able to handle the criticism.”

“I guess,” I said as we reached the front door to Billings. “It just seemed mean.”

Ariana stopped and stared at the door. The sky chose that moment to open up. A fat raindrop plopped right in the middle of my forehead.

“Look, Reed, if you can’t handle it then maybe you shouldn’t come back,” Ariana said rather harshly. She placed her hand on the door handle and gripped hard enough for her knuckles to turn white.

“I never said I couldn’t
handle
it,” I told her. “I just—”

“No. You don’t have the stomach for it,” she said, looking me in the eye. “And that’s fine, but just don’t pretend to be something you’re not. It’s a waste of your time. And mine.”

Whoa. Okay. Where had
that
come from?

Ariana whipped open the door to Billings and strode inside. For a long moment I stood there, feeling as if I’d just been slapped. Who the hell did she think she was, talking to me that way? She didn’t know me well enough to know what I was or was not capable of.

Anger seared my skin as I walked into Billings after her. I couldn’t just let this one go without saying anything. First the implication that I had something to do with Thomas’s disappearance and
now this? What, exactly, was Ariana’s problem with me? As I entered the foyer, I expected her to be on her way upstairs, but the place was deserted. Then I noticed that all the lights in the common room off the entryway had been dimmed. I slowly pulled off my scarf and shook it out as I went over to inspect the situation. The half-dozen couches and chairs had been pulled together to face the big-screen TV, and there were all my dorm mates, gathered together with snacks and drinks, watching the latest Orlando Bloom movie.

It was a very cozy scene and, after all the stress of the past few days, looked like the perfect antidote to my two tons of stress.

“Hi, Reed,” Taylor whispered from her spot on the first couch. Kiran glanced over her shoulder and fluttered a wave. Rose looked up and smiled.

“Hey,” I replied, already scoping out a spot.

Across the room near the fireplace, Ariana was just settling in on an overstuffed pillow at Noelle’s feet. Noelle pulled a throw off the back of her chair and passed it to Ariana, never taking her eyes from the screen. She lifted an hors d’oeuvre—some kind of cracker, cheese, and black gunk combination—from a platter on the table next to her and placed the entire thing in her mouth.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Movie night,” Rose whispered. “We do it once a month.”

“Sweet,” I said.

“Not for you, glass-licker,” Noelle said in full voice. “You need to get back to the windows.”

I blinked. “But I finished the windows.”

“Yeah. And they have more streaks than my mom’s last dye job,” Cheyenne said.

“Go to it,” Noelle said. “Maybe you’ll be able to catch the last five minutes. But I doubt it.”

Everyone laughed. All fifteen of them. Fifteen times the humiliation. Ariana looked at me with those eerie eyes and smirked.

“Would you bring my bag upstairs for me, Reed?” she asked, holding out her messenger bag. “Thanks,” she added sweetly.

Then I saw Natasha was watching me, too, with a meaningful stare. I gave her a nod, feeling very
CSI
. There couldn’t have been a more perfect opportunity to get back to my project. Back to that computer. And little did Ariana know she had just handed me the one thing I might need to finally break her password wide open. Her bag. Which undoubtedly had her planner inside.

Ariana thought I had no stomach? Just watch me.

An hour later my eyes were dry, my neck was tight, and a headache throbbed at the back of my skull. I checked my watch every two-and-a-half minutes, wondering exactly how long it was going to take Orlando to find love. Did I have fifteen minutes or another hour?

“Okay, come on, Reed,” I said through my teeth, shaking out my hands.

I flipped to the next page in Ariana’s planner and turned it over on the floor at my side. Taylor’s theory had turned out to be both a boon and a curse. At first I had thought I would just check Ariana’s birthday and see if she had anything written there. That was before I realized that I had no idea when Ariana’s birthday was. So instead I had started to flip through page by page, figuring the special days would be obvious, that she’d have written
Dad’s birthday
on a certain date, or
Parents’ anniversary
somewhere in there.

I was wrong. Nothing was obvious in Ariana’s planner, other
than the fact that she was a doodler. A doodler and a jotter who brainstormed poems and titles in every available space on every available page. Yes, there were poem titles on some dates, but there was no way of knowing if the dates held any significance. So I had spent the last hour typing in pretty much every word I found in any given date square.

Pretty soon, my knuckles were going to seize up. Early onset arthritis. That was where this mission was going to get me.

I took a deep breath. I just had to keep at it for a few more minutes. Then I would call it a night and at least wipe down Noelle and Ariana’s windows—which looked streak-free to me—so that they would think I had followed orders.

I was on April. April fifth had a single word in its square. I took a deep breath and started to type.

Rubber band.
R-U-B-B-E-R-B-A-N-D
. Enter.

Invalid password!
the screen replied.

Okay . . . next. Slammed.
S-L-A-M-M-E-D
. Enter.

Invalid password!

I groaned. I scanned the calendar, looking for something even remotely intriguing, and my eyes fell on the last day of April. April 30. In big, red letters was the word
home
. Then, underneath that, in much smaller letters, the title of one of her more recent poems: “The Other.” That one had been published in last month’s
Quill
.

I took a deep breath. My fingers were trembling. Okay. “The Other.” Two words.

T-H-E
[space]
O-T-H-E-R
. Enter.

Invalid password!

Somewhere nearby a door slammed. My heart was in my mouth. I closed the computer and was about to stash it away, but instead I froze. I froze and listened. Footsteps. Footsteps coming closer . . .

Oh, God, no. I scrambled to put everything back. I almost dropped the computer. I was never going to get it all in there in time. . . .

And then the footsteps passed by the door. They were going back downstairs. I sat down hard on my butt and breathed. Everything was shaking. I should just bag this. Just bag it and start over tomorrow. But when was I ever going to get an opportunity like this again?

Slowly, I opened the computer again. I would just try this last one and that would be it.

Okay. Theother. One word.

T-H-E-O-T-H-E-R
. Enter.

There was a beep. My pulse raced. The drive whirred to life, the screen went black, then came up with a blue sky background and the two sweetest words I had ever seen on a computer screen.

Welcome, Ariana!

Holy crap. I was in! Holy mother of—I had done it! I wanted to jump up off the floor and scream and yell and improvise a dance of joy. But that wouldn’t have been the best idea, what with the old creaky floors and the fifteen girls watching Orlando in rapt silence under my feet.

Deep breath, Reed.
I scrounged in my bag and found the
floppy disk I had brought along just in case there was anything worth copying. I shoved it in the slot on the side of the computer and tried to calm my heart. If it kept pounding that loud, it would drown out any noises from downstairs, and I couldn’t get caught. Especially not now.

There were several file icons on Ariana’s desktop, each marked with a year. I clicked open the most recent and there were nothing but Word files inside. Poems. Hundreds of poems. Some with titles I recognized from the
Quill
, most with ones I did not. But was one of these an incriminating file in disguise? Was one of these “poems” actually some kind of anti-Leanne rant that might prove Ariana wanted to hurt her in some way? Who knew? My heart filled with sick, frustrated desperation. I did not have time to click open and read a hundred or more poems.

I scrolled down in the window, looking for who knew what. At the very bottom was one single file icon. A file within the file. It was marked “projects.”

Okay. This could be something. I double clicked. Inside were several more Word documents, each with initials as their titles. EP, CS, IP, NL, TL, IM, and then LS.

LS. Leanne Shore.

My entire mind went blank. This was it. A file on Leanne. I suppose that part of me had always thought it was impossible. That Noelle and Ariana could never have gotten someone kicked out of school for no good reason. But here it was. I was about to have the proof.

Reluctantly salivating, I opened the file. A Word document
popped up and filled the screen. At the top, the words
Latin Studies
. Then,
Notes from 8/5
. My whole body slumped and I almost laughed. Apparently, Ariana had spent her summer taking classes. In Latin. Studies.

Nothing to do with Leanne. Ariana was innocent.

I took a breath and closed the document. I listened for footsteps and heard nothing. Apparently Orlando was still doing his thing. I decided to check out the other initialed documents, just to satisfy my curiosity, so that I wouldn’t have gone through all this for nothing. I opened EP. It was a list of women’s names with “yes” or “no” next to each one and a total at the bottom, some kind of RSVP list. Maybe Ariana had helped her mom throw a party or something. Next up was CS. I opened it and my heart took a nosedive.

As I Lay Dying
, Faulkner, 1930.

Their Eyes Were Watching God
, Hurston, 1937.

Invisible Man
, Ellison, 1947.