B00B9FX0F2 EBOK Read online

  “What happened?”

  “I left it in my book bag during practice, and when we were done, it was gone. Probably Hugo.”

  “Who’s Hugo?”

  “The retarded janitor.”

  “Jesus, Sully.” Troy rolled his eyes exasperatedly. “Hugo’s not retarded. And he didn’t steal your phone.”

  “Because you did?”

  Jason interrupted again. “Who else had access to the locker room? Did anyone know what was on there?”

  For the first time, Sully actually looked him in the eye. “Other than Hugo and the coaches, no one goes in the locker room while we’re in practice. Except sometimes the coaches give their keys to the captains. Like Palmer here.”

  “Or like Luke Gray?” Jason had ignored Troy’s warning not to ask questions, and now he was violating the second rule. “Could he have stolen your phone?”

  “Relax, Jason,” Troy said sharply as Sully’s face darkened with anger. “You, too, Sully.”

  “Don’t freaking tell me to relax. You bring this tool into my house, you let him talk about Luke like this. Seriously, who are you?”

  Now he got in Jason’s face, and Rakesh quickly stepped in. “Your boy Luke caught me by surprise yesterday, but if I’d seen him coming, he’d be a dead man right now. You will, too, if you step to my friend again.”

  Jason felt a surge of gratitude, followed by an urge to laugh. Rakesh was always talking about fighting guys, but until yesterday, Jason was pretty sure it had never actually happened. Strangely enough, Sully retreated, though he continued to glare at Jason.

  “Dude, I’m not trying to fight you,” Jason said. “And I mean no disrespect, but I found the video in Luke’s glove compartment — and …”

  “Oh, you’re the one who broke into his car?” Sully started toward him again, but Troy restrained him.

  The words kept spilling out of Jason’s mouth. “If you care about Luke and your team at all, you’ll tell me what you know, because otherwise I’ll go to the police and tell them Luke killed his sister, and your season will be over.” It was a wild bluff, but Jason’s poker face was getting better. Sully looked nervously from Troy to Jason, briefly at Rakesh, and then back to Troy.

  “Is that what happened?” He was starting to break, Jason could tell.

  “What aren’t you telling us, Sully?”

  He sank into the couch and placed his hands on his knees.

  “He didn’t need the video, man. He already knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sully’s eyes kept darting between his visitors, like a trapped animal looking for an escape route. “I tried to cover for you,” he said to Troy. “I told him I heard something about his sister and that punk Max. I mean, I thought you were going to hit it and quit it like everyone else did.” Troy charged toward him, and Sully leapt to his feet, ready to fight, but he was quickly overpowered. Troy’s fist hovered in the air while he used his other hand to hold Sully down.

  “Say another word about Lacey, and I’ll make sure you never walk again, you smarmy little daddy’s boy.” His voice was quiet, but sharp enough to cut glass. “Now tell me when you talked to Luke about it.”

  Sully stared up at him defiantly. Troy knocked his head against the floor and growled, “When?”

  Beaten, Sully muttered, “The day before Roxy Choi’s party.”

  The buzzing from Jason’s pocket was right on cue. Jenna. Again. He pressed ignore, but a minute later it started to ring again. Rakesh couldn’t keep the smugness out of his voice when he asked Troy whether he still believed Luke was innocent. Troy shot him a withering glance and then released his grip on Sully and stood up.

  “You think it was Luke?” he asked.

  The phone in his hand flashed that Jenna had left another voice mail. Sully lumbered to his feet. “When did you replace your phone?” Jason asked quietly.

  He scoffed. “The day after I lost it. I can’t live without a phone.”

  Jenna’s words came back to him. John Sullivan … He’s on the lacrosse team and he’s always got his camera out. It’s so annoying.

  “Did you film anything the night of Roxy’s party?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What do you mean you don’t remember?”

  He laughed drily but no one joined him. “That night was kind of a blur.”

  Troy smacked him on the back of the head, and Sully’s hand shot out in a jab, but Troy was out of the way.

  Rakesh and Jason exchanged an uneasy glance. Rakesh voiced the question for both of them. “Yo, is drinking some sort of capital crime in Brighton?”

  “During the season it is,” Troy answered, still glaring at Sully.

  “Well, can you check? Would you still have it?”

  “I never delete anything.” He moved to the gleaming monitor in the corner. “After my phone disappeared, I started backing everything up.” Sully clicked through his hard drive, and asked Troy if he remembered what night the party had been.

  “October fourth,” he said quickly.

  “What do we have here?” Sully said. He opened the video, and they assembled behind him, attention fixed on the screen.

  At first it was a party, like any other party. A few kids told Sully to piss off, someone gave him the finger, and from the side of the frame, you could see him returning the gesture. “Hate that kid,” he muttered. The air went out of the room the moment Lacey appeared on the screen. She’d looked so happy and alive in the other video, but here her expression was tired and drawn, distress visible in all of her movements. What was she so upset about? Jason wondered. She fingered her necklace distractedly as her eyes wandered around the room, and then Troy was at her side. He leaned over and said something into her ear, then she strode off as he followed closely behind her, looking around him to make sure he wasn’t being watched, somehow missing Sully and his camera.

  “This was right before she told me we had to tell Luke,” Troy explained. “We went up to the balcony to talk.”

  Sully began to wander around the house. In the living room, he focused on a couple, apparently underclassmen, kissing on the sofa. Rakesh burst out laughing as the girl looked up, mortification all over her face. “Turn that off,” she protested, but Sully just laughed and walked away.

  “Classy,” Jason said sarcastically.

  Sully held up his hands defensively, “Hey, I wasn’t the one going at it on someone else’s couch.”

  And then suddenly Jenna was on camera, in a doorway, checking her phone. She looked up and saw Sully coming toward her. “Hey, have you seen Lacey?” she asked.

  “Yeah, she went upstairs with Troy,” he slurred.

  “Why are you always trying to start something?” She reached out and batted the camera away. “Turn that thing off.” For whatever reason, Sully complied.

  “That must have been right before she came upstairs,” Troy said.

  “Yeah, but did you see how confused she was when Sully was trying to tell her you guys were together? I don’t think she knew.” Hope flickered inside of Jason. He wanted so much to be wrong about Jenna.

  “Maybe Lacey told her when they were alone.”

  Jason tried to focus. There was something off about it. “Sully, is there more?”

  “Yeah, I have two other videos from that night. Now I sort of remember taping that one, but the rest of that party is pretty hazy. I have no idea what happened.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  When the video started up again, the music had gotten louder, and the camera was less steady. A meaty guy in a Brighton lacrosse jacket was badly impersonating a math teacher, pushing imaginary glasses up his nose, pulling at a necktie that wasn’t there, and spouting nonsense about equations. They could hear Sully laughing loudly, but the comedian was looking next to him at someone they couldn’t see.

  “I hate that guy,” the invisible man said; Jason could tell he wasn’t smiling as he spoke.

  “That’s Luke?”

 
“Yep,” Troy said. “We were all trying to make him feel better about Jericho. Though I doubt Springer’s method actually worked.”

  The camera turned toward Luke, who nodded at Sully and quietly asked him to turn it off. An instant later, the screen went black.

  “One more,” Troy said.

  Jason’s pulse began to race, and something in him twisted up. What if the third video was just Sully taping the activity in his coat pocket? Jenna and Luke. They killed Lacey, and then they stalked him, manipulated him, used him as a puppet. But the why lingered, a thorny knot he could barely get a hand around, much less untangle. Jenna had a crush on Troy and was angry at her friend for going behind her back. Luke was crazy overprotective and felt betrayed. But these were motives for writing an all-caps screed on someone’s Facebook wall, not for murder. And they didn’t explain what Jason was doing here, in John Sullivan IV’s playroom, waiting to watch a grainy iPhone video of kids he’d barely met.

  Jason still hadn’t listened to Jenna’s messages. Worse than seeing nothing on the tape, he suddenly realized, would be seeing proof that Jenna hurt Lacey. She was dishonest and probably sick, but he didn’t want to believe she was a killer. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to tell them to pause; he wished he could put everything on hold, just for a second, just until his head was straight, but the movie was rolling.

  “Can you fast-forward through this part?” Troy’s impatience hummed through his entire body, you could see it in his tapping foot, his pursed lips. He had none of Jason’s reluctance to find out what had happened, only a thirst for the truth.

  Sully rolled his eyes, but did as he was told. This video was longer than the others, almost twenty minutes according to the scrollbar at the bottom of the screen. They were nearly halfway through when they got to a figure they recognized. “There, stop,” Troy and Jason said in unison.

  It was Lacey, standing in the dimly lit hallway. The picture was out of focus, most of the shot was blackness, but Lacey’s chin being filmed from below was unmistakable. “Now I remember,” Sully said, his brow furrowed with concentration. “I couldn’t find my phone when we were leaving. I thought someone stole it again, and I was freaking out. Spencer found it in the hallway before we left.”

  “Shhh!” Jason silenced him. Lacey was talking. Troy leaned down and turned the volume as high as it would go.

  “Go back,” he commanded. Sully rewound until the phone dropped from his hand. They watched him scamper down the stairs and saw the feet of Arla Summers and whatever guy she was with pass through the frame. Then Lacey’s blurry face filled the screen.

  Jason held his breath. “… don’t care who you tell,” she was saying. “I’m tired of keeping these secrets. They’ll get over it. They love me. Which is more than I can say for you. I thought you were my friend, but everyone else was right, you’re disgusting.”

  “Watch what you say to me.” The disembodied male voice was familiar, but Jason couldn’t place it. From the look on Troy’s face, he couldn’t, either.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Lacey said, but a second later, you could see fear register in her eyes. “Max, don’t …”

  “Luke,” Rakesh said.

  Jason saw spots. Maybe he had heard wrong. Troy confirmed he hadn’t: “Are you deaf? She just said Max.”

  “No, Luke is here.” He pointed, and sure enough, Luke stood in Sully’s doorway, white as a sheet, the darkness of the hallway at his back. His eyes flitted uneasily between his friends and the two kids he’d attacked the day before.

  Troy addressed him gently. “How long have you —”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Luke wailed, barreling toward them.

  Before Jason could be sure which “you” he was referring to, Troy stepped in front of the group and locked arms with his cocaptain.

  “You think you can lie to me? I know all about you!” Luke swung wildly, and Troy absorbed the blows to his shoulders and chest, only lifting his hand protectively when Luke’s fists approached his face.

  “Dude, calm down,” Troy managed in between punches. “Let me explain.”

  “Don’t bother explaining. I knew about you and Lacey. Why didn’t you protect her? She needed you. And now you’re here, with this guy….” He gestured to Jason and then finally relented, dropping his hands to his sides, panting. Sully stood next to him and pulled him gently backward, out of arm’s reach of Troy, who was rubbing his biceps where Luke had been hitting him.

  “Let me explain,” Troy repeated finally. “Jason just wants to help Lacey. That video. Did you see it?”

  Jason came to his aid. “She didn’t fall, Luke.”

  “I know,” he said mournfully. Jason realized he thought she jumped. Because of Troy. That was why he’d been so aggressive at the grave site; he was protecting his friend. It was the only thing left he could do.

  “She didn’t do it to herself, either,” Jason added. Luke looked up at him, and for the first time Jason saw something other than fury in his eyes. There was all the sadness, all the loss pooled up and trapped there. Now he understood Jenna had been right: Luke really was torn up over the death of his sister.

  Luke looked uneasily at Troy. “What’s he talking about?”

  It took him a minute to answer. Like Jason, he was still wrapping his mind around it, parsing through what they’d just seen. “It was Max.” He started to explain the video.

  Jason’s head was spinning. He went back to the beginning as well. So much had happened since he’d first begun talking to Lacey, so much suspicion and doubt and so many revelations. He had all the puzzle pieces now, or almost all of them, and they were assembled right in front of him, but the picture they formed was still obstructed from his view.

  “We need to finish the video,” he said definitively, thinking of Jenna. Where did she fit into all of this? Where did he fit into all of this? He needed to know what had happened that night.

  “We’ll start at the beginning, so Luke can see.”

  “No,” Jason said. He sounded colder — stronger — than he ever had before. “There’s no time.” We needed your help. There was no other way. Max was still out there and so was Jenna. “Max knows I’m close.”

  Troy protested, and Rakesh backed Jason up.

  “I’m not a moron,” Luke finally said. Rakesh opened his mouth, but Jason kicked him before he could form the insult. “I want to see what happened.” He crossed his arms across his chest, and so Sully pressed play.

  “Max, don’t,” Lacey said, and a thin arm reached for her. She pushed him back.

  “I’ll put the video on Facebook. What do you think Luke will do when he sees what you did with his best bro? Do you think Jenna will understand why you went behind her back? Everyone will know what a liar you are. I’m giving you a chance. I’ll keep your secret. I’m not even asking that much in return.”

  They were watching something awful: the murder of an innocent girl, yet Jason’s heart leapt. Jenna didn’t know about Lacey and Troy. Jenna wasn’t involved in Lacey’s death.

  Faintly, they heard a door creaking and the clamor of voices.

  “Oh, hey, Lacey, what are you doing up here?” It was a girl’s voice, friendly.

  “Just, uh, looking for a bathroom,” Lacey answered, her eyes nervously creeping to the side. Max must have ducked out of sight.

  Luke was rapt, his expression pained. Jason tried to put himself in his shoes, observing his sister minutes before she died, powerless to warn her how dangerous the person she was protecting was.

  “Rox told me no one was supposed to be up here. But you can use the one in her parents’ room over there. The line downstairs is so annoying.”

  “Thanks, Laura.”

  A minute went by. “This is over, Max,” Lacey hissed. “I’m not gonna go out with you. Tell the entire school about Troy for all I care. The worst part is I defended you to him. I actually liked you.”

  “I thought you were special. But you’re just like every other conformist a
t this stupid school.” A hand reached to her chest and yanked at the necklace hanging there, tearing the chain. “You think this means something?”

  “Hey! Give that back!”

  She disappeared from the frame, and as the five boys stared at a blurry wall, they heard the sounds of a struggle, and a girl’s muffled shriek, and then nothing. A few minutes later, they could see someone’s legs passing by the camera, and then nothing, until the picture went dead.

  No one spoke. They sat staring at the screen, shell-shocked, the sounds of ragged breath filling the room, and then suddenly they were all talking — then shouting — at once.

  “You had this video the whole time!”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me …”

  “You let her hang out with that guy!”

  “… should never have trusted him.”

  “What are you even doing here?”

  “I never let her do anything.”

  “My sister …”

  “When I get my hands on him …”

  “I loved her, too.”

  It was Rakesh who put a stop to it. “Shut up!” he screamed. “You’re all giving me a head ache. Jason, what do we do now?”

  To Jason’s surprise, they all looked at him expectantly. He wanted to tell them he couldn’t help. He was tired and sore, spent. There had been too much risk already, too many twists, and for what? Lacey was still gone. And then he remembered. Jenna. Max was out there, and Jenna didn’t know how dangerous he was. They could protect her. He could.

  “We have to call the police,” Jason said.

  “I can handle Max Anderson,” Luke replied, balling up his fists.

  Jason already had his phone out of his pocket. It was a few minutes past one in the morning. Jenna’s voice mails now seemed urgent, just like she’d been trying to tell him.

  Troy and Sully reasoned with Luke as Jason checked his messages. The blood drained from his face when he heard Jenna’s whispered plea.

  “I should never have lied to you. I think there’s something wrong with Max. Please call me back when you get this.”

  She had gone to Max. When Jason had not listened to her, she had gone to him, and now whatever happened to her would be his fault.