Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
An emergency weather alert wakes me up the morning of the chemistry exam. The all-caps text urges me to shelter in place after 5:00 p.m. An ominous warning that today’s going to be shit.
“I’m so screwed.” Poppy frantically flips through her notes at breakfast. As expected, after word spread that Hunter and I were still together after all, Poppy welcomed me back to our table with open arms, as if she hadn’t practically thrown a homework packet at my head to avoid even looking at me Monday. They all have their secrets, but at least they’re predictable. “Do you remember what a tetrahedral is?”
“No idea.”
“C’mooooooon,” she whines, slapping her notebook against my chest. “You’re supposed to be the smart one!”
I shrug, skimming my own barely legible notes. A chemistry test had been the last thing on my mind when I was busy breaking and entering into Hunter and Gabe’s room. Maybe I would’ve made more headway in figuring out why there was a hidden camera in their room if I hadn’t been cramming for this test before crashing at midnight. “Guess we’re both screwed.”
I’m more than screwed if I don’t figure out how to memorize an entire textbook in the next two hours. Grades shouldn’t matter anymore, but an all-star student and potential High-tower Fellow suddenly bombing an exam in her best subject is bound to draw the wrong kind of attention. I’ve only just made it back into Solina’s twisted inner circle. I don’t plan to stick around long, but I still need to get Poppy alone. Talk to Izzy. Figure out what’s going on with the hidden camera in Hunter and Gabe’s room. Follow all the leads I still have.
I need more time. Failing just makes the clock tick even faster.
“Bitch,” Poppy mumbles, giving me a cheeky smile when I turn to glare at her. “Love you!” She presses a kiss to her palm, then pushes it against my cheek—the touch sizzles like a burn.
Poppy’s not the only one who’s frazzled. All through the dining hall, our chemistry classmates are hunched over their notes scrambling to remember what a trigonal pyramidal is.
“I tried to study with Gabe yesterday . ” Poppy punctuates the statement with a gag. It’s one of the few mornings Hunter and Gabe haven’t joined us for breakfast, thanks to their floor’s resident advisor calling an “urgent meeting” to discuss the aftermath of the weekend’s bonfire.
What’s the point of confiscating phones if everyone’s going to find out what went down anyway?
I’d hoped to use the alone time with Poppy to dig in a little more. Figure out where she was over break and what she might be hiding. It’s just my luck that today’s the one time she’s actually spending more time looking at her notes than trawling for gossip.
I resist the urge to bite my thumb as my eyes glaze over the longer I look at the page in front of me. I’ll be lucky if I can get a single answer right, let alone enough to pass.
“ So annoying,” she continues, unprompted, when I don’t reply. “I trekked my ass all the way out to the library because Hunter’s letting him use this private wing his dad donated to, and all he did was yell at me the whole time. He said the noise from my headphones was too distracting.” She leans in for dramatic effect. “ Headphones. ”
Poppy collapses against the back of her chair with a groan, tossing the packet in her hand down between us. “This thing is useless. How am I supposed to memorize all of this in a day? And I can’t even read Gabe’s notes.”
I peek up at her with sudden interest. The papers are jumbled. Some of them are pages torn straight from a notebook, but I can’t make out what they say from this distance—must be Gabe’s notes. Between the notes are grainy photocopies of what looks like an old chemistry exam. The answers are already bubbled in. I resist the urge to ask her where she got it from. It shouldn’t be surprising that the elite of the elite have access to shortcuts.
The possibility of passing makes my mouth water, my fingers itching to grab the old exam and run. It’s not something Solina would’ve ever done, but there’s too much at stake if I fail for me not to take the risk.
Even brilliant kids have their off days.
“Could I take a look at it too?” I ask warily, prepared for her to snatch it back.
Poppy sits up, interest piqued. “Keep it,” she says with a raised brow, holding the packet out to me. “Didn’t think you had it in you, Ms. Four-Point-Oh.” When I reach for it, she tightens her grip and leans across the table, her face hovering inches from mine. “Ready to come down to our level?”
I’ll never stoop as far as the people here are willing to go, but I am desperate enough to break out of the mold Solina left behind. Thankfully, Poppy lets go as quickly as she leaned in. Settling back into her seat with a smug smile and a whispered, “You’re welcome.” The satisfaction of seeing me squirm must be payment enough.
Just as I’m about to excuse myself from the table, she snaps her fingers. “Think you can still have your sister read my UCLA essays?” she says once I’ve turned around.
Shit. I’d completely forgotten about the “favor” Solina promised her. What was her plan, exactly? I don’t have anything to say about UCLA, and I can’t imagine she knows anyone who does. Was she just going to edit the essays herself and pretend she had some kind of extra layer of wisdom?
“Y-yeah. Email them over to me and I can send it to her tonight,” I reply, struggling to keep my voice level. Even through the nerves, I see an opportunity. “I can come over to your place and we can go over whatever she sends back?”
“Perfect.” She downs the last of her coffee and pushes back from the table, her none the wiser and me one step closer to finding something that’ll get me out of here.
“Good luck,” she calls out over her shoulder, turning back to face me with a smirk that’s as chilling as the frost on the windows. “But you probably won’t need it.”
School has never been my strong suit. Dropping out wasn’t the agonizing decision teen dramas and guidance counselors make it out to be. It’s the obvious answer when textbooks are worth more than your savings. When you’re better at taking orders than balancing equations. Some assholes might think that says something about me—that I don’t know what an imaginary number is, or who won the War of 1812. Knowing a bunch of dates in a book about dead white guys written by another dead white guy doesn’t mean anything. But knowing how to play their game does.
Solina never liked the idea of cheating, but that didn’t stop me from doing it anyway.
“You’re never going to learn if you just take a shortcut,” she’d say as she watched me brainstorm new ways to sneak answers. Nothing could top stuffing a vocabulary list into the collar of my turtleneck before our seventh-grade English final, but I was willing to try.
“Maybe I don’t need to learn,” I’d snapped back, sticking my tongue out to prove my point.
Not everyone can be like her and Tiffany, able to hold a thousand facts and learn a hundred more without breaking a sweat. Some of us are a different type of smart. Smart enough to work nine hours and bill for ten. Smart enough to save old clothes to patch the holes that come along in the new ones. Smart enough to make things feel normal, even when they’re falling apart.
Cheating was the only thing that got me through three weeks of algebra, and now it’s going to save my ass from tanking this chemistry exam.
There’s an art to cheating. Writing down the answers on your hand is an obvious trap. Any teacher who gives a shit will be able to spot you from a mile away. Creativity is your friend. After breakfast, I rush back to my room and quickly cut the answer sheet up into small strips, folding each one until they’re as small as I can get them. I’ll probably be late to first period, but I’ll take a scolding if it means I have a chance at passing.
Once I’m down to a handful of small strips of paper, I lay one of Solina’s uniform skirts flat against her desk. Washing these for her every semester was a pain in the ass, but at least now they’re finally worth the effort. The hemline is perfect—the inner seam thick enough to easily hide all the slips of paper.
The sewing kit I always packed for Solina but she never used is right where I suspected it would be: untouched at the bottom of a drawer. There was no point in her learning how to hem for herself when Tiffany always gave in and did it for her.
I focus on threading the needle, picking a thin gray thread almost identical to the one holding the skirt’s hem together. When I reach into the seam, it comes apart easily, like it knew it was always meant to split. My index finger travels down the side of the hem, pulling up loose threads until I hit something sharp.
Pain jolts through my arm as I yank my hand back toward my chest. A drop of blood blooms on the tip of my finger. With my uninjured hand, I turn the skirt fully inside out, peeking at where the seam has come undone. Something is already carefully folded into the gap, crumpled and frayed. I pull it out slowly, careful not to split the seam more than I already have.
An index card, folded in half. Covered corner to corner in Shakespeare quotes and themes and plot points, in that loopy cursive I know so well. The same one on the ornaments we made on our first Christmas with Tiffany. On the wall in the bathroom measuring our heights. On dozens of birthday cards.
I run my finger along the paper without thinking, blood smearing across a quote labeled as from Act Two of Hamlet . “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
Another hidden piece of her. Another thing I’ll never understand.
After wiping the blood off on a tissue, I head straight back into the closet, pulling out the rest of Solina’s skirts and laying them out on the desk. I press along each hem, pulling at the seams until the rest of her secrets spring free. Notes and Post-its and bunched-up graphing paper. Dates and coordinates and formulas. Every seam comes apart with barely any give. Years of coming undone and being stitched back up again by someone who never bothered to learn how to sew properly.
I fight back a laugh as I take in the ruined skirts. All that crap she gave me in seventh grade just to take my signature move straight out of the playbook. How could someone I thought I knew better than I knew myself feel like a stranger? How could just a few hundred miles turn my sister into a different person?
How can I play this part when I don’t know who the hell Solina was here?
For a fleeting second, I wonder what I would’ve done if I’d known. Would I have given Solina the same shit she gave me? Called her a bully, a liar, a hypocrite? Throw back that same accusation she weaponized against me and tell her she was the one who didn’t really care? At least not enough to tell her friends the truth about me.
All that anger fades as quickly as it bubbled to the surface. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, having to uncover so many layers of my sister. Realizing that she wasn’t the girl I know.
But I would always love her. Through loss and grief and rage. Even when I can’t stand her. Even when she can’t stand me.
That’s one thing that’ll never change.
I work quickly, stuffing as many strips of the answer packet into the skirt’s lining as I can. Enough that I can salvage a C. Maybe a B, if I’m careful. I’ve still got a few minutes to make it to first period. I’m prepared to run as fast as I can across campus when I spot something beneath the door to the room. A note, folded in half, slipped beneath the crack.
How long has that been there?
My brain whirrs as I pick up the note, trying to remember if I’d heard footsteps walking past the room or if I’d seen any signs of a note when I walked in. The hall outside our door is empty, no lingering sound of footsteps in the stairwell. I study the note, checking for a name. The paper is thick, almost like card stock, coated with a fine layer of what feels like dust. Like it’s been sitting in the back of a drawer for years. I hesitate, unsure if I should open something that could easily have been left for Claudia. Curiosity gets the better of me—act now and apologize later.
There’s no doubt who the letter was intended for once I unfold it. Six words written so roughly sections of the letters are torn—the pen ripped straight through the page—like they’re shouting to be heard. The handwriting is shit, but the message is clear.
LEAVE NOW OR I ’LL MAKE YOU