from whoever sent the Truth or Dare rules yesterday.
I should pretend I never saw it. Everyone at Bayview High should. But we don’t. After what happened with Simon, it’s baked into our collective DNA to be morbidly fascinated with this stuff. Last night, while a bunch of us were supposed to be running lines for the spring play, we kept getting sidetracked by trying to guess who the unknown texter might be.
The whole thing was probably a joke, though. It’s four o’clock when I push through the doors of Until Proven’s office building—well past the twenty-four-hour deadline for whoever’s supposed to be playing the game to respond—and the latest Simon wannabe has gone silent.
I pass the coffee shop in the lobby and take an elevator to the third floor. Until Proven is at the far end of a narrow corridor, next to one of those hair replacement clinics that fills the entire hall with a rank chemical smell. A balding guy comes out of its door, his forehead unevenly dotted with wispy tufts of hair. He lowers his eyes and slinks past me like I just caught him buying porn.
When I crack open Until Proven’s door, I’m immediately hit with the buzzing sound of too many people crammed into too small a space, all of them talking at once.
“How many convictions?”
“Twelve that we know of, but there’s gotta be more.”
“Did anybody call Channel Seven back?”
“Eighteen months, then released, then right back in.”
“Knox!” Sandeep Ghai, a Harvard Law grad who started working for Eli last fall, barrels toward me from behind an armful of red folders stacked up to his nose. “Just the man I was looking for. I need forty employer kits compiled and sent out today. Sample kit’s on top along with all the addresses. Can you get these out for the five o’clock mail run?”
“Forty?” I raise my eyebrows as I take the stack from him. Until Proven doesn’t only defend people who Eli and the other lawyers think are wrongfully accused; it also helps them find jobs after getting out of jail. So every once in a while, I mail out folders full of résumés and a cover letter about why hiring exonerees, as Eli calls them, is good for business. But we’re usually lucky if one local company a week is interested. “Why so many?”
“Publicity from the D’Agostino case,” Sandeep says, like that explains everything. When I still look confused, he adds, “Everyone turns into a concerned corporate citizen when there’s a chance for free PR.”
I should’ve guessed. Eli’s been all over the news after proving that a bunch of people convicted on drug charges had actually been blackmailed and framed by a San Diego police sergeant, Carl D’Agostino, and two of his subordinates. They’re all in jail awaiting trial, and Until Proven is working on getting the phony convictions reversed.
The last time Eli got this much press was for the Simon Kelleher case. Back then, Eli was the lead story on every news show after getting Nate Macauley out of jail. My dad’s company hired Nate a couple of weeks later. He still works there, and now they’re paying for him to take college classes.
After Bronwyn Rojas left for Yale and Until Proven started looking for another high school intern, I figured Maeve would take it. She’s tight with Eli, plus she was a big part of why Simon’s plan unraveled in the first place. Nobody would’ve looked at Simon as anything except a victim if Maeve hadn’t tracked down his secret online persona.
But Maeve didn’t want the job. “That’s Bronwyn’s thing. Not mine,” she’d said, in that voice she uses when she wants to end a conversation.
So I applied. Partly because it’s interesting, but also because I wasn’t exactly fighting off other job opportunities. My father, who tells anybody who’ll listen that Nate Macauley is “one helluva kid,” never bothered asking if I wanted to work at Myers Construction.
To be fair: I suck at anything tool-related. I once wound up in the emergency room after hammering my thumb to a pulp when hanging a picture. But still. He could’ve asked.
“Five o’clock,” Sandeep repeats, cocking finger guns at me as he backs away toward his desk. “I can count on you, right?”
“I got it,” I say, looking around for some empty space. My gaze lands on Eli, who’s the only person at Until Proven who gets an entire desk to himself. It’s stacked so high with folders that when he hunches forward