meet without me, anyway.” I turn on my heel, for once leaving her in my wake.
* * *
—
Embarrassment turns to rage as I tromp across campus back to Bay. How dare Sierra treat me like that. For what? Trying to solve the murder of our friend? So what if the Ivies don’t like the reckoning that’s coming for everything we’ve done over the last two and a half years? If it was something we did that led to this, we deserve to know.
Or if it was Emma’s hookup, we need to know that, too.
Finally I get back to my room, and I wrest the phone that’s been tempting me out of my bag. I check that the door is locked, even though I know it is, and curl up in the farthest corner of my bed, pulling my down comforter around me like a shield. I power on the phone.
And then the lock screen asks me for a passcode.
I curse under my breath, start cycling through potential codes.
Emma’s birthday, both American and European style, doesn’t work. I try as many other notable birthdays as I can recall—Tyler’s and both her parents’. (I have to creep on Emma’s Facebook to get those.) I’m running out of tries. The phone will lock me out after ten.
My eyes search Emma’s side of the room, looking for clues. Nothing obvious with numbers jumps out at me. There’s a large print of the Eiffel Tower at night, the Marie Antoinette movie poster, one of Degas’s dancers. Emma had a thing for Paris—all things French, really. I zero in on the movie poster, for some reason. Emma wasn’t merely a cream puff; she was fiercely smart and thoughtful about things, genuinely interested in history. She read not one but two biographies of the cake-loving queen (though, as she reminded me more than once, Marie never actually said that, not that way, referring to the famously misattributed quote).
It’s silly, stupid really, but I find myself Googling “Marie Antoinette,” pulling her essential details. And I take a chance, tap in the passcode.
1-7-9-3. Year of death.
It works.
I whoop in triumph as the home screen comes up. An angry red 11 shouts out from the messages app. I tap in. Three threads are clearly spam, advertising something or other in Spanish, and there are a few older ones labeled with names like Ashley and Brian, but there’s only one that’s an active conversation. There’s no real name, unless her paramour’s name is Beau. But I reckon it’s a continuation on the French theme.
I take in a succession of gray speech bubbles filling up the left side of the screen. I read them from the bottom up, tracing panic backward.
Emma, wtf, where are you? Answer me, please. I’m worried.
Emma, are you OK?
I need you, babe. Don’t keep me waiting!
Are you coming? (insert racy pun here)
I’m here, aching for you.
I gag, even though they’re hardly sexts. Aching for you? No thank you. I scroll up through the chat history until I get to Emma’s last message to Beau.
I’ve had the worst fucking night. Need you. Usual place. 2 a.m.
I check Beau’s final panicked text. It’s from 2:30 a.m.
Back, back, back, I find evidence of at least three months’ worth of flirty texts and references to clandestine meetings. There are some legitimate sexts, as well as more-intimate selfies of Emma and even a freaking dick pic that I did not need to see, ever, and will struggle to banish from my memory. Isn’t this what Snapchat is for?!
I am able to deduce one thing from the dick pic: Beau is likely white. I never thought analyzing dick pics would be a life skill I’d develop.
Otherwise, his texts to Emma don’t offer many clues. He always uses complete sentences and proper grammar, though his emoji game is also perfectly on point. He’s generic, like every try-hard guy who pulls out cheesy, romantic bullshit from TV and movies because it’s what he thinks girls like. Tyler calls Emma “babe,” too.
All I know is that Beau lives on campus—there are no instructions about sneaking past main security. It doesn’t mean much, since hundreds of students go here.
What I don’t get is why Emma needed a whole other phone to text this guy. Who would be so bad that Emma would need to keep their texts attached to a completely different account?
I pull up Google on my laptop and type