next to the quarry. Adam must have let slip what he did to Grace.” Preston smooths out the note again and again. “So he panicked. He knew you were blackout drunk that night. The only thing I’m hung up on is that Cassius has no reason to hate you this much.”
I dig my nails again into the inside of my wrist. I saw Grace do it in middle school. She said the pain zapped her back to the present.
“I never told you this because I hate thinking about it now,” I say slowly. “But Cassius and I hooked up over the summer. Maybe he has weird feelings toward me because of that.”
“Joy.”
“It’s Cassius, though. He protested the frog dissection in bio.”
“Joy,” he repeats. “You do know that’s his little sister in the photos with Eastman?”
“What?” I grab the photos. They don’t look alike. She’s slim, no trace of vitiligo.
“Savannah Somerset. She’s a freshman this year,” he says. “That explains why Cassius wants Eastman to be publicly humiliated.”
I want to believe him, I want all of this to be over before it starts. But it feels wrong. “If that’s his sister, he wouldn’t have me put these all over school.”
“Maybe he’s mad at his sister, too.”
“What are we even gonna do—confront him?”
“We need a plan. If we’re right, he killed somebody. He’s dangerous.”
“I’m more dangerous than Cassius Somerset.”
“Quiet people, Joy. You can’t see into their heads.”
I remember how I tried to get to know Cassius over the summer, how little he spoke when I did.
“In the meantime, do you need help putting the pictures up tomorrow morning?” says Preston suddenly.
I shrink away. “What?”
“We have to assume Cassius has something to back this up. Some way to make it look like you killed Adam. It wouldn’t be hard for the police to figure out you blacked out that night. You could be tried as an adult and sent to prison. Until we figure this out, we have to play along. This is murder, Joy.”
“You’re sure—you think there’s no chance he’s telling the truth—”
I said it without thinking: I’m more dangerous.
“You are not capable of something like that,” he says firmly.
I’m so exhausted. “Either way, I can’t spread these around. Imagine being Savannah, coming to school, seeing these pictures everywhere.”
“It’s not ideal. But it’s better than you going to prison.”
“I can’t, Pres. I need to take the pictures to the cops no matter what the note says.” My fingertips tingle again. “That is some creepy disgusting child porn shit.”
“No, no, no.” He scratches convulsively at the zit on his chin. “You have to do it. Joy, please. You can’t go to jail.”
I shake my head. “It isn’t so easy just to frame someone for murder, you know? Maybe the cops could investigate. Like look at fingerprints and crime stuff. And then, if it was me, they could tell me.”
“Joy!”
“And if it was, maybe I do deserve to go to jail,” I mumble. “That’s where they put people so they can’t hurt anyone.”
“Stop it. Grace needs you.”
“She barely talks to me lately.” I touch the rip on the side of my quilt. It’s been there since fifth grade, since Grace and I made sock monkeys and her scissors snagged in the fabric. She cried over it, she felt so bad. “We’re not the way we used to be.”
He makes a weird noise that isn’t a word.
“And my parents think I’m a failure anyway. I’m not going to college, Pres. I’m basically fucked after high school. Prison wouldn’t be so bad.” I’m dizzy. “They’d feed me and—I’d know what the rest of my life would look like.”
“Forget about Grace, then.” His chin’s bleeding. “I need you.”
“Pres, it’s okay.”
“It is not okay.” He’s half yelling. I flinch. Downstairs, the treadmill noise stops. “I rely on . . . before I met you, it was horrible. I don’t need much. I just need one person. It’s stupid.”
“It is not stupid.”
“It’s stupid how I am. If something happened to you, I don’t think anyone else in the world would want anything to do with me.”
My heart splits wide open. “You’d find a new person.”
“I don’t want to.”
Suddenly Grace opens my door, a microwave popcorn bag in her hand. “Hey.”
Pres shoves the photos under his thigh. They trade panicky nods. They’ve always been alarmed by each other.
“Mom called and wanted me to tell you she and Dad are both going to be home in like fifteen,” she says carefully.
If she moved the blanket just a little bit, she’d see