Down to the Liar(6)

Murphy disappears behind his laptop screen again, letting us girls duke it out.

“I’m not planning on telling Skyla who they are,” I say, proud of myself for not yanking my arm out of her grasp despite my own growing irritation. See? I can be patient. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I need to know. I can’t stop them if I don’t know what they want.” Or more accurately, what they fear.

Bryn clearly doesn’t approve of my answer, but it’s really not my job to do everything the Bryn Way. If it were, I’d quit that crap job in a hot second.

“Look, I’m hoping it’s a shallow clique misunderstanding I can correct with a little leverage. No public humiliation.”

“What if it’s more than that?”

“I’ll worry about that if we get there. I can’t come up with a solution before I understand the problem.”

“It’s time,” Murphy says. “You’d better take off, Julep, unless you want to blow the whole thing.”

A sad outcome of my shenanigans at the end of last year is that everyone is automatically skeptical if I’m involved in something. Even though I’m supposedly spearheading this “project,” I can’t risk one of our marks getting suspicious. I can barely say hi to people in the hallway without them giving me the what’s your angle eyebrow. So I end up farming out most of my St. Aggie’s work to people who owe me favors. It’s annoying having to deal with that extra layer between me and the job, and there’s been more than one botched assignment I’ve had to smooth over. I hate taking the risk, especially with Dean Porter continually breathing down my neck. But I’m often too busy with non-school-related cases to do everything myself anyway.

Bryn wordlessly swings her backpack to the floor, fishes out her laptop, and hands it to Murphy.

“Phone and tablet, too.” He smiles at her apologetically. She glares at him but produces the phone.

I head out the door, clutching my own laptop on the off chance someone sees me leave the room. Always play the role to its fullest, or one day you’ll slip up just enough to get caught. My dad taught me that. Too bad he didn’t follow his own advice. He slipped up enough to get caught by the mob, and now he’s in the pen with a bum shoulder and a five-year sentence. It could have been worse, though. He could have been dead. Like Tyler.

Thinking about my dad inevitably leads to me thinking about my mom. I still haven’t found her. I have no freaking idea where to even start looking, and neither does my dad. I’ve combed through my student file, but all the people listed in it are untraceable. No one’s ever heard of them, and there are no records of them anywhere that Murphy and I can find. There’s no personal information, like previous addresses, known associates, or even their favorite color. And if I can’t track them down, I can’t ask them if they know where my mom is.

Ralph, my dad’s bookie and best friend, is still missing, too. He should have made some kind of contact by now. It’s been months. Petrov won’t cop to killing him, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t. Part of me hopes Ralph comes back. A bigger part of me hopes he’s cashed out and is lying on a beach somewhere sipping mai tais and binging on his wife’s Korean cookies.

Which circles me back around to thoughts of Tyler. The boy I almost-but-not-quite maybe-could-have loved. The boy who betrayed me. The boy who died instead of me.

My brain shies away from thoughts of him. Especially lately. Something will trigger a memory, and I’ll flinch. Then anger swirls up, swallowing the memory and the pain. The practical effect is that I’ve gotten a lot snarkier lately, and I snap quicker and more often. I know I’m doing it, but I can’t make myself stop. Everything irks me these days.

I stop at my locker and shake myself loose from the grip of things I can do nothing about. I’m much better off focusing on the job at hand. And just as I think that, the majority of St. Aggie’s girls’ tennis team passes me on their way to the computer lab. Skyla’s on the tennis team as well, but she tends to socialize with Bryn’s group instead. It’s not much of a motive for publicly urging someone to off herself, but popularity is a strange animal and girls can be vipers sometimes.

I slam my locker door closed and jump when I see the person standing behind it, waiting for me to notice him.

“Damn it, Carter,” I say, holding a hand to my chest. “Make some noise next time, will you?”

“Sorry.” He doesn’t look sorry. He looks like a weasel with a five o’clock shadow and a greasy tangle of dark hair. “Murphy sent me to get your computer. He wants to add the receiver to your hard drive, so you can help him sort through the data.”