"Noelle stole my phone," I told him. I shivered in my thin sweater. The hot streak of anger had passed and I suddenly realized I was freezing. I placed my bag on the ground and pulled my coat on. "I really am sorry."
"It's cool," Josh said. "Just. . . next time, don't let her take it. With everything that's been going on . . ."
For a second I thought he was going to reach for my hand, and my heart skipped nervously, but then he thought the better of it.
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He shoved his fists into the pockets of his coat instead. My fingers itched for the phantom contact.
"I know," I said. "Won't happen again."
Josh managed a smile. "Good. Because if anything happened to you . . ."
My chest felt warm and full. I had all but forgotten the unpleasantness in the caf.
"Okay," I said. Because there were a million things I wanted to say but couldn't.
Josh leaned back against the brick wall behind him and tipped his head up. He let out a huge sigh.
"So, did you hear about Rick?"
"Yeah," I said. I leaned back next to him. Looked down at my shoes. "It's all anyone can talk about."
"I can't believe it. After all that, they let him go? How incompetent are these people?" he said.
"I know. I feel like we're never going to know what really happened," I said.
"I know what happened," Josh snapped. "Rick and Thomas got into it and Rick killed him. End of story. Why can't these people ever just accept the easy answer?"
I felt something flip in my mind and tried to keep the thoughts at bay, just as I had all day long. But there was no more avoiding it. On they came. If the police were right, if Rick was not the killer, then the killer was obviously still out there. One thing we knew for sure was that Thomas's body had been found in the
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area. Somewhere near Easton. Rick the townie had made sense because he lived in town, but if it wasn't him, then it stood to reason that it was someone else from around the school. Maybe even someone at the school.
Whenever I got to that point on the logic train, my engine died. I just could not wrap my brain around the idea that someone at Easton hated Thomas that much. That someone at Easton was capable of murder.
"I don't know," I said, glancing away.
"It had to be him," Josh said. "It had to be."
"It would make everything so much easier," I said, feeling numb. "Because if it wasn't him, then it was someone else. Maybe someone--"
I couldn't finish the sentence. There was no way.
Josh stared into the darkness. "Maybe someone we know."
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* * *
"This feels sort of weird," I said as my friends and I approached the Great Room in Mitchell Hall on Tuesday night. I could already hear the dance music pumping through the walls. A few of the former headmasters' portraits were shaking in their gilded frames.
Headmaster Stern from the early 1900s did not look happy about it.
"What doesn't these days?" Natasha asked.
She had a point. Ever since Thomas had died, everything had felt weird. Laughing, eating, talking, studying. But partying, no matter how much we tried to justify it, felt even weirder than everything else.