Vengeance (Private 14)

“I don’t know, you guys. Most of the people I sent the plans to seemed really excited. Some of them even donated money,” I told them. “I can’t imagine that any of them would have wanted to sabotage the project.”

Everyone around the table exchanged wary glances, as if waiting for one of us to confess. Finally Kiki Rosen leaned forward, wrapping her earbud wires around her iPod before she shoved it into her battered canvas backpack.

“Okay. Forget who screwed us. The real question is, how do we get unscrewed?” she asked.

“We have to go back to the drawing board. Literally,” I said with a sigh. “I already spoke to my architect and she said she could modify the plans, but since a lot of the materials have already been ordered, it’s going to cost a lot more money. Plus it takes a while to get some of these green materials, so that will cause some serious delays.”

“How serious?” Amberly asked.

I licked my lips, dreading what I had to say next. My phone rang again. One more ignore. “Billings might not be ready by the fall. It might not even be ready until the following fall.”

“What?” Lorna Gross gasped, her dark brown eyes wide. “But most of us will be gone by then.”

“Everyone but Amberly,” I said flatly.

“This sucks,” Astrid said, shoving a potato chip into her mouth.

“Tell me about it,” I replied.

Suddenly, Lorna sat up straight and leaned back, out into the aisle. “Hey, Missy!” she called out loudly, giving a wave.

I turned around to see Missy Thurber striding right by our table, her wide-nostriled nose in the air as she completely ignored us. Her French braid swung haughtily down the center of her back, and she didn’t even blink when she heard her former best friend calling out to her.

This was the new Missy. It wasn’t just me she’d been ignoring. She had stopped returning any and all calls from the Billings crew, had stopped saying hello to us in the hallways, had stopped even looking in our direction, unless it was to shoot me evil glares. It was like all of us, and everything we’d been through together, had been excised from her brain.

“That girl puts the ‘lone’ in ‘loner,’” Vienna said, rolling her eyes.

Instead of turning toward the small corner table she’d been occupying by herself for every meal since March, she hooked a left and walked right over to a table full of guys. Senior guys. Popular senior guys and a few of their female hangers-on. Graham Hathaway greeted her with a smile and made a big show of pulling out a chair for her. Missy sat with a self-satisfied twist of her lips. Then Graham ran off to the food line to get her lunch.

“Since when are those two BFF?” Portia asked, clearly annoyed.

I glanced over my shoulder at the table where Josh; his roommate, Trey Prescott; and some of his other friends were sitting, and saw that they had noticed Missy and Graham as well. Josh and Trey, in particular, shot Graham annoyed looks as he returned seconds later with a bagel sandwich and iced tea for Missy. I sat back hard in my chair and slumped.

Call me crazy, but the idea of my worst enemy at Easton and Josh’s worst enemy at Easton hanging out together made my blood run cold.

MYSTERY TEXT

I sat in my final class of the day that afternoon, staring out across the quad at the now-silent construction zone. The bulldozers and the backhoe sat motionless in the center of the plot, as if their drivers had up and fled right in the middle of work. It made them look oddly lonely and sad, like great, hulking orphans. Up at the front of the classroom, Mr. Cheever helpfully outlined every item that would be on my calculus final, but I hadn’t once looked up at the board. Instead, my eyes were trained on that damn frozen backhoe, as if simply glaring at it would make it roar to life.

I had already placed calls to every important county executive I could find online, not knowing which one might be able to help me, but it wasn’t like it mattered. I’d been screened by each of their assistants and no one had called me back. I wished Mr. Lange were still alive. He would have known exactly the right person to contact, exactly how to smooth things over. But me? I was clueless and utterly lost. And I didn’t like the feeling.

I could have gotten in touch with Chester Worth again, but I tried not to bother him too much. Sometimes I could tell that the tentative phone calls of a naive schoolgirl grated on his nerves, almost as much as the tenth call of the day from Janice Winthrop grated on mine, and just knowing that I might be annoying him made me nervous to call. Somewhere in the back of both our minds, we realized I was not his responsibility, and sooner or la

ter his duty to his deceased business partner was going to wear out.

If only I could get Noelle involved. That girl was definitely her father’s daughter. It was like she instinctively knew how to get things done, and get them done right. She had a way of talking to people that made them snap to attention.

But Noelle was off the project and, deep down, I knew why. She was angry at me because that knife her father had taken in the gut had been meant for me. She had never said it, she probably never would, but I knew she was thinking it. She had to be. Because I was thinking it too. I’d been thinking it every day since it happened, feeling the weight of it, the crushing blame. Our father had died to save me. I spent at least 99 percent of my waking hours trying not to let that fact overwhelm me. Which was another reason that rebuilding Billings was so important to me. Staying focused on every minute detail of such an overwhelming project kept me from obsessing on other, more horrifying thoughts.

I knew Noelle wouldn’t have wanted to lose me, but I often wondered, if it had come down to a choice between me and her father, which one of us would she have chosen to keep alive?

Someone in the room coughed, rousing me from my thoughts. I looked at the board and quickly jotted down a few notes, but there was no way I could catch up now. I glanced across the two rows of diligent students that separated me from Sawyer and hoped that he was taking good notes, because I was definitely going to need to borrow them.

Suddenly, I saw something flash out by the construction site. Someone was walking quickly away from one of the trailers. It didn’t look like one of the workers, though. He was too slim, too skittish, too young. He wore a black canvas jacket and a baseball cap and was moving so fast and furtively it made my nerves sizzle.

My phone vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans, making me jump. Behind me, Astrid snorted a laugh. I yanked the phone out and held it in both hands under my desk, cursing whichever alumna had decided to scare the crap out of me in the middle of class. The text was from an unknown number. Even though this wasn’t completely out of the ordinary—some of the alums had texted from numbers I didn’t have stored in my phone—my heart still pitter-pattered nervously. I’d had some bad luck with mystery texts in my recent past when Noelle and her grandmother had staged her fake kidnapping and sent me on a series of ridiculous tasks to get her back.

At the board Mr. Cheever droned on. I held my breath and opened the text.