Accomplice (2 page)

After I left Ace to doodle on his yellow legal pad, I slipped into English class. Or tried to. Dr. Glenn stopped talking when I slid into the room. “I’m s-s-s—sorry.” I sounded like Dean. “I was in the counseling center—”

“Of course, Miss Jacobs. Take a seat.” Dr. Glenn isn’t a sentimental guy. He’s kind of a hard-ass. But he didn’t ask me for a written pass. And that’s how I knew his pacemaker was functioning in full-heart capacity. After about four notebook pages of notes, I heard snuffling from the back corner. Looked around to see one of Lauren Szabo’s hands wiggling in the air. The other was covering her face. You know how, during the Oscars, when they replay the most emotional parts of the nominees’ performances? So you can see just how amazingly talented they are? That’s what Lauren looked like signaling her tragedy in the back row.

She kept pinching the bridge of her nose. Apparently that’s the face Lauren puts on when she’s pretending to be trying not to cry. Dr. Glenn looked over his tiny glasses at her. “Yes, Miss Szabo?”

“May I please be excused to the counseling center?” It became a refrain that echoed through most of my classes, especially after Lauren returned to report on the new counselor: “He has such
understanding eyes
.”

Lunch was kind of an ordeal, mostly because I couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to have an appetite. Usually upperclassmen get to sign out at the front office and we go to Subway or get pizza at Vito’s. That was all that got me through Monday morning—counting down the minutes until I could shake loose of everyone and escape every single set of eyes in the building. But when I got to the office, the clipboard with our names was gone. “Signout is suspended until further notice,” the secretary chirped. Until she saw it was me reaching for the pen. “Oh, Finn. How are you
doing
?” She leaped out from her desk and started patting my hand before I could move it away. “Sweetheart, Mr. Gardner canceled upperclass signouts. Under the circumstances, we think it’s best for everyone to stick to campus.”

“Does he think someone kidnapped Chloe?”

She stopped patting my hand then and started straightening out the piles of forms. It was a weird kind of relief to make someone else feel uncomfortable for a change.

“There’s a lot of reasons for all of us to stick close together right now.” Behind me, a line started forming,
kids jostling and wondering what the holdup was. “No signing out today!” Mrs. Axelbank called out in a bright voice.

“Are you kidding me?”

“It’s because of Chloe.”

“What? Why?”

“What does that have to do with lunch?”

“This is bullshit.”

That was Teddy Selander, and it was actually good to hear someone say it, to hear that not everyone’s world had shut down because Chloe slid off the face of the planet. “Why can’t we sign out?” But when I turned, Teddy clamped his mouth shut, stepped back like I might hit him.

“Sorry, Finn.”

“Why are you sorry?” But Teddy had already spun around, headed toward the cafeteria.

We’d said we couldn’t call each other or even text each other. Cops can trace that kind of stuff. Part of Chloe’s checklist had been to toss her cell phone in the old well back behind my house. It was about the thousandth time I wanted to call her. There were things we hadn’t known. And the biggest one was the kind of power we had all of a sudden. I felt like a superhero, like I had some kind of invincible cloak of grief around me.

Teddy Selander was an asshole. He’d been an asshole
since the sixth grade, when he’d moved to New Jersey from wherever they breed his particular kind of asshole. But, all of a sudden, we’d made him act like a decent human being. It was the kind of thing I wished we could put on our college applications.

It started as a joke. A sick joke really, the kind that Chloe and I could only tell each other because anyone else would think we were terrible people.

In the first week of our junior year, after college seminar started, we had to eat lunch in the auditorium two days a week. Soggy sandwiches, while the college guidance team lectured us about the admissions process. That was the same month they found Margaret Cook—the girl who was kidnapped from the campground in Yosemite. In the middle of the night, surrounded by her family. The guy had taken her months before, when we were still sophomores, and all summer long she was all over the news. She became a ghost story, a warning label:
You’re never really safe.
And being pretty, with cheerful red curls haloing your head, didn’t change anything.
People
put Margaret Cook on their cover and published the postcards she’d written out to her friends and never got to mail. A truTV camera crew followed some psychic around who believed that she could sense her around the
Parks Commission Cabin, and they actually dug around there, with bloodhounds. Initially, Chloe and I and pretty much every other kid in Colt River ate it all up.

By August, Margaret Cook was old news. We figured she was dead. Pretty much everyone besides her family seemed to figure she was dead. Her parents still went on talk shows, but eventually the networks stopped flashes of them during commercials. And then junior year started, and it felt like every other year of school hadn’t counted—they’d just been practice for three AP courses and SAT review at night and Honors Precalc and the one hundred and forty sheep that Chloe and I cared for to show off our sense of responsibility.

But even the sheep weren’t enough. We signed up for a Labor Day beach cleanup, because, you know, colleges needed to know there would be no untidy beaches with us around. When we got home, my dad was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a jar of pickles, eating kosher dill after kosher dill, with brine all over his chin. On the TV on the counter, there was some lady standing in front of a big red house, announcing that Margaret Cook had knocked on her parents’ door that morning. Her hair had been cut off. She seemed to be in relatively good health, showing symptoms of shock and malnourishment.

My dad’s kind of sensitive in this really weird way and he was all choked up about it. “That little girl came
home.” And then he got even louder. “That little girl CAME HOME.”

“Holy crap!” Chloe dropped her backpack at the door and bounded over to the TV to turn up the volume. “It’s Margaret Cook. It’s Margaret Cook, right? Why is she wearing a do-rag?”

My father choked back another pickle. “They cut off her hair. They cut off that poor little angel’s hair.”

“She’s our age. She’s a year older than us.” Chloe knew all the stats. And even as we got used to the news of Margaret Cook’s resurrection, Chloe couldn’t let it go. The rest of the night, she kept flipping back to CNN.

“Nothing’s ever going to be the same for her. She’s just walked back into her life and nothing’s ever going to be the same.” Chloe sounded stoned. She sounded like kids had that time they had a hypnotist get people to cluck like a chicken and stuff at our eighth-grade formal.

“Yeah, that’s awful,” I said.

“Maybe it’s awful.”

“What do you mean,
maybe
? She got kidnapped. It’s been months—who knows what some pervert did to her—”

“Yeah, but she’s home now and everyone knows who she is.”

“Exactly. That’s horrible, Chloe—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” But she didn’t seem convinced. Even when late night reruns came on and she got up to leave, Chloe was still a little out of it, like Margaret Cook was this loop she couldn’t get free from.

Which was how Margaret Cook followed us into our college seminar. Chloe came straggling into the auditorium, still in the process of snapping shut and pocketing her cell phone. She was a good ten minutes late and no one said a word, which is what happens when you’re the kind of pretty that when you go to the movies, people watch you and not the screen. And it helped that she smiled at everyone. That sounds like nothing, but I mean
everyone
.

Chloe smiled at the crusty-haired gamer guys who took over the computer lab during study halls. The bitchy future manicurists of America. Cranky maintenance workers. She moved through everyone seamlessly, cheerfully. And it never felt like she took anyone’s adoration for granted. Chloe worked at it—just like how she printed out banners with witty slogans every school council election. It’s not like anyone would consider running against her, anyway. But she still campaigned.

Except for being the charm queen, Chloe was just kind of normal. And maybe that was her charm—she worked hard but didn’t really test well. She didn’t cut herself or take two trains into New York City to buy her clothes in SoHo.

That day I was glad to see how normal she was—relieved. She wasn’t carrying a single magazine with the face of Margaret Cook on the cover. She was just the same old frantic, breathless Chloe, sinking down with all her stuff into the seat beside me.

The seminar was the third of about fifty we’d have on how to get into college. Colt River is farm town, but it’s not the same kind of farm town that my parents grew up in. Back then, you went to college if you were hoping to get out. Now you needed college, even if you’re going to come back and work on your dad’s place. Mostly because you have to know when to sell your dad’s place. You have to crunch numbers and keep up with newfangled crops and herds. You know, like ostrich.

The college talk pretty much went like this: It’s not a buyer’s market anymore. It’s true there are thousands of universities and colleges in the United States, but more teens than ever are applying for slots in the esteemed establishments. And for the next few years, until something extraordinary happened to level off the playing field, those elite schools—the ones we’d already picked out based on the stickers our parents wanted on the family SUV—they got to pick and choose.

You could tell the guidance lady had practiced this speech in front of a mirror a few times. For one thing, she paced around like our football coach on the sidelines. She waved her arms and pointed. And she kept singling
out kids for eye contact. She yelled a lot. I really sort of half expected her to whip out one of those dry-erase boards and draw x’s and arrows with a marker, as if she was diagramming plays. We had some options! We were not powerless! We had to look closely at the possibilities!

One of the possibilities was to apply to the West Coast, the Midwest, the South. Any place but the Northeast with its glut of college applicants. “There are airlines, people.” You could tell she’d practiced bellowing that line out loud. “We have these things called airplanes. You don’t have to limit your choices to the narrow scope of a two-hour drive from your parents’ houses.”

Clearly, College Guidance Lady didn’t grow up here. My parents considered Delaware pretty far away. That part of the pep talk was valuable to the two or three asshats who thought that three summers at the Jersey Shore made them surfers. They were going to apply to the University of Hawaii, aloha very much, and the rest of us could drown in the foam crush they’d be spraying out from beneath their bitchass boards. Everyone else sat there and assumed that College Guidance Lady wasn’t talking about us, because we’d worked really hard and had planned to go to Amherst since the sixth grade. We’d been carrying Tupperwares of piss all around St. Barnabas Hospital for years, just to prove that someday we were going to make top-notch med students. We were
the Class Council secretary, treasurer, archivist. We were envied in the tiny Colt River High School Orchestra for our ability to pluck pizzicato solos on the viola. We were special.

Only not. What College Guidance Lady seemed to be saying was that we weren’t as extraordinary as we all thought we were. “Where do you see yourself in three years, Mr. Ryden?” It was like College Guidance Lady had rehearsed that one, too—ask the kid who’s most obsessed with the whole application process, the one who dreams in Number 2 pencil. The one who’s dressed as a Princeton tiger every year for Halloween since we were six. Because he’s not wound tight enough or anything.

“I’m hoping to attend Princeton University, ma’am.” And that was why Kenneth was Kenneth. Because did he really have to clarify? Did he think College Guidance Lady would think he meant Princeton Air Conditioning Repair School? She was clearly screwing with him, setting him up for God knows what kind of spirit-deflating exercise, and he still called her
ma’am
. Next to me, Chloe covered her eyes with her hands.
God
, I thought,
sign us all up for the army. Anything to make this stop.

“And so are
two hundred thousand
other high school students. What makes you so special?” And poor Kenneth actually went on to list things. “WHAT MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?” College Guidance Lady boomed. “Ladies and gentleman, it’s not enough anymore
to be the captain of the cross-country team, the vice president of debate club, or even the president of our local chapter of Future Farmers of America. Lots of young people have resumes peppered with fancysounding titles. Lots of young people are on the honor roll. You need to think about what makes you stand out. Every year, hundreds of thousands of American students apply to colleges and think that because they are wellrounded, they are going to roll right onto campus.” When she said that last bit, College Guidance Lady actually did a rolling hand motion. She looked like she was on her way out of the auditorium in a conga line.

No such luck. She straightened up a little. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you think being wellrounded is enough these days, you’ve been misinformed.” And that’s when the murmur started. It sort of rolled over the rows of seated kids. Because we had been misinformed. And had spent hours—hundreds of hours—listening ardently to that misinformation. Girl Scouts, marching band—I cannot tell you how many hours I’d spent in some dorktastic costume. Because we were supposed to have some longass list of activities to convince college admissions committees how wellrounded we were.

It was actually nuts to see our whole class flipped on its ass a little. In the back rows, the same kids who are usually slumped over during assemblies were still slumped
over. But they were grinning a little, laughing at the kids who’d bought into the bullshit. Kids like me and Chloe.

But Chloe didn’t even look that upset. She was dead calm compared to half the kids who sat around us twitching tearfully. That’s when she made the joke. It was just an offhand comment, hushed in the rest of the wellbehaved riot brewing around us.

“Now do you see why Margaret Cook’s so lucky?” Chloe poked me. “She’s got a ticket anywhere.”

I said, “You’re sick.” And she tossed her head back and cackled.

College Guidance Lady just kept going. “Admissions committees want students who understand the world around them, who have unique perspectives.” And I raised my eyebrows, heard Chloe suck in her breath, trying not to laugh. “They want people who matter. Individuals who have overcome adversity.” By then we were rocking in our chairs.

“
Margaret Cook is going Ivy
”—I remember whispering that to Chloe, just to see her squirm harder in her seat, just to get her laughing even harder.

That’s how the whole thing started. That’s when it got on its way to becoming real.