Burned (25 page)

She held the locket away from her face, but the girl’s eyes seemed to follow her. She had a manipulative, winning smile that had entranced Aria for years. A scream froze in Aria’s throat. All of a sudden, she couldn’t breathe.

Ali
.

“Aria?”

Aria looked up and blinked. Noel was staring at her from a few feet away. She gave him a tight, nervous smile and shut the locket fast. The catch had broken, though, and the locket sprung right back open. She stared at the picture once more. It couldn’t be. Surely her brain was playing tricks on her. She tried to close it again, then peered carefully at the front of the pendant. In the strong overhead stage lights, the initial inscribed into the silver wasn’t an
I
or a
J
. It was a
T
.

For Tabitha?

Something suddenly clicked in her brain. Heart thudding, she grabbed her phone, pulled up the Tabitha Clark Memorial website, and stared hard at the picture of the girl on the home page.
That
was where she had seen this necklace before. On Tabitha, before she died.

She held up the necklace. “W-where did you really find this?”

Noel looked confused. “I told you. It was in the sand in St. Martin. Why?”

Aria’s thoughts scattered in a million different directions. “That’s impossible,” she whispered. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Had A planted it for Noel to find? And then there was the picture—Tabitha and Ali
had
been friends.

She took a step, but her legs felt wobbly. “Aria?” Noel touched her arm. “What is it?”

“I just have to …,” she said faintly. She staggered toward the exit. Her phone beeped. It was Graham. Panicked, Aria hit
IGNORE
, then dialed Spencer’s number. But the call went to voicemail.

“Where are you?” Aria demanded after the beep. “We need to talk.”

But she was afraid to say anything over the phone, so she hung up and kept running. She called Emily next, but she didn’t answer either. Same with Hanna. She ran up the aisle and sprinted to the elevator, pressing the
UP
button repeatedly.

“Aria?”

Aria turned. Graham was standing by the window, staring at her. “You walked right past me,” he said, looking annoyed. “Why didn’t you answer my call? I need to talk to you.”

“I …” Aria trailed off, her gaze dropping to the locket in her hands. Graham was looking at it, too. His eyebrows met. His mouth grew very small, and all of a sudden, he reached out and touched her wrist. She gasped and closed her fist around it, but it was too late. Of course Graham recognized his girlfriend’s old necklace. He’d probably recognized it from earlier.

“I-I can explain,” Aria stammered.

Graham blinked hard. “You
can
?”

His cheeks were red. His eyes blazed. All at once, another barrel clicked in her brain, and a horrible thought bulldozed all others.
He knows what I did
.

It made perfect sense. Graham hadn’t wanted to talk to her about his burgeoning crush: He wanted to confront Aria about being a murderer.

She spun around, searching frantically for somewhere to go. The red
EXIT
sign for the stairs glowed in the distance.

“Aria!” Graham yelled, lurching after her. He grabbed her arm and clamped down hard. His fingers felt like hot irons on Aria’s skin. She screamed and wrenched away from him, pushing through the heavy door and heading down. She’d never gone below the auditorium level and didn’t know what was there. Up ahead was a door marked
DO NOT ENTER
.

Graham’s footsteps echoed on the landing below. “Aria, come back here!” he roared.

She burst through the door anyway and spilled into a large, empty room full of ship machinery. Boilers chugged. Air-conditioning units hummed. Other utility devices rattled and churned. The space was lit by a few spare overhead lights and split into several long, mazelike corridors. There wasn’t a soul around.

Behind her, the door opened. “Aria!” Graham called out, his voice reverberating.

Aria skidded behind a boiler, but Graham spied her and started running, his face red, his nostrils flaring, his teeth bared.

She wheeled around, desperately searching for someone to help her, but she was alone. Then she scrambled for somewhere to go, somewhere to hide. There was another door past the boilers marked
STAFF ONLY
. She ran for it and pushed it open. This room was filled with pipes and monitors and more boilers. The grumbling sound was almost deafening, reminding her of a revved motorcycle engine. The doorknob rattled, and Aria rushed to turn the lock, then threw her weight against it. Frightened tears ran down her cheeks.

“Damn it, Aria, you can’t hide forever!” Graham pounded on the door.

“Please,” Aria whimpered. “Just go away.
Please
.”

“I’m not leaving until—”

An engine sputtered. He tried to scream over the machinery sounds. “I need to—I need …”

“Just leave me alone!” Aria sobbed. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to do it to her! I was just so scared! We all were!”

“You can’t … I … he … and …” Graham’s angry voice rose and fell. Aria could only make out every other word. “… watching you!”

“Please go away!” Aria screamed. “I said I was sorry! Please let me go!”

“… there’s a picture!” Graham continued. “…
watching
you!”

Aria blood sizzled. He had to be referencing the awful photo of Aria pushing Tabitha off the roof. Maybe
he
had taken that photo. Maybe that’s what he meant by
watching you
.

Thoughts cascaded in her mind like a falling line of dominoes. What if Graham was crazy about Tabitha and hadn’t let her go after they broke up? Maybe he’d followed her to Jamaica to rekindle things. Maybe he’d taken pictures of her without her knowing, and had posed on the shore to take pictures of Tabitha on the crow’s-nest deck. Only, instead of documenting Tabitha with some new friends, he had witnessed a murder. Maybe he’d snapped a picture of her lying on the beach, too, after she’d fallen and died. Maybe he’d even torn this necklace from her throat and planted it for Noel to find. It didn’t make sense why Graham didn’t tell someone at the resort right away, but maybe he’d wanted to get revenge
his
way. And so … he’d become A.

Aria began to tremble. Was it possible? All the warnings her friends had given her, all the times they’d said he had motive, and there she was, by his side, making
excuses
for him. He
did
have motive. He could have gotten in touch with Naomi, somehow, after the crash, and recruited her onto his team.

He could be a murderer. A torturer. And now she was trapped in this room with him on the other side.

The door thumped and thudded with Graham’s pounding fists and kicking feet. When Aria shut her eyes, she saw Tabitha’s terrified face as she fell. She pictured her broken body on the sand, kissed by the incoming tide. Aria
was
a terrible person. She deserved Graham to be mad at her. But she didn’t deserve what he’d done as A.

Boom
.

Aria screamed and covered her head. The sound was so close, and the room vibrated. The lights flickered overhead, and the sound of metal hitting the ground clanged all around her. She let out a breath and peeked through her fingers. Had something exploded? There was as horrible smell in the air of gunpowder and charred electronics. It sort of reminded her of a firework. Or, perhaps, a homemade bomb.

A fire alarm started to blare. “Everyone!” Jeremy’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker after about a minute. “We need you to evacuate right now! Please go to your lifeboat stations in an orderly fashion!”

Evacuate?
Aria’s heart started to pound. She wasn’t even opening the
door
.

She cocked her ear, waiting for Graham to start pounding again. A few seconds passed, and then a minute. Finally, Aria opened the door a crack. Emergency lights flashed overhead. The room was thick with smoke. A boiler had tipped over. Pieces of metal were strewn all over the floor. Black smoke was pouring out from seemingly everywhere, and flames leapt to the ceiling. The explosion had definitely occurred right there in that room.

She let out a scream, then wrenched open the door. She had to get out of there. She looked around for Graham, expecting him to grab her. But even through the haze, the realization dawned on her fast.

Graham was gone.

Emily followed the stream of kids toward the stairs, her nostrils burning with smoke. Above her, emergency lights flashed. Kids were screaming about the strange explosion, laughing hysterically, or making nervous comparisons to
Titanic
. And even though they’d attended a safety meeting the very first day on the boat, no one seemed to remember where their lifeboat stations were.

“Everyone!” Jeremy yelled over the loudspeaker. “If we get separated, please remember to meet us at the Royal Arms Hotel in Hamilton, Bermuda.”

Jeremy repeated the message three times more. As Emily waited to go down the stairs, she glanced at the sky. A plane zoomed overhead, coming from the Bermuda airport, which was now a ten-minute boat trip away. Was it the plane she and Jordan were supposed to be on? She pictured the people sitting in their seats, the stewardesses cruising up the aisles, the smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafting through the cabin—and the two unoccupied seats meant for her and Jordan.

The line moved up a little, and a few more kids made it through the stairwell door. A girl in front of Emily with cornrows in her hair nudged her friend. “I heard terrorists blew up the cafeteria.”

“No, these two guys who were in the talent show did it,” her friend replied knowingly. “They knew their act sucked, so they decided to bomb the place and steal the Vespa.”

“You’re making that up.” Cornrows rolled her eyes.

“Maybe it was that girl who jumped overboard earlier,” another voice said. “Maybe this was revenge for whoever ratted her out to the Feds.”

“That’s crazy.” Someone sounded annoyed. “That girl never came up for air. She’s dead.”

“Can you believe she was on this ship the whole time? Who do you think turned her in?”

Stop talking about her!
Emily wanted to scream. It was like Jordan was an infamous celebrity, someone weird and unknowable.
She likes a lot of milk in her coffee
, she thought.
She’s fearless. She’s the most amazing girl I’ve ever met
.

She shut her eyes and considered Jordan’s body sinking down, down, down, to the depths of the bay, just like Tabitha’s had. She wanted to strangle A with her bare hands. Why couldn’t A have just let them go? Why did A have to ruin Every. Single. Thing?

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Aria was on the stairs behind her, dressed in a bikini and her grass hula skirt and drenched in sweat. Hanna and Spencer were there, too, dressed normally but looking hysterical.

“What’s going on?” Emily asked.

Aria glanced back and forth at all the kids on the stairs, then dragged Emily onto the landing, which was cool, dark, and empty. Kids swarmed past, but no one seemed to notice they were there.

“
Look
.” Aria fished the round gold locket she’d been wearing all week out of her pocket and dangled it under Emily’s nose. The two halves of the pendant splayed open. Emily squinted at the two girls in the picture inside. One of the girls was Ali. When she realized who the other one was, she stepped away, confused.

“Is that
Tabitha
?” she whispered.

“This was her necklace,” Aria said. “Noel found it on the beach, but I checked the pictures of Tabitha online, and it was definitely hers.”

Spencer shook her head, stunned. “I bet Naomi planted it for Noel to find and give to Aria.”

“Or maybe Graham did,” Aria said, still breathing hard. She looked like she was about to burst into tears. “I was wrong about him, guys. He stared right at the necklace like he knew what it was, and then gave me this look like he knew everything I’d done. I ran from him and shut myself in the boiler room, but he screamed at me through the door. I screamed out an apology for what we did to Tabitha, but it didn’t make him stop. He said he was watching me, and he mentioned a picture. I think he was the one who set off the bomb, too. He mentioned gunpowder once when we were talking—he would have known how to make an explosion.”

Spencer clapped a hand over her mouth. “You could have been killed!”

“I know.” Aria swallowed hard.

Emily trembled. “What picture do you think he was talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Aria said. “Maybe the one of Tabitha on the beach. I think
he’s
the one working with Naomi.”

“Oh my God.” Spencer sank onto a stair, looking woozy.

“But why would Naomi—or Graham, or whoever—plant that necklace for Noel to give to Aria?” Hanna asked.

“It proves we killed Tabitha,” Spencer said, leaning closer so that a bunch of boys clamoring down the stairs wouldn’t hear. “It connects us to her and that night. A is trying to build an airtight case.”

Emily wilted against the wall. “I don’t get it. Why would A need to build even more of a case on us? A—both of them—have the pictures. One of the As saw us. And we
did
do it. Why does A need to gather extra evidence?”