Deadly Pink (25 page)

I felt so drained that I needed to set my head back down on the pillow while Mom was busy telling Emily— for the fourth or fifth time—“It's okay, honey, we'll work things out, everything's going to be fine.”

It took a while before I became aware that Adam was standing beside my couch, holding Mom's phone out to me.

Without the energy to ask who it was, I took the phone and mumbled, “Hello?”

“Grace!” My dad's voice cracked. “Are you truly all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, forcing more energy into my tone so Dad wouldn't sound so worried. “Emily and I are both fine.” Then, my quick mind having already run out of anything useful to say, I added the obvious, “You finally got out of your meeting.”

Dad took that as criticism. “I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you.”

There were a few seconds of muddled conversation while we talked over each other, with me saying, “No, I didn't mean...,” and him saying, “Yeah, but I should...,” and we both said, “What?” and we both tried to repeat what we'd just said earlier; then we both stopped entirely.

After a few seconds of silence, Dad said, “The young man there told me you were the hero who saved the day.”

I glanced at Adam, who had moved to help Ms. Bennett and had his back to me.

Hero?
That's quite an upgrade for someone who's just come to terms with
levelheaded.

“Well,” I said, “that's a bit of an exaggeration...”

“No,” Dad insisted, “he said you wouldn't give up, that you kept trying, no matter what. Grace, I'm so proud of you—and so grateful.”

Well, so that was the good part.

The okay part was when Mr. Kroll, representing Rasmussem's legal department, came in. Mr. Kroll welcomed Emily back, with all his usual warmth and sincerity; he followed that with at least a half-hour of legalese, all of which came down to:
You don’t sue us and we won't sue you.

Oh, and by the way, pack up your stuff and don’t bother thinking you'll ever work for Rasmussem again.

Working for Rasmussem had been Emily's dream for, like, forever, but all right, that was to be expected.

Then came the bad part.

I don't know about Mom, Dad, and Emily, but I'd assumed that once Emily made a formal statement about how she'd fiddled with the scores of those SAT tests, and once she'd apologized and promised never to do it again, she'd be forgiven. Maybe get a good talking-to from the people who run the SATs, maybe have a fine imposed by her college or even by the other colleges, the ones her friends had gotten into under false pretexts.

I was not expecting the police to come, to arrest her for fraud, and to take her away in handcuffs.

Thus began our education in the American judicial system. Before then, my family's sole experience in legal matters was that time my father had been to traffic court to contest a speeding ticket. So it's been a crash course in bail bondsmen, grand jury indictments, and endless hearings separated by interminable delays.

Our family has a lawyer now, not Mr. Kroll, of course, but a lawyer to look out for our interests, a lawyer our parents had to hire—and pay and pay and pay for. This lawyer of ours says Emily has two things on her side: her age and her obvious remorse. By sheerest luck, Emily was a couple of weeks short of her eighteenth birthday when she hacked into the computer system, making her a minor during the actual commission of the crime. Along with her attempted suicide (now that it's all over, we can acknowledge this), her confession, and her contrition, that makes a certain amount of leniency possible. Or so says our lawyer. He asserts his doubt that Emily will actually have to serve jail time. But then he admits she might.

Meanwhile, her high school friends, the ones whose scores she padded, have each and every one of them been thrown out of the colleges they were attending. They'll need to retake the tests and apply—elsewhere, they've been told—next semester. Scholarship money had to be returned. In the case of Frank Lupiano, this was such a significant amount that his parents have had to take out a second mortgage on their house, their only option for keeping
him
out of jail.

Because of this, our family also got an education in hate mail and obscene phone calls. We've all had to change our e-mail accounts and phone numbers and social networking to avoid those former friends and their parents—and also to avoid people we don't even know, people who feel they lost the chance to go to the colleges they are sure they would otherwise have gotten into, if only Emily's friends hadn't wrongfully taken their places.

The first few weeks, Mom and Dad fluttered and hovered over Emily, always trying to keep a discreet watch on her, obviously worried that she would seek another way to escape her complicated life.

But actually ... Emily ... I don't know how to say this in a way that won't make those who hate my sister hate her more, but she is doing well. Sure, she's worried about her upcoming court date, about the sorrow she's caused, about how her actions have cut down so many of her options for the future. But even with all those fears and regrets, now that everything's gone public, now that she's no longer keeping secrets, it's like the worst is over. Our family has survived, and sometimes—not often, but sometimes—Emily even looks happy.

Not that I would ever wish what we went through on anybody else, but our relationship has evolved. It's not so much one of older sister/younger sister, but more one of longtime friends who have gone through a lot together. And

I like that.

Mom is calmer, Dad is home more often, and my friends aren't interested in college yet—so they all think that Emily is kind of cool and that I am the Empress of the Total Immersion Universe. Sub-teen Games division, of course.

So what I'm saying is that I, too, am generally happy.

And I felt that even before Ms. Bennett texted me—clever computer engineer that she is, she somehow tracked down my new phone number. What she said was:

You did well.
Call me in another 5 years.

Not bad for the other sister, the levelheaded one—who still hates trigonometry.