Down to the Liar (2 page)

“Let me get this straight,” Mike says after demolishing a piece of corn bread. “You’re asking me for advice? Angela, would you check her temperature? She must have been bitten by a zombie or something.”

“Ha. I’m so amused by you right now,” I say, and scarf another spoonful of Angela’s
abuela
’s famous mole poblano.

Mike and his wife, Angela, both work odd hours—him as a sometimes-undercover FBI agent and her as a nurse—so dinnertime shifts from four in the afternoon to eight-thirty at night depending on the day.

“Knock it off, Ramirez,” Angela says to Mike as she stacks our plates to take to the kitchen. But when she passes me, she rests the back of her free hand against my forehead. “Perfectly normal.”

“I’m surrounded by comedians,” I say.

“Better than being surrounded by teen-eating sharks,” Mike says.

“I’m not sure I’m not surrounded by teen-eating sharks, actually.”

“Explain,” he says, eyeing me sharply.

So I tell them about Skyla. When I’m done, Angela’s expression is a typical momlike mixture of horrified and sympathetic. “That’s awful. That poor girl.”

“The first thing I’d do is report it to Facebook,” Mike says, slathering butter on a second piece of corn bread.

I lean forward to snag another piece myself. “Whoever’s doing this would just create new accounts. We need to shut it down permanently.”

“Then you have to find out who’s doing it,” he says.

“Any ideas on how to do that?” I ask.

“Start with the victim.”

“I did. She says she has no idea who’s behind it.”

“Doesn’t mean following her around won’t give you leads,” he says. “It worked with you.”

I chew on that while he chews on corn bread. He has a point. Following me did lead him to Petrov (the mob boss I mentioned earlier). And I was too big an idiot at the time to realize that was what Mike was up to before Mike took Sam out of the game.

That night I lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling in Mike and Angela’s guest room, flipping through memories of the time before I became Julep Dupree, rescuer of human-trafficking victims. Tyler…I will always regret that I happened to him. But tonight I feel the loss of Sam more.
We were in fourth grade when we started running the three-card monte scam on our classmates.
I should be brainstorming this job with him, not Mike.
We were eleven when we played our first false Good Samaritan scam to get out of gym class.
He’s the best hacker I know, wicked smart and sensitive, all of which I desperately need on this job.
We were thirteen when my dad disappeared the first time with no explanation, and all that stood between me and panic was a scrawny, half-black kid in a Clone Wars T-shirt.
But he’s almost a thousand miles away, being brainwashed by military school.
We were fifteen when he confessed that he was in love with me and then put his life on the line to help me save my dad.
If he ever comes back, he won’t be my Sam anymore.

My phone rings and I answer.

“Hey, Bryn. What’s—”

“Have you checked Facebook tonight?”

“No,” I say, sitting up. “Why?”

“Looks like they’re going after you now, too.”

“Good morning, brindle-coated, dogface bitch,” Murphy says as I join him in St. Aggie’s computer lab the next morning.

“Skyla’s frenemies are nothing if not creative in their insults,” I say, snorting in amusement as I hop up to sit on the table across from him.

Brindle-coated. I can’t even take that seriously. The other two posts Skyla’s antagonizers wrote about me were equally asinine. But the creepy part I can’t laugh off is that the posters knew Skyla had met with me so soon after the fact.

Hence our campout in St. Aggie’s computer lab. We’re starting the job with a Trojan horse scam to see if we can breach the Internet trolls’ defenses through their personal computers. That’s right—good old-fashioned spyware, baby. God bless governments and creepy corporations.

Ms. Shirley, the computer science teacher and chief overlord of the lab, thinks we’re conducting a research experiment on Internet surfing patterns. She has no idea we’re actually planting hacker bugs into the computers, phones, and tablets of a couple dozen of Skyla’s closest friends, so we can monitor every click and swipe they make over the next few days. No doubt we’re violating several school rules, a dozen or so ethical principles, and maybe even a law or two. But hey, if it finds us the culprits, well…what’s a little loss of privacy among friends?

“If Sam were here, he could hack into the Facebook servers directly and get the IP addresses without breaking a sweat,” Murphy says, clacking away on his laptop.
But Sam isn’t here
is what he doesn’t say. He probably knows I’d sense the judgment. Murphy thinks I shouldn’t have let Sam leave. Or maybe it’s me who thinks that.

“Why bother taking the easy road when we can go the hard way instead?” I say with a shrug.

“Incoming,” Murphy says, nodding toward Bryn, who’s hurtling toward me at a velocity that can only mean she’s pissed about something.

“Bracing for Bryn-pact in three, two…”

He looks annoyed. “Funny.”

“What the hell, Julep? You put me on the suspect list?” Bryn says when she stalks up to us.

A few months ago, I’d have been irked by the accusation—not because it implies I don’t know what I’m doing (which it does), but because I used to hate having to explain every little thing to newbies. But now I’m getting accustomed to playing disreputable-Yoda, which is proof positive that you
can
teach an old con new tricks.

“First of all, it’s not a list of suspects, it’s a list of people participating in our
research project,
” I say, signaling her to keep her voice down. If she doesn’t zip it, she’ll tip off Ms. Shirley. “And second, of course I did. I don’t want anyone getting suspicious that you’re
not
on the list.”

Bryn scoffs. “That doesn’t make any sense. The others don’t know they’re on a list.”

“Whoever’s behind the attacks knows they’re doing something wrong, which makes them naturally suspicious of anything unusual happening around them. Especially if it involves computers. They’re more likely to trust the legitimacy of this
research project
if they see that Skyla’s BFF is participating, too.”

“How’d you get everyone to agree, anyway?” She folds her arms, her body practically buzzing in irritation.

“The carrot and the stick, like always. The carrot being a five-dollar gift card to the Ballou. The stick: threatening to cut off their access to the school WiFi.”

Murphy looks up. “We did not threaten to cut off their WiFi.”

“I may have threatened to cut off Jenna’s WiFi,” I say.

Murphy’s expression is now as aggravated as Bryn’s.

“What?” I hop off the table. “She doesn’t drink coffee.”

Bryn shakes her head. “This better work. Or we’ll have betrayed all our friends for nothing.”

“Chill out, Judas. In a day or two, we’ll have found our bullies, we’ll eighty-six the spyware, and no one will be the wiser.”

Bryn grabs my arm. “Wait—‘found our bullies’? Skyla made it clear she doesn’t want to know who’s behind it.”

Murphy disappears behind his laptop screen again, letting us girls duke it out.

“I’m not planning on telling Skyla who they are,” I say, proud of myself for not yanking my arm out of her grasp despite my own growing irritation. See? I can be patient. “But it doesn’t change the fact that
I
need to know. I can’t stop them if I don’t know what they want.” Or more accurately, what they fear.

Bryn clearly doesn’t approve of my answer, but it’s really not my job to do everything the Bryn Way. If it were, I’d quit that crap job in a hot second.

“Look, I’m hoping it’s a shallow clique misunderstanding I can correct with a little leverage. No public humiliation.”

“What if it’s more than that?”

“I’ll worry about that if we get there. I can’t come up with a solution before I understand the problem.”

“It’s time,” Murphy says. “You’d better take off, Julep, unless you want to blow the whole thing.”

A sad outcome of my shenanigans at the end of last year is that everyone is automatically skeptical if I’m involved in something. Even though I’m supposedly spearheading this “project,” I can’t risk one of our marks getting suspicious. I can barely say hi to people in the hallway without them giving me the
what’s your angle
eyebrow. So I end up farming out most of my St. Aggie’s work to people who owe me favors. It’s annoying having to deal with that extra layer between me and the job, and there’s been more than one botched assignment I’ve had to smooth over. I hate taking the risk, especially with Dean Porter continually breathing down my neck. But I’m often too busy with non-school-related cases to do everything myself anyway.

Bryn wordlessly swings her backpack to the floor, fishes out her laptop, and hands it to Murphy.

“Phone and tablet, too.” He smiles at her apologetically. She glares at him but produces the phone.

I head out the door, clutching my own laptop on the off chance someone sees me leave the room. Always play the role to its fullest, or one day you’ll slip up just enough to get caught. My dad taught me that. Too bad he didn’t follow his own advice. He slipped up enough to get caught by the mob, and now he’s in the pen with a bum shoulder and a five-year sentence. It could have been worse, though. He could have been dead. Like Tyler.

Thinking about my dad inevitably leads to me thinking about my mom. I still haven’t found her. I have no freaking idea where to even start looking, and neither does my dad. I’ve combed through my student file, but all the people listed in it are untraceable. No one’s ever heard of them, and there are no records of them anywhere that Murphy and I can find. There’s no personal information, like previous addresses, known associates, or even their favorite color. And if I can’t track them down, I can’t ask them if they know where my mom is.

Ralph, my dad’s bookie and best friend, is still missing, too. He should have made some kind of contact by now. It’s been months. Petrov won’t cop to killing him, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t. Part of me hopes Ralph comes back. A bigger part of me hopes he’s cashed out and is lying on a beach somewhere sipping mai tais and binging on his wife’s Korean cookies.

Which circles me back around to thoughts of Tyler. The boy I almost-but-not-quite maybe-could-have loved. The boy who betrayed me. The boy who died instead of me.

My brain shies away from thoughts of him. Especially lately. Something will trigger a memory, and I’ll flinch. Then anger swirls up, swallowing the memory and the pain. The practical effect is that I’ve gotten a lot snarkier lately, and I snap quicker and more often. I know I’m doing it, but I can’t make myself stop. Everything irks me these days.

I stop at my locker and shake myself loose from the grip of things I can do nothing about. I’m much better off focusing on the job at hand. And just as I think that, the majority of St. Aggie’s girls’ tennis team passes me on their way to the computer lab. Skyla’s on the tennis team as well, but she tends to socialize with Bryn’s group instead. It’s not much of a motive for publicly urging someone to off herself, but popularity is a strange animal and girls can be vipers sometimes.

I slam my locker door closed and jump when I see the person standing behind it, waiting for me to notice him.

“Damn it, Carter,” I say, holding a hand to my chest. “Make some noise next time, will you?”

“Sorry.” He doesn’t look sorry. He looks like a weasel with a five o’clock shadow and a greasy tangle of dark hair. “Murphy sent me to get your computer. He wants to add the receiver to your hard drive, so you can help him sort through the data.”

I hand him the computer. “You were friends with Sam, right?”

He nods, though on him it’s more a head-duck than a nod.

“Do you still talk to him?”

“Not really,” Carter says. “He’s not on the forums much anymore. Kind of a shame. He always seemed to know the answer.”

My chest tightens, so I nod back instead of speaking.

He starts off down the hall, but I stop him. “Thanks, Carter. For helping with the job. You didn’t have to.”

He keeps his eyes downcast as he says, “I know her.” Then he scurries away before I can say anything else too far outside his comfort zone.

“Ms. Dupree. Loitering in the hallway, I see.”

That smug observation would only come from Dean Porter. Sure enough, she’s snuck up behind me like a titian-haired sniper. I want to roll my eyes at her, but the last thing I need is for her to haul me into her office. If I never see the inside of that floral monstrosity again, it will be too soon.

“I believe fourth period is still currently in session.”

I hand her the pass I always keep on my person. I have a stack of them in my book bag for just such an emergency. I am an expert forger, after all.

The dean doesn’t bother examining the pass. She knows it’s as fake as the IDs I unloaded on her desk last October. But she also knows she can’t prove it without talking to the teacher whose signature I forged, and Mr. Ludzinski owes me a favor. Even if she could get him to back her up, I’m a protected species at St. Aggie’s these days. President Rasmussen likes me, which means I can get away with pretty much anything short of setting the library on fire.

“Get to class.” She levels her serious-as-a-train-wreck gaze at me. But as soon as her back is turned, I smile. She’s carrying her laptop, and she’s headed toward Ms. Shirley’s computer lab. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. A window into the dean’s personal computer? Yes, please.

I’m about halfway to fourth period when I pass the door to the chapel. Skyla is kneeling in front of the statue of St. Nicholas and lighting a candle. I almost keep going. She hired me to make the attacks stop, not to counsel her through the experience. But Mike’s advice echoes in my brain:
Follow the victim.
Maybe I can get something out of her while she’s in the mood for confession.

I kneel next to her, clumsily making the sign of the cross. I don’t pray very much, or, you know, ever. But I can fake the motions well enough.

“He’s the patron saint of thieves,” I say, indicating the statue. “We go way back, St. Nick and I.”

“He’s also the saint of children,” she says quietly, not looking at me.

“You say ‘tomato’…”

“What can I do for you, Julep? I’ve already served you the privacy of all of my friends on a silver platter.”

“If they’re not responsible for the attacks, they have nothing to fear from me. I’ll push the deactivate button on the spyware myself the second this is over.”

“Well then, what do you want? It’s kind of hard to hold a conversation with you and God at the same time.”

“I get that a lot.” I light my own candle, wondering where the patron saint of children was when Tyler was shot. “Are you sure you don’t want me to make it public? Taking down your attackers, I mean. I can ruin them for you.”

She sighs. “And what good would that do?”

“They would never do it to you, or anyone else, ever again. You’d be doing the school a public service.”

She doesn’t respond for several minutes, but then she settles back on her heels and faces me.

“I’m not interested in doing anyone any favors. I just want to survive this. I’m not strong like you or Bryn.”

“Then you can lean on us. You’re not alone in this if you don’t want to be.”

Skyla’s gaze drops to her hands lying folded and limp in her lap. “I know.” She seems to be thinking something she’s not sure how to say. I wait for her to figure it out. I have time.

“Garrett’s been very supportive. Not just during all this awfulness, but since we started dating last year. My parents…they’ve always been so wrapped up in their music careers and each other, I’ve only ever been an afterthought to them. I’ve spent holidays alone since I was six. But then Garrett came along and made me feel taken care of. I don’t want to lose that. I just want to go back to what it was like before all this started happening. Can you do that?”

She’s asking it with a genuine tone rather than a challenging one. Her expression is pleading for understanding. And I do understand. I can tell you from personal experience that fame is not all it’s cracked up to be.

“I will try.” I reach for her hand and squeeze it. She smiles for the first time.

At half past boring o’clock, I lean back in my desk chair in the Ballou office, rubbing my eyes and fighting a yawn. This paper on the importance of textiles in the English industrial revolution is trying to choke the life out of me. The evening started so promising with sending out invoices and logging received checks from past clients. But then I remembered this awful paper is due next week. Just wrap me up in tweed and smother me already.

I decide to take a walk, since I don’t have to check back into Casa de Ramirez for another hour. I don’t have a particular destination in mind, so it shouldn’t surprise me when the “L” and my feet transport me to my old stomping grounds. I wave at Fred, my former homeless neighbor, as I pass the apartment building I lived in with my dad and continue on, retracing worn routes to favorite haunts.

Chicago’s wet nights smell like a mixture of oil, rain, and newsprint. I get a strange feeling when I smell it. I imagine it’s similar to the feeling kids get when they smell their mom’s perfume.