The Rivals (24 page)

“Maia, I can’t fight with you anymore,” I say.

“I’m not fighting,” she says coldly. She doesn’t look up from the book.

“You know what I mean,” I say as I shut the door behind me.

“No, Alex. I hardly know what you mean about anything anymore.” She turns the page and keeps reading.

“Maia, you’re more important to me than the Mockingbirds,” I say, keeping my voice calm and steady, so she knows I mean everything I’m saying.

She raises an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

I sit down on my chair. “Yes. Our friendship is more important than the stupid case.”

“And when did you decide this?” She closes her book and turns to look at me.

“Now. This weekend. Always. I’m just saying it now because I’ve said it badly before. And I’ve acted badly before. And I should never have looked in your bag. I never should have pried. I never should have thought for a second that you’d be connected to the case. I know you’d never sell drugs. I know that, Maia. I know that like I know the Ninth Symphony cold.”

“I wish you’d acted like it,” Maia says, and she shifts. She’s not cold anymore. She’s wounded. This is the side of Maia I have never seen.

“I know, and I should have. I should have done a better job at so many things, but especially this. And I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

“Why’d you snoop, then? Why did you look through my things?”

I run a hand through my hair. “Because I feel completely alone. I mean, it doesn’t matter that there’s a board. It doesn’t matter that Martin’s on it. At the end of the day, we’re all alone. Ms. Merritt won’t do a thing,” I say, and then tell her about the brochure, about Ms. Merritt’s comments outside the Faculty Club about how Anderin abuse might be distracting me from more important tasks, even about the
shared culpability
dig.

“No. Bloody. Way,” Maia says, shaking her head. “She’s hell-bent on her record, isn’t she?”

“Yes. And that’s why I felt all this pressure to do
something
. Because she does nothing but smile and cheer and look the other way. And then all these students were coming up to me and telling me stuff. Here I was, fresh off my own case and thinking how I had to give back. I mean, I never expected to be leading the Mockingbirds. I had no idea that’s how they worked. And I wanted to do right by them, like what they did for me. So when students came to me and pointed fingers at the debate team or Theo or whoever, I wanted to do what I could to figure it out. I wanted to solve the case. And you were saying students were playing me; then I saw you putting the pills in your bag and it looked like you were hiding them. So then I thought you were playing me, and that’s why I looked in your bag. And I’m sorry, and I feel terrible because I know you would never do that.”

“I wasn’t playing you, Alex. I was just trying to keep it private. And I meant it when I said something about the case seems dodgy.”

I snort. “Oh, trust me. It’s
all
dodgy,” I say, and I decide to take a chance. I decide to sit down on her bed next to her. I brace myself for the possibility of her kicking me off. But she doesn’t, so I continue. “Maia, the thing is, it’s all gotten worse. Because right before you left for Miami—” I hesitate for a second, because I’m too embarrassed to say how or why I tricked Beat, so I censor that part and continue. “Beat said you’ve been supplying to the whole team, and of course I know that he’s lying.”

Her brown eyes widen. “Beat Bosworth? What a twat.”

I laugh lightly. “I’m glad to see your sense of humor is intact.”

“He is the biggest poseur I have ever met. He only joined debate because the Mockingbirds busted him for that idiotic Benadryl act last year. I’ve never considered him one of the true members of the team.”

I tell Maia he brought two other teammates to us, figuring this will only incense her and turn our tacit truce back to ice. But she laughs again, a deep, hearty chuckle.

“Those losers. No wonder he picked them. They’re the worst performers on the team.”

“Really?”

“He is totally trying to set me up, Alex. I will smother him,” she says, and raises an eyebrow playfully. I’m not quite sure how to react, so I say nothing. But inside I’m thinking maybe Beat
is
the one who’s setting us up. Maybe he’s been toying with me all along to get to Maia. “You are going to let me have my day in court with him, right?”

“Um, no! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t believe him. I’m not going to press charges against you. I’m not going through with this. I don’t care how many people he brings. I won’t do it. That’s why I said you’re more important to me than the Mockingbirds. I love you, my crazy British roommate.”

She waves a hand in the air. “You Americans. You’re always so emotional with your professions of love. You need to adopt more of my British coolness.”

Then she reaches out to hug me. “Shhh. Don’t tell anyone I bestowed a hug,” she says.

“Your secret is safe with me,” I say, because she is who I will protect. She is who I will defend. I have crossed so many lines, but this line—my friend or the Mockingbirds—this is the line I will not cross. I side with her. I stand by her.

Except she doesn’t want to have it my way.

“Now, listen to me. You
are
going to let them file charges against me. You are going to serve me. You are going to write my name in that book. And then I am going back into the laundry room—where, I might add, I had some of my finest oratory moments last year—and I am going to smash those thespian bastards to a new level of rhetorical oblivion. Got it?”

“Maia, I don’t want to try you.”

“Oh, but I want to be tried.”

“I can’t let that happen.”

Maia reaches over and squeezes my hand. “Let’s go to the cafeteria. It’s dinnertime,” she says with a look of mischief in her eyes.

Midway through the meal, Maia stands up and clears her throat to get everyone’s attention. It doesn’t take much for the noise and the chatter to die down, because Maia is imposing, her voice carries, and she has that indefinable thing called presence.

“I want you all to know that for the next
mock
debate,” she says, pausing on the word
mock
to make it clear she is talking in code, “I am going to be defending myself in the
Pharming
case, and I am going to win.”

Then she walks out. It takes me a second to process what she just said and how she did it, pure 100 percent Mockingbirds-style. Then I race out of there and follow her.

“Are you crazy?” I call out.

Maia shakes her head and slings an arm around me. “I am
ebullient
,” she says, and flashes me a big, brilliant smile. “I enjoyed every single second of it.”

After she writes her own name down in the book in the library, we return together to our room. T.S. is there and declares she has news.

“Parker and Anjali were totally flirting last night,” T.S. says.

“Shut up!”

“Yep. Anjali had one of her chess parties. I stopped by with Sandeep. Parker was already there, and I swear, Alex, he was freaking glowing.”

“He has a massive crush on her.”

“Evidently it’s mutual. He kept leaning in to whisper to her, and she was laughing at everything he said and she kept touching his leg.”

“She could do better than him. Much better,” I say.

“I, for one, think he could do better than her. She’s a snot,” Maia chimes in.

“You’re just saying that because she’s the only one who’ll ever disagree with you in English class,” I point out.

“And really. How dare she? Doesn’t she know better?” Maia says with a wink, and I am glad everything is back to normal with Maia.

If only I could figure out what I want to say to Martin. But when it comes to him, I have no idea.

Nor does he. Because when I text him the next day, saying
Sorry about our fight
, he writes back
Me too
.

But that’s it. Neither one of us says anything more, and I don’t see him much as the next week passes by in a blur.

I call Theo to ask him point-blank if he’s going to let someone else be tried for his crime or if he’s going to own up to it. But when he answers, I don’t even have a chance to ask because he tells me he’s not at Themis right now. He’s home in New York. Before I can ask why, he says he has to go.

I track down Delaney, but she doesn’t know much more than I do. She tells me he left campus a few days ago with barely a word, saying only that he’d be back in a few weeks.

I try him a few more times that week to no avail, so I do the one thing I still do well. Piano. I finish my Juilliard audition CD, and when I record the Ravel, it’s my residual anger at everything—Ms. Merritt, the Mockingbirds, Parker, Theo, even Martin—that propels me through the piece. I pop the CD in the mail and as I watch the envelope slide into the mailbox, I am keenly aware of a phantom beside me—my own wish that Martin were here with me, that we could send it off together.

We don’t have many Mockingbirds meetings, though we do hear a few minor complaints, like when a freshman comes to us when her shampoo has been replaced with green dye. Martin explains that pranks are pranks, and those are still allowed. Then I tell her she should embrace the new look, that some people look great with rainbow-hued hair. She stares at me like I can’t possibly understand the horror of her new hair color. I shrug my shoulders. What can you do? Some people can rock a cool do, some can’t.

When the official meeting ends, Martin and I make small talk, but there’s a distance between us now—and maybe I was wrong when I thought the Mockingbirds were coming between us, when I thought our different codes were dividing us. It seems Jones, or rather what I would or wouldn’t share about Jones and when, has become the wedge after all. Maybe we are just normal teenagers, not merely idealists, not simply caped crusaders who have adulthood thrust upon us prematurely thanks to an administration that either trusts too much or cares too little. But, really, we are just your average seventeen-and eighteen-year-old boys and girls who fight and love and feel.

The night before the trial, I slide into bed with
A Separate Peace
. As I read about the prep schoolers holding a midnight trial of one boy for causing the accident that broke his friend’s leg, I realize maybe there is truth in fiction. Because here is a student tribunal just like ours.

I close the book and peer out the window. White flakes drift down. Then I glance over at Maia, who’s sound asleep. I wonder if she’s nervous about tomorrow. I wonder if she’s worried about the trial. Sure, she’ll be in her element—talking, arguing, examining. But this time she’s playing for keeps. Because it’s not just another argument on foreign policy or politics. This time it’s for real. She’s fighting for what she loves. If she loses there’s no more debate team, no more Elite, no more love of her life.

If she loses, she could be like Theo.

But that won’t happen. This isn’t risky; there isn’t a bad landing.

Maia was made for the courtroom; she was bred to be a champion. She’ll be fine. Everything will be just fine, I tell myself as I fall asleep, the rest of the student body sleeping soundly too as the snow turns everything white.

It’s the calm before the storm. An illusion.

Because when I wake up at seven on Saturday morning, a full two hours before the trial starts, I find five text messages on my cell phone. All from Martin. All telling me to meet him right away. His notes are sloppy, full of spelling errors and abbreviations.

I slam on clothes, pulling and yanking in record time, and race out of the room. I run across the quad, making a clompy path through the newly fallen snow to his dorm. I grab the heavy door, and Martin’s on the other side, his hand pulling open the door, ready to find me too. His eyes are solid brown, like a wall, a sheet of monocolor.

“The evidence is gone,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“The bag. In our room. Gone.”

“Who took it?”

“No idea,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair. He screws his lips together, breathes heavily, shuts his eyes. I feel like I’m watching a pot about to boil over and scald everything in its path.

“Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Walk me through this. The bag was there in the closet yesterday, right?”

“Checked it like I do every morning. But this morning—gone,” he says, each word like a brick in his mouth.

“So it could have happened anytime in the last twenty-four hours.”

He nods.

“Well, what were you doing yesterday?”

“Class. Lab. The usual. Sandeep and I went to Williamson last night and watched football with some friends there.”

“Did Parker go with you guys?”

“No. He stayed behind in the room.”

“Does he know what happened?”

“Yes. He’s freaking out and crying,” he says.

“He’s crying?”

Martin nods. “Makes me sick. Dudes shouldn’t cry unless it involves dead pets or dead people.”

“But why is he crying?” I ask.

Martin twists up the corners of his lips, a scornful look meant for Parker’s tears.

“Seriously. Why is he crying?”

“I don’t know, Alex. Maybe because the case is blown? Think that might be it?”

“You don’t have to yell at me. I’m trying to understand everything.”

“He’s freaking out because the evidence is gone and—”

“He took it.”

Martin says nothing.

“Parker took it,” I say again. “That’s why he’s freaking out. That’s why he’s crying. I’m telling you someone has been trying to set us up all along. And I bet it was Parker.”

Martin shakes his head. He doesn’t want to believe it.

“He took it and hid it. He took it and destroyed it. He took it and did something with it while you guys were at Williamson. I never trusted him.”

Martin breathes hard. “I don’t think he did it, Alex.”

“Why not? He was there. He had access. He’s crying now, probably to cover it up.”

“It wasn’t him. I know it wasn’t him.”

“How did it happen, then?”

“I don’t know how it happened. Maybe someone broke into our room and took it.”