“Olivia, you are a terrible liar. What’s going on?”
Sierra grabs hold of my arm, rounding us to a stop outside Austen. Two boys graze past us, opening the door and sending a heavenly blast of warm air our way. Sierra stands firm, making it clear we will freeze until I spill.
I debate how much to tell her. But then I think about Emma’s secret phone in my purse. How much do I have left to uncover?
But this is Sierra. If I can’t trust her, I am truly alone.
“I’m looking into people Emma screwed over. I’ve…heard some things from people since she died. Things I had no idea about. Like how Kaila might not have gotten herself expelled. I thought it was worth looking into.”
“That is really fucking stupid. You’re not a cop. And look.” Sierra shuffles in place, nudges a toe into a graying patch of snow. “Things with Kaila got super dramatic, and yeah, we kept you out of it. Emma wasn’t perfect, but Kaila’s dangerous. You should stay away from her.”
“So you admit it? You did shit behind my back? This is the angle the cops don’t know about. All the crap we pulled, the stuff you guys did behind my back. I can talk to Kaila while she’s got her guard down, find out if she was near campus last week.”
Sierra considers me, a range of emotions passing over her face. Consternation morphs to pity.
“Liv, what are you doing? Why do you care so much about this?”
Her question knocks me back a foot. “Our friend died,” I remind her.
“I know that,” she snaps. “I was the one who found her, remember? We’re all…broken from this.” She blows out all the air in her chest in one long, slow exhale. “I’ll never get her face out of my mind. I can’t help but feel responsible….”
“I know.” I touch a tentative hand to her arm. “If we’d stayed at the party, not left her, maybe it would be different.” For me, it’s a genuine sentiment. For her, a condemnation, that the Ivies are lying about the timeline.
Sierra flinches. I drop my hand.
“Liv, all the things we did, whether you knew about them or not, are in the past. We did it. Admissions are all but over. Let it be. And if something Emma did got her killed, the cops will figure it out. There’s no need to bring the Ivies’ shit into it. And what if Kaila did do it? You’re just going to meet with her alone?”
“I won’t be alone. Ethan is going with me.”
“Ethan Kendall? What have you told him?”
Everything. “Nothing,” I say. “He knows Cataldo has me on the security footage outside Whitley. He offered to help. Overeager student journalist and all that.”
“Wait, why were you outside Whitley? And why wouldn’t you take the back way?”
That gets a raised eyebrow from me. “You know about the back exit?”
“Everyone does.” She shrugs. “Everyone who needs to sneak in and out of Whitley, at least. That was dumb getting caught on tape, though.”
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so why would it matter?”
She takes a step back from me. “Are you a suspect?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. Not anymore. Cataldo keeps asking me questions about Emma’s love life.”
Suddenly Sierra is intently interested in the ground.
“Did Margot tell you? Or, worse, did you know?” I ask her.
“I…suspected.”
“I lived with her and I didn’t notice!”
“Well, you’re not exactly the most observant when it comes to these things, Liv. No offense.”
Sierra does mean offense, so for once I decide not to grin and bear it. I show her how observant I can be.
“The cameras were hacked, Sierra. You were always saying it would be easy to do if the school was stupid enough to connect the cameras to the internet. Any idea who might have done it?”
“Paul probably messed something up, hit the wrong button.”
I shake my head. “The cops specifically said hacked. Someone turned them off for a few hours.”
Sierra and I lock into a stare-down. I know she did it. She will not concede.
Finally Sierra heaves a sigh, breaks eye contact. “I mean, yeah, it wouldn’t be hard. Olivia, why are you harping on this? I’m sure whoever did it was sneaking around, hooking up or something. Not killing Emma. You have to let this go. Come on.” She powers up the stairs to Austen, not waiting to see if I follow. She reaches the top landing before she notices I’m not beside her.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Sounds like the Ivies prefer to meet without me, anyway.” I turn on my heel, for once leaving her in my wake.
* * *
—
Embarrassment turns to rage as I tromp across campus back to Bay. How dare Sierra treat me like that. For what? Trying to solve the murder of our friend? So what if the Ivies don’t like the reckoning that’s coming for everything we’ve done over the last two and a half years? If it was something we did that led to this, we deserve to know.
Or if it was Emma’s hookup, we need to know that, too.
Finally I get back to my room, and I wrest the phone that’s been tempting me out of my bag. I check that the door is locked, even though I know it is, and curl up in the farthest corner of my bed, pulling my down comforter around me like a shield. I power on the phone.
And then the lock screen asks me for a passcode.
I curse under my breath, start cycling through potential codes.
Emma’s birthday, both American and European style, doesn’t work. I try as many other notable birthdays as I can recall—Tyler’s and both her parents’. (I have to creep on Emma’s Facebook to get those.) I’m running out of tries. The phone will lock me out after ten.
My eyes search Emma’s side of the room, looking for clues. Nothing obvious with numbers jumps out at me. There’s a large print of the Eiffel Tower at night, the Marie Antoinette movie poster, one of Degas’s dancers. Emma had a thing for Paris—all things French, really. I zero in on the movie poster, for some reason. Emma wasn’t merely a cream puff; she was fiercely smart and thoughtful about things, genuinely interested in history. She read not one but two biographies of the cake-loving queen (though, as she reminded me more than once, Marie never actually said that, not that way, referring to the famously misattributed quote).
It’s silly, stupid really, but I find myself Googling “Marie Antoinette,” pulling her essential details. And I take a chance, tap in the passcode.