Pregnant For my School Rival

Same Hand

The text from his father came back in under a minute.

No.

That was all. No period after it, no explanation, just the single word glowing on Alexander's phone in the boathouse locker room. He'd typed three drafts before sending his own. Please stop reading her file. Then, It's a conflict of interest and you know it. Then he deleted both and sent, Dad, can we talk about the Wilson file, which got him the answer he'd have bet money on.

He shoved the phone into his bag and peeled his wet shirt over his head.

Practice had been bad. Coach Reyes had called him out twice for rushing the catch, and the second time the whole eight had gone quiet and stared at their oars. His hands stung. The blisters on both palms had split open sometime around the third piece and he'd kept pulling anyway, because pulling was the only thing in the day that made sense. Pull until the lungs burned and your brain went white and nobody could ask you a question.

The others had left. The locker room was empty, all damp wood and river rot and the chlorine-sweet smell of the cheap soap Coach stocked. Alexander towelled his hair, pulled on a clean shirt, and walked out onto the dock with his bag over one shoulder.

The sun was down. The river had gone from gray to ink. Two security lamps hummed at the ends of the dock and cut yellow circles on the planks.

Emma Wilson sat on an overturned scull at the far end, her bag in her lap.

He stopped. For a second he wondered if she was real.

"You're late," she said.

"I didn't know I had an appointment."

"You didn't." She held something up between two fingers. A small yellow square. "We need to talk about this."

He crossed the dock slowly. Each board creaked under him and he disliked how loud it was.

She didn't hand him the note. She let him read it from where he stood, her thumb pinning it to her knee. HE LIED ABOUT THE TRAY. ASK HIM WHERE HE REALLY GOT IT.

Alexander's stomach turned over.

He knew that handwriting. The ruler-straight capitals. The way the letter E was made with three identical bars, no variation. He'd looked at the same hand for two days.

"Where did you find it?"

"My locker. This morning. Inside." She watched him. "You don't look surprised."

"I'm surprised."

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I've seen one of these before."

He unzipped the front pocket of his bag, dug past the spare tape and the wrist guards, and pulled out the other note. Yellow, creased, soft at the corners from a day and a half in his pocket. He crouched, and put it on the scull next to hers.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

The two notes sat side by side in the lamp's glow. Same pad. Same size. Same felt-tip, black, the same flat ink where the pen had pressed hardest. Same E. Same S with a little hitch in the upper curve, as if the writer had stopped and restarted the stroke.

SLIDE 4. LINE 2. DON'T SAY WHERE.

HE LIED ABOUT THE TRAY. ASK HIM WHERE HE REALLY GOT IT.

"Okay," Emma said, very quietly. "Explain."

He sat down on the dock. He hadn't planned to. His legs just folded, and the boards were cold through his trousers.

"It was in my locker vent," he said. "Seven-fifteen, yesterday. The page was folded inside, with that on top. I don't know who put it there."

"You told me the tray."

"I know."

"Why?"

"Because it sounded better." He heard how it came out and winced. "Because you'd already think I made it. If I said it showed up in my locker with an anonymous note, you'd think I was covering. So I said the dumbest thing I could think of and made it worse. Great plan. Really solid."

"Why did you give it to me at all?"

He looked at the river. A cold wind pushed ripples across it and the lamps shivered in the water.

"Because the number was wrong," he said. "And you'd have lost."

"You wanted to win."

"I did." He rubbed his thumb across a split blister. "I do. Just not like that."

Emma didn't say anything. He didn't look at her. He listened to her breathe and to the dock groaning against its pilings, and he thought, absurdly, that it was the longest they'd ever been in a room together without one of them saying something cruel.

"Someone's playing us," she said.

"Yeah."

"Both of us. At the same time."

"Looks that way."

"The page was forged in my handwriting. Somebody logged into my school account at seven-oh-two to print it. Somebody put this in my locker and that in yours." She spoke the way she did on stage, quick, flat, building the case. "So what do they get? If I walk in with the wrong number, I lose. If you accuse me of cheating, you win, but you look like a rat. Either way we end up hating each other more than we already do. Somebody wants that." Her jaw tightened. "Why?"

"I don't know."

"Who benefits?"

"Besides me?" He almost smiled. "That's what I'd say if I were being accused. So I'll say it first. It's not me."

She studied him. It was a long study. He'd been looked at by teachers, by judges, by girls at parties, and none of them had looked at him the way Emma did, which was like someone checking a bridge before they put weight on it.

"I know," she said at last.

"You do?"

"You're a lot of things, Blake. A liar isn't one of them. You're just really bad at being honest." She tapped the second note. "The sticky pad. Look at the edge."

He leaned in. Along the bottom of both squares, almost invisible, a tiny blue stamp had been pressed into the adhesive strip. A shield. Three letters.

WBA.

"Westbridge Academy supply closet," Emma said. "The front office. Every admin pad has it."

"So it's somebody inside."

"Somebody with access to the office and the library terminals and your locker." She drew her knees up. "That's a short list, I think."

"Not that short. Teachers, aides, student helpers."

"Okay. Not that short." She pushed a stray hair behind her ear, and he noticed that her hand wasn't steady. She noticed him noticing and shoved it in her pocket. "I can't do this alone. And I can't trust anyone on the list, which includes basically everyone."

"What are you asking?"

"A trade." The word came out like it cost her. "You tell me anything you see, hear, find. I tell you the same. Nobody tells your father, nobody tells Pruitt. We find out who's doing this before the twenty-fourth."

"And then?"

"And then I beat you."

"Fair." He did smile, this time. It hurt a little. "Partners."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like it's a prize." Emma stood, slung her bag, and held out her hand. Ink in the creases of the fingers. A faint blue stain at the base of the thumb. "A trade. That's all."

He looked at her hand for what felt like a long time.

Then he took it. It was cold and dry and small, and she squeezed once, hard, like a person testing a rope.

Overhead, the lamp buzzed and flickered. Then it went out.