Friend Me Page 11

  “It was Hiro’s watch, but he didn’t want it at university,” Michael says. He grips his knees, like he’s stopping himself from running out of the room. “Told Lily she could have it. Only it’s chock-full of that experimental AI, the Taiko thing that’s here.” He waves a hand around the room.

  Mum searches the ceiling, like the answer to why kids are so stupid will be written there. “Unbelievably reckless. Now every bit of our lab’s AI—Jeeves and Taiko included—will be under the microscope. One of our guys got a quiet tip from his museum friend about the door lock. Anna reckons we have till Monday before the police get in touch, maybe to shut us down. If we haven’t figured out by then how Taiko was able to hack the lock and who’s behind this …”

  Mum goes silent, but her words crash in my ears. The lock was hacked. Like the cameras at the school. I guess the police don’t suspect me after all. But Haley—she’d fit the bill perfectly. Someone who hates Zara. Someone who, just possibly, has some serious hacking skills. Oh God. Spots swim in front of my eyes, and I clutch at a chair to steady myself.

  The kitchen doors burst open. Lily’s mum, carrying a tray with steaming bowls, heads for the dark dining table in an alcove off the living room. She calls out something in Japanese, and Taiko switches on the lights.

  “If you kids are hungry, you’re welcome to join us,” Lily’s dad says in a tone that makes it clear they want to talk, alone. The sound of Lily and Hiro arguing drifts through the kitchen door. Michael says thanks but we’ll head to bed, and he gives me a significant look.

  Mum leans over her bowl, talking quietly to Lily’s mother between mouthfuls of something noodley. The chandelier picks out the shadows under her eyes. The familiar feeling of losing Mum to one of her projects closes over me. Despite the crisis, you can tell she lives for this: a puzzle, a deadline, an AI mission. Find out who let Zara go through that door, and how, before scandal wipes out their lab.

  Mum ignores us as I follow Michael upstairs. She has no idea that I have the missing puzzle piece they need; it sits like a hot coal in my stomach. I’ve been so fixated on finding Haley, convincing her to wipe those messages we sent. I was terrified the police would get the wrong idea that we were responsible. Maybe it’s the right idea.

  “You are so lucky you’re not connected to this,” Michael murmurs, and I check him, sure for a moment that he’s being sarcastic. But his gray face tells me he’s not. I scramble to remember how much he knows. Have I told him anything about Haley? Or that we joked about Zara dying? He leans against the wall outside the room he shares with Hiro and drops his voice. “Mum said she took Jeeves apart before they came here, downloaded his voice recognition history.”

  I’m about to ask why this matters when he huffs. “Don’t you remember? When I said, ‘Jeeves, destroy Zara Tucci’?” My pocket beeps, and there’s the muffled sound of Jeeves trying to reply. Michael swears and swipes the phone from me as soon as I fumble it out of my jeans. He hisses at Jeeves to stop. “I forgot that flipping thing is always listening.” He hands it back. “That day in the kitchen. You probably don’t remember. It was a joke, for God’s sake!”

  “You think … Jeeves did this?” The faint hope that Haley is innocent surges up, and I snatch at it, like a life raft. Jeeves hacked Taiko earlier, to let me out. Could he have done this?

  “I don’t know.” Michael rubs his eyes. “He’s just a computer, but Mum’s always on about making him smarter. And I set him a challenge.”

  I try to tell him Mum will know it was just banter and that their hunt for whoever let Zara into that locked room where she fell will never focus on him. Michael says it’s not whether Mum believes he was joking; it’s that Jeeves never forgets, and the police will find out. He drifts back to his room looking slightly less miserable but not much.

  I fall into bed, still in my clothes. I am the utter worst. Now Michael’s in the firing line, and I’ve still not got the courage to tell Mum everything. I squeeze my eyes closed, thinking of stupid things Jeeves has done: hearing us wrong, putting Scrabble on the shopping list when we asked for apples. I’m desperate for anyone but Haley to be responsible for Zara’s accident. But Jeeves is too basic to go that far. I think.

  I know who has answers, but I clutch my phone to my chest, too much of a coward to ask. Oh, Haley. Tell me you didn’t do this.

  Lily’s bed stands empty. She probably hates me. I deserve it. I’ve messed everything up, and I don’t have the courage to put it right. I curl into a ball, staring at the wooden birds in the moonlight: Lily’s great-grandma was in jail for nothing, and she somehow kept going. I can’t even make myself open You-chat.

  I sit up and flick on the app, before I lose my nerve. I barely glance at Haley’s messages—Sorry I wuz mad about you and Lily … R you at the dance? It is crazy in here—if you’re here, meet me near the bathrooms—before I start typing.

  Haley, just stop. Why did you send those horrible messages to Lily? I know you don’t go to Loranger Middle. And that you hacked the cameras there. I pause. My breath catches in my throat. Did you hack Zara’s watch, too?

  I’m shaking so bad, I can’t hold my phone steady while I wait for her answer. The status on my sent message blinks to seen, so I know she’s read it.

  But there are no bubbles to show she’s typing. The light by her name is green, and You-chat says Haley Alan is online, but she doesn’t reply.

  She’s ghosting me.

  Another awful thought springs up: the reason I wanted to see her in person, instead of talking about Zara on You-chat. The police will look at these messages, any day now. My heart thumps as I press and delete the message I just sent. I’m an idiot.

  I vault out of bed. Lying still is impossible. I can picture them downstairs: They’ll pick open Lily’s watch and run diagnostic whatevers on Taiko. Then they’ll check You-chat, and because they’re geniuses, they’ll be able to get right into the You-chat systems and see what messages Haley and I sent, even the ones I erased.

  I wrench open the balcony doors and lean over the picket railing, panting. I pull in giant breaths of cool air. Surf breaks quietly on the shore. I focus on the hush of it.

  “Bundle up.” Lily holds out a crocheted blanket to me. A matching one drapes her shoulders.

  I have no idea how long I’ve been standing here. Long enough for my hands to turn to ice. I can barely look at Lily, so I keep my eyes on the water instead. “Lily, I’m sorry. You’re right, I—” My throat closes, but I push on. “I don’t think I really know Haley. And I am super sorry for the trash she said to you.” I pull the blanket closer, wishing I could dissolve in the air, like breath.

  She shakes her head. “You wanted to be loyal to her. I get that. But she attacked me, Ro.”

  “I’m so sorry.” For a minute, the only sounds are the waves and the clink of dishes drifting up from downstairs. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  Lily doesn’t answer right away. “Apart from give Zara a watch that almost killed her?”

  It’s a moment before it dawns on me that Lily feels her own guilt for Zara’s accident. I turn to face her: Her eyes are swollen from crying. “Listen, you gave her the watch to be nice, right? And she loved that thing. She was always flashing it—showing everyone she had the same as you.”

  Lily’s face crumples. She shakes her head. “Not at first. Zara was always mean about my mom’s tech. It’s one thing for me and Hiro to say it’s annoying and useless, but—”

  “I know exactly.”

  She looks at me. “Yeah. I guess you do.” I find some napkins in my pocket from the lobster restaurant and pass her one. She wipes her eyes and leans on the balcony. “So, Zara didn’t even wear Hiro’s watch. Then I somehow start to be the center of things at school, and these girls begin sitting with us—Zara’s friends. Zara always made fun of people, but it got worse. But also, she wanted everyone to know that she and I were friends first.”

  “Kind of—possessive?” I think of Haley, I can’
t help it.

  Lily nods. “That’s when she starts wearing the watch and copying my style. But still being awful to me sometimes? It’s complicated.”

  “You just want her to be real and normal,” I say, “but she makes you uncomfortable.” I remember hard-core things Haley said: Sometimes the only thing they understand is force. Would I have grabbed Zara’s hair if Haley hadn’t done that to Coral? A coldness settles on me, despite the blanket. I know Haley’s helped me. But she’s also like a voice in my head, finding all the worst things in there and making them bigger.

  “Exactly!” Lily says forcefully. “And I’m like, ‘Don’t be mean about my mom’s tech!’ Even if I am!” Lily gives me a guilty look. “That was my other worst-thing-I’ve-ever-done. I trashed one of my mom’s AIs. I got into so much trouble.”

  “The robot butler you had at your house? I thought Hiro broke it.”

  “No, this was—ugh, a book-reading thing.” Lily scrapes away hair that’s blown over her eyes. “My mom wasn’t around much at bedtime. She programmed an AI to read me any story, in her voice. And I smashed it. I wanted her, not a machine. I mean—eerie, right?”

  This is so déjà vu, I’m gobsmacked. “Jeeves, our AI, reads out don’t-forget lists to me every morning. Mum’s always on the train by then.” Lily nods, like she’s lived the exact same life. “She’d get Jeeves to come to parent-teacher meetings, if she could.”

  “I know, right?” Lily sinks into a wicker chair and cozies her blanket around her. I take the other chair and tell her about FRED. Lily stares open-mouthed as I describe my trauma: finding Mum skinning this robotic cat in the kitchen. She starts giggling, and she can’t stop, and that sets me laughing, too.

  Lily leans back and lets out a long breath. “We might be moving back to Tokyo.”

  “What?”

  “Mom’s a Japanese citizen. She says they can yank her residency permit if she gets in trouble with the police.” Lily shakes her head, like she’s rejecting the thought. “It won’t come to that. She’ll figure this out. She always does.” Lily looks at me. “Talk about something else. You go now. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  Another chill rolls through me. I look at the black ocean and the silent moon, trying to remember it all, before it’s gone. Lily would’ve been a good friend. But I can’t hide this anymore.

  “I played a game with Haley, pretending that Zara was dead, and imagining how she’d die. Then she nearly did. And I think Haley did it. For me.”

  All set?” Lily joins me on the boardwalk path to the shore. The sun’s coming up and the sky is a canvas of brilliant pink and gold.

  I turn away from the sunrise. “I didn’t hear you.”

  She smiles. “That’s the idea. Stealthy.”

  We start down the path to the beach. I can’t take my eyes off the sky, which is deepening to cherry orange. A gull wheels overhead, and it’s like I’m soaring with it. For the first time in ages, I feel like a free person.

  From the instant I told Lily my awful secret last night, she’s been an absolute star. She won’t let me take a shred of blame for what Haley’s done; she says it’s Haley who has the nasty streak and that she’s been playing me from the start.

  Lily made me take out my phone, and we scrolled back together. I wanted to cry with relief, because when we looked at the jokes about Zara dying, even though I’d deleted mine, it was obvious that Haley had started it: You know? If Zara died in a freak mascara accident, the world would be a better place. I still felt wretched that I had lol’d and agreed. And it was me who’d joked that maybe Zara’s smartwatch could zap her.

  But Lily shook her head. She’d done almost the same thing, she said, wishing the Tokyo mean girls would be shot into space. “There’s a difference between hating a bully and plotting to kill them,” Lily said as we sat on the balcony. She tapped my phone, pointing out the message where Haley had actually asked what kind of smartwatch Zara wore. “Haley crossed the line.”

  Lily and I walk now over the wet sand and the rippled lines left by the low tide. Rolled up and stuffed in my backpack is the one thing that I’m praying can get us out of this mess: a mindmap Lily and I drew last night, on a sheet of watercolor paper she nicked from her dad’s studio. Lily said if we brain-dump everything we know, we can figure out who Haley is and how to find her. The paper is a mess of scribbled facts and theories: Lily thinks Haley hacked into the school cams from here in Old Orchard Beach. We were both too tired to think straight last night, though. Now that we’ve slept a bit, we’re going to try to make sense of it. I checked again this morning: Haley still hasn’t answered my latest message. I don’t think she’s going to.

  “I think it’s this street.” Lily turns away from the water toward a path between two big beach houses, leading into town. Her mum took her phone, so we’re finding our way old-school. A faint mist sits over the road, shining white in the sun, making everything unreal. My head swims with lack of sleep. It was after two when we crashed, and Lily shook me awake at six thirty.

  My hand goes to my jeans to check the time before I remember: My phone’s back at the cottage, too, buried under everything in the closet. I need to keep it away from Mum until Lily and I have found Haley. Then, I promise myself, I’ll tell Mum everything.

  Where is your phone?? It’s mine until further notice. I found that note from Mum when I woke up, propped against the dish of wooden birds. My stomach flipped: She’d come looking for my phone while we slept, like I thought she might. I picture the phone under the crate of old framed watercolors in the closet. It’s safer leaving it there than bringing it along to Lily’s favorite bagel place, where we’re headed; Jeeves’s tracker would let Mum pinpoint us. Sorry, Mum, my brain whispers, though I doubt she’ll ever forgive me.

  I waited on the beach while Lily sneaked around the cottage, to see what our mums already knew. She said the living room was a jumble of wires and laptops, and her Taiko watch was in pieces. No sign of Lily’s phone, or our mums, who’d clearly been up most of the night. From her mother’s notes, it seems they’ve seen Lily’s You-chat account and know that Haley sent her horrible DMs. But it doesn’t look like they’ve thought to go into my account yet, or Haley’s. I swallow hard. There’s a storm coming, and it looks like Mum. She’s going to find what Haley and I said about Zara.

  I follow Lily across an empty car park toward a tired-looking building, where a wooden bagel hangs over the door. I’m sure I can’t eat a thing, but the waft of bready goodness that whooshes over us as Lily opens the door makes my stomach whine.

  “Oh!” Lily exclaims. “It’s your friend.”

  An electric jolt sticks me to the floor. Walking out of the kitchen is Jason. His face is cloudy with sleep. But his eyes widen when he spots us, and a smile lights his face. “Roisin!” He gives Lily a nod, too. “Hey.”

  “It’s Lily—my friend Lily,” I babble, realizing I didn’t introduce her last night. Lily smiles a quick hello and moves away to study the bagel menu written across the wall. “He’s gorgeous!” she mouths to me.

  She’s not wrong. His brown eyes feel like a hug, and he’s three feet away from me. “Did you find your friend?”

  I shake my head. “She’s nobody’s friend.” I hesitate, unsure how much to say. I don’t even know Jason. But he did jump to help me at the dance last night. And he insisted on trading You-chat handles so he could tell me anything he found out.

  Jason sees me pause and calls to a bald guy at the till, who looks a little like him. The man checks the clock on the wall and nods. Jason points me to stools at a counter by the window, saying he shouldn’t really start for fifteen minutes, anyway. “New job. Technically I’m only allowed to work after seven. Which my uncle says is late; he starts at three.” Jason widens his eyes.

  “Ugh, remind me never to open a bakery.”

  He laughs. “Yeah. I do not function at three a.m. My uncle’s, like, nocturnal.”

  I smile and look at my hands. He really is
good-looking. Smart, too. I push the thought away. Crushes are for normal people, not for fugitive immigrants who are soon to be suspected of attempted murder. “Right, so.” I sigh and tug at the zip of my backpack. It’s a risk, but my gut says Jason can help: He’ll know things we don’t, like how high-tech the school is, and who the computer geniuses are. Haley could be one of them, using a different name. “Maybe you can help us. What do you make of this?”

  “Mindmap.” Jason helps me smooth the paper out across the narrow counter. “Our science teacher loves these.”

  HALEY is written inside a giant cloud. We’ve put everything we know about her around the edge, from Hates mean girls to Likes manga. Some notes have lines leading to other facts, like Lives (lived?) in OOB—Knows Zara? “Who’s Zara?” Jason asks, then his jaw hangs open as he spots another note. Joked about killing Zara—Tried to. “No way. This Haley chick tried to kill a girl?”

  “Technically, that’s still in the ‘maybe’ column, but we think so.” Lily arrives with a bag full of paper-wrapped bagels. She sits down and hands me one.

  “You need some background,” I say to Jason, and between us, we tell him the basics: that Zara’s a complicated friend of Lily’s who used to live in OOB. Then Zara moved to Massachusetts and started bullying me. I met Haley online, she helped me survive Zara, we girl-bonded, and we joked about Zara dying. After Zara’s accident, I panicked someone would see our messages, deleted mine, then hoped to get Haley to do the same.

  Jason makes a yuck face when we describe the gruesome fall that shattered Zara’s leg. But he shakes his head. “Why do you think Haley caused it? That’s a big assumption.”

  Lily and I swap looks, because here’s where we need to tell Jason about our crazy families, who live in a world of high-tech, connected everything. Lily gives him the short version, and I jump to the part where we know Zara fell because a door lock was hacked.

  Jason thumps the counter. “Like the cameras at the school!”