within a three-desk radius saw what she was doing. I had to bust her. How could I not? I had no choice.”
“But weren’t you worried she was going to blow the whistle on you?”
“What whistle? She had no idea who I was.” He paused. “Until you started asking questions.”
I gulped. “Me?” I squeaked out.
He nodded. “As soon as you started nosing around, Sydney did, too. She knew the school board was investigating and realized how badly everyone wanted to know how the answers had gotten out. She bribed Nicky to tell her who was giving him the cheats, then she called me and said that if I didn’t get her reinstated on the homecoming court she was going to tell the administration all about it.”
I nodded. The blackmailer becomes the blackmailee. Nice move. I had to say, it didn’t sound like Sydney was as dumb as Mr. Tipkins had thought after all.
“That’s why she agreed to meet with me?”
Tipkins nodded. “She said if I didn’t get her back on the court, she was going to tell you everything and it would be all over the paper.”
“But you couldn’t let that happen.”
He shook his head slowly back and forth. “No. I had too much of a good thing going. I was finally making good money. I wasn’t going to let some no-brained bimbo take that away from me.”
“So you went to her house?”
He nodded. “After you came to interview me, I realized I couldn’t let her talk to you. So I went to her house. She was in the backyard, tanning of all things! Made suspension look more like a vacation than a punishment to me.”
“And she had her laptop with her?”
He nodded. “Plugged into an outlet. She was on the damned Titter on her laptop.”
“Twitter,” I corrected automatically.
“Whatever. She was too busy on that thing to even listen to me. I tried to tell her I didn’t have the authority to get her back on the homecoming court. I told her I’d pay her off, make it worth her while to keep her mouth shut.”
“But she didn’t go for it?”
“She said all she cared about was being homecoming queen.”
“So you killed her?”
He nodded, an eerie light in his eyes. “It was easy. All I had to do was give her a little shove, and into the pool she went.”
“With her laptop,” I pointed out.
He grinned, showing off those grotesquely stained teeth again.
I shivered, imagining how her last moments must have been. Had she felt the electric shock? Felt the water flowing into her paralyzed lungs? Or had she died instantly, one minute here and the next just… not?
“And now…,” Mr. Tipkins said, taking a step toward me, “it’s time to tie up the last little loose end.”
Oh, fantastic amounts of fluffin’ fudge.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I WATCHED IN HORROR AS MR. TIPKINS’S EYES CHANGED. Gone was the angry flash when he’d talked about how he was an underpaid, underappreciated teacher, the confusion of trying to figure out Titter versus Twitter, and the disdain when he’d spoken about the ignorance of his current students. This was something different. Something dead, flat, and calm, and more eerily menacing than anything I’d ever seen.
Anxiety balled into pure panic in my stomach, making my body move and squirm all on its own.
“Um, you know what? I’m no loose end. I’m hardly an end at all. You see, I’m not into being homecoming queen, or getting cash, or anything like that. I’m totally just into being quiet. Not talking. Not telling anyone about anything. I can be totally quiet, see?” I shut my mouth illustrating my point.
Tipkins shook his head. He was so not buying this.
And I was so out of time.
I wriggled my wrists as he rounded the starting block, coming up behind me. The left one slipped a little. I’d worked out some slack in the rope. But it still held tight.
“You won’t get away with this,” I said, changing tactics. “Someone will notice I’m gone. They’ll come looking for me.”
Speaking of which-where the heck was Chase? How long would he wait before realizing I wasn’t just in the bathroom? How long had I been out? How long would it take him to figure out I was here, on campus still, by the pool with a Twittercidal maniac?
Though, I realized as Mr. Tipkins began to separate my bound wrists from the board, it didn’t matter. I was out of time altogether.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, my voice shaking.
He didn’t answer, instead pulling me up off the ground by my still-bound-together hands. I tried to struggle out of his grasp, but for someone who spent the majority of his life sitting behind a desk, he was surprisingly strong. And, as he steered me toward the edge of the pool, a horrific realization dawned on me.
He was going to throw me in.
“Wait, you can’t do this,” I said, doing my best to dig my heels into the cement. “Please, I swear I won’t tell anyone what you’ve been up to.”
“Too late,” Tipkins said, his hands gripping both my arms as he pushed me forward.
I did the only thing I could think of. I went limp, playing noncompliant toddler and sagging to the ground at the side of the pool.
“Help!” I yelled, being dead weight to the best of my abilities. “Help! Someone help me!”
“No one can hear you,” Tipkins said, towering over me, hands on his ample hips. “They’re all enjoying their stupid dance.”
Which is where, more than anything, I wanted to be. Dancing, laughing. Where I’d been just a few minutes ago now felt an entire world away. Had that been the last time I’d ever see my friends? Sam and Kyle? Chase?
“Help!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. Even though I knew Tipkins was right-there was no way my volume could compete with the DJ’s. No one would hear me. No one would run to the rescue.
I was on my own. And if I was going to get out of this alive, I was going to have to save myself.
Mr. Tipkins leaned down, putting both hands under my armpits to lift me off the ground.
It was now or never.
I took a deep breath…
… and head-butted him in the nose as hard as I could.
“Unh!” Mr. Tipkins reeled backward, his hands going to his face.
I took the opportunity to pop up to my feet, hopping like a bunny toward the gate that encircled the pool. Only, since Tipkins had two separated feet, he quickly recovered and caught up to me. I felt him shove at my back, hard enough that we both fell to the ground.
I rolled to the right, bringing my feet up and kicking as hard as I could, catching him squarely in the chest. I heard the wind whoosh out of his lungs. I inchwormed myself into a sitting position, pulling my legs under me to awkwardly get back on my feet.
I got one hop away before Tipkins’s hairy-knuckled hand grabbed the rope at my ankles, pulling me backward and down to the ground again.
I fell hard, both knees scraping against the cement as I landed with a thud that jarred my teeth together. I wriggled and kicked backward with both feet as hard as I could, connecting with something soft and fleshy.
Tipkins grunted but kept a hand on my ankles.
“Let. Go. Of. Me!” I shouted.
“Not on your life,” he growled back, regaining his breath and pulling himself onto his knees.
Right at the edge of the pool.
I scrunched myself up into a fetal position, cocking my knees as close to my chest as I could, then shoved hard
