“Not that well, but trust me, Sydney did not commit suicide.”
“You just said she was suspended for cheating. Maybe the guilt overwhelmed her?”
I let out a laugh, then quickly stifled it as Raley shot me a look.
“Look, Sydney wasn’t the guilty type,” I explained. “For example, Erin Carter was the front-runner for homecoming queen. Until Sydney started a rumor that Erin had lice. Suddenly no one would come within five feet of Erin, and the school nurse even came in to check her head right in the middle of PE. Trust me, guilt was not in Sydney’s repertoire.”
Raley did the deep-sigh thing again, and I looked away to avoid seeing his nose hairs vibrate with the effort. “Look, it’s too early to tell much of anything at this point. All I can say is that it doesn’t look like an accident.”
“What do you mean? She drowned, right? That can happen, can’t it?”
“We have to wait for the ME’s report, but it doesn’t look like she drowned. We found something in the pool with her.”
“Something?”
“Her laptop.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to process the information.
“It was plugged into an outdoor wall outlet. Our best guess is that Sydney jumped into the pool with her laptop and electrocuted herself.”
I blinked at him, letting this sink in. He had a point. That hardly seemed like an accident. Even if Sydney had been online poolside, what were the chances she’d decide to take a dip with her computer? No one was that stupid, not even Sydney Sanders.
On the other hand, I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of Sydney ending her life. Sure, she’d been tweeting some pretty unhappy stuff lately, but there was a huge gulf between saying your life sucked and actually ending it. And if you were going to end it, wouldn’t you want to wait until after you had unburdened yourself to the reporter you were supposed to meet?
“That just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, why would she kill herself before she-”
I stopped myself just in time.
Raley leaned in, his bushy eyebrows moving north. “Before she what?”
I shut my mouth with a click.
“Before… the homecoming dance,” I finished lamely.
That seemed to satisfy Raley as he just shrugged. “It’s hard to say what goes through a suicidal person’s mind.”
I bit my lip. I was pretty sure this person wasn’t suicidal. Which left only one alternative.
Sydney Sanders’s death was a homicide.
“It was a homicide,” I told Sam two hours later as I sat cross-legged on my bed.
“No fluffin’ way!”
I paused. “Wait-‘fluffin’’?”
Sam shrugged. “I was getting tired of ‘effing.’ It was too obvious, you know? I’m experimenting with some alternatives.”
“Well, fluffin’ is… creative.” I shook my head. “But, more important, yes way, Sydney was totally murdered.”
As soon as I’d arrived home in a police cruiser, Mom had jumped into total SMother mode, wigging out that I was with the police (again), hugging me to within an inch of my life when she heard the cop say one of my classmates had been killed (which, honestly, was a little comforting), then totally freaking that I’d been the one to find a dead body. (Again. Which, I had to admit, was totally freaky.) She’d immediately gone into the kitchen and made her version of comfort food, while I’d immediately called Sam and told her she had to come over ASAP. Both Sam and the rice cakes with flaxseed butter had arrived at the same time, and I’d used the comfort fuel to spill the whole story.
“So,” Sam said, grabbing a rice cake. She held it up to her nose, sniffed, then thought better of it, and placed it back on the plate. “Raley told you Sydney was murdered?”
“Well, not exactly,” I hedged. “He thinks she committed suicide.”
While I’d expected Sam to have the same shocked reaction I’d had at the idea, she just slowly nodded. “I can see that.”
I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, we’re talking about a girl who incorporated cheats into her nail- polish design. She was scheming. Underhanded. Remorseless. Not the type to give it all up.”
“But she was depressed,” Sam pointed out. “She tweeted four times this afternoon alone talking about how miserable she was.”
“You follow Sydney on Twitter?” I asked.
Sam nodded. “She was captain of the lacrosse team. We all followed her.”
“What did she say?” I asked as Sam pulled out her phone. I leaned in to read the screen over her shoulder.
“Well, the first one was about how it sucks that her homecoming dress is going to waste. The second was about how it sucks that no one is around to call until lunch. One was about how it sucks that we can’t sunbathe anymore ‘’cause of sucky skin cancer,’” she said, scrolling through the tweets. “And the last one was about how much it sucks being alone by the pool on a sunny beautiful day.”
“That last one,” I said, stabbing a finger at her phone. “When did she write that?”
“Um…” Sam squinted at the readout. “Three-oh-five.”
I felt a sudden chill run up my spine. “I was outside her place just a couple minutes later. She must have sent that tweet right before…”
Sam’s eyes got all big and round. “She went in the pool,” she finished for me. “Ohmigod. She was killed while tweeting. It was Twittercide!”
Again that too-close-for-comfort ball of nausea flared up in my stomach. I grabbed a rice cake, chewing quickly to wash down the sensation.
“Honestly, I think that’s one more point against Sydney having killed herself,” I decided. “If she was tweeting when she died, wouldn’t she have left some sort of message? Tweeted why she was doing it? A ‘good-bye cruel world’ kind of thing?”
Sam nodded. “Totally. That would have been classic Sydney.” She paused. “But why would anyone want to kill her?”
“I can think of one reason,” I answered. “She was about to talk to me. Maybe whatever she was going to tell me was something that someone didn’t want to get out.”
Sam’s eyes went big again. “Whoa. You killed Sydney!”
I shifted uncomfortably on my patchwork comforter. “No I didn’t! I mean, not exactly. But the point is that the cops all think it was suicide, and we’re the only ones who know it was actually homicide.”
“Meaning?”
I bit my lip. “Meaning,” I said, the realization sinking in, “it’s up to us to figure out who really killed Sydney.”
Which, I realized the next morning, was easier said than done. As I’d mentioned to Raley, you didn’t get to be the homecoming queen front-runner by being a wallflower. Sydney had been visible, active in everything at school, and not afraid to do whatever she needed to in order to get ahead. Needless to say, Sydney had as many enemies as she did friends. However, there was one person who would qualify at the moment as both Sydney’s best friend and worst enemy: Quinn Leslie, the former BFF who Sydney had ratted out to the principal when she’d been caught cheating.
Unfortunately, Quinn had been suspended along with Sydney, so cornering her during school was not an option. Instead, I made plans to visit her during lunch, and impatiently sat through first period, where I got no less than six texts asking if it was true that I’d found a dead body. Again. During second, I got two gleeful tweets announcing that Sydney’s suicide meant Mrs. Perry was delaying the chem midterm. During third, two texts said black armbands would be available in the quad at lunch. And during fourth, I got a tweet with a link to the official Sydney Sanders memorial page on Facebook, already outfitted with PayPal links to donate to teen-suicide prevention programs.
By lunch period, everyone on campus was buzzing about the suicide that I was sure was not a suicide, and I
