Nat shakes her head. ‘Possible, but unlikely. She always keeps it locked.’
Duncan comes in with a mug of coffee for Nat. She takes a sip. ‘Needs more milk.’ She hands it back. ‘Know what I was thinking?’
Duncan wrestles with the broken door latch and goes out again.
‘What?’
‘You know how whenever Fowler collects essays she gets us all to put them in a box by the door?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how on Thursdays she’s in that classroom with back-to-back classes the whole morning?’
I click my fingers as if something just occurred to me. ‘You think someone waited until class finished and then took off with the box?’
Nat nods. ‘Then swapped the essays, and replaced the box, all while she was in the room.’
‘Which means it probably happened in fourth period, when you and I were in Legal Studies,’ I say. ‘That was the only time between when the students handed in the essays and lunch, when Fowler would have collected the box.’
‘Exactly.’ Nat purses her mouth to indicate her high level of regard for my reasoning. ‘So anyone we can account for in fourth period I can cross off the list of potential suspects. And I’m pretty comfortable narrowing the focus to year-twelve students, given the whole thing was targeted at a year-twelve class. If we narrow it to Anglo students we cut down the possibilities again.’
‘What makes you think Amelia Westlake is Anglo?’ I say, surprised.
‘It’s obvious,’ says Nat. ‘Someone wanted to come up with a generic name that wouldn’t be picked as fake. For Anglos, an Anglo name will always be what they consider generic.’
I realise she’s right. I never thought of using anything but. I doubt Harriet did, either.
‘Unless …’ Nat looks thoughtful. ‘Our year group is – what? Seventy per cent white? Seventy-five?’
‘Around that. Why?’
‘I’m just thinking. If it was me behind this hoax, I’d want to maximise the number of suspects.’ Nat nods to herself. ‘We need to keep the search broad.’
I breathe a silent sigh of relief.
‘Then again …’
Nat certainly knows how to keep me on my toes. ‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Think about it,’ she says. ‘Fowler’s marking practices are shocking, but you know what’s worse about Rosemead’s English Department than Fowler’s marking practices, in my opinion?’
She doesn’t wait for me to guess. ‘Its perverse obsession with the narrow and elitist Western literary canon,’ she says.
‘I could be wrong, but didn’t Amelia Westlake have a cartoon about that already?’ I say, making an effort to sound uncertain.
Nat shakes her head. ‘The cartoon was about the under-representation of women writers on the syllabus,’ she says. ‘But that’s only part of the problem. Would it hurt them to include some Walker or Adichie on our reading lists? Or, God forbid, some Indigenous or Asian literature? Why didn’t Amelia Westlake target Rosemead for its lack of cultural diversity? Ask Daphne, say, or Zara, or Prisha, and they’ll tell you how outrageous it is.’ She bites her lip. ‘No. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Amelia Westlake is white.’
Damn her flawless logic.
‘Names and identities: it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?’ Nat muses. ‘I might even explore it in my sign-off this week.’
By her ‘sign-off ’ Nat means her editorial. Magazines usually print editorials at the front and newspapers usually have them somewhere in the middle. Nat likes to print hers on the very back page of the Messenger – that way, she can end with a pithy conclusion that will stick in people’s minds. Think global, eat local, for example. Or: Let’s kill off live exports.
Nat jots down a few notes. She drops her pen. Her fingers flit across my back. ‘God, investigative journalism is such a turn on,’ she says, a hand on my waist. I lean into her but she stops and pulls back. ‘Actually, before we do this, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’
‘Okay.’
‘Croon called me up to her office yesterday.’
My stomach squeezes. ‘The cartoons?’
‘Yep.’
‘I guess it was inevitable,’ I say carefully. ‘What did she say?’
Nat holds up her thumb and index finger so there’s barely a gap between them. ‘That I am this close to losing my editing job for publishing a series of pseudonymous contributions. That unless I help her work out who was behind them, she’ll take me off the paper.’ She grits her teeth. ‘And that she thinks it was you.’
I focus on projecting a calmness I don’t feel. ‘She told me the same thing. What did you say?’
‘That I had no idea who Amelia Westlake was. And that if you were behind it, I’d know.’ She looks at me steadily. ‘I wasn’t lying, was I, Will?’
‘Of course not!’ The false anger comes surprisingly easily. ‘She’s looking for an excuse to get rid of me. Last time I saw her she basically threatened me with expulsion because my marks weren’t up to scratch.’
‘I can’t believe that woman,’ Nat growls. ‘Then again, maybe I can. That’s exactly the kind of trick she’d pull. I’m sorry, Will.’ She looks embarrassed. ‘Of course you’d tell me if you were Amelia Westlake. Anyway, we were in Legal Studies together when the last prank happened. But you understand I needed to check. A lot is riding on this for me.’
‘Of course.’
I breathe in. Croon is going to take Nat off the Messenger if she doesn’t help her find Amelia Westlake. Knowing this, how can I keep our secret from Nat any longer? We’ve been such good friends for ages and now we’re …
Actually, the truth is I’m not exactly sure what we are to each other right now. I haven’t told anyone about our kissing in the newsroom, and I don’t think Nat has either.
I’m definitely into girls. That’s not the issue. I know that Nat is, too, as well as boys. Even so, I’m not sure how I feel about kissing her. Not that the precise nature of our relationship is relevant to the problem at hand. One
