Marisa’s phone pings from the coffee table. I brought it out here earlier. I knew she would text me.
Heard from school yet?
#Fuckyou
You still need to give me my phone back
Hellooooo
Must be sad knowing your job is on the line
I don’t respond. She’s angry enough that engaging with her at this point would be like provoking a snarling dog. I do, however, take pictures of these texts with my own phone. Document everything, my dad said once. He was talking about banking, but it’s good advice here.
Another text.
I’m going to eat your heart.
Jesus, now she’s quoting Much Ado About Nothing. I take a picture of that one just before another new text pops up.
You should check out Twitter
I hesitate, then take a picture of the text before it vanishes on her locked screen, like each of the texts before it. Then I go onto Twitter and search for EthanF8’s account, where I find this new post, dated forty-one minutes ago:
Someone sent me a naughty picture omg what do I do?
Acid churns in my stomach. I know what picture she’s referring to. The one in my grade book. And knowing Twitter, I can guess what’s going to happen. Sure enough, Ethan F8 has a number of responses:
Post it
Post that pic
“Naughty” how?
Show me the money Faulkner
Post
Show us the pic
Put it on Insta
Post it
Post it
I feel sick. Thankfully, some people respond by telling EthanF8 to shut up, to stop trying to get attention, to not post any picture. Then my stomach drops when I read an exchange between my student Sarah Solomon and EthanF8 from fourteen minutes ago:
Total bot, Solomon_Sarah posted. You’re not Mr. Faulkner.
No bot, EthanF8 replied.
Then a fake.
No fake, either.
Prove it, Solomon_Sarah wrote.
No, no, no, I think. Don’t respond.
I scroll down to the rest of the thread, and I see that EthanF8 has replied.
You write beautiful essays but you hide behind those cat-eye glasses like the world’s youngest virgin librarian.
Shit.
Maybe that’s why you sent this pic
Followed by a copy of the picture Marisa stuck in my grade book, with a black line drawn across the nipples.
“No!” I shout, dropping the phone like a burning coal. I jump up and start pawing through my workbag, looking for the school directory, knowing Sarah Solomon’s home phone number must be in there. I find the directory, but actually grasping it in my hand makes me pause, though my heart is hammering away in my chest. What am I going to do—call my student to say it’s not me posting nasty tweets at her? That I wasn’t the one who posted a nude pic and basically accused her of being a stalker? Byron and Teri would love hearing that I did that. Plus I’d probably get Sarah’s mom or dad on the phone, and I can easily imagine them calling the police.
So I call Coleman Carter instead.
“It’s not me on Twitter,” I say as soon as he answers. “It’s Marisa. She’s bullying Sarah Solomon.”
“Slow down,” Coleman says. “What are you talking about?”
“On Twitter,” I say. “That account Marisa opened pretending to be me. She just posted that picture she put in my grade book and basically accused Sarah of sending it to her. Me. Whatever. You have to tell her it wasn’t me. You have to call Sarah, call her parents, and tell them it wasn’t me.”
“Hold on,” Coleman says. “Sarah who?”
“Solomon,” I nearly shout into the phone. “Marisa is posting on Twitter as me, but it’s not me.”
On the coffee table, Marisa’s phone dings. A new text. I glance down at it, and everything stops.
I know who killed your parents
I stand rooted to the floor, staring down at the text on the locked screen. Six short words, and they almost drop me like a heart attack.
I know who killed your parents
Coleman is saying something in my ear. “I’ll call you back,” I say, and hang up on him.
Marisa’s text vanishes from the screen.
“Shit.” I swipe her phone and get the request to enter a pass code. “Fuck!”
My phone rings in my hand. Another unknown number. If it’s Marisa, I’ll eat her fucking heart over the phone. I answer and shout, “Hello?”
There’s some sort of background wind noise, as if the person on the other end is calling me from a racing sailboat. “Ethan?” a voice says unsteadily.
“Who is this?”
A pause, a shifting kind of sound, like the phone is being brushed across something. That rushing, roaring noise continues. “I’m sorry,” the voice says. “I just … I’m sorry.”
Realization forms like a ball of ice in my stomach. “Suze?” I say. “Is that you? Where are you? What’s going on?”
A flat, hard sound like a car horn obliterates any reply she makes. Is she on a street somewhere? The sound fades abruptly and Susannah sighs. “I always loved the King and Queen buildings, you know? All lit up at night. Now they’re green. Maybe because it’s March. Like a spring thing.”
The King and Queen buildings are a pair of skyscrapers, glass towers sporting white latticed “crowns,” a square one for the King building and a curved one for the Queen. They are a good three or four miles away, just off the Perimeter. “Are you there?” I ask. “Susannah, are you at the King and Queen buildings?”
“So pretty,” she breathes, and the finality in her voice, the sense of an approaching end, lights up my spine with alarm.
“Suze, where are you?” I yell, searching around the kitchen for my keys. I snag them off the counter, then start looking for a pair of shoes.
“It’s not your fault, Ethan,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Susannah?”
She mutters something; the only words I can clearly make out are “way down,” and then the roaring noise increases, only to end in a jarring silence.
“Susannah?” I yell. “Suzie!” There’s no sound—the call has ended.
I brace myself against the back of my couch, fighting off a wave of panic, and force myself to think. She doesn’t have a car, but
