I pull the phone away from my head, so Krystle’s voice is garbled and unintelligible. I’m having trouble following what she’s saying. My thoughts keep drifting away from me before they are fully formed. “You took the money?”
“No, I didn’t! That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” She’s yelling through tears now, and I’m having trouble understanding what she is saying. “The detective, he thinks … He told me to get a lawyer. I’m so scared, Allie. What should I do?”
My phone beeps. I have another call. The screen reads: Artie Zucker. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the sign for the girls’ bathroom. I need quiet, room to breathe. “Let me call you later.” I hang up.
I answer the call from Zucker.
“Hello?” My voice sounds slurry. I must have drunk more champagne than I’d thought.
“Allie, this is Artie Zucker. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think police officers are going before a judge tomorrow to get a felony warrant for your arrest.”
“My arrest.” I lean my shoulder against a cinder block wall and let those words sink in.
“We have to be prepared. I’ll let you know more tomorrow, but it’s a good idea for you and Mark to get your financing in order. Chances are bail is going to be high.”
I stare at the phone after Artie hangs up, cold fear gripping me. An arrest warrant. Bail. I’m overheated. I need to splash cold water on my face.
The door to the girls’ restroom is within reach when someone grabs my shoulder. I stumble, but right myself against the water fountain.
“What the hell?” My words bleed together as if embroidered with one piece of thread.
An enraged face zooms into view, a few inches from my own. It’s Vicki, her curly hair piled into a tower atop her head. She’s wearing a red peasant dress that clings in all the wrong places, but I can’t identify what country she is representing.
“We need to talk,” she declares.
“I don’t think so.”
“I did a little research on you, Allie Ross. Or should I say, Alexis Healy?”
She spits out my maiden name as if it’s venom and can wound me, and she seems disappointed that I don’t collapse immediately. I’ve been called worse, I want to say.
“Calm down, Vicki,” says a woman whom I’ve just noticed standing next to her. She adjusts her cat-eye glasses. “Don’t let her get to you.”
“Yeah,” I slur. “Calm down, Vicki.” I’m in no mood for her bullying.
“You think this is funny?” Vicki’s face shines with sweat. A blue snakelike vein throbs along the left side of her temple. I stare at it, tempted to touch it.
Behind her, a small crowd has gathered, Karen Pearce and Oliver’s mother at the center of it. They are far enough away for plausible deniability, but they are obviously rubbernecking. I see two figures approaching. The one with long, glossy hair is Leah, and the other is Janelle in her African gown and head wrap. My friends are coming to help me.
Vicki puckers her thin lips into a tiny circle as pink and wrinkly as a cat’s asshole. “I know you had something to do with Rob’s death. You’re not going to get away with this—”
“Shut. Up. Just shut up.”
Vicki’s mouth opens in shock. “Did you just tell me to shut up?” She stretches her thin lips into a sneer and turns to the woman standing behind her. “Her whole ‘I’m a victim of sexual assault’ story is bullshit.”
“Survivors, Vicki,” the woman behind her whispers. “The term is survivors.”
“Rob isn’t the first man she’s falsely accused of rape.” Her words silence the crowd. I don’t need to look up to feel the glares. “She did it to her teacher in high school, didn’t you, Sexy Lexi?”
“How do you know about that?” Wooziness washes over me.
Vicki holds up her phone and begins to read in a clear loud voice. “All day long I daydream about your hands on my body. I want to feel you rub your cock against me. Your hot pulsing—”
“Shut up!” I slap at the phone. “Just stop!”
“Does that sound like a victim to you?” she asks the crowd.
I pinch the bridge of my nose in an attempt to focus. I don’t remember a Vicki from Overton. But with those words comes thundering a memory of walking into French class one late spring morning and the entire room falling quiet, all eyes on me. It was a few days after I had missed my movie date with Madeline. She had been giving me the cold shoulder since then. I’d thought it was because she was so hurt, but now I know it was because she had lit a fuse on a bomb that would soon detonate my life, and she couldn’t bear to look me in the eye.
Someone whispered, Sexy Lexi.
The entire class exploded in laughter.
Our teacher, Madame Saheb, came in and shushed everyone into silence, but it did nothing to stop the horrible shame growing in me like a cancer during the lesson. My naked photograph online was bad enough, but worse were those letters, laying out my innermost desires, naked and vulnerable for the world to mock.
I had signed them all Sexy Lexi.
It was a private joke, which now everyone knew.
“I have a friend who went to Overton Academy,” Vicki says. “She told me everything. How you got him fired. Arrested. And then it all turned out to be bullshit.”
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s not what happened.”
She exchanges a knowing glance with her friend and snorts. “I told you she was mental.”
I lean in close to her face and watch her beady eyes expand in fear. “You know what?” I say. “Fuck. You.”
I turn my back on her and her friend and head into the girls’ bathroom, which is empty, thank god. The only sound is the old radiator near the window, clanking as it belches out copious amounts of
