Page 110 of For Your Own Good

He smiles. “I figured it out.”

“Okay, Encyclopedia Brown,” she says. “What is it?”

“A plant. Well, really it’s a berry.”

She nods. She already knows from her lawyer.

But he doesn’t stop there. He explains about doll’s-eyes: what it is and what it does to the body. The longer he talks, the more upset Courtney becomes. He stops, realizing he’s describing how her mom died. It feels like it happened so long ago that he almost forgot.

Just like he almost forgot about searching through Crutcher’s desk and finding that book about plants.

67

IT’S AFTER EIGHTo’clock at night when Teddy walks into the Fairlane Hotel downtown. A swanky place, the kind his students and their parents would stay in. Or own.

The Fairlane is where Belmont holds a lot of its fundraisers, along with the faculty holiday party, the headmaster’s inauguration, and prom night. Now that Belmont is closed, the hotel is where the board of directors holds its meetings.

Teddy finds the board on the mezzanine, in a room with ugly carpet and ridiculous curtains, but otherwise it’s fine. The chairman sits at the head of the table. He is short, round, and unattractive. But very, very wealthy.

“Thank you for meeting with us,” he says.

Teddy takes the only empty seat. “Of course. Anything I can do.”

“We appreciate that.” The chairman introduces a new face at the table, Grady Lewis. He’s young, with slick hair and a polka-dotted handkerchiefin his breast pocket. “Grady is from a PR management firm in New York. Our lawyers suggested we hire them to help with this... situation.”

Grady stands up and walks to the front of the room, where a PowerPoint is waiting. Everything about him screams douchebag.

Teddy is okay with that. For now.

“The tragedy of this situation cannot be swept away or ignored,” Grady says. “Everyone is scared, from the faculty to the parents, and now you have students who have been, presumably, poisoned. Your enrollment will drop. That’s a fact.” He pauses, looking around the room. “We estimate that by the time the school reopens, you’ll have lost at least fifty percent of your students.”

No one says a word, but they look very unhappy.

“At this point, you don’t have a lot of options. The investigation is out of your hands—actually, the entire school is out of your hands. But what you can do is keep people informed about whatyou’redoing to rectify the situation. Your new security system, for example. And a new system for food controls. All these things need to be communicated to the parents. Because, as you know,” Grady says, almost smiling, “they’re the ones who decide everything.”

A clever way of saying they’re the ones who pay the bills.

“Because you have lost your headmaster—a most unfortunate event, in so many ways—our first recommendation is that you designate someone to speak for the school. Give it a face, not just a written statement delivered to the media. You may even want to designate an interim headmaster.”

Grady turns to Teddy, along with everyone else.

If he were an author, he couldn’t have written this story any better.

MAD SCIENTIST

Zach stares at the text from Lucas, having no idea what he’s referringto. A movie, a cartoon, a video game? A superhero, maybe, or a villain. At this time of night, Lucas could be referring to anything.

It’s almost midnight, and Zach is in his room, working on another assignment from Titus.

Zach replies:Is that your new life goal?

Dude. No. Get online. That’s what they’re calling him. MAD SCIENTIST.

Zach doesn’t have to get online to know thathimrefers to whoever is poisoning people at Belmont.

The first person he thinks of is Courtney. She’s going to get online and see that’s what everyone is calling the person who killed her mother. When she was in jail, she didn’t see all the social media. She didn’t know anything about #HomicideHigh or read what everyone was saying. Maybe it was better that way.

That’s messed up, he says to Lucas.