Page 39 of The Ruling Class

I wondered how blind the rest of the school had to be not to realize that she wasn’t.

The two of us didn’t have a chance to talk before classes started. In English, she kept her eyes locked on the board. She wouldn’t even look at me. In physics, we were assigned to work in partners.

“We’re supposed to calculate the coefficient of friction,” Vivvie said, busying herself with pulling metal discs out of a plastic bag. “We’ll need the angle of the ramp …”

“Vivvie.”

She looked up at me. I held her gaze but didn’t say anything, willing her to remember that, for better or worse, she wasn’t in this alone.

“I got the phone.” She said those words so quietly, I almost couldn’t make them out. “He’d thrown it out. I went through the trash.”

Her hand shook as she set one of the metal discs on the scale. On the other side of the room, Henry Marquette was doing the same thing. Vivvie tried very hard not to look at him, but she couldn’t keep her gaze down. I reached out and steadied Vivvie’s hand.

“You’re okay,” I told her.

She reached into her bag and slipped out a flip phone. Her hand wrapped around it so tightly that her knuckles strained against her skin. “Nothing is okay.” For a moment, she pulled the phone close to her body, but then, like someone ripping a bandage off an open wound, she thrust it across the table toward me, forcing her grip to relax, finger by finger. I closed my own hand around the phone, feeling the weight of it.

“Girls.” The teacher stopped by our table. “No phones.”

I dropped the phone into my blazer pocket before he could move to take it from me. “What phone?”

The teacher pointed his index finger at me. “Exactly.”

The class passed torturously slowly. We did the work. But all I could think about was the phone in my pocket and the fact that on the other side of the room, Henry Marquette kept sending narrow-eyed glances at Vivvie and me.

“As it turns out,” Asher told me, slipping behind me in the lunch line, “it is possible that I do know someone who might be able to get information off a disposable cell phone.”

“Even if the phone has been wiped clean?” In between classes, I’d checked the call log and contacts. Both had been cleared.

“My contact is … let’s say,resourceful,” Asher told me. “Nothing electronic is ever truly deleted.”

“Asher.” Henry Marquette cut between the two of us. “Any chance you’re actually intendingnotto skip out on your remaining classes today?”

“That’s Henry’s way of saying he thinks you’re a bad influence on me,” Asher informed me. “Given the high bad influence standards set by yours truly, I’m pretty sure that’s a compliment.”

Based on the steely expression on Henry’s face, I was pretty sure that it wasn’t.

If only he knew. Asher excelled at acting natural. From his tone, you would have thought he and I had been plotting a high school prank, not discussing how one went about pulling deleted information off a disposable phone.

Henry had no idea just how bad an influence I was.

“I’ll meet you in the computer lab during free period,” Asher told me.

I started making my way to the courtyard.

“Tess,” Henry called after me. On his lips, my name sounded like a nonsense word, one he’d condescended to saying and thought about as much of asflapdoodleorflibbertigibbet.“A moment?”

What if he knows?My heart announced its presence in my chest, beating viciously against the inside of my rib cage.Of course he doesn’t know, I told myself. There was no way he could.

“Yeah?” I said.

Henry came to stand next to me. “I understand Emilia hired you to keep Asher out of trouble in my absence.”

Emilia. Not Vivvie. Emilia. The knots in my stomach relaxed, just slightly.

“Emiliatriedto hire me,” I corrected, forcing myself to respond to what he was saying instead of what he wasn’t. “She also tried to bribe me, and I’m pretty sure that threatening me into compliance might have eventually been on the table.”

Henry took his time with his reply, spacing his words apart, giving each its own weight. “Regardless, as it happens, I am no longer absent.” His green eyes narrowed slightly. “Whatever you’re doing with Asher, you can stop.”