Page 29

JUNE

Paige was the first of them to be cleared.

Upon examining the first journal the police had in evidence, it was concluded that it was impossible to have been authored over the course of the school year—pressure of the pen, age of the pages. The journal found in the Millses’ bathroom, on the other hand, was accepted to be real. One by one, Jodi watched her friend’s charges be dropped.

They decided that Oliver Burns’s testimony of the Ride or Die incident wasn’t enough if they didn’t know who was driving, so without the journal, Paige was cleared. Once Jodi’s signed statement about her own identical incident with a glass bottle had been examined by both sides of the case, Reagan suddenly reconsidered if she had truly seen Emily on her street the day the soda bottle was allegedly thrown. All of Lucy’s charges were dropped, too.

Jodi got the text from Lucy just before the West Side Story rehearsal that Wednesday night. Lucy’s dad was already on the phone with his friend in the dean’s office at UCLA. Smiling down at her phone, Jodi typed back that she was glad just as the stage manager called for places.

Jodi set aside one ticket for Julian on the Friday show, but he would never make it.

On Friday morning, Julian Hollister pled guilty to criminal harassment of Emily Mills. The text message and the Google Drive, the eyewitness account of him “putting hands on her”—all of it was on the table even without the fake journal. The prosecution and the defense came to terms on a reduced sentence: six months at the Sacramento juvenile detention center. He was taken into custody immediately following the plea bargain hearing. He would have to get his GED from juvie.

Jodi’s heart was in her throat the entire performance, and by the time the curtain closed, she was already on her way to Rosa’s car in the waiting zone.

“What’s wrong?” Rosa asked.

Jodi buckled her seat belt and wiped away the tear trailing down her cheek. “Nothing. The play was really good tonight.”

The DA’s office wasn’t as ready to talk plea deals with Zack. With his name on the group and his Mustang being used for the Ride or Die incident that Oliver witnessed, they still wanted to pursue him. Also, Emily had told her sister about having sex with Zack in painful detail, so Hannah was now considered a witness.

By finals week, Hannah was more ghostly than ever, shuffling down the hallways and staring off into space. Jodi asked Oliver if she’d been buying from him, but he’d told her no, not since a month ago.

On the last day of school, the DA’s office and the defense for Zackary Thrasher called a meeting. Jodi waited at school after her last final, staring at her phone. Across the quad, she saw Hannah Mills doing the exact same. She considered approaching her, but her stomach was too knotted. If they went to trial, Jodi could be called to testify, and she would have to tell the truths that she knew.

It was almost five o’clock when her phone buzzed.

“Zack?” she said, picking up the call.

“It’s done, Jodi!” She could hear his smile through the phone.

“What? What happened?”

“There was a date discrepancy. An intern on my defense team found it yesterday . Emily said ‘Saturday’ when she meant ‘Sunday’ and I had an alibi for the Saturday. Peter had canceled the morning session and we rescheduled for the evening. I guess the testimony from her sister was super hazy on which day, so the prosecution decided it wasn’t worth it to put it in front of a jury!”

Jodi felt her smile dripping off her face, try as hard as she might to keep it there. “Wow. Peter Kim for the win. So you got off on a technicality?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He kept his voice low. “They dropped all charges, like Paige and Lucy.”

Jodi nodded, trying to unwind this feeling in her chest. “Yeah. Great.”

Like Paige and Lucy.

But he wasn’t like Paige and Lucy. Zack had actually done something wrong. But because of a wrong date, he didn’t have to live with the consequences.

And Julian was in juvie.

Zack must have heard it in her tone. “What’s wrong? Are you… disappointed I didn’t go to jail?”

Jodi cleared her throat. “No. I’m not disappointed.” She looked across the quad and saw a small blond girl with orange shoes on the phone, too. “I’m really happy it worked out, Zack. Call Paige and Lucy. I’ll talk to you soon.” She hung up.

Hannah Mills jumped to her feet and took off toward the door leading inside. Jodi grabbed her things and followed.

Once in the hallway, Jodi looked left and right, and she found a halo of blond moving quickly toward the girl’s bathroom.

Jodi pushed the door open. “Hannah?”

Hannah Mills stood at the sinks, tears falling down her cheeks.

“So he’s innocent?”

There was something tight about her eyes, and her lips were cracked and chewed.

“They dropped the charges. Emily wrote the wrong date in her journal—”

“Wrong date? What wrong date?” Hannah swung around and forward, and Jodi almost stepped back.

“The date Zack allegedly had sex with her. Emily wrote Saturday instead of Sunday, and Zack had an alibi for Saturday.”

Hannah stared at her, rage building behind her eyes. Suddenly, a choking sound came from her throat, and her face crumpled. She paced away from her, and a scream tore from her throat.

“Hannah, I know this is upsetting—”

“You’re the one who told them about the real journal, aren’t you?” she mumbled. “My mom told me you came over. You went upstairs and looked for it, didn’t you?”

Jodi stood frozen. She’d called it the real journal.

“I was thinking it might have been you,” Jodi said quietly. “You created the fake one?”

Tears streamed down Hannah’s cheeks. “It took me weeks. I had her handwriting perfect. I rewrote the entire thing. I had every date correct, I swear.”

Jodi knew to be careful. She couldn’t give Hannah any indication that she knew there was truth to the journal entry about Zack and Emily having sex.

“The journal in the wall—the real one—it stopped in April. But you created May entries?”

Hannah sniffed. “After Emily told me she’d had sex, she said ‘Journals are for kids. I’m an adult now.’ So I filled in the May dates myself.”

Jodi’s eyes narrowed. Something still didn’t make sense.

“Did Emily tell you about my dad throwing a bottle at me?”

Hannah wiped her nose with her wrist, nodding. “She told me everything about everything.”

So Hannah had twisted it and put it into the journal, something to hold against Lucy. “Why didn’t you accuse me of anything?” Jodi asked.

Hannah looked up at her with wet eyes. “You meant a lot to her. She wouldn’t have wanted that. But I’m sorry that I—” She cut off, biting her lip.

“What?”

“I’m sorry if I’ve been scaring you,” she said slowly.

It dawned on her. “Hannah, were you behind the text messages?”

She stared at the sinks. “I just wanted them to remember her. To feel guilt.”

“How did you do some of that?” Jodi thought about the text about the hair dye, the flare in Paige’s photos.

“I started hacking in seventh grade,” Hannah said flatly. “It wasn’t hard to get into your search histories.”

Jodi’s eyebrows lifted. She realized in both circumstances that she’d felt the text messages knew too much—when Jodi was thinking of trying a new hair dye and when she wanted tickets to the show in San Francisco—it wasn’t clairvoyance. It was her search history.

“What about the different numbers?” Jodi asked.

Hannah shrugged. “I bought burner phones. Tossed them when I was done with them.”

Jodi’s eyes narrowed. “Did you put that light in Paige’s photos, too?”

“No?” Hannah looked at her curiously. “What light?”

Jodi felt a chill crest over her shoulders but waved away the question.

“Listen, Hannah. I know you’re angry. I know you miss your sister. And maybe you don’t think we got what we deserve, but you have to stop now. You did all you could to get the law to do their job. If you go any further with all of this, you could really get in a lot of trouble. It could ruin your life just as much as ours.”

Hannah chewed on her lip, dead skin tearing off to reveal red, raw sections. She nodded.

“Theirs,” Hannah said slowly. “I didn’t want to ruin your life.”

Jodi’s stomach felt sick. “I was like them, though. I could be just as mean. Did Emily show you the Google Drive?”

“Pieces of it. When I looked through it, I said I needed to tell Mom, and she deleted it from her phone. I didn’t even see which of them sent it to her.”

Jodi nodded. “Well, I might have meant a lot to Emily, but I wasn’t kind to her. Not like I should have been.”

“You didn’t like her,” Hannah said matter-of-factly, shrugging. “It happens. But you don’t have to like someone to be kind to them. You came over after school and talked with her. You let her annoy you. You gave her something to look forward to every day. I think that’s being kind.”

Jodi’s vision blurred as she stared at the bathroom tiles. She supposed it was mostly true. It still didn’t fix the ache in her chest when she thought about what was on that Google Drive.

Pushing back her tears, Jodi turned to Hannah. “Are you going to be alright? Do you have someone picking you up?”

Hannah sniffed and nodded. “I can get someone, yeah.”

Jodi wondered if she should hug her, but settled for placing a hand on her shoulder. “You can talk to me about her, if you want. You have my number.”

When Hannah didn’t respond, Jodi moved on wobbly legs toward the door.

“Why were you late?”

Jodi spun back to her. Tears were spilling down Hannah’s cheeks again.

“When?”

“On prom night. In the limo. You were so late. She said you’d be there at seven.”

Jodi felt bile creeping up her throat. “Hannah, I’m sorry, but Emily was never invited in the limo.”

But Hannah’s forehead was scrunched in confusion. She opened her mouth a few times before saying, “But she said to wait. She said, ‘Jodi has to see.’”

Her heart pounded in her ears. “See what?”

“She said I had to wait. I didn’t want to, but she said I couldn’t—”

“Couldn’t what?”

Hannah was sobbing, heaving for air.

“I wasn’t allowed to scream until the limo pulled up,” she wheezed. “But you were so late. And she wasn’t waking up anymore. And by the time you came, she was already gone.” Hannah looked up at her with her sister’s pale, cold eyes. “Why were you so late?”

There was ice in Jodi’s chest, a heavy weight in her stomach. Hannah didn’t “find” her sister’s body.

She was there—in the bathroom.

“Why did the police report say Emily’s dress was wet?”

“Because she told me to turn the cold water on her every time she passed out. She said she had to stay awake until you came.”

Hannah’s voice broke into sobs. Jodi decided that if Emily were still alive, she would no longer have been so kind, as Hannah put it.

What would have happened if they’d pulled up in the limo to pick her up at seven? Jodi would have never left Emily’s side again—she knew that now. She would have always tried to take care of her, the girl who’d almost died. She wouldn’t have forgiven Julian for bullying her. If Emily told her Zack had slept with her, Jodi wouldn’t have forgiven him, either.

Emily would have won. Jodi would have seen exactly what she was supposed to.

Jodi swallowed back the bile in her throat. “Hannah, I’m so sorry. Emily shouldn’t have asked you to do that. We were never going to pick her up in the limo. She misunderstood.”

Hannah’s pink, wet face was pulled tight in pain. She lifted her hands to hide it.

“That was really wrong of her. I hope you know that, Hannah. It wasn’t fair to you. And it wasn’t your fault.”

Jodi stepped forward and pulled Hannah into a hug. She let her cry on for a long time. When she was finally done, Jodi asked hesitantly, “Did Emily really try to kill herself in April? The first time?”

Hannah sniffed and shook her head. “I thought it was good for dramatic effect.”

Jodi took a deep breath, exhaling the hatred she felt for Emily Mills at that moment, and pulled Hannah closer.