Everyone in school knows about locker eighty-nine: the locker on the bottom right, at the end of the hall near the science labs. It’s been unassigned for years now; really, it should’ve been allocated to one of the hundreds of students in the school to load with books and papers and forgotten, mold-infested Tupperware.
Instead, there seems to be an unspoken agreement that locker eighty-nine serves a higher purpose. How else do you explain the fact that every year, when we all get our schedules and combinations, and lockers eighty-eight and ninety meet their new leasers, locker eighty-nine stands empty?
Well, “empty” might not be the right word here. Because even though it’s unassigned, locker eighty-nine ends most days housing several envelopes with almost identical contents: ten dollars, often in the form of a bill, sometimes made up of whatever loose change the sender can gather; a letter, sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten, sometimes adorned with the telltale smudge of a tearstain; and at the bottom of the letter, an email address.
It’s a mystery how the envelopes get in there, when it’s rare to spot someone slipping one through the vents. It’s a bigger mystery, still, how the envelopes are collected, when no one has ever been spotted opening the locker.
No one can agree on who operates it. Is it a teacher with no hobbies? An ex-student who can’t let go of the past? A bighearted janitor who could use some cash on the side?
The only thing that’s universally agreed on is this: if you’re having relationship issues and you slide a letter through the vents of locker eighty-nine, you will receive an email from an anonymous sender within the week, giving you advice. And if you’re wise enough to follow that advice, your relationship problems will be solved, guaranteed, or your money back.
And I rarely have to give people their money back.
In my defense, in the few cases that didn’t work out, the letter left out important information. Like last month, when Penny Moore wrote in about Rick Smith dumping her in an Instagram comment, and conveniently left out that he did it after finding out she’d coordinated her absent days with his older brother so they could sneak off together. If I’d known that, I never would’ve advised Penny to confront Rick about the comment during lunch the next day. That one was on her. Admittedly, it was kind of satisfying to watch Rick perform a dramatic reading of her texts to his brother in front of the whole cafeteria, but I would’ve preferred a happy ending. Because I did this to help people, and to know I made a positive difference in the world; but also (and maybe even mostly, in this case), because it pained me to drop ten dollars into Penny’s locker all because she was too proud to admit she was the one in the wrong. Problem is, I couldn’t defend myself and my relationship expertise if Penny were to tell everyone she didn’t get a refund.
Because no one knows who I am.
Okay, I don’t mean literally. Lots of people know who I am. Darcy Phillips. Junior. That girl with the shoulder-length blond hair and the gap between her front teeth. The one who’s best friends with Brooke Nguyen, and is part of the school’s queer club. Ms. Morgan-from-science-class’s daughter.
But what they don’t know is that I’m also the girl who hangs back after school while her mom finishes up in the science labs, long after everyone else has left. The girl who steals down the hall to locker eighty-nine, enters the combination she’s known by heart for years—ever since the combination list was left briefly unattended on the admin officer’s desk one evening—and collects letters and bills like tax. The girl who spends her nights filtering strangers’ stories through unbiased eyes, before sending carefully composed instructions via the burner email account she made in ninth grade.
They don’t know, because nobody in school knows. I’m the only one who knows my secret.
Or, I was, anyway. Up until this very moment.
I had the sinking inkling that was about to change, though. Because even though I’d checked the halls for stragglers or staff members like I always did barely twenty seconds ago, I was thirteen-thousand percent sure I’d heard someone clear their throat somewhere in the vicinity of directly the fuck behind me.
While I was elbow deep inside a very much unlocked locker eighty-nine.
Crap.
Even as I turned around, I was optimistic enough to hope for the best. Part of the reason why I’d gotten by without detection for so long was the locker’s convenient location, right at the foot of a dead-end, L-shaped hallway. There’d been close calls in the past, but the sound of the heavy entry doors swinging closed had always given me plenty of notice to hide the evidence. The only way someone would be able to sneak up on me was if they’d come out of the fire escape door leading from the pool—and no one used the pool this late in the day.
From the looks of the very wet guy standing behind me, though, I’d made a fatal miscalculation. Apparently, someone did use the pool this late in the day.
Well, fuck.
I knew him. Or, at least, I knew of him. His name was Alexander Brougham, although I was pretty sure he usually went by Brougham. He was a senior, and good friends with Finn Park, and, by all accounts, one of the hottest seniors at St. Deodetus’s.
Up close, it was clear to me said accounts were categorically false.
Brougham’s nose looked like it’d been badly broken once, and his navy-blue eyes were opened almost as wide as his mouth, which was an interesting look, because his eyes were kind of bulgy to begin with. Not goldfish-level, but more like a “my eyelids are doing their best to swallow my eyeballs whole” type of bulgy. And, as aforementioned, he was wet enough that his already dark hair looked black, and his T-shirt stuck to his chest in damp, see-through patches.
“Why are you soaking?” I asked, folding my arms behind my back to hide the letters and leaning against locker eighty-nine so it closed behind me. “You look like you fell in the pool.”
This was probably one of the few situations where a sopping wet, fully clothed teenager standing in the school hallway an hour after dismissal wasn’t the elephant in the room.
He looked at me like I’d said the stupidest thing in the world. Which seemed unfair, given I wasn’t the one who was wandering around the school halls literally dripping.
“I didn’t ‘fall in the pool.’ I was swimming laps.”
“With your clothes on?” I tried to shove the letters down the back of my skirt without moving my hands, but that was a more complex task than I’d anticipated.
Brougham surveyed his jeans. I used the brief distraction to ram the letters inside the band of my tights. In hindsight, this was probably never going to go far in convincing him he hadn’t just seen me digging through locker eighty-nine, but until I had a better excuse, denial was all I had.
“I’m not that wet,” he said.
Today was apparently the first time I’d heard Alexander Brougham speak, because until just now I’d had no idea he had a British accent. I understood his wide appeal now: Oriella, my favorite relationship YouTuber, once dedicated a whole video to the topic. People with perfectly good taste in partners historically had their senses addled in the presence of an accent. Setting aside the messiness of which accents were considered sexy in which cultures and why, accents in general were nature’s way of saying, “Procreate with that one, their gene code must be varied as fuck.” Few things, it seemed, could turn a person on as quickly as the subconscious realization they almost certainly weren’t flirting with a blood relative.
Thankfully, Brougham broke the silence when I didn’t reply. “I didn’t get time to dry off properly. I’d just finished up when I heard you out here. I thought I might catch the person who runs locker eighty-nine if I snuck through the fire escape. And I did.”
He looked triumphant. Like he’d won a contest I was only now realizing I’d been participating in.
That was, incidentally, my least favorite facial expression. As of right this moment.
I forced a nervous laugh. “I didn’t open it. I was putting a letter in.”
“I just saw you close it.”
“I didn’t close it. I just banged it a little when I was sliding the, uh … the letter inside.”
Cool, Darcy, way to gaslight the poor British student.
“Yeah, you did. Also, you took a pile of letters out of it.”
Well, I’d committed to this enough to shove them down my tights so I might as well follow this through to the end, right? I held my empty hands out, palms up. “I don’t have any letters.”
He actually looked a little thrown. “Where did you … I saw them, though.”
I shrugged and pulled an innocent face.
“You … did you put them down your stockings?” His tone wasn’t accusing, per se. More “mild, patronizing bafflement,” like someone gently questioning their child on why, exactly, they thought dog food would make a great snack. It only made me want to dig my heels in further.
I shook my head and laughed a little too loudly. “No.” The heat in my cheeks told me my face was betraying me.
“Turn around.”
I leaned against the lockers with a rustle of paper and folded my arms across my chest. The corner of one of the envelopes dug uncomfortably into the back of my hip. “I don’t want to.”
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Yeah. He wasn’t buying this for a second.
If my brain were functioning properly I would’ve said something to throw him off track, but unfortunately it chose that precise moment to go on strike.
“You are the person who runs this thing,” Brougham said, confidently enough I knew there was no point protesting further. “And I really need your help.”
I hadn’t settled on what I believed would happen if I ever got caught. Mostly because I’d preferred not to worry about it too much. But if you’d forced me to guess what the person catching me would do, I would’ve probably gone for “turn me in to the principal,” or “tell everyone in school,” or “accuse me of ruining their life with bad advice.”
But this? This wasn’t so threatening. Maybe it was going to be okay. I swallowed hard in an attempt to shove the lump in my throat down closer to my thudding heart. “Help with what?”
“With getting my ex-girlfriend back.” He paused, thoughtful. “Oh, my name’s Brougham, by the way.”
Brougham. Pronounced BRO-um, not Broom. It was an easy name to remember, because it was pronounced all wrong, and that had irked me since the first time I’d heard it.
“I know,” I said faintly.
“What’s your hourly rate?” he asked, peeling his shirt away from his chest to air it out. It thwacked heavily back against his skin as soon as he let go of it. See? Overly wet.
I tore my eyes away from his clothes and processed his question. “I’m sorry?”
“I want to hire you.”
There he went again with the weird money-for-favors language. “As…?”
“A relationship coach.” He glanced around us, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “My girlfriend broke up with me last month and I need her back, but I don’t know where to start. This isn’t something an email’s gonna fix.”
Well, wasn’t this guy dramatic? “Um, look, I’m sorry, but I don’t really have time to be anyone’s coach. I just do this before bed as a hobby.”
“What are you so busy with?” he asked calmly.
“Um, homework? Friends? Netflix?”
He folded his arms. “I’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour.”
“Dude, I said—”
“Twenty-five an hour, plus a fifty-dollar bonus if I get Winona back.”
Wait.
So, this guy was seriously telling me he’d give me fifty dollars, tax-free, if I spent two hours giving him some advice on getting back a girl who’d already fallen for him once? That was well within my skill set. Which meant the fifty-dollar bonus was all but guaranteed.
This could be the easiest money I’d ever made.
While I mulled it over, he spoke up. “I know you want to keep your identity anonymous.”
I snapped back to reality and narrowed my eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged, the picture of innocence. “You’re sneaking around after hours when the halls are empty, and no one knows it’s you answering them. There’s a reason you don’t want people knowing. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes.”
And there it was. I knew it. I knew my gut was screaming “danger” for a good reason. He wasn’t asking me for a favor, he was telling me what he wanted from me, and throwing in why it would be a bad idea to refuse. As casually as anything. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blackmail.
I kept my voice as steady as I could, but I couldn’t help the touch of venom that seeped through. “And let me guess. You’d like to help me keep it that way. That’s where this is going, right?”
“Well, yeah. Exactly.”
He’d stuck his lower lip out and widened his eyes. My own lip curled of its own accord as I took him in, any goodwill I’d been feeling toward him evaporating in one puff. “Gee. That’s so thoughtful of you.”
Brougham, expressionless, waited for me to go on. When I didn’t, he circled a hand in the air. “So … what do you think?”
I thought a lot of things, but none of them were wise to say out loud to someone who was in the middle of threatening me. What were my options here? I couldn’t tell Mom someone was threatening me. She had no idea I was behind locker eighty-nine. And I really, really didn’t want everyone to find out this was me. I mean, the awkwardness of how much personal information I knew about everyone alone … even my closest friends didn’t know my involvement. Without anonymity, my dating advice business was a bust. And it was the only real thing I’d ever achieved. The only thing that actually did the world any good.
And … god, there was the whole Brooke thing from last year. If Brooke ever found out about that she’d hate me.
She couldn’t find out.
I set my jaw. “Fifty up front. Fifty if it works out.”
“Shake on it?”
“I’m not done. I’ll agree to a cap of five hours for now. If you want me for longer, it’s my call to continue.”
“Is that everything?” he asked.
“No. If you say one word to anyone about any of this, I’ll tell everyone your game is so bad you needed personal relationship tutoring.”
It was a weak addition, and nowhere near as creative as some of the insults I’d thought of a few moments ago, but I didn’t want to goad him too much. Something flashed so slightly across his blank face I almost missed it. As it was, it was hard to define. Did his eyebrows rise a little? “Well that was unnecessary, but noted.”
I simply folded my arms. “Was it now?”
We stood in silence for a beat as my words played back in my head—they’d sounded bitchier than I’d intended, not that bitchiness was unwarranted here—then he shook his head and started to turn his back. “You know what? Stuff it. I just thought you might be open to a deal.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” I darted forward to head him off, hands up. “I’m sorry. I am open to a deal.”
“Are you sure?”
Oh, for god’s sake, was he going to make me beg him? It seemed unfair to expect me to accept his blackmail terms without any pushback or sass at all, and I was liking him less and less by the second, but I’d do it. Whatever he told me to do, I’d do it. I just needed to keep the situation contained. I nodded, firmly, and he took his phone out.
“Okay then. I’m at practice over at my swim club before school every day, and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons we do dryland training. Tuesdays and Thursdays I swim here at the pool. I’ll grab your number so we can organize this without me hunting you down at school, okay?”
“You forgot ‘please.’” Damn it, I shouldn’t have said that. But I couldn’t help myself. I snatched the phone from him and entered my number into it. “Here.”
“Excellent. What’s your name, by the way?”
I couldn’t even begin to stifle my laugh. “You know, usually people find out each other’s names prior to making ‘deals.’ Do you do it differently in England?”
“I’m from Australia, not England.”
“That’s not an Australian accent.”
“As an Australian, I can assure you it is. It’s just not one you’re used to hearing.”
“There’s more than one?”
“There’s more than one American accent, isn’t there? Your name?”
Oh for the love of … “Darcy Phillips.”
“I’ll message you tomorrow, Darcy. Have a wonderful night.” From the way he surveyed me, lips pressed together and chin raised as his eyes drifted down, he’d enjoyed our first conversation about as much as I had. I stiffened with annoyance at this realization. What right did he have to dislike me when he was the reason that exchange had gotten so tense?
He slid his phone into his damp pocket, electrical failure be damned, and turned on his heel to leave. I stared after him for a moment, then took my chance to rip the letters out of their extremely uncomfortable position by my underwear and shove them in my backpack. Just in time, too, because Mom emerged around the corner not ten seconds later. “There you are. Ready to go?” she asked me, already turning back down the hall, the clack of her low heels echoing in the empty space.
Like I was ever not ready to go. By the time she packed up her stuff, answered her emails, and got some sneaky paper marking in, I was the last student to leave this area of the school—everyone else was way down at the other end hanging around the art room or the track field.
Well, except for Alexander Brougham, apparently.
“Did you know students stay back this late to use the pool?” I asked Mom, hurrying to meet her stride.
“Well, we’re in the off-season for the school team so I daresay it wouldn’t be busy, but I know it’s open to students Vijay gives passes to until reception closes. Darc, could you text Ainsley and ask her to take the spaghetti sauce out of the freezer?”
By Vijay, Mom meant Coach Senguttuvan. One of the weirdest parts about having a parent work at school was that I knew the teachers by their first and last names, and had to make sure not to slip up in class or talking to my friends. Some of them I’d known practically as long as I’d been alive. It might sound easy, but having John around for dinner every month, and at my parents’ birthday parties, and hosting New Year’s Eve for fifteen years, then suddenly transitioning to calling him Mr. Hanson in math class was like playing Minesweeper with my reputation.
I texted my sister Mom’s instructions as I hopped in the passenger seat. To my delight, I found an unread message waiting from Brooke:
I don’t want to do this essay.
Please don’t make me do this
essay.
As usual, getting a message from Brooke made me feel like the law of gravity had declined to apply to me for a beat.
She was obviously thinking about me instead of doing her homework. How often did her mind wander to me when she started daydreaming? Did it wander to anyone else, or was I special?
It was so hard to know how much to hope.
I sent a quick reply:
You’ve got this! I believe in you. I’ll send you my notes later tonight, if it’ll help?
Mom hummed to herself as we pulled out of the parking lot, unbelievably slowly, so as to not bowl down any unexpected turtles. “How was your day?”
“Pretty uneventful,” I lied. Best to leave out the whole “I got hired and also blackmailed” thing. “I got into an argument about women’s rights in sociology with Mr. Reisling, but that’s normal. Mr. Reisling’s a dickhead.”
“Yeah, he is a dickhead,” Mom mused to herself, then she gave me a sharp look. “Don’t you tell anyone I said that!”
“I’ll leave it off the agenda at tomorrow’s meeting.”
Mom glanced sideways at me, and her round face broke into a warm grin. I started to return it, then I remembered Brougham, and the blackmailing, and I wilted. Mom didn’t notice, though. She was too busy focusing on the road, already lost in her own thoughts. One of the good things about having a perpetually distracted parent was not having to dodge prying questions.
I just hoped Brougham would keep my secret to himself. The problem was, of course, that I had no idea what kind of person he was. Wonderful. A guy I’d never met properly, who I knew nothing about, held the power to throw my business—not to mention my relationships—into havoc. That wasn’t anxiety inducing at all.
I needed to talk to Ainsley.