The next morning, I take a longer time than usual brushing my hair into a neat ponytail and making sure my uniform’s flawless. Shirt: crisp. Blazer: ironed. Skirt: three fingers above the knee. Socks: four fingers above the ankle. I force myself to focus on each task with a fierce intensity so I don’t have to think about last night, but Sophie haunts every minute I’m awake. Every time I close my eyes, her blank, unseeing face flashes through my mind until I can’t take it any longer. I need to talk to someone. A grown-up. Someone who will solve everything.
I can’t stomach the thought of going to breakfast. I haven’t even dared to look at my phone. I know DD has probably blown up with stories about last night, and I don’t want to know all the nasty gossip that must have been posted about Sophie. I don’t want to see my classmates’ faces at the dining hall, eating while gossiping with barely concealed glee about Sophie. Once I’m dressed, I head straight to the principal’s office.
The receptionist is a kindly old lady who takes one look at my pale face and somber expression and says, “Let her finish her coffee first. It’ll be best for everyone.” I give her a weak smile and sit there, wringing my hands, until the receptionist nods and tells me it’s probably safe for me to go in. My legs are all wobbly when I get up.
Mrs. Henderson sits behind a stupidly huge mahogany desk. It’s the kind of desk a dude might buy to compensate for smaller things. Or maybe the kind of desk one buys to intimidate the shit out of problematic students. It’s working. I feel tiny and dispensable.
She looks up when I enter, and I swear she actually sighs. “Ah, Lia Setiawan.”
Why does she know my name? Does she know the name of every student here? Considering there are over a thousand students in this school, probably not, which brings us back to the first question: Why does she know mine?
“Sit down, Lia.”
I do as she says, reminding myself not to pick at my fingernails or fidget or anything. Mrs. Henderson looks harried, the lines on her face deeper than usual, locks of hair flying loose from her usually flawless bun. I realize belatedly that she must have spent all night putting out fires everywhere and that maybe this isn’t the best time for me to…do whatever the hell it is I’m trying to do.
“What can I do for you?” Mrs. Henderson says with a small, tight smile. A smile that obviously takes a lot of effort to put on.
“Um, I—um, I came here to talk about, um—” Stop saying um. “Ummm…” I clear my throat. My fists are clenched. “I wanted to talk about last night.”
Mrs. Henderson’s lips tighten, like a purse whose strings are being tugged closed. “I’m sorry, but I cannot discuss any details regarding last night.”
“No, I know, I’m not here to talk about Sophie—well, I sort of am—but only in relation to Mr. Werner.”
Now a frown appears on her face, and she clasps her hands and leans forward. “Mr. James Werner, your English Lit teacher? What about him?”
God, here it goes. My hands clench tightly. “Um, it’s going to sound really crazy.”
She utters a sharp, bitter laugh. “Given the night we’ve all just had, I think it’s safe to say nothing else will faze me now.”
“Okay,” I manage. I take a deep breath, then I tell her everything. Mr. Werner’s class, track and Mandy, dating Danny. She frowns when I tell her about failing English Lit, looking concerned. With shaky, sweaty hands, I lay out all the pieces of evidence I have—printouts of my emails with SiliconBrains, the copy of the test SiliconBrains gave me, pictures of Sophie’s messages on my walls, and my English Lit test papers.
Mrs. Henderson flips through the papers, and the whole time, the groove between her eyebrows deepens, but she says nothing as I babble on until I get all the way to last night. “And I think he was doing the same thing to Sophie, which was why she—”
“Let me stop you right there,” she says, holding up her hand. “We’re not going to make wild guesses on Sophie Tanaka or any other students or ex-students here, okay?” She sounds so stern that my insides shrivel up and I quickly nod.
“Yeah, of course. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”
She makes a “hmm” noise, like she’s not convinced, then she frowns at me again. “Is that why you were at Mr. Werner’s office last night? You told the officers that it was a dare. But it wasn’t, was it?”
My mouth opens, but no words refuse to come out. Why would she ask me about that? Who cares why I was there, especially after everything I’ve just told her?
Seconds crawl by painfully before I finally manage to say, “Uh, sort of. I just. Um, ignoring the events of last night, because you’re right,” I add quickly, “I’m not here to gossip about Sophie at all, I guess I’m here because I needed to tell you about what’s been going on with Mr. Werner. About him selling grades to students.”
Mrs. Henderson’s eyes close, and she pinches the bridge of her nose like she’s trying to wish away my presence. After a while, she clicks her tongue and says, “Alright. Hang on a second, Lia.”
She picks up her desk phone and taps a number. “Morning, April. I need you to look into an email account for me. The address is SiliconBrains@gotmail.com. Yes, this person—oh right.” She puts a hand over the receiver and says, “Lia, April has to go into your email account in order to trace the messages from SiliconBrains. Is that all right with you?”
“Uh.” I mentally scroll through the latest messages in my email. Anything bad or embarrassing? Not that I can remember.
“Lia?” Mrs. Henderson is watching me expectantly.
“Yeah, okay.”
“All right, April, I’ll have her send you her email details. Thank you. Yes, right away, please.”
She hangs up and instructs me to email the IT person with my account name and password. I do it, but wow, does it ever feel wrong. Still, once I hit Send, I kind of feel slightly…hopeful. April will find out who SiliconBrains is, and then we can summon SiliconBrains here. This stupid shitty tunnel has a light, after all.
“These accusations are quite disturbing,” Mrs. Henderson says, taking off her glasses and placing them carefully on the table. “Do you know how many applicants we get every year?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Over ten thousand. And that’s not counting the scholarship applicants.” She gets up from her desk and walks around her chair to gaze out of her huge picture window. “We only accept two hundred students every year, so out of those ten thousand applicants, less than five percent will make it here. We review scholarship applicants with an even more stringent eye.”
What does this have to do with me, exactly? I swallow, trying to still my stomach.
“Last year, one scholarship student graduated with a full scholarship to Juilliard for cello. The other one went to Caltech. The year before that, our scholarship student received a Rhodes award to study at Oxford University. In England,” she adds, in case I’m one of those rare idiots who don’t know where Oxford University is. She finally looks at me, and her gaze is one 100 percent disappointment. No traces of warmth or sympathy.
Dread seeps into my limbs, poisoning every part of me.
“And now we have you. Lia Setiawan. A rising star on the track. Runner’s World referred to you as the female answer to Usain Bolt! Of course, once we saw that, we had to take a look at you. And wow, did you ever blow us away. We thought that with the right training, you could be Olympics material.” Mrs. Henderson shakes her head. “We chose you over a student who invented a machine to test for liver toxicity that costs two dollars to make. But we chose you, Lia, because who can turn down the next Usain Bolt?” Her phone rings, and she holds up a finger in my direction, as though I were about to interrupt, and then picks up the phone.
“April? Yes. You got in? Uh-huh. Right. That’s what I thought.” She looks at me, and it’s like a door just got slammed in my face. Whatever April’s found, it’s nothing good.
I want a do-over. I want to turn back time and talk myself out of coming to Mrs. Henderson’s office. Why the hell did I think I had enough evidence to back up my claim?
Mrs. Henderson hangs up the phone. “Would you like to hear what April said?”
No. “Yes.”
“Well, this SiliconBrains email address is being used under a proxy server.”
“A what?”
“A VPN.”
All I know about VPNs is that they’re what people use in countries like Indonesia, where porn is censored, to—well—watch porn.
“It makes the email impossible to trace.” Mrs. Henderson narrows her eyes at me. “Which means there’s no way you can prove that SiliconBrains isn’t…well, you.”
“What?” I cry, jumping to my feet.
“Enough lying, Lia.” She’s not shouting, but somehow, her voice is so commanding that I’m struck dumb. As I stand there, gaping like a fish on land, Mrs. Henderson takes out a folder from a drawer and slides it across the table toward me. I catch it and stare.
LIA SETIAWAN—DISCIPLINARY ACTION NEEDED.
The words are written in all caps. They’re being shouted at me from the page.
From afar, I hear Mrs. Henderson say, “I was expecting you to come to my office. I thought you might want to apologize and explain your atrocious behavior and performance.” She reaches across the table and flips the folder open.
The first page is titled: James A. Werner’s report on Lia Setiawan, English Lit 210.
“Mr. Werner has a very long list of complaints about you. Cheating in class—well, you confirmed that all right. Then we’ve got lying, harassing fellow students—”
“Harassing fellow students?”
She flips over to the second page. The title burns its way through my retinas.
Lia Setiawan—Harassment Report
Victim: Mandy Kim
“Mandy Kim?” I cry.
“Young lady, do not raise your voice at me,” Mrs. Henderson snaps.
I try, I really do, to get myself under control, but the world’s gone crazy, and I can’t believe the extent to which Mr. Werner has gone to screw me over so completely. Tears sting my eyes. My breath’s coming in and out in short, wheezy gasps. I need to make this right. “I’m sorry, but Mandy’s had it in for me ever since I got here—”
“It’s not just her,” Mrs. Henderson says. She flips to the next page, and the next.
Lia Setiawan—Bullying Report
Victim: Elle Brown
Victim: Arjuna Singh
Victim: Yoshi Kitagawa
When Mrs. Henderson speaks, her voice is pure ice. “We have a zero-tolerance policy on bullying, Lia. And a zero-tolerance policy on cheating.”
“I didn’t—” My voice catches in my throat. It feels like a fist is squeezing my throat. “Mr. Werner—”
“Mr. Werner has been a teacher here for more than ten years. He hasn’t had a single complaint against him.”
“Sophie!” I cry. The grip around my throat loosens. There’s something, finally. No matter how tenuous. “Sophie made a complaint about him. My first day here, she came here and she said he made her fail!”
Mrs. Henderson’s face goes cold. “How dare you use that poor girl against him? After what happened last night? Do you not have any compassion?”
“I do!” I’m speaking too loud now, practically shouting, but I can’t help myself. “I sleep in her room! She wrote on the walls about Mr. Werner! I have nothing but compassion toward her. Don’t you see? She killed herself because of him!”
“Enough!” Her voice slices through mine like a crack of thunder. She points a finger at me, wielding it like a sword. “I won’t have such slanderous gossip about my teachers or my students. Draycott Academy is a sterling institution that creates future world leaders. It’s clear that you do not belong here.”
“Wait, what?”
She shakes her head. “I blame myself for this. I should have known you wouldn’t fit in.”
Wouldn’t fit in? Never mind swimming, my mind is drowning.
“Against my better judgment, I thought maybe we could take a risk. I’m sorry for the mess, Lia. I will be filing for your expulsion immediately. It’ll be effective right after the next board meeting, which is in…” She checks her calendar pointedly. “Two days’ time. I suggest you start packing your things.”
And just like that, all my nightmares about being kicked out of school scream into reality.
I don’t remember walking out of Mrs. Henderson’s office. Everything goes by under a murky layer, like I’m seeing myself in a dream. Somehow, I make it back to my room, where I sort of just slump onto the floor and lie there, not crying or sleeping or anything. I lie suspended in that state, outside of time and space, and watch the world turn.
It’s over. Everything is over. There’s nothing I can do to save myself. I’m sinking into the deep and dark. My limbs are lead. I’m well and truly defeated.
And then, suddenly, the anger finds me. And I let it swallow me whole.
I’m going to go down, that much is clear. No school will have me, not now that I’m about to get expelled from Draycott. My future is over. There’s no saving me. But I’m not going to go down alone. I won’t be the next Sophie, self-destructing because of Mr. Werner. I’m taking him down with me.