“What are you doing sitting here in the dark?” Mom asks when she gets home from work and finds me in the living room with no lights on.

I’ve been sitting on the sofa all afternoon, watching the video over and over, obsessively searching for clues to prove it’s fake. No luck so far. All I’ve got are tired, gritty eyes.

“Dara, what’s going on? Why haven’t you put the casserole in the oven yet?” Mom flicks on the lights, making me blink. “Does this have to do with the phone call I got from Mr. Joyner today about some video? He sent me a link to watch, but I was totally slammed at work and didn’t have time.”

“Yes,” I say, pointing to my phone screen.

Mom comes over and sits next to me.

“Before you watch this, you need to know something really important.” I look straight into her eyes. “I never said this.”

Mom’s brow furrows. “How about you just play it for me?”

I exhale as I press play and watch my mom’s reaction to the video. Her eyes widen when she hears me say that Will paid someone to take the SAT for him.

She shakes her head, confused, when the video ends. “So are you telling me this video is … fake? That you never actually said this, but somehow there’s this video of you doing it?”

“You don’t believe me,” I say, unable to keep the hurt from my voice.

“I didn’t say that,” Mom says. “I’m just trying to be clear about what you’re saying, because this is … extremely confusing.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. “No one is more confused than me. How do you think I felt when I watched this the first time, knowing I never said that?”

“I just don’t understand how—” Mom bites her lip. “Wasn’t Will one of your coworkers at camp this summer?”

I nod. “And we were dating.”

“Dating?” Mom exclaims. “You never told me you were dating anyone!”

“We didn’t tell anyone,” I say. “But can you, like, forget that for a second? It’s not the point.”

Mom frowns. “So what is the point, besides the fact that my daughter is hiding things from me?”

“The point is that I never said this,” I explain. “Yet somehow there’s a video of me doing that. And now Will hates me, and my friends hate me, and Mr. Joyner called me into his office and implied that I made it because of some fight Will and I had and—”

“Hold up,” Mom says, raising her hand. “The principal accused you of making this because of a fight with your boyfriend?”

I nod, and Mom mutters something impolite about Mr. Joyner under her breath. I think she believes me, which fills me with relief because it means I’ve got at least one person on my side.

“I know,” I say. “But that’s not the biggest problem. I need to figure out how to prove that this video is fake.”

Mom taps her index finger against her lip. “Where did it come from?”

“Remember I told you about that anonymous gossip site at school called Rumor Has It?” I say.

“Yes, ridiculous,” Mom says, shaking her head.

“Rumor Has It posted the video this morning.”

“And you have no idea who this Rumor person is?”

“No. Or how this video exists.”

“It’s bizarre,” Mom says.

“I know. It’s freaking me out.”

“I have to ask you this,” Mom says. “Did Will pay someone to take the SAT for him?”

“Mom—no!” I say. “But it looks really bad for him, because his scores increased a lot from May to August.”

“So … are you sure he didn’t?” Mom asks.

I hesitate for a second before answering. Can I be totally sure? I mean, he said he loved me a bunch of times before this morning, but then he wouldn’t even listen to me, much less believe me, when I told him I never said what was in the video.

As much talking the logic through with myself as answering Mom, I say: “I saw him practically every day over the summer. He was always talking about taking another practice test. I don’t think he was lying about that. So if he cheated, he never told me.”

“As long as you’re as sure as you can be,” Mom says. She hesitates. “Do you want me to talk to Ted about this? He might know about how the video could be manipulated, and given his line of work, he might have the tools to help prove it.”

Ted’s my mother’s boyfriend—excuse me, her fiancé—and he does video editing for the local TV station. He proposed to Mom right before school started, and now it’s all wedding this and wedding that constantly. I’m still getting used to the idea of things going from just Mom and me to becoming part of a family of five, with Ted as my stepdad and Carson and Saffron as my stepsiblings.

“Aren’t you two too busy planning the wedding?”

Mom inhales quickly and gives me a sharp look. She swallows visibly and then speaks in a slow, measured tone. “Do you really think I’m incapable of doing anything except planning a wedding?”

“No, but it’s been pretty much the number-one topic of conversation around here for months.”

Mom frowns. “I get it, Dara. You’re upset about what’s happening to you, and you’re unsettled by me getting remarried,” she says. “But please don’t forget that I love you, and you’ve always been my priority.”

I feel bad that I kind of want to roll my eyes, because I know she’s being sincere. She just doesn’t get that this is weird for me. That I’ll leave for college and be replaced with two other kids. Instead of saying any of that, I just say, “I’m … sorry.” And I mean it.

“We’ll figure this out,” Mom says.

I want to believe her. But right now I don’t see how.