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  “Not necessarily. She might be smart enough to have hidden whatever she took,” Carrie points out. “That would protect her from getting caught. It could be anywhere in the house. All she’d have to do is get it before she leaves.”

  “What a convenient theory,” Hayley snaps. She’s furious, and already tugging at her pockets to show us they’re empty. When she finishes, she opens her bag and turns it upside down on the end table. There’s lots of stuff in there: a change purse and wallet, lip balm, hand cream, theatre stubs, two packages of gum, a folding hairbrush, and a few other odds and ends. But no jewellery of any kind. Nothing at all of mine.

  “See!” Hayley says. Her teeth are clenched.

  “What about the cellphone pocket?” Lori asks.

  Hayley sighs and rolls her eyes. She tugs at the Velcro flap and pulls out her phone. Setting that aside, she turns her bag upside down once again.

  We all see something fall to the carpet. We all step closer to get a better look. I’m the only one who can identify it, though, and that’s because it’s mine. An antique brooch that once belonged to my great-grandmother has just dropped out of the cellphone compartment on the side of Hayley’s purse. I feel like I might be sick.

  “I did not take that!” Hayley says. She turns to face Carrie. “You put it there! You set me up.”

  Carrie shakes her head sadly. “Hayley, we don’t want to judge you. Whatever is making you do this — let us help.”

  Hayley’s fists are clenching and unclenching at her side. I’m scared she’s actually going to haul off and hit Carrie so I step between them. Hayley’s eyes meet mine.

  “I would never take anything from you, Shana,” she says. “I would never take anything from any of you. I’m not a thief.”

  Hayley looks around at us. Her face pleads with us to believe her.

  “Admitting that you have a problem is the first step,” Carrie says softly.

  “The only problem I have is you, you lying —”

  “Carrie?” Krysti says, interrupting. “Just out of curiosity, why didn’t you say something before now if you’ve known about it for months?”

  “I didn’t want to embarrass Hayley,” Carrie says. “I’d been hoping that she’d come to her senses and put back the stuff she took. But when I saw her stealing again today, I realized that isn’t going to happen. She probably needs professional help.”

  “That ring my dad gave me was really important to me,” Lori says. She looks at Hayley with sad, pleading eyes.

  Hayley barely glances at Lori. She’s too busy stuffing things back into her bag. She throws it over her shoulder and clears her throat. “Do all of you actually believe I’ve been stealing from you?” she asks.

  The room goes completely silent.

  “I guess that answers my question,” Hayley says. Then she walks out.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  No one speaks for a few moments. The first sound comes from Carrie, who has begun to cry. Krysti is closest to her. Once again she puts an arm around Carrie’s shoulders and tells her it’s okay.

  Of course, she’s wrong.

  It’s definitely not okay.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Carrie sobs. “Now Hayley hates all of us.”

  “I don’t think she hates us,” I say. “She’s just upset right now.”

  “I handled it all wrong,” Carrie says miserably. “I should have spoken to her in private when I first realized she was stealing. It must have been humiliating for her to get caught red-handed that way.”

  “Don’t you think we should be the ones who are upset with her?” Lori asks. She looks down at her hand, like her missing ring might magically appear there. “After all, it’s our stuff she’s been stealing.”

  “If she’s been taking things, there must be some reason behind it,” I say. “She needs her friends more than ever.”

  “I doubt that she still considers us her friends,” Carrie says. “Not with her stealing out in the open. She probably sees us as enemies now. It’s so sad.”

  “One of us should go and talk to her,” Jen suggests.

  “I’ll do it,” Carrie tells us. “I was actually just about to say that I’d go and talk to her.”

  “I don’t think that’s the best idea,” Krysti says. “She’s really furious with you. I think it would be better if someone else went.”

  “It’s because she’s angriest at me that I should go,” Carrie says. “She’ll know for sure that we all care, if the person she attacked the most still wants to work things out. I’ll just give her a day or two to cool off and then I’ll talk to her.”

  I wasn’t sold on the idea. And by the looks on the others’ faces, they weren’t, either. But none of us wanted to argue about it. There’d been enough arguing for one day. So, we reluctantly agreed, and then tried to get back to having fun.

  That didn’t work. It’s hard to force yourself into having a good time when something is troubling you. I found myself going over and over what had happened. Again and again I saw Hayley lift her purse up and shake it. I saw the brooch fall and I saw the shocked look on her face. That troubled me. Why would she be shocked if she knew it was in there?

  I mention this to Jen later, when the two of us have gone to the kitchen to make more iced tea.

  “Maybe she thought it wouldn’t fall out. Like, if she had it pinned in there or something, but it came loose,” Jen says. Her eyes narrow a little. “Or maybe she thought she could convince us she was innocent if she acted shocked.”

  I think about that while I stir the pitcher of powdered mix, water, and ice cubes. By the time I toss in some lemon slices I’m pretty much convinced that Jen is right. If Hayley knew she was caught and there was no way out, pretending to be horrified when she saw the ring might have been her only option.

  “You saw how she tried to say Carrie set her up,” Jen adds. “That was ridiculous. And remember it was right after Carrie said if we didn’t find anything on her, then Hayley might have hidden it in the house somewhere? Why would Carrie have said that if she knew it was in Hayley’s bag?”

  “True,” I say. “Anyway, Carrie would never do anything like that.”

  “Of course not,” Jen agrees. “Why would she?”

  “Exactly,” I say. And the idea is ridiculous. Hayley must have taken the brooch. The only other possible explanation is that Carrie really did set her up and that’s out of the question.

  For starters, there’s no motive. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from listening to my mom talk about crime, it’s that there is always a motive. She likes to corner me now and then and rhyme this stuff off like she’s a giving a seminar at a legal conference.

  “You need to do more than just look at the evidence,” she’ll say after giving me a quick rundown on the latest crime that’s crossed her path. “You’ve got to ask yourself, who had a motive, and what was it? Greed? Jealousy? Anger? Revenge? Sometimes someone commits a crime to cover up another crime. Sometimes it’s for some kind of emotional payoff. And every now and then it’s hard to figure out why someone did something. But there’s got to be a reason — even if it only makes sense to the person committing the crime.”

  And what motive could there possibly be for Carrie to do something like that to Hayley?

  I think back to the way Hayley acted at school the other day. I’m wondering if that could have upset Carrie more than I realized, when it hits me.

  The thefts have been going on for at least a month! That’s when Lori’s ring went missing. So something that happened this week couldn’t have anything to do with it.

  It’s disappointing to think of Hayley as a thief. But it would be even worse to think of Carrie as someone who would betray a friend in such a terrible way.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

&nbs
p; I can’t stop turning this all over in my head. I get hardly any sleep on Saturday night. Sunday drags along while I think about one idea after another. By the evening, I have pains in my stomach. I decide to send Hayley a message. Except I can’t.

  It takes a few minutes before I realize that the problem I’m having isn’t because of any kind of Facebook glitch. I’ve been unfriended. A quick check shows me that I’m not alone. Hayley is no longer on any of our friend lists. She’s even gone so far as to block us — or me, at least.

  I send Carrie a frantic text message. Mainly, I want to know if she talked to Hayley yet. She answers that she did, but it went worse than she expected. A lot worse. She says she’s busy, but she’ll fill us all in at lunch tomorrow.

  Hayley is at her locker when I get to school in the morning. She turns away as soon as she notices me. A moment later, she breezes by with her books. Not a word, not a glance. It’s like we’re complete strangers.

  But that’s the point, isn’t it? That I really don’t know her. If you’d told me a week ago that Hayley was stealing from her own friends, I wouldn’t have believed it. And now she clearly wants nothing to do with any of us.

  At noon, Carrie looks grim when she fills us in on what happened. We sit listening with our lunches hardly touched.

  “I just showed up at Hayley’s place,” she begins. “I figured that was the best thing to do. I didn’t want to give her a chance to tell me not to come.”

  Krysti nods. “That was probably a good idea,” she says. Jen, Lori, and I are silent, waiting. I think they’re just as shocked as I am over what’s happening.

  “Her grandmother let me in, but I can’t say Hayley looked too pleased to see me. She was rude right from the start and only got worse as I tried to talk to her. I told her we were all worried about her.”

  “We really are,” I agree. Jen meets my eye and nods.

  “Yeah, well, she wasn’t one bit interested in hearing that.” Carrie pauses and pokes at the poutine she bought for lunch. She takes a small bite and chews it quickly before going on.

  “So, apparently, this has been coming for a while. The sad truth is that Hayley doesn’t like any of us anymore. Actually, judging by the things she said, she really hates us. You should have heard the way she sounded.”

  “What kind of things did she say?” Lori prods.

  Carrie shakes her head while she eats another bite of poutine. “Horrible things. Horrible and mean,” she tells us. “I hate to repeat any of it, but I guess you have the right to know.”

  She turns toward Jen first. “I really don’t like to say this, because I think you look great just the way you are. But Hayley said she can’t stand eating lunch with you. She said it makes her sick, the way you stuff food into your fat face at lunch.”

  I’m shocked, and I can see by the others’ faces that they are, too. Jen is always worrying about her weight, but the idea that she’s fat is totally in her head. She has some crazy idea that she should be skin and bones like a model.

  She turns her head away now, but not before the rest of us see tears filling her eyes. Anger flares up inside me at Hayley. And it gets worse.

  Carrie goes on to tell us the other terrible things that Hayley said to her. Like, how Lori is the most selfish, stuck-up person she’s ever met, and Krysti is a skank who wears the shortest skirts she can find because she wants all the guys to know she’s open for business.

  Then she gets to me. I try to steel myself, but nothing can prepare me for what I hear next.

  “And Shana,” Carrie says. Her voice drops and she can’t look at me as she repeats Hayley’s hateful words. “She said Shana is the worst of all of us because she goes around acting like miss-goody-two-shoes, but then she went and made out with a greaseball like Sly Blackwood.”

  “What?” Lori says with a gasp. “Ewww. That’s not true, is it, Shana?”

  I want to deny it, but my mouth won’t move. And even if I could speak, I’d be lying if I said it never happened.

  It wasn’t long after Mike and I broke up. As in, right after he dumped me. Everything hurt so much. So, I did something stupid. I had a pity party and got wasted one Saturday when my mom and dad were out for the evening. All I originally intended to do was dull the pain and go to sleep. I can’t remember when or how that changed but all of a sudden I decided it was a much better plan to go to Mike’s house. I had this crazy idea that if I confronted him and he saw how much I was hurting, he’d change his mind and want to get back together.

  So, I was on my way there, lurching along the street. Only, partway there I lost momentum. All I wanted to do was put my head down and rest. I guess that’s when I ran into Sly, and the next thing I knew, I was at his place. Then I was laying on his bed while the room spun around me. I’m not sure how it happened that we started kissing, but we did. That went on for a while — until I felt his hand snaking its way under my top. By the time he’d reached my bra the fog had cleared enough for me to protest. Rather loudly, in fact. My drunken yelling brought his older sister to the scene and she lit into him, too. Then she got me into a car and drove me home.

  My cheeks feel like there are flames burning against them as I remember that night. I can hardly face the others, who have already realized that my red-faced silence means what Carrie just said is true. I, Shana Tremain, have made out with the scruffiest guy in our entire school. Close as we are, that isn’t something I ever wanted to share with my friends.

  And that’s when it hits me. I never told Hayley about Sly. There’s only one person in the whole world who I shared that ugly moment in my life with.

  My very best friend. Carrie Freeman.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  I’m so nervous that I can hardly steady my finger to ring the doorbell. The second I hear the corresponding buzz inside, I wish I could take it back, turn, and run.

  What am I doing here?

  The door swings open with a long squeak. Hayley’s grandfather is standing there. He smiles warmly and tells me he’ll fetch Hayley. He goes back inside and disappears around the corner. I hear him telling Hayley that someone is there to see her.

  She doesn’t look happy to see me, but she doesn’t yell or tell me to get out or anything. I offer a weak smile.

  “Hi, Hayley,” I say. She just stares. I take a deep breath and go on. “Remember that day in the cafeteria — when you told me you didn’t know who you could trust?”

  She nods, still looking wary.

  “Me,” I say. It sounds louder than I meant it to. “You can trust me.”

  Hayley’s expression softens just a little. She steps back and gestures for me to come in. As I step inside, her grandmother’s head appears down the hall a little, where the doorway opens to the kitchen.

  “Oh, hello, Shana,” she calls. “Hayley, should I make you girls something to snack on?”

  “We’re good, Gram, thanks, anyway,” Hayley tells her. “We’re just going to hang out in my room for a while.”

  “Well, you just email me a text message if you change your mind,” her grandmother says, waving her cellphone in the air.

  “Okay, Gram,” Hayley tells her, while we try not to giggle. Then she whispers to me, “Gram’s awfully proud of how tech-savvy she is. I don’t have the heart to correct her.”

  “It must be hard for old people to keep all this stuff straight,” I say. I can’t help wondering how a girl who won’t hurt her grandmother’s feelings by telling her you don’t email a text message could be so cruel to her friends.

  We get to Hayley’s room and she points me to her desk chair and then plunks down on the end of her bed. “So,” she says, “you wanted to talk to me?”

  I’ve been thinking about how to approach this. I don’t want to betray Carrie, but I’m bothered by what she claims Hayley said about me. Mainly, I can’t
figure out how Hayley knew about Sly.

  I suppose it’s possible that Sly blabbed and Hayley heard it from somewhere else. I’m doubtful about that, though. I’d called him and begged him to keep it between us after I realized what I’d done. I know he was totally embarrassed at the way it ended, so luckily he would have had his own reasons for keeping it quiet, too. In any case, he’d been super-nice about it and promised he wouldn’t tell. I never heard a whisper about it from anyone, so I’m pretty sure he kept his word. After all, if he’d blabbed it around, it’s almost guaranteed that it would have gotten back to me.

  Another possibility is that Carrie betrayed my confidence and told Hayley about it at some point in time. But that doesn’t make sense to me, either. Carrie is closer to Jen and Krysti than she is to Hayley, but they clearly hadn’t heard it before now. If Carrie was going to tell one other person in our group, I can’t see it being Hayley.

  If neither of those things happened, there’s only one other possibility. It’s the last thing I want to be true, but I’m determined to find out, one way or the other. What I need to do is find out the truth from Hayley, if I can. I turn to face her.

  “So,” I say, drawing it out, “about Sly Blackwood.”

  “Sly Blackwood?” she repeats, like I’ve just said something in a strange language. “What about him?”

  “You said something about him to Carrie,” I say, vaguely.

  “About Sly Blackwood?” she echoes. She looks as puzzled as she sounds. “What are you talking about, Shana? I thought you were here to discuss what’s going on.”

  It’s as clear to me as it’s ever going to be. Hayley obviously has no idea what I’m talking about. There’s no way she said what Carrie claims she said. That brings me to my next question.

  “Did Carrie come here to see you the other day?”

  “Yes.” Hayley’s expression stiffens. I can almost see her thinking she’d better be careful what she says to me.