Life After Theft
Page 59

After a pause Mr. Hennigan said icily, “We need to talk.”
I peeked around and saw Sera standing in front of Mr. Hennigan’s office. But she didn’t have the confident, straight posture I was used to seeing. Her shoulders were slumped and her head hung forward, her hair almost blocking out her face.
She looked . . . guilty. And it killed me inside.
I didn’t want her to know I’d seen her get called into Mr. Hennigan’s office again, so after the door closed I continued on past the front office and into the lunchroom to the table where we normally sat.
She didn’t come back the whole lunch period. I had to catch her on her way into her history class. “Hey,” I said, laying a hand on her shoulder.
She turned and smiled, but I realized it looked a lot like Kimberlee’s smiles. The fake ones.
“Hey!” she said, her voice sharply chipper.
“You didn’t come to lunch,” I said, refusing to actually ask her where she’d been. I wanted to see what she would say.
“Oh,” she said, waving a hand dismissively, “I had to stay after in English. I totally screwed up an assignment and had to work with Bleekman to make it up. Sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t know till right then.”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Oh, okay,” I said, looking down at my shoes.
“But we can do something tomorrow after school,” she suggested.
I nodded and accepted a kiss before she disappeared into her history class. It tasted strangely sour.
She lied.
But then, who was I to judge? Technically, I’d been lying to her from day one. I tried to remember that as I walked into my own class.
Twenty-Eight
WHEN I ARRIVED HOME, KIMBERLEE was restlessly pacing in my room. “What if it doesn’t work?” she said, without a greeting. “What if something got lost, or someone stole somebody else’s bag and I’m stuck here forever!”
“Fate wouldn’t hold you responsible for someone else’s actions,” I grumbled, already in a bad mood; what the hell did I know about fate? “You can only be held accountable for things you actually did.” I was pretty sure I’d seen that in a movie once. Or something.
She paused and looked down at me where I had dropped into a beanbag with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s I’d grabbed from the kitchen on the way in. Sugar therapy.
“Are you sure the cave was completely empty?”
“Kimberlee,” I said firmly, “you checked twice. It was totally empty. Everything you stole has been returned or donated to a good cause.”
But my mind wasn’t on our latest stunt. I couldn’t help but be angry that Sera hadn’t admitted to being called into Hennigan’s office. And if she’d lied this time, she’d probably lied last time, too. If she had been pressured to help him, it didn’t matter anymore. But the thought of Sera in league with Hennigan made me look at her differently. It pissed me off.
More than the drug thing. I could think of a million excuses for that. She made some bad friends, bad choices, and then got dumped in a situation where she had no choices at all.
But this felt weirdly personal.
And if she was lying about him, what else was she lying about? After all, she had never told me about the girl who died. I had to drag it out of Khail. And she hadn’t said anything about her problems with Kimberlee at all. She was the victim in that situation—why wouldn’t she tell me? Didn’t I have the right to know? I was her boyfriend.
But then . . . did that mean she owed me a full life’s confession? I didn’t want to think that way either. My sense of right and wrong—of justified and unforgiveable—felt completely screwed up.
Kimberlee sat down in the other beanbag. “Why hasn’t it happened?” she said in a very small voice. “Shouldn’t it have happened by now?”
I shrugged, my mind whirling so fast I could hardly concentrate on what Kimberlee was saying. “Maybe it’s one of those things that happens at midnight, or at night when you—I’m sleeping. It’ll happen,” I said, stretching my arms over my head.
Khail and I had managed a very brief conversation in the bathroom—it was a bit nostalgic, actually, considering our first conversation—and talk around the school confirmed that before fifth hour, everything on Hennigan’s lawn was gone. Including the tarp. The deed was most definitely done.
All we had to do was wait for Kimberlee to pop.
“Sit,” I told Kimberlee. “I have a surprise.”
She sat—albeit a little warily—and I reached into a bag beside me. I stopped by the video store on the way home—a little farewell . . . present, I guess . . . seemed appropriate. With a little ta-da! I pulled out a cheesy romance movie, one she’d managed to talk me into way back at the beginning of all this. Kimberlee’s face fell.
“What?” I said. I looked at the movie case. I had gotten the right one, hadn’t I? All the sappy romances look pretty much the same to me.
“No, no,” she said, waving her hands. “It’s great really. It’s just, you’ve been so nice to me. After everything. Me almost getting you beat up that first day, and bothering you about Sera, and having to take so much stuff back. And you still brought me a movie you hate. I guess I . . . well . . . for a nerd, you’re pretty cool.”
She was getting weepy now, and not the fake-weepy she used to get what she wanted out of me. This was new, and not entirely comfortable. I didn’t want to embarrass her by making a big deal out of it—okay, I wanted to, but I knew it wasn’t the nice thing to do—so I just smiled and nodded before turning and putting the movie into the player.