“I wrote it down,” she whispers. “I wrote it all down and was going to send it to you…but I couldn’t.”

“That’s okay.”

I can feel my heart pounding, and I’m desperately trying not to push her too hard.

“Are you talking about the Magpie Man? Do you know his name?”

The phone goes dead, and when I call back, she doesn’t answer. After at least twenty attempts, it goes straight to voicemail.

“Call me back,” I say. “Please.”

But she doesn’t phone or reply to my messages.

Whatever she knows, she is too scared to say it out loud.

Chapter 103

I usually don’t pay attention to the younger students, but today, I’m watching closely.

I watch every girl who passes me, looking for any suggestion that one of them is Clara. But when they see me, they either smile or make a face and scuttle away, freaked out by the weird eleventh grader staring at them.

You can tell the ones who watch my show and the ones who don’t. The ones who smile at me think they’re making friends with a celebrity. The others think I’m picking a fight.

“What are you doing?” Hanna asks, and I tell her about Clara.

“That’s exciting,” she says.

I shrug. “Not really. I don’t know anything about her, and she’s not answering my calls. She’s disappeared.”

Hanna watches me staring around the courtyard. “I know an easier way.”

I look at her until she smiles and says, “SIRK.”

I don’t get it at first, but then I do, because the teachers have this program on their computers—Student Information Record Keeper, or SIRK—to record us and keep all our information in one place.

It literally knows everything about everyone at the school, and if Clara goes here, she’ll be in it.

The problem is teachers rarely leave their laptops unguarded. And when they do, they lock them.

If I want to see if Clara goes to St. Anthony’s, I need to break a pretty big rule.

Chapter 104

When I tell Emily my plan, she scowls and says, “No fucking way.”

“Why not?”

“If you get caught, we’ll both be in serious trouble. There’s some really confidential information on there.”

On my page, under special notes, it says, MOTHER IS DECEASED. It’s a warning to new teachers to watch what they say. I saw it once, over a teacher’s shoulder in sixth grade, and I hated it. Three words, all in capitals—a reminder that never loses its sting.

“Imagine what it says about everyone else,” Emily says. “Humphries will go ballistic if he catches you.”

“He won’t catch me.”

Emily shakes her head and says, “I love you, Jess. But I’m not getting expelled for you.”

“I think you’re overreacting.”