“Can I see it?” I asked, still grinning, still upbeat.

The one who looked like Bee shook her head ever so slightly at the tiny girl, but she was already handing me the paper. I took it with trembling hands.

My worst fears were confirmed.

There, on the front page of the special Homecoming edition of The Grove News, was a huge, albeit blurry, picture of me leaning on Bee, clearly sobbing my eyes out, as we made our way out of the girls’ bathroom. It looked like it had probably been taken with a cell phone, and the headline read, “It’s Her Party and She’ll Cry If She Wants To?” Under the picture of me and Bee, there was a smaller caption: Homecoming Queen misses crowning under mysterious circumstances. My eyes darted over the rest of the article as my heart started pounding. “. . . hiding in the boys’ room . . . violently ill . . . tension between the ‘Queen Bee’ and her underling, Bee Franklin . . . this reporter . . .”

By now, I had sort of started hyperventilating as my eyes zeroed in on the byline in bold letters.

David Stark.

Who I was now going to murder.

Chapter 6

IT WASN’T just the humiliation of having the entire school know that I was puking and crying in the bathroom during Homecoming, or the veiled insinuations that I’d been sick because I was pregnant or on drugs. It was that the school probably already knew that Mr. Hall and Dr. DuPont were missing. And sure, that bathroom had looked spotless, but it’s not like I’d done a sweep for DNA. For all I knew, the police were in Headmaster Dunn’s office right now, with big folders full of evidence that two men had died in the girls’ bathroom last Friday, and asking if anyone was displaying any “strange behavior.” And, oh, look! Here was a convenient picture of me sobbing around the girls’ bathroom.

“Are you okay?” the tall sophomore asked. “You look kinda . . . purple.”

I snapped my head up and smiled, or at least pressed my teeth together in the semblance of a smile. “I’m fine,” I said, but my voice was way too loud. “This is just a silly misunderstanding between me and David. Can I keep this?”

“Sure,” the shorter girl who’d handed me the paper said.

“Thanks so much!” I turned around and headed straight for Wallace Hall.

Before I’d gone more than a few steps, I heard Ryan call my name. He was jogging over from the parking lot, a bunch of papers crumpled in his hand. “Hey!” he said once he’d caught up to me. One hand cupping my elbow, he leaned down, studying me. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” I said, trying to look more okay and less homicidal.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick Friday night?”