Page 77 of Serpentine Valentine
Rebecca was harder to get to know. She had a group of good friends, and she worked two part-time jobs to make ends meet because she was an orphan and paid her own way through school. I met her at the Penny, where she worked the night shift three times a week. Between serving other customers, she told me that Professor Morgan kind of gave her the creeps. Still, he was talking about offering her a space as his research assistant next year, and she was desperate for the money and status that came with it.
At first, I couldn’t find a connection between them.
If he was targeting girls, why Lex, Felicity, and Rebecca—all different ethnicities and personality types?
But then, I remembered what he’d told my mother that evening when I’d eavesdropped outside his office.
Lex is no one.
No one.
All three girls came from very humble backgrounds. If he did sexually harass them, Felicity didn’t have the social currency or bravery to fight back, and Rebecca quite clearly couldn’t afford to blow up her life with asex scandal when she was already working so hard to get ahead in life. Lex, too, fit that mold. A foster child there on the grace of scholarship money without any prominent friends or family connections to cause a fuss.
Rebecca was the reason I started to put the dots together about that snake symbol too.
“Don’t worry about me,” she’d told me. “I know he’s a bit of a creep, but I carry pepper spray with me everywhere, and I have the number if I ever need to text it.”
“What number?” I’d asked.
She’d slid a torn piece of paper across the table to me. “Have it, I can grab one somewhere around campus, but I already have the number programmed in my phone, anyway.”
It was the same four-digit code I’d seen on the tree in the quad.
4357.
“Where did you get this?”
She frowned at me, waving a hand as she moved away to another table. “They’re all over the place if you look around.”
She was right. There were posters on bulletin boards in the hallways, in the Walking Stick Café, and the Penny. I found a chalk drawing of the snake ouroboros on the sidewalk by the lake front and a spray painting of it on the side of a dumpster next to the cafeteria.
When I looked up the number online, I learned the number spelled out HELP.
I was still thinking everything over, trying to uncover the mystery because it felt somehow important when I got home from the library that Monday night and the house was empty.
Effie was on the student council, so she often had late-night meetings, and Gracie was part of the theater troupe on campus, so I wasn’t surprised she was gone, too. But Juno and Lex were usually home by then, studying or reading or debating current events.
Something at the back of my mind squirmed, but it was too slippery to catch in my grip.
I was too restless to study, so I paced the living room and then the dining room and kitchen. When I grew bored of that, I made my way into the library on the main floor. I didn’t spend any time in there because it was mostly Juno’s domain, the big desk taken up by computer monitors and technical equipment that didn’t make any sense to me because I was old-school enough to like longhand notes and typewriters.
I spun in the big red leather chair behind the desk and kicked my feet up on the table, accidentally dislodging the computer mouse.
The screen came awake with a little whirr, and the black screen snapped to a different image behind a passcode prompt.
I stared at it, jaw slack, open mouthed.
The desktop wallpaper depicted two snakes twined into an infinity eating their own tails.
The same symbol I’d found around campus.
Without letting myself think too hard about it, I dug my phone out of my pocket and looked up the article in the school paper about Jerrod Ericht and then the Delta Alpha fraternity. In the photo of Jerrod with the poster stapled to his chest, I could just make out a small tangled symbol next to the Man Eaters sign off.
There was no mention of it at the fraternity house where twelve members had been found two weeks ago tied up in their basement with illegal sex tapes they’d made of assaulting other students, but I knew it had been there somewhere.
It was the Man Eater Crew’s calling card.
That was how they knew who to target in their vigilante crusade.
