Page 9 of I Hope This Doesn't Find
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I tell her, half pleading. Acid churns in my stomach. I hate it when people are mad at me. I hate it, I hate it, I can’t stand it. “I swear, it’s probably a misunderstanding—”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m not—”
“Are you really going to pretend it wasn’t you?”
“Hey,”Abigail snaps, stepping before me, her arm raised to block my body. But even then, I’m shaking, my teeth chattering so loudly I can feel the echo reverberating in my skull. I want to fold in on myself, disappear into the ground.Don’t be mad, I want to say, as pathetic as it sounds.I don’t know what’s going on, but please just don’t be mad. Because it might be Rosie standing here now, but in my head it’s someone else. Footsteps storming out the living room and the slam of the door, like a thunderclap, the rumble of the engine, then the horrible, crushing quiet. That’s what happens when people get angry. They leave, permanently, and they forget you, and there’s no going back.
“Did you or did you not,” Rosie says, holding her phone up close to my face, “write this?”
With difficulty, I take in the email loaded onto the screen, and the world falls away from me.
I can hear my own ragged breathing, my blood pounding in my ears.
I recognize every word, because I did write it. I can even remember where I was, slumped against my bedroom wall and fuming. Rosie had sent out a mass email to everyone in the year about throwing a party to celebrate winning the science fair.Guess you can all call me a nerd now, she’d joked. And next thing I knew I was typing out a reply faster than my fingers could keep up.Thisreply:
If you’re going to steal someone’s project and take all the credit, you could at least have the decency to not flaunt it around like you actually had anything to do with it. Since when did you even care about science? Since when did you care about any of your subjects at all? You spend most of class texting people and online shopping and watching videos of cats and then when the assignment actually comes around, you decide you can just leech off my work? Just because I didn’t say anything at the time doesn’t mean I didn’t know—
“Well?” Rosie demands.
“It shouldn’t be there,” I whisper, my fingers tingling. My whole body feels numb. It shouldn’t be there. It shouldn’t. Itcan’t be. The email was meant to be in my drafts, for my eyes only. But the truth is staring me in the face. For god knows what reason, my draft was sent out, and not just to her. It was sent via Reply All,which means everyone included in her original email—everyone in the year level—would have received it.
And then a new, terrifying possibility dawns on me.
It’s so terrible that my heart shuts down. My blood runs cold.
Oh god—
The crowd shifts, and the last person I want to see right now appears. He doesn’t even have to push his way through; he simply walks forward, his head lifted, and everyone parts for him, offering up all the space he needs.
Julius brushes past Rosie and Abigail like they’re not even there and stops before me. His eyes blaze black, but the rest of his features are pure ice. And all at once, my worst fears are confirmed.
“Sadie,” he says, his voice more a rasp than its normal drawl. He says my name like it’s poison, like it costs him something. “Come with me.”
Then he stalks off, without even glancing back to check if I’m following.
•••
I do follow.
I don’t want to, but it’s either that or stay behind and let Rosie yell at me while everyone stares.
My face feels raw when Julius finally slows down in the school gardens. We’re a good distance away from the café and the basketball courts, and there’s nobody else around. It’s pretty here, I observe through my panic, with ivy crawling over the fences and winter roses blooming in the background. There’s even a small pond, glittering amid the greenery. When the school first built the gardens, they’d brought in a duck as well, but then a fox snuck in at night and killed it, and people were so upset that we held a funeral. Everyone attended, and one of the boys in my year level wept, and the duck ended up being buried in the grass.
Actually, I think the duck might have been laid to rest right under the spot I’m standing.
“I’ll have you know,” Julius begins, low and furious, “that I wasnotnamed after a Roman dictator.”
I’m so disoriented, so shaken still, that I can only say: “You weren’t?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What . . . were you named after, then?”
“A printing company,” he says, then pauses, like he regrets volunteering this information. “But that’s beside the point.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s referring to.A Roman dictator.My emails. In one of the many angry emails I’d written to him, I had mocked his name.Your parents must be so proud, I’d said.You’re really living up to your namesake.
