The Headmaster's List Page 4

  “How are you feeling about going to school tomorrow?” her mom asked. “You can stay home another week if you’d like … Get back into the swing of things slowly.”

  “No, I want to go. I need to. I don’t want to be stuck in bed anymore.”

  “I can drive you,” her dad offered, but Spencer shook her head. Usually she took Gertie the Van because she had field hockey after school, but she didn’t want to be in a car again.

  “I’ll ride my bike. It’ll be a nice workout before class at least.”

  “With Ripley?”

  “She can run alongside. It’s not that far to school,” she said. They lived below Pico, whereas most kids who went to Armstrong Prep lived right by school in the tony neighborhood where it was located. “Right? I can’t … I don’t want to get into a car again. At least, not for a while.”

  Her parents glanced at each other. Mom tipped her head and murmured, “Riding home was rough for her today.”

  Dad looked at Spencer in a way that made her heart break, so she stared at her plate. “Sure, kiddo,” he said. “Anything you need. Ripley will be with you the whole time, but if you ever feel like you need to come home early or if you’re not feeling well—”

  “I’m not made of glass, I swear, I’ll be fine.”

  Her parents exchanged looks, but they didn’t fight her—there was no winning against Spencer’s determination.

  Dad said, “The doctors mentioned that it will take a little while for you to adjust to everything, and we don’t want you to push yourself too hard.”

  That used to be Spencer’s every day. She had always needed to give everything of herself and more at work, school, and at field hockey practice. She’d enrolled in almost every club possible: debate, yearbook, chess, pi club, somehow able to fit everything into the day and still have time to work and eat and sleep. For her, taking it easy was not, in fact, easy. Some people might call her stubborn and hardheaded, and she was not used to asking for help.

  With her broken arm now, though, she didn’t want that to slow her down, although inevitably it would. She needed to focus on getting her applications done for college and she couldn’t miss the deadline. Caltech wasn’t going to wait for her. They wouldn’t care if she broke her arm and was late on submission. Besides, Spencer hated being late, more so when others were late. Nothing else put her in a bad mood more than someone showing up later than they said they would.

  Injured or not, she was going to get everything in on time.

  “Weren’t you guys the ones who said I needed to get into the best school?”

  “That was before…,” Spencer’s mother said.

  “Before what, a debilitating car crash that killed a kid and almost killed me?”

  Shocked silence.

  After a moment, Mom barely managed to say, “It was an accident, Spencer. You need to go easy on yourself. It wasn’t anyone else’s fault but Ethan’s. He’s made some mistakes and now he’s suffering the consequences. It’s not up to you to decide what happens to him next. You need to focus on yourself and your future.”

  The way she said it made it sound like Ethan’s future was already decided for him. Again, she saw his face, lit up in her memory, the surprise, the panic … He’d looked at her, right before impact, like he’d wanted to see her right before it all went dark. And something about it didn’t feel right. She didn’t know what, but she kept seeing his face every time she closed her eyes, like he’d been the one who died, and not Chris. His beautiful face was haunting her.

  “May I be excused?” Spencer asked. “I need to get my stuff ready for school tomorrow.”

  Her parents exchanged another round of looks. She expected that would be happening a lot in her presence. Her attitude could use a check, but she had pity points she was willing to cash in. No one argued with her when she pushed back from the dining room table and Ripley moved out from underneath, following her up the stairs, taking the steps with her at her side. Only two years old and already so well trained, it was like Ripley knew what Spencer needed at all times.

  When they made it back to her room, Ripley took up a spot at the foot of Spencer’s bed and watched as Spencer moved around her room, gathering her notebooks and supplies for her late start at Armstrong. Her uniform hung on a hanger, pressed and ready in her closet.

  It was a nighttime ritual she looked forward to. She always put her things in her bag the night before school, sorted her books by smallest to largest to fit in the largest pocket, stowed her pencil case on top, and double-checked that her headphones were wrapped neatly in their case. Organizing everything the night before meant that it was one less thing she had to worry about in the morning. Even being five minutes early for something was considered late according to Spencer—a fact that Olivia liked to heckle her about. Olivia had a casual relationship with schedules. But Spencer was adamant. Her future was on the line.

  In fact, when she’d taken the SATs just last month, Spencer got pulled over for running a stoplight, which forced her to have less time before the test to study, giving her only forty minutes when she’d planned on having a full hour. She didn’t want to admit that it threw her off her rhythm. It’d be all her fault if she lost five hundred points on the test because of it.

  Spencer wiggled her fingers in her cast, analyzing just how she would be able to put on the long-sleeved white blouse over her cast and decided it would be a problem for tomorrow. She turned to Ripley lying patiently on her bed, her head lowered between her front paws but watching Spencer with eyebrows raised, ready to jump into action at the first sign.

  “What am I forgetting?” Spencer asked, mostly to herself but directed at Ripley. It was an attempt to jog her memory.

  She moved to her closet, making sure she had everything for her uniform, and instead she found one of Ethan’s hoodies, hanging on a hanger. Her stomach dropped at the sight of it. Evidence of him kept popping up, she couldn’t escape him. In one move, she pulled the hoodie from the hanger and looked at it. Green, his favorite color, with a white stripe down both sleeves. She’d loved wearing it, especially at night when she could curl up in bed, pretending he was next to her. It still smelled like him, and she frowned.

  Her parents hadn’t approved of Spencer’s relationship with Ethan, but they never stopped her from dating him. She knew they thought he was spoiled and irresponsible even though they never said it out loud. They had rules about people being over when they weren’t around, as well as a keep-her-bedroom-door-open policy too, in case anything got too wild. They might have hoped that she would outgrow him, see that they just weren’t compatible. At the end of the day, Spencer supposed they were right, but she would never admit it to them.

  With a noise of disgust, she crumpled up the hoodie, threw it into a corner of her closet where it landed in a heap on the floor, and yanked the closet door shut, sealing her feelings away.

  “I can’t stop thinking about him, Ripley,” Spencer said, keeping her voice low in case Hope had her ear pressed up against the closed door, which was an all-too-common occurrence in the house.

  Ripley just looked at her, eyebrows moving as if trying to analyze the look on Spencer’s face, trying to figure out if she needed help. Spencer wasn’t sure this was the kind of thing Ripley would be able to help with. Everyone had said that the crash was an accident, but Spencer had the strangest feeling that things didn’t happen the way everyone said they did.

  Scream. SPENCER! Float. Tree. Ethan. Crash.

  It was so strange. She remembered seeing the palm tree, lit up, brighter and brighter, as the headlights went careening toward it. Ethan’s face, his eyes. The roar of the engine. Like an old VCR she could pause and rewind the memory.

  She wasn’t able to place a concrete reason as to why, but it felt like a pinprick in the back of her mind that something was wrong.

  She still had no memory of the crash, or some of the hours leading up to it. The last part of that night she specifically remembered was breaking up with Ethan, screaming at each other, her back to the party raging behind them, Ethan’s face slathered in guilt. His hands, the bounce of his hair as he shook his head, the dot of light in his dark eyes as he pleaded with her to forgive him, the way his cologne washed over him. It was a memory so real, she could touch it. But she couldn’t remember getting into the car with him. Why had she gotten in his car if they were fighting?

  Scream. Float. Crash.

  And then the next thing she remembered was being in the hospital. It was like her brain was a thousand-piece puzzle and she was missing five hundred pieces and the box with the picture on it had been thrown away. No guide. There were so many questions that she needed answers to, and none of it made any sense.

  “I know I’m probably overthinking this,” she said to Ripley, knowing full well it wasn’t any use talking to a dog, but it made her feel better saying the words out loud. “I just can’t help but think it isn’t right. I can see Ethan in my mind, but something is wrong. Something…” In her memory, he’d been wearing that hoodie in the crash. How could it be possible, though? Unless memories were overlapping one another, of driving with him before … Something else about his face was wrong, but she didn’t know what. She couldn’t trust her own mind anymore.

  SPENCER! Crash.

  Ripley tilted her head at Spencer, the folds of her ears raised curiously. Of course, she didn’t know what Spencer was saying, but it was funny to think she did.

  “You believe me, right, Rip? You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  Ripley’s tongue lolled cheerfully.

  “It’s okay if you do. I think I’m crazy.”

  Ripley yawned and put her head on her paws, blinking drowsily. It was getting late.

  So Spencer went to bed with Ripley warming her feet, staring at the glowing stars on her ceiling, seeing the lines of the tree and hearing Ethan’s voice, until she fell asleep.

  FIVE

  SPENCER PARKED HER BIKE AT the rack in front of the east entrance at Armstrong Prep and caught her breath, wiping the sweat on her brow with the back of her wrist.

  The school, a building in Romanesque Revival that exemplified the elite education that would be taking place inside its walls, sat on the edge of a hilltop surrounded by dense forest and gardens. It radiated excellence. Anyone who looked at it got a sense that this was an important place to be. To Spencer, it was just school.

  Ripley waited patiently for Spencer to lock up her bike, panting after having jogged alongside Spencer the whole thirty-minute ride from her house to school.

  She’d had to pedal fast to get there on time. Even though she had prepared for her return to Armstrong, she still scrambled to remember things before she could head out the door, like taking her medicine, and showering without getting her cast wet, and making time for her mom to help her with her braids because she couldn’t do it with one hand. On top of that she couldn’t find her favorite flats, the sparkly ones with bows, which Hope insisted she hadn’t borrowed, which made Spencer have to settle for her old loafers. The medicine made everything soft, made her feel like she was losing track of everything.

  She’d needed to figure out the safest route, avoiding the busiest streets and taking mostly neighborhood roads past the hedged estates and gated lawns, down the street where she worked at Brain Freeze, passing by St. Mary’s with its marquee letter sign out front saying PRAY FOR JULIANNE, though groundskeepers were switching out the name with the beginnings of CHR, riding past the tents for homeless vets erected in the park, and taking a shortcut through the parking lot of the Brentwood Place Shopping Center. Admittedly, when she wasn’t swerving out of the way of cars either oblivious to her presence or intentionally trying to get as close to her as possible to scare her, the ride itself was quite peaceful, what with the warm sea breeze slicing through the early morning sunlight that countered the dreamy haze of the morning’s dose of painkillers. Spencer had quickly learned that the city was not designed for bikes. By the time she pulled up to school, she only had a couple minutes before the first bell.

  Spencer cradled her cast to her chest as she fumbled with the bike lock’s key in her right hand, trying to turn it but failing. This was one job Ripley couldn’t do without opposable thumbs, but Spencer even had those and still struggled. She didn’t want this one thing to fluster her, but she couldn’t help the feeling of eyes watching her.

  Before school, students often gathered on the front lawn, sipping from their ventis and enjoying the last bits of the morning before the first bell ushered them into first period. Spencer was in the minority in riding her bike to school. It was more common to see BMWs and Teslas in the parking lot than her dad’s old Schwinn on a bike rack, but that wasn’t the reason people were staring at her now. She was capital I Involved in the crash that killed Chris Moore. Of course, she had prepared herself for this moment, ever since Olivia had said it was all the school talked about, but it didn’t ease the tension that coiled in her gut when it was actually happening. Spencer tried to keep her head high, but no matter what, everyone knew. How was she supposed to get back to a normal life if she was forever labeled as That Girl from The Crash?

  Even if they didn’t know her name—which was wasn’t likely since Armstrong’s class sizes were small—they’d see it all over her face. The stitches in her cheek weren’t going to be taken out for another week, but Spencer couldn’t stand to miss out on any more school than she already had. It was her senior year, the most important to maintain her perfect GPA, and college application deadlines loomed. If she fell behind, even with her grade point average being one of the highest, she couldn’t risk letting that be the deciding factor of her getting into Caltech or not.

  She cursed under her breath when the key wouldn’t twist in the lock. Would Caltech even want someone who failed at such a simple task as locking up a bike?

  “Do you need some help?”

  Without looking up, she said, “I got it.” The key still wasn’t turning. She wasn’t going to be some damsel that needed Prince Charming to swoop in and save the day. Especially not Jackson Chen, Ethan’s best friend.

  “You sure?” Jackson’s scuffed-up Vans appeared in her field of view as he stepped toward her. She lifted her eyes, squinting into the sunlight, landing on Jackson’s gentle smile. Personality-wise, he was the polar opposite of Ethan. Whereas Ethan lived as if the runway was coming up short, Jackson’s whole demeanor was more suited to the carefree surfer lifestyle. He had his skateboard tucked under his arm. Like Spencer, he’d opted to leave the car at home. He, however, lived closer to school than she did. He didn’t look like he’d even broken a sweat.

  “I’m fine.” She wiggled the key, but it refused to budge. She thought about asking him how he was feeling, knowing his best friend wasn’t coming to school, currently under house arrest, but she didn’t quite know how to phrase it without sounding nosy. She settled on: “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. Here,” he said with a shrug. Everyone knew that when a person said that, they were the opposite of okay. She knew that feeling all too well.

  “Cute dog,” he said about Ripley. Her tail slapped happily on the ground, as if she knew he was talking about her.

  “Don’t pet her. She’s working.” Spencer didn’t mean to sound so clipped; her temper was shorter these days because everything wouldn’t stop hurting.

  “Of course. I can read, you know.” He was referencing the patches on Ripley’s vest. “Doesn’t change the fact that she’s cute, but I’m not sure a service dog can turn a key. Are you sure you don’t need a hand? Having two might work.”

  Spencer was about ready to kick her bike over in frustration before she took a deep breath. Riding her bike, especially so soon after the accident, may not have been such a great idea after all. Her legs already ached. But she’d never been in the habit of asking people for help. All her life, she’d been independent, getting a job scooping ice cream for some extra cash, picking up Hope after school in Gertie the Van, making dinner when their parents were working late. Asking for help was not in her user manual.

  Before she could say anything else, Jackson kneeled down, setting his backpack and skateboard at his side, and pulled the chain tighter into the lock, allowing Spencer to twist the key.

  “Thanks,” Spencer said. She slipped it into the small pocket of her own backpack and picked up Ripley’s leash.

  “I get it. I broke my wrist skateboarding when I was ten. I don’t think I have to tell you about the hassle of going to the bathroom…” The corner of his mouth quirked up, creating a little dimple in his tanned cheek. Unlike Ethan, he took a lot of the same AP courses that she did, but their schedules never lined up.

  Spencer couldn’t stop the smile that spread on her lips even though thinking about Ethan sent her stomach into knots. She’d known Jackson already for a few years, and seeing a friendly face eased her nerves.

  Jackson was always the mild-mannered one whenever Ethan would invite his friends over to swim in his pool, often the one to mellow out Ethan’s high-octane energy with an easy laugh. He was on the soccer team with Ethan and was always over at his house. She had always thought he was cute, but seeing him now just reminded her of Ethan.

  “Spencer!” Olivia’s voice carried over the grounds. She was crossing the green lawn, waving her arm over her head.

  Spencer thanked Jackson again before she and Ripley headed to the low wall where Olivia waited.

  “And so she returns!” Olivia sang with a twinkle in her eye and together they headed into the building just as the first warning bell rang, giving them ten minutes to get to first period.

  Coming back to Armstrong as a senior, Spencer expected much to stay the same. The long stretch of hallway branching off into classrooms lined with lockers painted burgundy to match school colors, the school crest in the tile underfoot, the posters broadcasting the upcoming homecoming dance and auditions for the school plays. School was back in session.