Higher Learning Page 6

  “How are you so bendy?” she asked, looking partly impressed and partly disgusted. I understood the look – that was how I’d felt about people who exercised for most of my life.

  “I used to dance at my old school,” I said. “Plus I was on the cheerleading squad.”

  “You cheer?” she asked.

  I nodded, hoping my hunch was right and that she was also on the squad. “Yeah. I know not many schools have cheerleading teams in Australia, but it is pretty fun.”

  “We have a team here,” she said.

  “Really?” I said, feigning surprise. “Are you on it?”

  She nodded. Jackpot. “We’re having tryouts later this week. Maybe you should come.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that would be cool. I’d love to cheer here,” I lied.

  Abhati glanced over my shoulder in what I knew was Chelsea’s direction and grimaced. “You might want to patch things up with Chelsea first, though,” she said. “She’s captain, and she won’t let anyone on the team unless she likes them.”

  “Are you friends with her?” I asked.

  Abhati shrugged. “Not exactly, but she doesn’t hate me. Plus I make a good pyramid base, thanks to my muscles.”

  Oh, wow. That sounded like actual cheerleading stuff. In my time at high school (when Lea and then Stacey had been cheer captains), the cheerleading squad had mostly just done the Macarena and Nutbush holding pom-poms. Well, OK, it was a little more complicated than that, but pyramids? Chelsea was really taking things to the next level.

  “Would she really not pick me for the team based on my personality? Even if I was good?”

  Even in American teen movies the cheer captains hadn’t been that vindictive.

  “Oh yeah,” said Abhati. “If you want to cheer, you need to be friends with Chelsea. Or at least you need to be someone she doesn’t hate.”

  I nodded slowly. OK. I wasn’t going to be able to get on the squad and then befriend Chelsea. I was going to need to get her to like me beforehand.

  James blew his whistle. “OK, guys,” he called out. “Everyone make sure you’ve written down your scores, then come over here.”

  Abhati and I headed over to James, who had just finished marking out an area of the ground with coloured plastic cones. Looking at the area he’d measured out, I gulped. The cones looked to be about twenty metres apart. That meant...

  “Next up we’re going to be doing the beep test,” James announced.

  I groaned. He flicked his eyes towards me and shot me a warning look. I wasn’t meant to be an obnoxious student. I was meant to be a well-behaved cheerleading candidate. I bit back my attitude. The beep test was one of the worst things I remembered from my high school PE classes. Basically it consisted of running between two points twenty metres apart before a buzzer went off – but each time, the buzzer went off a little earlier. The more tired you got from running, the faster you had to run. Back in the day, I’d dropped out as soon as the teacher would let me. (That had been before the ‘no prac classes for Charlie’ rule had been implemented.) This was going to test me more than it was going to test the rest of the kids in the class. I’d already worn my legs out with my morning routine, but I couldn’t phone it in. I had to impress Chelsea with my fitness. Then I would try to befriend her.

  What a fun sounding to-do list.

  The entire class lined up along one side of the area James had marked out. After he explained how the test worked, James pressed something on his phone and the test began to play out of the Bluetooth speaker he’d brought along. Everyone was OK for the first few levels. Even my legs were performing pretty well. Then it got a little trickier. As soon as one kid dropped out, half the class followed him. The remaining half clearly consisted of the athletic kids who were on various different sports teams: Abhati and a number of other people who I assumed were in the cheer squad including Chelsea and her minions along with Lachlan and a bunch of guys. Slowly, people began to drop out. A couple of Chelsea’s minions, then Abhati and a few guys who looked like footballers.

  Eventually it was just me, Chelsea and Lachlan left, and my legs were not impressed with the situation. I made eye contact with James at one point and his face made it very obvious that it looked like I was about to pass out. He subtly tilted his head, indicating that I should drop out. I’d done enough. I stumbled slightly and missed a buzzer. (You were allowed to miss three, technically, but most people dropped out after missing the first.) I considered joining the rest of the students lying on the soft, cool grass...

  And then I heard Chelsea scoff.

  My eyes narrowed and my wobbly legs were forgotten. Nope. Bitchtits Chelsea was not going to beat me. I might have been nearly dead from all the hours of exercise I’d been forced into today, but my competitive streak was stronger than my desire to drop out. She was not going to win. No chance.

  Lachlan missed the next beep and dropped out. It was just me and Chelsea left. I was one step closer to winning.

  My legs and lungs were screaming at me now. They didn’t want to keep running. They wanted me to sit somewhere nice and cool and eat Oreos dipped in peanut butter. Preferably in some sort of situation where James McKenzie was the one feeding them to me.

  At the thought of James, my mind stopped focusing so much on the horrors of my present and latched onto him. Our conversation earlier hadn’t been weird. It had seemed like the kind of conversation that two friends who hadn’t accidentally kissed would have. I hadn’t even squeezed his arms or anything.

  I was so caught up thinking about James that I didn’t even notice Chelsea miss one buzzer and then another. By the time I realised what was going on, Chelsea had already dropped out and was watching me from the sidelines, arms crossed, wearing a scowl mixed with a look of unbridled loathing on her beet red face. I’d won.

  I kept going for a couple more lengths just to really rub in the fact that I’d won before dropping out. When I finally quit, I staggered over to Abhati.

  “If you want Chelsea to like you, I don’t think that was quite the right way to go about it,” she murmured.

  I looked over in Chelsea’s direction and found that she was still glaring at me. Yeesh. I hoped she wasn’t carrying any weaponry.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I think you might be right.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We headed back to the change rooms. Hidden in a cubicle, I peeled off my sweat-soaked tracksuit and threw it in my bag before I put the wire back on as best I could. Once I was back in my school uniform I grew uncomfortably cold again. I pulled my jacket tight around myself and decided to head to the library to check that the wire was still working. I walked there very slowly – my legs were NOT impressed with me – and went inside. There were no students to be seen. It was the perfect place to meet up.

  I walked around the library trying various doors until I eventually found the room (which was really more of a storage cupboard) that Tim was sitting in. While the main part of the library was fairly well heated, this little room was as cold as ice. Tim was keeping his hands warm with a cup of coffee and had managed to produce a scarf from somewhere, so he was insulated against the cold. Even so, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend all day in here.

  “Hey,” I said when I opened the door. He was sitting at a large desk on a plastic chair, surrounded by tall shelves filled with boxes.

  “Hey,” said Tim, looking at me in concern. He removed his headphones as I collapsed in the seat opposite him. I filled him in on the morning’s events.

  “Well,” he said after I’d finished, “that explains why I heard nothing for the past hour. You think this Chelsea girl really hates you now?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Abhati seemed to think so, and seeing as she’s on the squad I think she’s probably a good person to listen to.”

  Tim nodded. “Well, at least you’ve got one cheerleader who likes you. Also you can tell Adam you’re the fittest in your class. He might even be impressed with you for once.”

  I r
olled my eyes. “Adam will probably ask why I couldn’t do more push-ups.”

  When the bell rang for my next class, I stood slowly. My legs were already stiff. They were going to hurt in the morning.

  The next two classes – art and geography – were relatively uneventful. Although Chelsea was in both of them, I had no success befriending her. She was surrounded by her friends the whole time, and if at any point I deigned to look in her direction, I found at least one of them glaring at me. When the bell rang for lunch, I headed back to the library to talk things through with Tim, hoping that he’d be able to give me some pointers on how to befriend the witch.

  “I need help,” I said.

  “Professional help?” said Tim. “I have to say, I’m glad you’re finally accepting your problems and trying to do something about them. Want the name of my therapist?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I meant your help actually. Wait, you have a therapist?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Apparently it’s recommended after you’ve been tortured.”

  “Tortured?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that why you ended up in hospital? Because they were trying to get information out of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought they were just trying to kill you.”

  He shrugged. “Bit of both.”

  “Oh, OK.” I grimaced. That was kind of horrific. “Does the therapy help?”

  “It seems to,” he said with a shrug. “The nightmares have just about stopped, although that could be the sleeping pills Adam hooked me up with.”

  “Upside of having a doctor friend.”

  He smiled. “It’s the only reason I put up with him.”

  “I’d believe that.” I paused. “I used to have therapy in high school.”

  “I know,” said Tim, holding up a manila folder with my name and the school crest on the front.

  I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve been looking into me?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, I didn’t find the therapy that useful, but I think it was because the guy who did it was a dick.”

  “He sounds it,” said Tim. “The new school counsellor here is good, though.”

  “You know her?”

  He nodded. “Gracie goes to her.”

  “Oh, OK,” I said, surprised. “I knew she was seeing someone, but I didn’t know who.”

  Tim smiled. “It’s good that we both have to see people, I guess. Makes Gracie feel like it’s not weird. Even Ellie’s seeing someone at the moment.”

  “How are they doing?” I asked.

  “Well, Gracie’s doing better than me, as far as I can tell. Ellie’s kind of anxious. We both are. Super nervous when Grace isn’t right in front of us, but we’re working on it.”

  I nodded. That made sense.

  “How – how were you?” asked Tim. “After your brother left, I mean.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, then frowned and shut it, unsure how to respond. “Angry,” I said finally. “Mostly just angry.”

  “With your brother?”

  “A bit. With Harcourt, too.”

  “You’re pretty sure he had something to do with it, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “I was also angry with James, but that was nothing new.”

  Tim smiled. “You over that anger now?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think it might have been replaced with a new anger, though.”

  Tim raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “It’s been months since we last saw each other, and until yesterday we’d barely spoken at all. Not even a Facebook message.”

  Tim folded his arms. “Well that’s just not on.”

  “I’m still angry with you, too.”

  Tim raised his eyebrows. “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “Disappearing without saying goodbye to me.”

  “Well, you were unconscious in hospital at the time,” he said. “I couldn’t wait for you to wake up. I would have missed my flight.”

  “If that was meant to make things better –”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I admit, that was a bit rude.”

  “Then you nearly died –”

  “Like that was my fault!”

  “Well, you were the one who got caught spying,” I pointed out. “Who else’s fault would it be?”

  “OK,” said Tim, hands up in front of him. “Why else?”

  “Uh, number one reason – you didn’t fill us in about Gracie’s dad until we’d already figured out who had taken her.”

  Tim leaned back in his chair. “Yeah. I’m a little angry at myself for that one too.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “Sorry,” I said eventually. “I know you had your reasons for everything.”

  “It’s OK,” said Tim. “You’re allowed to be angry with me. Especially when I’ve been a dickhead.”

  “A massive dickhead. Like, a total bag of wangs.”

  “OK, calm down, honey,” he said, half smiling. “Now, I have a proposition for you.”

  I tilted my head, curious. “Yes?”

  “Something to make this undercover venture a little more worthwhile, so it doesn’t feel like you’re going through the hell of reliving your high school years for no reason.”

  “I’m listening,” I said, putting my elbows on the desk and leaning towards him.

  “I think we should look into your brother’s disappearance.”

  That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “I...”

  “Think about it. Before he went missing, he spent most of his time here at this school. I have access to the records. I can talk to teachers who knew him. I can do what the detectives didn’t do at the time.”

  “It’s not what the detectives didn’t do that concerns me.”

  “Think about it.”

  I nodded. I didn’t need to think about it.

  “I’m in,” I said. “One condition.”

  “Yes?”

  “James doesn’t find out about it.”

  Tim frowned. “That’s kind of a weird request.”

  I sighed, trying to figure out how to explain it. “I... I don’t know...”

  “What?”

  “It’s just... I think James is on my brother’s side in all this, but if Harcourt has convinced James that Toph did something...”

  Tim nodded slowly. “Right. Safest to keep this to ourselves for now.”

  I nodded. “What information have you been looking at, anyway?”

  Tim gestured at the boxes on the shelves around him. “This is the records room. Apparently they keep physical copies of stuff as well as digital, just in case. Plus there are school magazines in the main part of the library. And this computer?” He gestured to a table behind him, atop of which sat a brick so old it looked like it could be running Windows ’95. “This baby lets me access any school record I want.”

  I frowned. “How?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? I think it’s haunted. Or its software hasn’t been updated this century. Whatever the reason, I have access to anything I want.”

  “OK. So we’re doing this?”

  “Well, you’re not making much headway with our main case. I might as well use my downtime in the records room to our advantage.” He looked me in the eye. “I know how much it sucks when someone goes missing. I want to help.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Charlie...” said Tim. He sounded like he was gearing up to something.

  “Yes?”

  “Remember how you were telling me that your brother left behind notes for James and Will as well as you?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Have you had any luck getting the others to show you theirs?”

  I sighed. “I tried to get Will to show me his once.”

  “What happened?”

  I sighed and began to recount the story to Tim.

  The day after I’d r
escued Gracie – which also happened to be the day after The Incident with James – my friends had thrown a party for me to celebrate the fact that I wasn’t dead. Did I mention that my friends are weird? After a couple of drinks, I’d called Will to pick me up from the hotel where we’d been celebrating.

  We’d talked a little before I cut to the chase.

  “How about you show me that letter Topher left you?”

  “Wow,” said Will. “So not only are you calling me drunk to pick you up from a party – ”

  “I’m not thadrunk,” I slurred, then I pulled my head back in horror as if trying to run away from my own sloppy words. Wow. Maybe I was drunk. “I can’t be drunk, though. I didn’t fall over on my way to the car.”

  “Maybe alcohol is the cure for your clumsiness.”

  “I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you’re meant to say as a rehab counsellor.”

  Will took a deep breath then sighed. “I’m not going to show you my letter, Charlie. Ever,” he said. “Now do you actually want to hang out with me or should I just drop you off at your house?”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m far too drunk for you to leave me alone. I’ll probably fall asleep and set fire to myself with a cigarette.”

  “You don’t smoke.”

  “And yet I’d still manage it,” I said.

  Will didn’t even crack a smile.

  I sighed. “Of course I want to hang out with you, you idiot.”

  He smiled reluctantly.

  “Even if you are a traitor and you won’t tell me what you know about my brother’s disappearance.”

  He rolled his eyes at me, but he was still smiling. He knew I wasn’t really angry with him. He must have had his reasons for not showing me the letter. Besides, I could always break into his house and search it someday while he was at work. (Will had never been great at hiding things, which is how his mum had found the weed stash he’d hidden in his brother’s room five years ago. On second thoughts, maybe I should search James’s house for Will’s note from Topher...)

  “So basically,” I said to Tim, “my only chance to see Will’s letter is to search his house for it while he’s not there.”