Chapter 2 Everyone Is Lying

They herded us back inside twenty minutes later. Nobody explained why; they just started shouting instructions again, and the whole school ended up crammed into the cafeteria like we were being punished for something none of us had done.

Teachers stood posted at every exit, arms crossed, faces doing that thing where they try to look calm for the students while clearly not feeling calm at all. Someone a few tables over was crying quietly into her sleeve. Someone else kept trying to video call their mom, the phone held low under the table like that made it less obvious.

I sat where Jenna pointed, near the windows, my backpack still sitting untouched between my feet. My hands hadn't stopped feeling wrong, cold and shaky, even though it wasn't cold in the room at all.

"You're freezing," Jenna said, sliding her jacket across the table toward me. "Put this on."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You found a dead girl."

I didn't answer that, because there wasn't a version of the sentence that made it sound less insane than it already did.

Across the room, I caught sight of Noah Bennett sitting alone at the end of a table that should have had more people at it. He had his hood up, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor as it owed him an explanation. I didn't know him well, just enough to know he'd dated Maya once, and that whatever had happened between them hadn't ended quietly. I wondered, for half a second, if he'd heard yet. Then I wondered if he already knew before any of us did.

Principal Alvarez stood at the front of the room, waiting for the noise to settle, and it took almost a full minute before three hundred students actually stopped talking. When she finally spoke, her voice had the careful, flattened tone adults use when they're trying not to scare anyone and failing at it anyway.

"There has been an incident on campus. Local police are conducting an investigation, and until further notice, the school will remain in a full lockdown. No one is to leave the building. Parents have been notified and are being asked to wait outside rather than come in."

The whispering started before she'd even finished the sentence.

"Someone said it was Maya Collins."

"I heard she was stabbed."

"I heard it happened in the music room."

"I heard Rina Vale found her."

That last one traveled fast enough that I felt it land, heads turning two tables over, then three, a girl I didn't even know staring at me like I might do something else terrible right there in the cafeteria. By the time it reached the far wall, the story had already changed twice, and in one version I heard drifting back toward me, I hadn't found the body at all. I'd been standing over it.

Jenna leaned in. "Ignore them."

"Everyone thinks I did it."

"Everyone is scared and stupid at the same time. It'll pass."

"Will it?"

She didn't answer that one, which told me more than if she had.

I wanted to believe her anyway. I might have, if someone hadn't sat down across from me right then, quiet enough that I didn't notice until she was already there.

Lena Brooks. I knew her name, mostly because she sat three rows behind me in a class where neither of us ever spoke. She wasn't loud, wasn't part of any group I could place her in, the kind of girl who existed at the edges of things without ever quite stepping into the middle of them.

She wasn't at the edges now. She was looking straight at me, and her hands were pressed flat against the table like she needed something solid to hold onto.

"You shouldn't trust Ethan," she said.

Jenna went still beside me. I felt my stomach drop somewhere south of my knees.

"What?"

Lena's eyes flicked toward the far end of the cafeteria, and I followed them without meaning to. Ethan was sitting with his usual group, not eating, not talking, just watching our table like he'd been doing it for a while.

"He was with Maya last night," Lena said, quieter now. "Behind the school. After midnight."

"How would you know that?"

"I saw them."

"Why were you there?"

Something shifted in her face, fast, there and gone. Not guilt. Fear. "I wasn't supposed to see them," she said, and then, like she'd caught herself doing something she hadn't meant to do, she stood up so fast her chair scraped hard against the floor. "I shouldn't have told you that."

"Lena, wait, what does that mean?"

"Forget I said anything." Her voice had dropped to almost nothing.

"You can't just say that and walk away."

But she already was. She didn't look back once, weaving fast between tables toward the far doors, and I sat there with Jenna's jacket still around my shoulders and Ethan's eyes still on me from across the room.

"What was that about?" Jenna asked.

"I have no idea."

But that wasn't entirely true. Something about how Lena had said it, fear underneath it rather than on top of it, made it feel less like a warning and more like a confession she hadn't meant to start.

For the first time since eight o'clock that morning, I understood that whatever happened to Maya wasn't going to stay a simple, contained thing.

It was going to unravel everyone. Starting, apparently, with me.

I stayed there long after Lena disappeared through the doors, watching the space where she'd been like it might explain itself if I looked hard enough. Jenna didn't push me to talk. She just sat with her shoulder against mine, which was somehow worse, because it meant she'd noticed how badly my hands were still shaking.

Twenty minutes passed before a teacher's aide came through with a clipboard, calling names in small groups to be taken somewhere for questioning. I watched kids get pulled away one at a time, some annoyed, most just scared, none of them looking like they understood yet how serious this actually was.

"Rina Vale."

My name landed in the middle of a sentence I wasn't listening to, and it took a second to register that it had been called at all. Jenna's hand found mine under the table.

"Go," she said. "I'll be right here."

I stood on legs that didn't feel entirely like mine and followed the aide toward the front of the cafeteria, past rows of faces that turned to watch me go, past Noah still staring at the floor like nothing in the room existed, past Ethan, who didn't turn to watch me at all. He kept his eyes fixed on the table in front of him, jaw tight, like looking at me was the one thing he couldn't afford to do in front of everyone else.

That, more than anything Lena had said, was what stayed with me as I walked out of the cafeteria and into a hallway lined with police officers.

He wasn't just avoiding my eyes.

He was hiding something behind them.