When

11-04-2014

   BY THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY AFTERNOON I knew it wasn’t my imagination. It started with Mrs. LeBaron (11-18-2060), my homeroom teacher. She kept glancing in my direction during the twenty minutes before classes started. And it wasn’t a nice look. It said, I know what you did, and I think you’re terrible. I tried to shrug it off. Tevon’s murder was all over the news and it was all anybody could talk about at school, but I didn’t think anyone knew that I’d been called in by the FBI. Well, except for Stubs, and he’d never tell anyone.

   But then my chemistry teacher, Mr. Pierce (3-12-2029), called me over as class was letting out and he said, “Hang in there, Maddie. In this country you’re innocent until proven guilty.” And I understood then that all the teachers knew.

   Worse yet, Mr. Pierce seemed to be the only teacher who was on my side. In French class Mrs. Johanson (2-2-2031) snapped at me for using the wrong preposition while Mike Dougherty (5-6-2067) had done the very same thing right before and she hadn’t even blinked. Stubs leaned forward from behind me and whispered, “Why’re they all acting so weird around you?”

   I didn’t answer him, because out in the hallway I heard Harris call to a student caught out of class after the bell. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe nobody knew I’d been called into the FBI offices over the weekend, but they could know about the meeting in Principal Harris’s office. The faculty’s reaction was too intense for them to have just learned that I’d met with the agents. They seemed to know the details of the conversation in Harris’s office, which meant it could only have come from Harris himself.

   I didn’t know if he was allowed to tell the other teachers about what was said, but it was pretty obvious that he had, and it really upset me. I started to wonder who else he’d told. The news reporters covering the story were saying what a monster Tevon’s murderer was, and after seeing the photo of his dead body, I knew that firsthand. It was bad enough to think that Agents Wallace and Faraday thought me capable of doing something like that to a young kid, but it was a whole different kind of nightmare to think that all my teachers believed I was capable of that, too.

   As if to have my worst fears confirmed, a little later as I was leaving Precalc, Mr. Chavez said, “Did you really kill that kid, Fynn?”

   He’d spoken so low I almost hadn’t heard him, but when I glanced up he was looking at me the way Wallace had, like he simply knew I was guilty. Immediately, I dropped my gaze and bolted out of there. Stubs had to run to catch up. “Hey!” he called, following me to a barely used stairwell. “Mads! What’s going on?”

   “It’s nothing,” I said, trying to hide my face from him. I didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it already was, and I was terrified everyone else at school was going to find out.

   Stubby frowned and caught my arm to stop me from walking away. “Will you talk to me, please? Seriously, what’s up?”

   I took a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure Mr. Harris told the other teachers about the meeting with the feds in his office.”

   “Whoa,” he whispered. “Can he do that?”

   I shrugged. “I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter now because obviously the word’s out, and pretty soon, the whole school will know and everybody’s gonna think I’m a murderer.”

   Stubs eyed me with a bit of humor. He always knew when I was being melodramatic, but this time I wasn’t playing. I was actually crazy scared. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t think like that, okay? None of the kids know yet, right? And maybe the teachers will keep it on the down low until the feds actually catch the guy who did this.”