Free Keeping You a Secret by Julie Anne Peters Page B

destruction of people’s lives? What about destroying their trust in others?
    Reynardi ranted on and on about prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law, blah, blah, blah. He wanted names and he wanted them now.
    Get real. Like someone’s going to stand up and confess? Rat out their friends?
    After the assembly I was so irate, I stormed to my locker. Cece was there. The others who’d been tagged were hanging out at her locker, too. One of the guys had a videocam and was shooting a tape of Cece, as if she were starring in a silent movie – making the discovery of the hateful message, tearing her hair out. She was funny. Made me want to laugh. I couldn’t laugh. I felt too angry, too numb. I heard her ask for a copy of the tape because it’d make great PA.
    What’s PA? I wondered.
    I was so intent on watching her – them – that I didn’t notice the crowd forming. A dozen or so people had circled around and were closing in on Cece and the others. The guy with the videocam lowered it slowly. There was this prolonged moment of silence, tension so thick you could taste it. Oh, my God, I thought. It’s a lynch mob. They’ve come to finish the job. Say something, my brain commanded. Speak up.
    “I wanted to say I’m sorry this happened to you,” a voice carried in from the rear. I recognized it. “I hope you don’t think we’re all this way,” Leah said.
    There was a general murmur of agreement. Cece and the others didn’t respond. Most of them cowered against the lockers, looking freaked. They looked to Cece for direction. She clapped once and said, “Okay, let’s get this on film. You guys can be extras. I want to see moral outrage here, and fury. Like this.” She shook a fist at the crowd to demonstrate. “Anyone got a beer? We could do foaming at the mouth.”
    Laughter filtered through the crowd.
    Cece cued the camera, and the extras really got into it, hamming it up and acting out. Across the hall, Cece’s eyes found mine. They spoke the truth; she wasn’t enjoying this. She was humiliated. Hurt. Afraid. Her fear was so palpable it made my blood curdle. I wanted to find whoever had done this to her and kill them.

Chapter 10

    “Did you finish your essays on those two applications?” Mom asked at dinner. “They have to go out next week.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    Mom eyed me. Cece was right, I was a terrible liar. “I’ll do them tomorrow.”
    “You keep saying that.” Mom passed the bowl of creamed corn to Neal. “You’re running out of tomorrows.”
    Running out of tomorrows, I repeated to myself in my room, sprawling across my bed to begin another midnight marathon of homework. Sometimes I felt as if there were no tomorrows, that everything, my whole life, was crammed into one long day. A continuous stretch of meaningless time. Sometimes I even wished there was no tomorrow, if this was all I had to look forward to.
    I opened my econ text, then shut it. I scrounged in my pack for my sketchbook instead. So far it included a full-page, cross-hatched drawing of Cece’s head, a side shot of her ear, a drawing of her right hand on the art table with the assortment of rings she always wore. I wasn’t close enough to get details of the patterns in the rings.
    On the next page was a picture of the light switch – wow, that was exciting. I flipped to a blank page. With a half-moon shadow from my study lamp, the basement rafters would make a stunning still-life. Ugh. I needed inspiration. What was it Mackel said? “Let it come. Don’t force it. Just free-draw.” Which, to me, meant free fall. It was at time like this I wished I did drugs.
    Okay. I got up and searched through my CDs. Didn’t get too far. I cranked up the volume on Dixie Chicks and lay back, closing my eyes, to “let it come.”
    What came was her. The way one side of her mouth cricked up a little higher than the other when she smiled. That freckle, or mole, right above her lip. The sparkle in her eyes, the warmth. The fire, too,