Free Hero Complex by Margaux Froley Page B

her thoughts, she’d hurried past Scott and planted herself right in front of Maya’s mother.
    C.C. looked at Devon expectantly as if she were an assistant interrupting a meeting with C.C.’s board of directors.
    “Hi, Ms. Tran? You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Maya’s. Devon Mackintosh. I just wanted to see if Maya is okay. Does she need anything?”
    C.C. pulled her thin lips into a tight smile. She looked over Devon’s head at Mr. Denny as if to say,
These kids just don’t stop, do they?
    Mr. Denny took the woman’s hand in an empathetic shake. “Thanks for coming by, Ms. Tran. I’m sure we’ll talk soon.”
    C.C. withdrew with the same tight smile and waited until Mr. Denny was opening his classroom door down the hall before turning back to Devon. “Devon, you said?” she asked brusquely. “Maya is doing fine. I’m collecting some work for her so she doesn’t fall too far behind the rest of her year.”
    “Is she coming back to Keaton?”
    “We’re still discussing next year. There are many options to consider …” C.C. started scrolling through her emails on her gold-plated phone. The silent way of saying,
Get the hell out of my face, kid
.
    Devon held her ground. “I’d love to talk with her. Maybe you’ll tell her to give me a ring? Or email or something?”
    C.C. looked up from her phone. “Maya’s not taking calls right now. But when she does, I’ll tell her you asked after her. Okay?”
    Before Devon could respond, the woman sashayed down the hall. Devon had no idea what C.C. could possibly mean.
Not taking calls?
Had her parents placed Maya under their own version of house arrest? It seemed that way. Since she’d left school, Devon had tried to find her online, but her Instagram and Twitter accounts had become inactive.
    But one thing was certain: Maya had not fallen off the face of the earth entirely. She’d be nearly six months pregnant at this point. Devon had a hard time imagining Maya’s small frame with a baby belly. Had Maya purposefully withdrawn from public, or had her parents forced seclusion upon her?
    As the first-period bell rang, Devon allowed herself the thought at the root of it all, the one that was nagging at her deep down. If she could find out what was going on with Maya, then she could share that information with Eric. And maybe then Eric would be more inclined to answer
her
questions.
    S ECOND PERIOD WAS EVEN worse than chemistry; it was her next session with Dr. Hsu.
    Devon found a seat on a bench next to the science building. She tried to wrap her head around the idea that in three minutes, she would be expected to pour out her deepest, darkest secrets to a woman who wanted to prove Devon was crazy.
    Last session Devon had enjoyed letting Dr. Hsu believe that Devon’s stories were simply paranoia getting out of control. Apart of her was curious just how far she could milk that angle. After all, everyone had thought she was crazy for believing that Hutch hadn’t killed himself.
    If the school administration were sidelining her as unreliable and delusional, then they wouldn’t plan on reinstating the peer counselor program anytime soon. Which was fine. Devon didn’t need that distraction right now. Last semester Keaton had lost three students—four if you included Hutch. Between Isla’s parents sending her to rehab, Matt’s choosing to leave school for an indefinite “surfing hiatus” (his words), and Maya’s pregnancy, Devon’s record of helping students cope wasn’t exactly stellar.
    Another thought crept into her mind. The powers-that-be at Keaton weren’t trying to pin any of that on
her
, were they?
    She had always assumed that implicating a student in negligent peer counseling—the pilot program, no less—would also make the school look bad. But maybe she had Keaton’s puppet masters wrong. Maybe the school was looking for a way to take her down with the other students. One less troublemaker?
    No, there was no way they would do