Free Revealed by Amanda Valentino

paper.
    I don’t know what I’d expected to find inside, but it definitely wasn’t the tacky FTD bouquet-in-a-basket that lay within. The flowers were so horrible they were like an affront to flowers everywhere—brightly dyed blue daisies, pink chrysanthemums, and some other orange flower I didn’t recognize. In the middle of the floral abomination was a plastic sign that read get well soon in gold script.
    It was like Amanda had gone out of her way to pick the ugliest bouquet in the world.
    The three of us studied the arrangement, not speaking. Finally, Nia broke the silence.
    â€œThat’s it?” she asked, and her eyes flashed angrily. “A get-well-soon bouquet.”
    â€œAn ugly get-well-soon bouquet,” Callie corrected her.
    â€œWell, maybe the idea is the flowers are so repulsive they’ll make you sick enough to need a get-well bouquet.” Nia’s voice was harsh with disappointment.
    It was true—this was a relentlessly awful bouquet. I thought back to the delicate daisy chain Amanda had woven that morning in the woods. Would the person who made that have chosen such a revolting display? Then again, the card and the handwriting meant it was clearly from her.
    Nia took a step back, folded her arms, and frowned at the flowers.
    â€œI’m going to say something.”
    â€œOkay,” said Callie.
    â€œAnd it’s going to sound crazy,” she continued.
    â€œWhich would make it different from most of what we say to each other because . . . ?” I offered.
    â€œThis is a message.” Nia was still staring at the depressing basket of flowers.
    â€œNow you sound like me,” I observed.
    Nia looked over the flowers at me and raised an eyebrow, then made the plunge. “Who do we know who’s sick?”
    Callie shook her head slowly. “No one.”
    Nia corrected herself. “I don’t mean sick like ill. I mean sick like in the hospital.”
    The perfect rightness of Nia’s point was so powerful it hit me like a punch. This bouquet was a caricature. It was a caricature of the kind of bouquets people send to people who are in the hospital. Which meant . . .
    â€œThornhill,” Callie and I whispered at the same time. We both stared at Nia, wide-eyed with amazement.
    â€œThornhill,” she echoed, nodding her approval of our answer. “Amanda wants us to pay a visit to Thornhill.”

Chapter 8
    There’s lying by omission and lying by commission, and even though I’m pretty sure the latter is worse, when I called my mom and told her I had agreed to help Ms. Garner with the sets, there was cold comfort in the fact that I was actually doing that, just not at this particular moment. True, I never actually uttered the sentence, The reason I am not coming directly home after school is because I am staying late to help with set design , but that was the kind of hair-splitting that carried more weight in a court of law than it would in the court of Katharine Bennett. The sheepish look on Nia’s face after she slapped her phone shut said she felt totally shifty about playing fast and loose with the truth, too.
    We walked to the bike racks in guilty silence. “It’s all in the service of the greater good,” Callie assured us as we unlocked our bikes.
    â€œThe end justifies the means,” Nia agreed, throwing one leg over her bike.
    Suddenly I remembered something Amanda had once quoted to me. “Gandhi said, ‘We must take care of the means and the ends will take care of themselves.’”
    Neither Nia nor Callie said anything for a minute, and then Callie said flatly, “Yeah, but remember what happened to him?”
    I thought of Gandhi’s assassination. “Good point,” I acknowledged. “Onward!”
    And we set off in our now-familiar single-file line.
    Orion General Hospital is a surprisingly big medical complex for such a small town, and it took us a while to