Chapter 3 The Boy by the Gate

Margo's POV

My phone buzzed against my leg for the fourth time before I finally stopped walking to check it, and every single text was from Dot.

wilhelmina prescott is missing? Tell me ur joking, Margo. Answer me MARGO

I typed back walking home, tell you everything tomorrow and shoved my phone in my pocket, right up against the USB drive that had been burning a hole there since I picked it up off the gym floor. I hadn't told Dot about it. I hadn't told anyone. I wasn't even sure yet what I was going to do with it: plug it into my laptop, hand it to the police, pretend I never found it at all. Every option felt wrong in a different way.

The school parking lot was still lit up with two cop cars when I cut across the side path toward the road, blue and red lights sliding over the fence like something out of a show. I kept my head down and walked faster, because the last thing I wanted tonight was some officer asking why a scholarship kid was hanging around a crime scene at eleven-thirty at night with a stolen flash drive in her pocket.

That's when I saw him.

Emory Doyle was leaning against the gate at the edge of the lot, arms crossed, not doing anything, not going anywhere, just watching the cop cars like he had all the time in the world and nowhere better to be. I knew exactly who he was without ever having a single class with him. Everybody did. The boy who got held back a year. The boy with the police record nobody talks about out loud, but everybody whispers about in the bathroom. The boy my dad would lose his mind over if he ever caught me within ten feet of.

I tried to walk past without looking at him. That's usually my whole strategy in life: walk past, don't look, don't get noticed. It's worked for me since sixth grade.

It did not work this time.

"You're the one who runs the sound stuff." He didn't ask it. He said it like a fact he already knew, in a voice that was rougher than I expected, lower, like he didn't use it much. "Margo, right?"

I stopped walking before I decided to stop walking, which annoyed me more than anything else that had happened tonight. "Do I know you?"

"Everybody knows me." He said it flat, no bragging in it at all, like it was just another fact, same as the first one. "Doesn't mean I know anybody back."

Up close, he didn't look like the story people told about him. I'd pictured someone mean, someone who'd look at me the way half of Westbrook does, like I'm furniture, like I'm background noise in somebody else's better life. Instead he was just looking at me straight on, like I was worth actually looking at, and something about that made my whole face go hot for no reason I wanted to think about right then.

"I have to get home," I said, which was true, and also the fastest way I could think of to end a conversation I had no business having.

"You were in that booth a long time." He hadn't moved from the gate. "Longer than everybody else. Lights went out, whole gym cleared, and you stayed."

My stomach dropped a little. "How do you know that?"

He tipped his head, just slightly, toward the school building behind him, toward the little black domes bolted up under the roofline that I walked past every single day and never once really looked at.

"Cameras," he said. "They catch a lot more than football games."

I felt my pulse pick up, the same cold, prickling feeling I'd had crouched under the soundboard with a hand still tingling on my wrist. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Means what I said." He pushed off the gate, finally, like he'd decided the conversation was over even though I felt like it had only just started. "You should ask your favorite teacher sometime what those cameras actually record. Where the footage goes. Who gets to watch it."

"Wait." I took a step after him, my voice sharper than I meant it. "Emory, wait, what are you talking about? Is this about Wilhelmina? Do you know something?"

He didn't stop. He didn't even slow down, hands shoved in his pockets, walking off into the dark past the last cop car like none of this was any of his business at all, and the worst part, the part that made me want to scream, was that he'd said just enough to make my skin crawl and not one single word more.

"Emory!"

Nothing. Not even a look back.

I stood there at the edge of the parking lot, blue lights still washing over the fence in slow circles, my heart going faster than it had any right to over a boy I'd known for exactly ninety seconds, and I hated how much I wanted him to turn around and finish what he'd started.

I didn't notice my phone buzzing again until it had gone off three times in a row. I pulled it out, already annoyed, ready to tell Dot I'd call her when I got home, and stopped dead on the sidewalk.

It wasn't Dot.

It was a number I didn't know, no name, no contact saved, and under it a single text sitting there in the dark like it had been waiting for me to look.

I saw what you took from the booth.

My whole body went cold, colder than the night air had any right to make me, and my thumb hovered over the screen for a second before three little dots appeared underneath it, someone typing, right then, right while I stood frozen on an empty sidewalk with cop lights flashing behind me and a boy who knew too much disappearing into the dark ahead.

Another message landed before I could even breathe.

Put it back before someone gets hurt.