Double Crossed(19)

“That’s not me.”

“But the dormitory doors were only opened once that night—at 2:27 a.m.—using a student identification card. This card.” Kat’s stomach flipped as the single-worst picture she had ever taken appeared on the screen. “This is your Colgan student I.D., is it not, Ms. Bishop?”

“Yes, but—”

“And this”—Headmaster Franklin reached beneath his seat—“was found during a search of your belongings.” The personalized license plate—COLGAN-1—seemed to glow as he held it above his head.

It felt to Kat as though all the air had left the dim room as a strange feeling swept over her. After all, accused she could handle; wrongly accused was entirely new territory.

“Katarina?” Ms. Connors asked, as if begging Kat to prove them wrong.

“I know that seems like a lot of very convincing evidence,” Kat said, her mind working, gears spinning. “Maybe too much evidence? I mean, would I really use my own I.D. if I’d done it?”

“So since there is evidence that you did it, that should prove that you didn’t do it?” Even Ms. Connors sounded skeptical.

“Well,” Kat said, “I’m not stupid.”

The headmaster laughed. “Oh, well, how would you have done it?” He was mocking her—baiting her—yet Kat couldn’t help but think about the answer:

There was a shortcut behind Warren Hall that was closer and darker and completely void of cameras.…

The doors wouldn’t need an I.D. to open if you had enough Bubblicious to cover the sensor on your way out.…

If you’re going to pull a prank of that nature, you don’t do it the night before a morning when the maintenance staff will be awake long before the students.…

Headmaster Franklin smiled smugly, relishing her silence, as if he were so smart.

But Kat had already learned that people at Colgan were frequently wrong—like when her Italian teacher had said that Kat’s accent would always make her stand out on the streets of Rome (even though Kat had already passed for a Franciscan nun during a particularly difficult job in Vatican City). She thought about how silly her History of Art teacher had sounded when she’d waxed poetic about seeing the Mona Lisa (when Kat knew for a fact that the Louvre’s original had been replaced with a fake in 1862).

Kat had learned quite a lot of things before enrolling at the Colgan School—but the thing that she knew best was that this was the kind of place where she could never share them.

“I don’t know about Trinity or Bern or any of those European schools, young lady, but at the Colgan School we follow the rules.” The headmaster’s fist banged the table. “We respect the property of others. We adhere to the honor code of this institution and the laws of this country.”

But Kat already knew about honor. She’d grown up with her own set of rules. And the first rule of Katarina Bishop’s family was simple: Don’t get caught.

“Katarina,” Ms. Connors said, “do you have anything to add that might explain this?”

Kat could have said, That’s not me or There must be some kind of mistake. The great irony was that if this had been an ordinary con, she could have lied her way through it without a second thought. But the truth? That, she wasn’t so good at.

Her I.D. badge had been duplicated. The license plate had been planted in her room. Someone had dressed like her and made sure they were caught on camera.

She’d been framed. And Kat didn’t dare say what she was thinking: that whoever had done it, they were very, very good.

Kat’s bags were packed in twenty minutes. She might have lingered, saying her good-byes, but there were no good-byes to say. And so, after three months at Colgan, Kat couldn’t help but wonder if the day she got expelled from boarding school might become the proudest moment of her family’s long and colorful past. She imagined everyone sitting around Uncle Eddie’s kitchen table years from now, telling about the time little Katarina stole a whole other life and then walked away without a trace.

Well, almost, Kat thought as she carried her bags past the once-perfect lawn. Ruts still tracked to and from the mangled fountain in the center of the quad: a muddy reminder that would no doubt last until spring.

She heard laughter coming from behind her, and turned. A group of eighth grade boys was standing together, whispering, until one bravely broke away from the pack.

“Uh…” he started, then glanced back at his friends, summoning courage. “We were wondering…um. How’d you do it?”

A stretch limo pulled through the ornate gates and up to the curb. The trunk popped open. As the driver started for her bags, Kat looked at the boys and then back at Colgan one final time. “That is an excellent question.”