“Secret?” Guinness threw his arms up in the air so hard, it made him stumble backward. “What is wrong with you girls? You all have the same jealousy issues!”
“Jealousy?” Tenley fumed. “Are you really that vain? This has nothing to do with jealousy. It has to do with you lying, Guinness.”
“Ha!” He took a jerky step toward her. His eyes narrowed and she could see a muscle twitching in his jaw. “Are you seriously calling me a liar, after everything you’ve done? After all your games?” The last word came out in an angry hiss.
Tenley’s breath caught in her throat. “What the hell does that mean?”
For a second Guinness just stared at her. His nostrils were flaring and his hands were balled into fists. He looked like an animal ready to pounce. “It means you were in my room!” he said finally. “Going through my things. You have no boundaries, Tenley.”
“Some things are more important than boundaries,” Tenley replied tightly. She took a step back, putting space between them. “Like a dead girl. Answer me, Guinness! Why do you have photos of Kyla?”
He backed toward the door, shaking his head. “I don’t need this. Not from you of all people.” Spinning clumsily on his heels, he stormed out the door and pounded down the stairs.
“Wait!” Tenley yelled after him. “I’m not done asking questions!”
The only response she got was the loud clap of the front door as it slammed shut behind him. Tenley kicked at her dresser, sending a shock of pain through her foot.
Her phone let out a beep, and she went over to it warily. If the darer texted her now, right after Guinness left… it would seal her theory. But the text was from Marta. Just remembered where I’d seen that train! Where did you get a drawing of Rabies-Mobile???
“Of course,” Tenley whispered. The memory came flooding back to her. In fourth grade everyone had been required to bring in a toy to share with the class for the year. Joey had brought in that train, and she and Marta had immediately coined it the Rabies-Mobile. They’d made fun of it all year, saying Joey belonged in one of the circus cars more than any elephant.
She sank down on her bed, reeling. According to Caitlin’s diary, her kidnapper had been a woman, and she’d had this train—Joey’s train—in her basement. Could that make the kidnapper related to Joey? Did he have any older sisters? Or maybe a cousin? An aunt? A mom? Tenley’s mind raced, thinking it through. She knew Mrs. Bakersfield was a single mother with a son on scholarship at Winslow. Maybe she’d been struggling financially.… Maybe she’d needed ransom money. It was an awful, sick theory, but it was a plausible one.
But if Caitlin’s kidnapper was connected to the darer somehow, who did that make the darer? Joey? She wasn’t rushing to jump to that conclusion; making that mistake once was more than enough. Besides, Joey was at a boarding school in Boston now; he couldn’t have anything to do with the latest messages.
Right?
CHAPTER NINE
Wednesday, 2:15 PM
“Wait up, pam!” Abby flicked her wrist, making her life-size puppet chase across the stage after Delancey’s. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, making her face seem even longer than usual. “I was hoping we could talk!”
“Of course, Polly,” Delancey crowed, making her puppet kick its legs up in delight. With her porcelain skin, heart-shaped face, and bushy curls, Delancey could almost blend in with the dolls. “Let’s sit!” The two puppets teetered on their strings, flouncing over to the single prop on the stage, a beat-up plastic tree stump.
It was the Purity Club Puppet Show, which all of Winslow was being forced to attend. The good news was, Sydney got to miss Señora Tucker’s recitation of the Spanish conjugations for harvesting and tilling and seeding. The bad news was, she was stuck watching Abby and Delancey and two wide-eyed freshmen parade their creepy purity puppets around for an entire period. Abby and Delancey had been talking up the show for weeks now, claiming it was “life-changing.” Sydney couldn’t help but wonder if it was all just a ploy to win that stupid purity contest Abby kept yammering about.
Onstage, the puppets sat down side by side on the tree stump, their strings tangling together. They were roughly the size of ten-year-olds and built out of shiny wood, with overly expressive faces painted onto them. One was wearing what looked to be a hand-knitted yarn dress and had the same wild curls as Delancey. The other was in a khaki atrocity: khaki pants and a khaki button-down, with a khaki scrunchy tying back its very Abby-like straight brown hair. Both puppets wore gold promise rings on their knobby wooden fingers that matched Abby and Delancey’s own.
“What did you want to talk about, Polly?” Pam the puppet asked, as Delancey struggled to untangle several of the puppets’ strings. Instead, the two puppets became even more tangled. Frustrated, Delancey gave the strings a hard yank—and Pam the puppet punched Polly the puppet smack in the face. The whole auditorium burst out laughing as Polly was flung backward off the tree stump.
“That’s what you get for being pure,” Sydney heard someone snicker. Calum twisted around in the row in front of her, shooting her a horrified expression.
“Only thirteen and a half more minutes,” she mouthed to him.
“Eight hundred ten seconds,” he mouthed back.
She rolled her eyes at him. Of course Calum could calculate that in less than a second. Ever since Monday night on the beach, when she’d mentioned she hadn’t seen him around much lately, Calum had been popping up everywhere. He’d even dragged her inside the cafeteria during lunch today—a scenario she usually avoided at all costs. They ended up sitting just a few tables away from Tenley and Emerson’s group. But even though she’d been texting with the two of them all week about Darer Numero Dos, the quick hand-lift Tenley gave her could barely constitute a wave, and Emerson didn’t even deign to look in her direction.
It wasn’t until after lunch—when none of their friends were there to witness it—that Tenley dragged Sydney over to talk to them. “I got us all pepper spray,” she announced. “It should be here tonight. I just think that after what happened in the hot tub yesterday…” She trailed off, the color draining from her face. “We need to be able to protect ourselves,” she finished fiercely.
“With pepper spray?” Sydney asked doubtfully. She couldn’t imagine tiny Tenley holding anyone off with a bottle of pepper spray, let alone the darer.
“With whatever we can,” Tenley shot back. She went on to fill in Sydney and Emerson on the train she’d seen in Caitlin’s journal, the one that had belonged to her kidnapper.
“Just promise me you’ll leave Joey Bakersfield out of this,” Sydney insisted. “Just because he once, years ago, owned a train like that does not make him the darer. So no going on a Joey warpath, okay? We’ve put him through enough already.”
Tenley agreed, but she had a grudging look on her face as she did.
“Wow!” Polly the puppet chirped now, drawing Sydney out of her thoughts. Onstage, Abby was struggling to right her puppet amid a thicket of tangled strings. “Your passion for purity just knocked me out, Pam! And speaking of purity…” Abby finally yanked the puppet upright. “I wanted to talk to you about homecoming.”
Pam the puppet clapped her hands together. “I hope I get voted queen!”
“I bet you will, Pam. But we have to make sure we don’t forget our Three Ps to Purity in all the excitement of homecoming.”
Both puppets jumped to their feet. “Pam and Polly’s Three Ps to Purity!” Abby and Delancey sang out in unison.
“One,” Polly the puppet announced, oblivious to the snickers peppering the auditorium. “Pamper yourself! Remember, girls: Pure doesn’t have to mean boring. When you’re feeling temptation, go get a pedicure! Fill your time up with things you enjoy.”
“What I enjoy is hooking up!” Hunter Bailey hollered a few rows up, making his friends hoot with laughter. Sydney watched Tenley and Emerson laugh along with them. Was it seriously possible they found him amusing? “A lot!” he added.
Sydney stifled a groan. She couldn’t wait to go to college.
“Silence!” Principal Howard scolded from the aisle. Up on stage, Abby tossed her long ponytail over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes in Hunter’s direction. “What’s number two, Pam?” she asked loudly.
“Two,” Pam the puppet said, “is pull a friend aside.” She put a hand on Polly the puppet’s shoulder. “Never be scared to ask a friend for help. And, of course, three is pride yourself on your decisions.” At that, the puppets launched into a song titled “I’m the Guard of my V-Card.”
Two excruciatingly long songs later, Abby and the others finally took their bows onstage. “Thank you!” Abby called out. “This homecoming, remember the Three Ps!” Lifting their puppets, they all made a clumsy exit.
Immediately everyone began to jostle out of the auditorium. Sydney hung back, waiting for Calum to catch up with her. She had a huge favor to ask him, and she wanted to get it over with.