“Call us, Meg. If anything happens, call us.” Brandon glanced at me and left the room.
I stood there staring at the ground, feeling confused and worried.
Greyson finally spoke up. “I don’t know why you didn’t leave with your friends.”
“I want to know what happened to Nancy.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care what you believe, Meg. You should have listened to your friend. What we had was about nothing more than sex.”
“I don’t care.” I bit my lip as I lied. His words had cut me to the core. I’d really thought we were beyond that stage.
“If you’re staying, you better get back outside. The tests will be starting soon.”
“Okay.” I nodded and glanced at him. He was surveying me with an odd light in his eyes.
He sighed. “You shouldn’t have stayed, Meg.”
“I couldn’t leave,” I whispered, and he nodded back at me.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
***
I didn’t go back outside right away. I couldn’t face the others and the questions in their eyes. I needed to compose myself, and I wanted to check to see if Nancy was back in the room. Part of me knew that she wouldn’t be there, but I was hoping beyond hope that she would have shown back up.
I quickly walked into our room and looked around. I stopped as I looked at my bed and the messy sheets. I was pretty confident that I had made my bed in the morning, like I always did. My breathing slowed as I looked around the room again to see if anything else looked askew. Nothing else seemed off, so I walked over to the bed and pulled off the duvet and the sheets to see if someone had left a note for me, but there was nothing there.
I threw the bedding back onto the bed and was about to walk back out of the room when I saw something shiny glittering underneath Nancy’s bed. I ran back and quickly pulled it out, and I was surprised to see a diary. I opened it slowly, feeling bad for invading Nancy’s privacy, but I needed to see what she had written in case there were any clues inside.
The diary appeared to have been started a long time ago, as the first entries were about some guy named Hunter who she appeared to have been in love with while in school. There was a lot of angst and emotion, and it seemed like Nancy had really had the bug for him. I flicked through the pages quickly, not wanting to read about her obviously unrequited and painful school crush. I flipped back a few pages, when I realized that my eyes had flickered over an entry about Maria.
“Maria is bringing her new boyfriend home this weekend. Mom and Dad are excited that she’s coming home, but that’s because they don’t know the truth. I can’t believe that Maria is stripping now. I hope Ryan doesn’t find out she’s coming home. He’s going to flip a switch. It’s so unfair that Maria has two guys and I have none. I wish that Hunter would notice me...”
I stopped reading then, as it seemed that the writing had changed pretty quickly back to her crush on Hunter. I sat on her bed and thought for a moment about what I had just read. I assumed that Maria’s boyfriend was Brandon. But what did she mean about the stripping? Had Maria been a stripper? And if so, did that mean that the club really was a strip joint? But who was Ryan? And why had Nancy been worried that he would find out about her new boyfriend? I flipped through again, more carefully this time, to see what else I could find. I paused on the next page as I saw another entry.
“Maria’s boyfriend Brandon is gorgeous. One of the most gorgeous men I’ve ever seen. He makes Hunter look like a little boy. Maria told me that he’s the best sex she’s ever had. I tried not to show her how uneasy she made me feel as she went into detail. I don’t think she knows I’m still a virgin. I don’t...”
I sat up straight as something hit me. Nancy was eighteen. And supposedly, Maria had dated Brandon ten years ago, Nancy would have been eight when all of this had gone down. Why would she have been writing about a boy she had a crush on at eight? And the sex thing? It didn’t make sense. There was no way that an eight-year-old had written this diary.
So that meant one of two things: this was someone else’s diary or this was written at a later date. Either way, this diary had been left here for a purpose. This wasn’t a case of Nancy accidentally leaving her diary in the room. Whoever had left the diary in the room wanted me to see it.
I wanted to feel like Nancy had left this for me to see, but I didn’t understand why she would have written so much about her high school crush Hunter if she’d wanted to give me clues about Maria. Who cared how she’f felt about Hunter? That wasn’t going to help me now. I closed my eyes and tried to think carefully. Maybe there were clues in what she had written about Hunter? Maybe the whole diary was a clue.