Page 126 of Depraved Boys

Pushing myself off the radiator, I said, “I know you’re hurting, but I won’t let you use me as a scapegoat.”

“Where are you going?”

“Outside, to wait for the police.”

I only took a few steps down the hallway and rested against the nearest radiator. Warmth seeped into my limbs, bringing with it the sensation of being stabbed repeatedly with thousands of pins and needles.

About forty minutes later, a female police sergeant and a male constable emerged from the stairwell. I rushed toward them, introduced myself, and led them to our room.

“Ashley.” I knocked on the door. “The police are here.”

A moment later, she opened the door, fully dressed and made up. The male officer looked at his sergeant, whose brows drew together.

“Ashley Evergreen?” asked the sergeant. “One of your classmates reported an assault.”

Ashley lowered her gaze to the parquet floor. “As I’ve said to my sister a hundred times, it was just a bit of name-calling. Nothing untoward happened.”

Anger exploded in my heart, which pumped out gallons of hot blood through my veins. Heat flared across my cheeks and into fingers I wanted to wrap around her scrawny neck. Why would she want to protect those animals, and why hadn’t she called to say she’d changed her mind?

I cleared my throat. “But we—”

“Sorry, officers. I’m not sure what’s wrong with my sister.” Ashley shrugged. “It’s either crying-wolf syndrome or Munchausen’s by proxy. She’s done it before.”

The policewoman flipped open her notebook. “Could you tell us in your own words what happened?”

Ashley stepped aside and let the officers into our room. As I followed after them, the male constable held up a hand. “It’s probably for the best if we interviewed you separately.”

“Right,” I snarled through clenched teeth.

I stood in the hallway, breathing like an agitated bull. All throughout, nausea battered through my insides, making my breaths ragged. After everything that girl had put me through, she had now undermined my previous complaints to the police by portraying me as a fantasist.

Eventually, the door opened, and Ashley strode out of the room with her nose in the air. The police invited me in and wanted to talk about all the complaints I had made in the past. According to Ashley, I had a track record of telling lies to get rivals into trouble.

It took nearly an hour to straighten things out, and after the police left, I turned to Mom and Dad’s smiling portrait.

“See what happens when you try to help Ashley?” Bitterness rolled from the back of my throat and coated the surface of my tongue.

Mom and Dad smiled back.

“She hates me more than she hates those boys. This time I mean it. Ashley and I are no longer sisters. I’m going to stop thinking about her completely.”

I paused as though waiting to see their reactions, but they continued smiling.

“And when she gets expelled, I won’t lift a finger to help.”

The boys weren’t at breakfast, so I walked across the dining room to the scholars’ table and sat with Michelle. Her hair was styled into cornrows with ends that trailed down her back. She and Cora repeated gossip about last night’s events and cast me furtive looks as though to prompt me to add to the conversation.

I wasn’t in the mood to rehash any part of Ashley’s ordeal and subsequent betrayal, so I headed to English, sat in the empty lecture theater with my laptop, and tried to read Corrine’s diary.

A string of nonsensical words danced before my eyes, and I blinked myself back into focus. My head injury had damaged my ability to concentrate on long passages of text, and the software I’d used to translate the numerical Optical Character Recognition readout into letters had produced gibberish.

“I can barely read English, let alone Latin and Spanish,” I muttered.

“What are you doing?” Prakash strolled down the steps.

I slammed the laptop lid. “Translating Gobbledegook.”

“Medieval English?” he asked.