Page 248 of Depraved Boys

“What?” I asked.

“Long black hair, and a pale complexion?”

My breath caught. “How did you know?”

“Have you seen the Japanese horror movie, Ringu?”

“Is it anything like The Ring, starring Naomi Watts?”

“Ringu is the original.”

I shuddered at the recollection of a long-haired girl crawling out of a TV set. “I had nightmares about it for months. It wouldn’t surprise me that I’ve incorporated her in my fractured memories.”

Cormac explained how he had adjusted my program to search the dictionaries of every foreign language Corrine had ever studied. He had also created a database of the most common words in the English language translated into Corrine’s numerical code. Every so often, Cormac would stop at a string of numbers that translated into either an English word or one that meant something in another language. Once we read through the sentence, it wasn’t too difficult to piece things together.

I shook my head and marveled at how Ashley had been able to translate large chunks of text without the use of a computer. The girl had wasted her natural talents by trying too hard to fit into a crowd that despised her.

After reading several passages of the diary, Cormac rubbed his temples. “I knew Corrine was unhappy, but I had no idea that the girls were that vicious. She didn’t tell me about half these encounters.”

“Does it change how you feel about Geraldine?” I asked.

He paused, eyes lowering to the screen. “I’m not surprised by the revelations. Geraldine told me she had bullied Corrine, and I’ve seen how nasty the girls can be through your experiences.”

I had my own opinions about his relationship with one of the girls responsible for Corrine’s breakdown, but I remained silent and waited for Cormac to elaborate. He kept his head bowed and continued typing into my laptop.

My shoulders slumped, and I exhaled a frustrated breath. Had the girl overridden his good sense with her pretty face and figure? I shook my head and waited for him to translate the next part of the diary.

“Geraldine’s becoming distant,” Cormac murmured.

I stilled my expression. Without Bianca and the knights to applaud her grand pigging of Cormac, she probably no longer wanted to continue the game. “Oh?”

“At first, I thought it was because she lost her friend, but she seems more interested in exaggerating her sadness to garner sympathy.”

My hands closed around the diary. “Why do you like her?”

“Because I’m a stupid guy who thinks with his dick.”

“Cormac!”

“She’s so pretty and knows how to get a guy excited. It’s addicting.” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re only sipping cups of tea with the kings. I’ve seen how Brunswick salivates over your boobs.”

A flush crept over my cheeks. I would have said it was different, but on the outside, our situations were exactly the same. He thought the kings were playing me but stopped talking about it to maintain our friendship, and I thought the same about Geraldine.

A tiny voice whispered that the knights had played Ashley from the start. It reminded me to look at what happened to her, but I shook it off. Even if Geraldine might be playing Cormac, it didn’t mean the kings were playing me. Too much had happened between the boys and me for their affections to be fake.

I leaned across the armchair, reached over, and squeezed Cormac’s hand. “Please, be careful with Geraldine.”

He squeezed back. “And the same to you about Kashaayah, Brunswick, and Garraway.”

Annoyance flickered across my skin. Geraldine went out of her way to cause me grief, while the kings mostly ignored Cormac. I was about to remind him that our situations were different when a voice interrupted us.

“Miss Evergreen?” Mr. Blunt stood over us with his cap in his hands. “Mrs. Benazir says you have an important phone call.”

The last time I entered the headmistress’s office on my own, someone had bludgeoned the back of my head and dumped me in the same cave the police had found Corrine’s dead body. I wasn’t about to visit the woman without a trusted escort. Cormac walked me down to Mrs. Benazir’s office and waited for me outside.

As soon as I stepped into the lavender-scented room, the headmistress’s lips thinned. “Thank you for coming down,” she said with a rebuke in her tone. “In the future, please give your callers your direct number. My office is not a telephone exchange.”

My brows drew together. Who could possibly be calling me via Mrs. Benazir? And why would they wait so long on the line for me to walk down from the east tower?