Beneath the Surface

The girls at the academy even told stories about serial killers and murderers that had been held in the older sections of the school. That made for some exciting walks late at night. Especially for the younger girls who were brought there for the first time. Shannon had enjoyed hazing the newbies with the stories of murderers loose on the grounds.

Many of the first-timers came there at age ten or eleven. The academy recognized potential prospects and sent letters early. The school was so prestigious that hardly anyone ever turned them down. The fact that the tuition was waived made the academy even more enticing.

On Friday and Saturday nights, after the fall semester started, the newbies usually got the full treatment from some of the other girls. Frightened squeals echoed throughout those older sections. Shannon had particularly enjoyed those times. She loved role-play and she was one of the best because she could always tell what would scare a new girl the most. It was almost as though she had a psychic ability to get inside an audience’s head.

Principal Evans and her staff turned out to be real buzz-kills. They penalized everyone involved in hazing of that nature. Shannon didn’t mind. The trade-off—a few days of detention for delicious moments of seeing a newbie totally wigging out—was worth it. The event was all theater, getting the complete, rapt attention of her victims, then being in the eye of the storm that swept out of administration.

“You still haven’t told me what’s going on,” Shannon accused.

“You’ll know soon enough,” Principal Evans said.

Okay, Shannon thought as they crossed the grounds to the school’s administration building, so you’ve got me beat when it comes to scary-quiet attitude. That’s fine. I’ll let you have that one. There were other ways to deal with adults.

Shannon called tears to her eyes. She could cry on cue. It was one of her best skills, and that little trick had earned her a lot of attention at home until her parents had either figured it out or just stopped caring. She still wasn’t sure which it had been.

She swallowed hard, made her voice tremulous and looked at Principal Evans. “It’s my parents, isn’t it? Something’s happened to my parents?”

Shannon was so good that she almost scared herself. Even though she was convinced that her parents didn’t much care for her, she still loved them. She didn’t want anything to happen to them.

Principal Evans was quiet longer than she would have normally been. Shannon wondered if she’d played the tear card once too often. But Principal Evans went for it anyway.

“No,” the woman said. “Nothing’s happened to your parents. As far as I know, they’re both fine.”

Shannon almost grinned in triumph. Not only had she created some sympathy in Principal Evans, but she’d also learned that her parents hadn’t been called. Whatever trouble she was in—and she honestly couldn’t think of what that trouble might be—it couldn’t be that bad.

However, the trouble was bad. It had to be bad if Marion Gracelyn was there.

The senator had been waiting in Principal Evans’s office. Marion Gracelyn was often at the school, but she’d never been there in the middle of the night, not that Shannon knew.

Marion Gracelyn was a beautiful woman. Her brown hair was shoulder-length and carefully coiffed, and her business suit was immaculate. Her brown eyes were intense, much more scary, actually, than Principal Evans’s. Whatever was going on, the senator was taking it way too personally.

In that moment Shannon was pretty sure what the trouble was going to be about. Somehow Principal Evans had found out what Shannon was doing to Josie Lockworth.

Without a word, Principal Evans waved Shannon and Tory into chairs in front of the desk. Then she sat in the big chair on the other side and tapped her computer keyboard.

Senator Marion Gracelyn remained standing.

Seated there in Principal Evans’s way-too-neat office and surrounded by proof that the woman had no life outside of what happened at the school, Shannon knew she was in more trouble than she’d ever been in. For the first time in a long time, she was scared.

The three of them—Shannon, Principal Evans, and Tory—watched the computer monitor on the desk. On-screen, Shannon broke into Josie Lockworth’s gym locker. Lock-picking, not usually found on a high school curricula, was only one of the specialized skills taught at the academy. Shannon had turned out to be quite good at it.

The personal DVD player was plainly visible in Shannon’s hand as she shoved it into Josie’s locker. Then Shannon closed the locker and hurried off.

“As you know, Josie has been accused of stealing things around campus,” Principal Evans said in her no-nonsense voice.

Shannon did know that. Everything Josie had been accused of stealing, Shannon had actually stolen and put in Josie’s locker or room. Those things had been found during subsequent investigations.

Josie Lockworth had been intentionally targeted by Shannon’s team the Graces. Upon arrival at the school, each new student was put with a team. Those teams weren’t designed to be cliques. They were intended to be a small support system within the school.

The Cassandras—Josie’s team—were led by Lorraine Miller. Everyone called her Rainy. She was Allison Gracelyn’s strongest competition at the school, and everyone took the competition seriously. Way too seriously, in Shannon’s view. But Shannon had gotten attention within Allison’s group, the Graces.

“How could you do something so reprehensible?” Marion Gracelyn demanded.

Shannon tried to speak and couldn’t at first. She’d never imagined getting caught. Josie had been chosen because she’d been the weakest link among the Cassandras. Her mother had been some kind of engineer for the Air Force. A spy plane she’d designed had failed during a test and killed several men.

Josie lived under that cloud and carried her mother’s guilt around with her. Shannon figured that Josie would have cracked under the social stigma of being thought of as a thief. The last week that the “thefts”—Shannon didn’t think of her borrowing other people’s property as theft because everyone had gotten their things back once it was discovered Josie had them—had taken place, Josie had shown obvious signs of distress. She’d gotten more withdrawn than normal and couldn’t seem to concentrate on her work. Not even math and physics, which were two of her most enjoyed subjects.

If you could take away the sheer love of math from Josie Lockworth, Shannon knew she was doing something. Still, part of her had felt bad for Josie. The other girl had never done anything to her. Under different circumstances, if she hadn’t been part of Rainy’s group and Allison hadn’t been so jealous of Rainy, they might even have been friends.

“Who put the video cameras in?” Shannon asked.

“I did,” Tory said. Her voice held a note of imperiousness and outrage. She could do a lot with a look and her tone of voice. That was why she got even better scores in the broadcasting classes than Shannon did.

“That was good,” Shannon said. “I didn’t think about that.”

“Josie’s my friend,” Tory said in a hard voice. “She would have been your friend if you’d given her a chance.”

That was probably true, Shannon admitted. But that wasn’t how things were. Lines had been drawn and she’d had to choose her allegiances.

“Have you nothing to say in your own defense?” Marion Gracelyn asked.

Shannon remembered then that the senator had once worked in the district attorney’s office in Phoenix. She’d had an impressive conviction rate. The pre-law classes at the academy talked about some of her cases.

“It wasn’t my idea to frame Josie,” Shannon said. She played her trump card. “It was your daughter’s.”

The Big Announcement—and that was how Shannon had thought of it since she’d first figured out how she was going to respond if she got caught framing Josie—didn’t deflect the heat as much as Shannon had hoped. In fact, if anything, the Big Announcement only seemed to turn up the heat.

Marion Gracelyn had become even further outraged at the accusation of her daughter.

Shannon had offered to show them the e-mails that she’d received from Allison. They were all in a file Shannon had set up on her computer in her dorm room.

Everyone knew that Allison was a geek when it came to computers. She did everything on computers. All her free time was spent on them. She organized all the Graces on computers and PDAs, posted their schedules and outlined her expectations in terse, well-written e-mails that came in at all times during the day.

Allison’s roommate even complained that Allison used a computer to wake her. Every morning, the roommate told them, Allison’s computer would come on and speak like a Borg, one of the cybernetic/human hybrids that were the bad guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Allison Gracelyn, Shannon knew, was a complete geek in her mind, but she had the good looks and body of a runway model. Those were two perfectly good reasons to like her. And to be envious.

As it turned out, Allison was also more clever than Shannon would have believed.

After they’d all tramped back to Shannon’s room with the academy coming to life around them, Shannon had logged on to her computer and brought up the file where she’d saved the e-mails from Allison.

The file was empty.

Panic settled into Shannon then. Josie hadn’t been the only one who’d gotten set up. Shannon had gotten set up, too.

“I don’t understand,” Shannon whispered as she looked at the empty folder open on the computer monitor. “They were right here. All of the e-mails Allison sent me about framing Josie for the thefts.”

“Why would my daughter do something like that?” Marion Gracelyn asked. She was definitely not happy.