Episode 7: The Club for People Who Can't Lie
It took me two days to work up the nerve to ask Ms. Alvarez, our homeroom teacher, if four students could use the debate room during lunch periods to "organize documentation regarding recent campus incidents," which is the kind of sentence that sounds so boring and bureaucratic that no one, including Ms. Alvarez, thought to ask a single follow-up question before saying yes.
It took considerably less time to convince Iris to actually show up, mostly because she arrived before I did, already sitting at the head of the table with a whiteboard marker in hand like she'd been running secret school-sanctioned investigations her whole life and was only now getting the paperwork to prove it.
"We need a name," she said, the second I walked in. "Something official-sounding. Something that gets us taken seriously if a teacher walks past."
"The Verification Committee," I offered.
"The Alliance Against Nolan's Continued Existence," Iris said, at the exact same moment, with total sincerity.
"We are not calling ourselves that."
"It's accurate."
"It's actionable if anyone ever screenshots the whiteboard." I picked up the marker before she could argue further and wrote, in careful block letters, THE VERIFICATION COMMITTEE, underlining it twice for emphasis, the way I underline things I intend to defend to the death in front of a faculty advisor.
Theo arrived next, calculus classmate and Mia's cautiously-official boyfriend as of the amusement park, carrying a folder of color-coded tabs that made my own organizational instincts sing with something close to professional recognition. Mia came in last, out of breath, having apparently sprinted the entire way from the library, where she'd recruited our fourth member: Ms. Okafor, the school librarian, who possessed what turned out to be a near-photographic memory for exactly which students had checked out which reference materials over the past two years, a skill nobody had thought to weaponize for the purposes of school-based conspiracy investigation until that exact Tuesday.
"I remember everything anyone's ever borrowed," Ms. Okafor said, settling into a chair with the calm authority of someone who'd been waiting her entire career for a task this interesting. "Including several people who came in asking about school security protocols under the thin cover story of researching a term paper. Shall we begin?"
We began.
Theo's charts turned out to be the backbone of everything. He'd cross-referenced every reported act of vandalism — the sabotaged sign-in sheets, the torn bulletin boards, the radio room break-in, the chemistry-wing camera outage during the doctored video incident — against the published student council duty roster, a document that, it turned out, the council itself was required to post publicly for transparency reasons nobody had ever bothered to actually check.
The pattern, once Theo laid it out in neat colored columns, was almost embarrassingly clean. Every single incident occurred during a window when Nolan Price was officially assigned somewhere else — a club meeting, a fundraising call, a scheduled absence with his name signed in his own careful handwriting on the roster, alibiing himself in advance with a paper trail so tidy it looked less like innocence and more like preparation.
"He's not doing any of it himself," Iris said, staring at the chart with the particular focus she usually reserved for engines. "He's establishing an alibi every single time, which means either he's got someone else doing the actual dirty work, or—"
"Or the camera outages aren't coincidence," I finished. "Someone's disabling security specifically during his scheduled absences. Which means whoever's doing it knows his schedule in advance. Better than most students would."
"Staff access," Mia said, quietly, and the whole table went still for a second at the phrase, the same one June had used in two separate recordings three years apart.
Ms. Okafor cleared her throat delicately. "I don't want to speak out of turn. But I recall a staff member requesting an unusually specific set of archived disciplinary files last spring. Files relating to a former student. A Vale."
"June," Iris said.
"I didn't think much of it at the time," Ms. Okafor admitted. "Staff request records fairly often. But it was requested by someone who, as far as I'm aware, had no direct reason to need them. Someone in student council advisory. Ms. Hart."
I wrote the name down on the whiteboard, under Nolan's, with a question mark beside it that felt, even as I drew it, entirely too small for what it might actually mean.
Somewhere in the second hour of chart-building, Iris did something I hadn't seen her do before, not once, not in five weeks of thirty-day arrangements and hallway confrontations and a rulebook full of numbered promises: she asked for help. Directly. Out loud. Without dressing it up as a demand or delivering it as a done deal she was informing the rest of us about after the fact.
"I need someone to pull the login history for the announcement account," she said, to the table generally, not to any one of us specifically, in the particular careful tone of someone practicing a skill they weren't naturally good at. "I can't do it myself. I don't have admin access, and even if I did, I promised I wasn't going to just — do things alone anymore. So. Can someone help me with that part."
Mia's hand shot up like we were in class. "I can ask my aunt. She works in IT for the district, she owes me a favor from prom."
"Thank you," Iris said, and it came out slightly stiff, slightly rehearsed, like she was trying on a phrase that didn't fit quite right yet but was determined to wear it anyway until it did.
I caught her eye across the table, and something passed between us that felt less like romance and more like quiet, mutual acknowledgment — of effort being made, of an old habit being deliberately unlearned in real time, in front of witnesses, which is its own particular kind of bravery.
"Your turn," she said to me, later, once Theo and Mia had gone to track down a specific archived duty roster from the front office and Ms. Okafor had retreated to reshelve a cart of returns with the businesslike efficiency of someone who considered conspiracy investigation merely an extension of ordinary library science.
"My turn for what?"
"You get to say the thing you've been not saying since the hallway outside the library." She didn't look up from the chart, kept her eyes fixed on Theo's careful color-coded columns, giving me, I realized, the exact kind of privacy she probably needed to hear it without having to watch my face do anything about it. "I'm not asking you to. I'm just noticing you've been carrying something around for four days and I'd rather you put it down."
I sat with it for a second, the way I'd learned to sit with things instead of immediately organizing them into a numbered list.
"I miss you," I said. Plain. No footnotes. "Not managing your case, not helping with the investigation, not any of the useful things I'm apparently good for. I just miss you specifically. And I don't want to get back together if it means going back to the version where you disappear into your own head to protect me from something and I don't find out until it's already a crisis. I need the version where you tell me before you do something, not after, even when telling me first feels like it costs you something."
Iris was quiet for a long moment. Then she picked up the whiteboard marker, uncapped it, and wrote something small in the corner of the board, below the chart, in handwriting considerably less confident than her usual bold, slanting scrawl.
I'll tell you before I break down a door.
She held the marker out to me.
I took it, and wrote beneath it, in my own careful, over-considered print: I'll ask before I plan for you.
We looked at the two lines for a second, side by side, small and slightly crooked in the corner of a whiteboard otherwise covered in vandalism timelines and suspect names, and it felt, somehow, more binding than the entire twelve-rule laminated document I'd drafted with such misplaced confidence five weeks earlier.
"That's not a real rule," Iris said, echoing my own words back to me from the day I'd handed her the rulebook, the ghost of a smile finally breaking through.
"It's the most important one," I said, and watched her laugh — actually laugh, the sound rare and slightly startled, like it surprised her every single time it happened — before either of us had to decide out loud whether we were officially back together or just two people who'd finally learned how to be honest at the same time.
We were still standing there, marker in hand, not quite touching but close enough that it counted for something, when a sharp tap sounded against the debate room's window — followed by the now-familiar thump of something dropping onto the sill outside.
Pickle hopped through the gap Mia had left cracked for exactly this eventuality, apparently having developed an unshakable habit of delivering evidence directly to wherever the investigation happened to be located that day, and dropped a small plastic card onto the table with the smug efficiency of a creature who considered himself, at this point, an unpaid full partner in the enterprise.
It was an access badge. Faculty-issue, laminated, photo slightly faded with age but clear enough to make out the face and the name printed beneath it in small official type.
CELIA HART — Student Council Faculty Advisor.
The table went very quiet. Theo and Mia had just returned with the duty roster, and all four of us stood there staring at the badge like it might start explaining itself if we looked hard enough.
"Ms. Hart," I said, slowly. "She signed off on June's expulsion recommendation three years ago. She's had staff access this entire time."
Iris picked up the badge, turned it over once in her fingers, and set it back down with the careful precision of someone handling something that might, at any moment, prove far more dangerous than it looked.
"We're not confronting her alone," she said, before anyone else could suggest it, and I watched her mean it — really mean it, not as a concession she was making for my benefit but as an actual rule she was choosing to follow now, the same way she'd choose to follow any other rule that had finally earned her trust. "We bring this to Ms. Alvarez first. All of it. Together."
I looked around the table — at Theo's careful charts, at Mia already dialing her aunt's number for the login records, at Ms. Okafor returning with a fresh stack of quietly damning archival requests, at Iris standing there choosing, deliberately, to be part of a plan instead of the sole author of one — and felt something settle in my chest that had nothing to do with contingency planning at all.
For the first time since a bolt fell from a lighting rig and changed the entire shape of my senior year, it felt like we might actually be close to an answer. And for the first time, none of us were planning to face it alone.
End of Episode 7.