SNEAK PEEK: Trust Me, I'm Lying

The Warning

“You really have no idea who would have done this?”

Susan Porter, St. Agatha’s bulldog dean of students, is glaring suspiciously at me as she calls the janitor on her walkie. I keep my snark in check, but it isn’t easy. My relationship with the dean isn’t what you’d call amicable.

“I really don’t,” I say. I’m not great with authority. Especially when that authority is on to me. “I certainly didn’t put a dead rat in my own locker.”

Her expression tightens, and since her features are already sharp enough to cut, the effect easily cows the more naive students. She’s wasting it on me, but I suspect it’s not something she can turn on and off. Her face just looks that way when she’s aggravated, and she’s almost always aggravated. Don’t get me wrong; she’s great at her job. She somehow manages to keep twelve hundred or so teens from outright revolt without getting so much as a strand of her titian bob out of place. And she’s perpetually suspicious of me, so she must be doing something right.

She scribbles something in a Moleskine notebook with a tiny pencil, both of which she carries in her navy-blue suit-jacket pocket. I’m sure whatever she’s noting is going straight into my file. The dean’s been on my case almost since I started at St. Agatha’s. She can’t have anything substantial against me or she’d have used it by now, but her ability to sense the criminal element is uncanny. I have yet to get a connection to the dean’s office, but when I do, I’m going to prioritize pilfering said file.

“Rest assured, Miss Dupree, that I will find the culprit,” she says, and stalks off.

It sounds more like a threat than a promise, but I’ll take what I can get. If it’s a student prank, she’ll find out. If not . . .

The janitor arrives, and I move out of his way to give him full access to my gore-covered locker. I try not to watch as he wraps the furry corpse in a piece of brown butcher paper before detaching its tail from the coat hook. I’m not really an animal person, but I still feel sorry for the little guy.

The puddle of guts on the floor of the locker is going to take the janitor longer to clean, so I decide to give up on my books. I turn to head for class and run smack into a hard, warm pillar.

“Are you all right?” asks the pillar.

I step back in surprise and look up, immediately recognizing Tyler Richland, the St. Aggie’s demigod/senior Paula name-dropped in the bathroom. He’s captain of the fill-in-any-sport-here varsity team, he’s popular, and he has a hotness factor that approaches solar levels. You don’t go to St. Agatha’s and not know Tyler Richland. In fact, you don’t live in Chicago and not know Tyler Richland. His dad’s a senator.

“Fine,” I say, and move to go around him.

“I meant about your locker. You must be pretty shaken up."

I frown at him. I don’t like people telling me how I should feel. And it’s weird that he’s talking to me at all. I’m a sophomore, on top of which I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to stay relatively anonymous. But then, maybe he has a job for me.

“I’d be shaken up,” he continues, turning his charm up a couple of notches. “I’d probably faint.”

“I suppose it’s not the nicest present someone’s ever left me,” I say. My chilliness is starting to thaw under the onslaught; that’s how powerful those molten-chocolate eyes are. But I am nothing if not professional, so I keep my expression neutral.

“Do you know what it’s about?”

“I have an inkling,” I admit, thinking about my trashed apartment. Coincidences are like unicorns—you can believe in them all you want, but that doesn’t make them real.