As if to prove my point, a stab of pain makes me crunch over, one hand darting up to grasp my side.
“Save it,” Heath snaps. He yanks out his phone and starts scrolling through it. “I know your little secret, asshole.”
My stomach drops. My secret.
But … but how? Admittedly, I may have gotten a little sloppy lately. My whole life flashes before my eyes, and suddenly I’m wondering how I’m going to get home once Heath tells the dean. I can’t even pay for a ticket right now, and I really would rather not have to call and tell my parents everything over the phone. All that time I was worried they weren’t paying me enough attention … well … this should finally do it. They’ll have no choice but to notice me when they’re shelling out a grand or more on a one-way flight home in disgrace.
Aside from that, I can’t help but
think of how my brothers will react when I show up from boarding school after getting expelled? I’ll never live it down.
“I have the proof,” Heath snaps, holding up his phone.
A lump lodges itself firmly in the back of my throat.
“Proof?”
I’m not sure I want to know what he means by that, but I also can’t not look.
Heath shakes the phone in front of me until I snatch it out of his hands and force myself to look at the still screen of a paused video.
It’s a video of … the bell tower in the church? Not quite what I expected. I frown and without any more hesitation, I press play.
The video shows me standing there at the top of the steps with Jasper fast approaching. My face is clear in the moonlight lancing through the open windows, but Jasper is nothing but a silhouette. There’s no evidence of the murder I saw in his eyes, just my own terror. From this angle, I look like a coward. Like I’m overreacting to a harmless little game.
As I watch, my video-self glances around, looks at the stairs, and then very clearly and deliberately walks backward toward them.
The video makes it obvious. When I fell down those stairs, it was no accident.
I glance up at Heath, our strange conversation after math class the other day suddenly starting to make sense. “You were filming?”
He shrugs. “Yeah, so? Gimme back my phone.”
I oblige without thinking, then immediately kick myself for not deleting the video first.
“I know you did it on purpose. I don’t know why, but you’ve certainly been milking it for all its worth.” He tucks his phone into his pocket and finally starts stripping off his gear. “If Jasper and Beck find out, they’ll do worse than what I did back there on the field.”
“Why haven’t you said anything, then?” I ask him, astonished. Mostly, my head is still reeling to understand what’s going on. I thought for a minute that the secret Heath was referring to …
I shake my head to clear it. Heath doesn’t know my real secret. Just this. And comparatively, this is nothing.
“I had to do it …” Heath looks up at me, his liquid brown eyes bearing a serious expression, “because you saw me making my … purchase.”
So, he knows about that, too. I thought he might’ve seen me when he glanced toward the infirmary window. Heath is too observant for my liking.
I shake my head slowly. “No … I didn’t see anything. Even if I did, who’s to say what you were buying?”
“Adderall.”
“What?”
“That’s what I was buying,” Heath says. “Adderall.”
I’m lost for words for a second. “Why … why would you tell me that?”
“Now we each know each other’s secret,” he says. “It’s for protection.”
I flounder for words, but that’s fine. Heath isn’t finished talking.