The Thrashers(102)

Once in the hallway, Jodi looked left and right, and she found a halo of blond moving quickly toward the girl’s bathroom.

Jodi pushed the door open. “Hannah?”

Hannah Mills stood at the sinks, tears falling down her cheeks.

“So he’s innocent?”

There was something tight about her eyes, and her lips were cracked and chewed.

“They dropped the charges. Emily wrote the wrong date in her journal—”

“Wrong date? What wrong date?” Hannah swung around and forward, and Jodi almost stepped back.

“The date Zack allegedly had sex with her. Emily wrote Saturday instead of Sunday, and Zack had an alibi for Saturday.”

Hannah stared at her, rage building behind her eyes. Suddenly, a choking sound came from her throat, and her face crumpled. She paced away from her, and a scream tore from her throat.

“Hannah, I know this is upsetting—”

“You’re the one who told them about the real journal, aren’t you?” she mumbled. “My mom told me you came over. You went upstairs and looked for it, didn’t you?”

Jodi stood frozen. She’d called it the real journal.

“I was thinking it might have been you,” Jodi said quietly. “You created the fake one?”

Tears streamed down Hannah’s cheeks. “It took me weeks. I had her handwriting perfect. I rewrote the entire thing. I had every date correct, I swear.”

Jodi knew to be careful. She couldn’t give Hannah any indication that she knew there was truth to the journal entry about Zack and Emily having sex.

“The journal in the wall—the real one—it stopped in April. But you created May entries?”

Hannah sniffed. “After Emily told me she’d had sex, she said ‘Journals are for kids. I’m an adult now.’ So I filled in the May dates myself.”

Jodi’s eyes narrowed. Something still didn’t make sense.

“Did Emily tell you about my dad throwing a bottle at me?”

Hannah wiped her nose with her wrist, nodding. “She told me everything about everything.”

So Hannah had twisted it and put it into the journal, something to hold against Lucy. “Why didn’t you accuse me of anything?” Jodi asked.

Hannah looked up at her with wet eyes. “You meant a lot to her. She wouldn’t have wanted that. But I’m sorry that I—” She cut off, biting her lip.

“What?”

“I’m sorry if I’ve been scaring you,” she said slowly.

It dawned on her. “Hannah, were you behind the text messages?”

She stared at the sinks. “I just wanted them to remember her. To feel guilt.”

“How did you do some of that?” Jodi thought about the text about the hair dye, the flare in Paige’s photos.

“I started hacking in seventh grade,” Hannah said flatly. “It wasn’t hard to get into your search histories.”

Jodi’s eyebrows lifted. She realized in both circumstances that she’d felt the text messages knew too much—when Jodi was thinking of trying a new hair dye and when she wanted tickets to the show in San Francisco—it wasn’t clairvoyance. It was her search history.

“What about the different numbers?” Jodi asked.

Hannah shrugged. “I bought burner phones. Tossed them when I was done with them.”

Jodi’s eyes narrowed. “Did you put that light in Paige’s photos, too?”

“No?” Hannah looked at her curiously. “What light?”

Jodi felt a chill crest over her shoulders but waved away the question.

“Listen, Hannah. I know you’re angry. I know you miss your sister. And maybe you don’t think we got what we deserve, but you have to stop now. You did all you could to get the law to do their job. If you go any further with all of this, you could really get in a lot of trouble. It could ruin your life just as much as ours.”

Hannah chewed on her lip, dead skin tearing off to reveal red, raw sections. She nodded.

“Theirs,” Hannah said slowly. “I didn’t want to ruin your life.”

Jodi’s stomach felt sick. “I was like them, though. I could be just as mean. Did Emily show you the Google Drive?”

“Pieces of it. When I looked through it, I said I needed to tell Mom, and she deleted it from her phone. I didn’t even see which of them sent it to her.”

Jodi nodded. “Well, I might have meant a lot to Emily, but I wasn’t kind to her. Not like I should have been.”

“You didn’t like her,” Hannah said matter-of-factly, shrugging. “It happens. But you don’t have to like someone to be kind to them. You came over after school and talked with her. You let her annoy you. You gave her something to look forward to every day. I think that’s being kind.”

Jodi’s vision blurred as she stared at the bathroom tiles. She supposed it was mostly true. It still didn’t fix the ache in her chest when she thought about what was on that Google Drive.

Pushing back her tears, Jodi turned to Hannah. “Are you going to be alright? Do you have someone picking you up?”

Hannah sniffed and nodded. “I can get someone, yeah.”

Jodi wondered if she should hug her, but settled for placing a hand on her shoulder. “You can talk to me about her, if you want. You have my number.”