It smells like his breath, plugs into Meg’s computer like it knows that socket, confirming for Jade whatever “Girl Friday”
means. And now, of course—of course—Hardy’s voice in his office is doing that rising thing that denotes the end of whatever session this is for him and Meg and the caller.
“Shit shit shit,” Jade whispers, and jabs a tab open in Meg’s browser, dials her school email up and logs in, jacking the password up not just once but two times, the warning flashing that one more failed attempt and she’ll be locked out until tomorrow.
Making herself go slow, she enters the letters of “Haddonfield” backwards, replacing the vowels with symbols and numbers.
Her inbox pops on-screen.
She drags the only file off the digital recorder into a new message right as the door closes down the hall, Meg’s shoes approaching at a painfully brisk clip. But the file isn’t loaded yet, is too big, shit shit shit.
Jade sends it anyway, which at least minimizes that guilty window, and, making herself wait long enough that the file might have had long enough to get sent, she guides the digital recorder out of its socket—X’ing out the DEVICE REMOVED
WITHOUT EJECTING error pop-up—sliding it over, over, over…
She can’t lift her hand to get it over the metal lip of the wire-screen pencil holder, the TRANSCRIPTIONS to-do box. Not without announcing what she’s just been doing.
Is this it, then? Is this where she gets busted, hauled into the place she already is, her mask ripped off?
Not if it doesn’t have to be.
Not before she hears that recording, anyway.
Because she can’t give herself away by raising the hand she has turtled over the recorder, she leaves it there beside the pencil holder and slumps forward as if exhausted, trying hard to sell that this is just where her hand got to unintentionally, ma’am, sir. Meg.
“And what are we doing here?” Meg asks, suddenly just there.
Jade fake-flinches, “roused” from a cat-nap on the clock.
What her mouse hand has opened just on reflex is the last email from Mr. Holmes. It’s still the top message in her inbox.
And now that it’s open, it could have just been new.
“Just,” Jade gulps, calling on her inner Billy, her inner Stu, finally saying, “Mr. Holmes.” She leans back, holds her hand out, presenting the email for Meg to see. “My dad doesn’t believe in internet,” she adds, cringing from having to play a card this needy.
Meg just scans the email. It’s about certain liberties she took with the bibliography of her last make-up paper, the biggest of those liberties being that there wasn’t a bibliography.
“I’m…” Jade starts, starts again, fully aware she’s the only one speaking here: “Ask Sheriff Hardy. It’s a late paper he wanted me to still submit.”
“The sheriff?”
“Mr. Holmes. For history class.”
“Which you already graduated from.”
“It’s complicated.”
“That part I do believe,” Meg says, scooching in but not yet displacing Jade, a proximity Jade overplays her reaction to, jerking her left arm—and hand—such that that wire-screen pencil holder goes tumbling off the edge of the desk, the digital recorder swan-diving in right after it.
“Shit, shit, sorry,” Jade says, standing so that Meg’s rolling chair rattles back against a file cabinet.
“This is why we should all stay at our own stations,” Meg tsk-tsks, collecting the scattered objects as if they’re nothing.
She holds up the recorder, though, says, “If this doesn’t work…”
Jade nods, playing guilty. For just and only that, nothing else.
“Go on then,” Meg says about the still-open email on her screen. “I don’t want to stand in the way of academic progress.
Reply. I’m sure teachers in the summer live for messages from students. Especially retired teachers.”
Jade positions her fingers at the keyboard version of ten and two, makes her email as short as she can: Just finished it this morning, will send it tomorrow by noon. doc or pdf?
She sends it with a flourish, like tapping the final ivory key of a piano performance, and in getting that fancy, she manages to accidentally open the file already attached higher in that thread. For a bad moment she’s sure Hardy’s mumbled voice is going to come through Meg’s speakers, but then the computer’s two-bytes are just rubbing together in their digital way to open the word processor around this document.