LITMIR.BIZ

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time in a long time, she was scared.

      The three of them—Shannon, Principal Evans, and Tory—watched the computer monitor on the desk. On-screen, Shannon broke into Josie Lockworth’s gym locker. Lock-picking, not usually found on a high school curricula, was only one of the specialized skills taught at the academy. Shannon had turned out to be quite good at it.

      The personal DVD player was plainly visible in Shannon’s hand as she shoved it into Josie’s locker. Then Shannon closed the locker and hurried off.

      “As you know, Josie has been accused of stealing things around campus,” Principal Evans said in her no-nonsense voice.

      Shannon did know that. Everything Josie had been accused of stealing, Shannon had actually stolen and put in Josie’s locker or room. Those things had been found during subsequent investigations.

      Josie Lockworth had been intentionally targeted by Shannon’s team the Graces. Upon arrival at the school, each new student was put with a team. Those teams weren’t designed to be cliques. They were intended to be a small support system within the school.

      The Cassandras—Josie’s team—were led by Lorraine Miller. Everyone called her Rainy. She was Allison Gracelyn’s strongest competition at the school, and everyone took the competition seriously. Way too seriously, in Shannon’s view. But Shannon had gotten attention within Allison’s group, the Graces.

      “How could you do something so reprehensible?” Marion Gracelyn demanded.

      Shannon tried to speak and couldn’t at first. She’d never imagined getting caught. Josie had been chosen because she’d been the weakest link among the Cassandras. Her mother had been some kind of engineer for the Air Force. A spy plane she’d designed had failed during a test and killed several men.

      Josie lived under that cloud and carried her mother’s guilt around with her. Shannon figured that Josie would have cracked under the social stigma of being thought of as a thief. The last week that the “thefts”—Shannon didn’t think of her borrowing other people’s property as theft because everyone had gotten their things back once it was discovered Josie had them—had taken place, Josie had shown obvious signs of distress. She’d gotten more withdrawn than normal and couldn’t seem to concentrate on her work. Not even math and physics, which were two of her most enjoyed subjects.

      If you could take away the sheer love of math from Josie Lockworth, Shannon knew she was doing something. Still, part of her had felt bad for Josie. The other girl had never done anything to her. Under different circumstances, if she hadn’t been part of Rainy’s group and Allison hadn’t been so jealous of Rainy, they might even have been friends.

      “Who put the video cameras in?” Shannon asked.

      “I did,” Tory said. Her voice held a note of imperiousness and outrage. She could do a lot with a look and her tone of voice. That was why she got even better scores in the broadcasting classes than Shannon did.

      “That was good,” Shannon said. “I didn’t think about that.”

      “Josie’s my friend,” Tory said in a hard voice. “She would have been your friend if you’d given her a chance.”

      That was probably true, Shannon admitted. But that wasn’t how things were. Lines had been drawn and she’d had to choose her allegiances.

      “Have you nothing to say in your own defense?” Marion Gracelyn asked.

      Shannon remembered then that the senator had once worked in the district attorney’s office in Phoenix. She’d had an impressive conviction rate. The pre-law classes at the academy talked about some of her cases.

      “It wasn’t my idea to frame Josie,” Shannon said. She played her trump card. “It was your daughter’s.”

      

      The Big Announcement—and that was how Shannon had thought of it since she’d first figured out how she was going to respond if she got caught framing Josie—didn’t deflect the heat as much as Shannon had hoped. In fact, if anything, the Big Announcement only seemed to turn up the heat.

      Marion Gracelyn had become even further outraged at the accusation of her daughter.

      Shannon had offered to show them the e-mails that she’d received from Allison. They were all in a file Shannon had set up on her computer in her dorm room.

      Everyone knew that Allison was a geek when it came to computers. She did everything on computers. All her free time was spent on them. She organized all the Graces on computers and PDAs, posted their schedules and outlined her expectations in terse, well-written e-mails that came in at all times during the day.

      Allison’s roommate even complained that Allison used a computer to wake her. Every morning, the roommate told them, Allison’s computer would come on and speak like a Borg, one of the cybernetic/human hybrids that were the bad guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

      Allison Gracelyn, Shannon knew, was a complete geek in her mind, but she had the good looks and body of a runway model. Those were two perfectly good reasons to like her. And to be envious.

      

      As it turned out, Allison was also more clever than Shannon would have believed.

      After they’d all tramped back to Shannon’s room with the academy coming to life around them, Shannon had logged on to her computer and brought up the file where she’d saved the e-mails from Allison.

      The file was empty.

      Panic settled into Shannon then. Josie hadn’t been the only one who’d gotten set up. Shannon had gotten set up, too.

      “I don’t understand,” Shannon whispered as she looked at the empty folder open on the computer monitor. “They were right here. All of the e-mails Allison sent me about framing Josie for the thefts.”

      “Why would my daughter do something like that?” Marion Gracelyn asked. She was definitely not happy.

      “Because Josie would break,” Shannon replied. The tears that rolled down her cheeks now were real. She was in a lot of trouble. She’d never, even in her wildest imaginings, thought she’d ever be in this much trouble. “Allison said we should frame Josie because she would crater.”

      “Why would Allison want that to happen?”

      “Because Allison wanted to win the competition against the Cassandras.”

      Everyone knew about the rivalry between the Graces and the Cassandras. That was a thing of legend at the academy over the last few years. Rainy and Allison had always competed at everything. And everyone knew that Allison carried the competition further than Rainy did. Rainy just wanted to do her best and make everyone else raise the bar. Allison wanted—no, she needed—to be the best.

      Shannon understood and respected that. She felt the same way.

      “I can’t believe Allison would do something like that,” Marion Gracelyn countered.

      But Shannon sensed the hesitation in the woman’s words. Marion knew about her daughter’s strong desire to beat Rainy.

      Work with that, Shannon told herself. She tried to ignore the feelings of desperation that ate at her. You can’t get into any more trouble than Allison if you were only following orders. And they’re not going to do anything to Allison.

      

      The problem was, in the end, that Shannon couldn’t prove anything.

      Allison flatly denied ever sending the e-mails. They’d never talked about the scheme around any of the other Graces. Or even among themselves, Shannon realized only then. Everything had been done through e-mail.

      But that was how Allison did everything.

      Principal Evans pointed out that the campus server would have created a log and kept track of all the e-mails sent through that server. Athena Academy kept all their computer hardware on-site and managed computer security.

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