Chapter 1: The Week Before the Splash
Chapter 1: The Week Before the Splash
Six days earlier, Lila had been sitting in the school library, staring at a stack of college application essays when her best friend, Mia, slid into the seat across from her, her face pale. “Did you hear what happened?” Mia whispered, pulling out her phone and pulling up a post from the Westbrook Student Facebook group. The post had a screenshot of an anonymous tip sent to the school’s tip line: Lila Marlow broke into the Dean’s office last week to change her calc final grade. Lila’s stomach dropped. She had stayed late at the library that night, but she had a receipt from the campus coffee shop proving she’d bought a latte at 10:17 PM, and three other students had seen her working on her AP Bio lab report. But the anonymous tip had spread like wildfire, and by the next morning, the Dean’s office had launched a full investigation.
For three days, Lila had been grilled by the school’s disciplinary committee. They showed her a blurry photo of a figure in a black hoodie standing outside the Dean’s office door at 9:47 PM, the exact time the break-in happened. “The hoodie matches the one you wore to the spring dance,” one committee member had said, and Lila had felt her blood run cold. She had worn a black hoodie to the spring dance, but she’d left it at her cousin’s house after the party. That night, she’d gone home, changed into a sweatshirt, and studied until 1 AM. But without proof of where the hoodie was, she was stuck.
That’s when she’d decided to check the school’s security footage herself. The campus security system was old, but the west wing hallway had two cameras: one above the stairwell and one mounted on the Dean’s office ceiling. Lila had asked the campus security guard, Mr. Torres, for access to the footage, but he’d told her he couldn’t release it to students without a court order. So she’d spent two nights sneaking into the security office after hours, using the password she’d overheard Mr. Torres type in one morning when he was complaining about his cat. She’d pulled the footage from the night of the break-in, fast-forwarding through hours of empty hallways until she saw the figure: not her, but Jake Hale.
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Jake had worn a black hoodie, his dark hair peeking out from the hood, and he’d jimmied the Dean’s office door open with a flathead screwdriver. Lila had taken a screenshot of the footage, saved it to a USB drive, and hidden it in her laptop bag-right before Margaret Hale had stormed into the graduation rehearsal that afternoon, screaming that Lila was a cheater and that her son deserved the internship more.
That night, Lila had packed her laptop bag with her textbooks, her diploma gown, and the USB drive, planning to hand the evidence over to the disciplinary committee first thing in the morning. But when she’d arrived at school at 7 AM, her laptop bag was gone from her locker. She’d reported it to the office, but the school had told her there was no record of a stolen bag in the security footage. She’d spent the next hour panicking, until she saw Margaret and Jake standing by the fountain, Margaret holding a navy blue laptop bag that matched Lila’s.
