It made me want to take it back.

The really interesting part was that, thanks to the roses on the stickers, the whole school was talking about the Red Rose Returner—seriously, in capital letters. The conversations would totally dissipate if Hennigan came anywhere near—and man, he was patrolling the hallways constantly—but everyone was whispering about us . . . me . . . like we were heroes. Hardly anyone grumbled about the assumption that the Returner was probably also the thief. Like it didn’t matter now that stuff was coming back.

There were a lot of interesting theories, ranging from the thief-slash-Returner being the ancient school janitor, Mr. Benson, to the wildest one, that it was Mr. Hennigan himself and that his rages against it were just to keep himself out of the spotlight. Unfortunately, the rumors about a senior trying to atone for high-school sins before graduation—the ones that made me worry for Khail and some of his teammates—were still the most popular. And the most logical.

“Would you turn them in if you found out who it was?” I asked our lunch table two days later, in what I hoped was an innocent tone.

“Are you kidding?” Wilson said. “And get lynched by the rest of the school? No way. Whoever this Red Returner guy is, he’s doing everybody a favor.”

“I would so make out with him,” Jasmine said a little dreamily, stroking a keychain rabbit’s foot she’d gotten back in the Christmas-tree stunt. She seemed unnaturally attached to it. But hey, I don’t judge.

“What if it’s a girl?” I asked.

Sera kicked me under the table. “You just want to see Jasmine make out with a chick,” she said dryly.

“Sorry, I was totally kidding,” I said, defending myself.

“Well, no one knows who it is and even if they do, they’re not telling.” She stood without waiting for a response, and dumped most of her lunch in the garbage before striding out of the lunchroom.

The table was quiet and everyone’s eyes slowly turned toward me. This was a clearly a boyfriend-duty moment. “See ya,” I mumbled before throwing away a significant portion of my own lunch to follow Sera down the hallway.

I had to jog to catch up with her as she pushed through the doors at the back of the school and dropped down onto a cement parking barrier. I sat beside her, feeling more than a little awkward.

“Man, I wish I still smoked,” she said after a long sigh as she unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it into her mouth.

“You used to smoke?” I said, genuinely shocked.

She laughed tersely. “Like I said, I wasn’t always a good kid.”

The wind blew a few stray hairs across her face. I reached out and gently brushed them back. “Why are you so upset over this?”

She sighed again and rubbed at her temples for a few seconds. “I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “I really don’t. But Kimberlee Schaffer has to be involved with this. I know she’s dead, but somehow, she’s linked and I have . . .” She hesitated. “I have some bad history with her and now everything has returned to smack me in the face and I just can’t handle it all right now.”

“Well,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I knew too much, “it has to be over soon, right? She can’t possibly have stolen that much stuff. And then you can just forget about it, right?”

“No,” Sera said with startling firmness. “I have to find out who’s doing this. I have to.” She rested her forehead on her knees, already hugged tight against her chest. When she spoke again her voice was muffled. “Maybe she has, like, a cousin or something. There’s got to be a connection.”

I rubbed Sera’s arms gently, feeling like the worst boyfriend in the whole world. I was practically ready to confess. Even leaned my head down toward her ear when she sniffed and said, “I would rat the bastard out in a second if I knew. In a second!”

Laying my cheek on her back, I did the only thing I could.

I said nothing.

Twenty-Four

“DUDE, I’M TELLING YOU, it’ll work,” I said to Khail on the phone—as I drove toward his house, strangely enough—after school. “You’ve heard everyone talking. They love us!”

“I don’t know, man. Not many people can keep a secret. And you’re talking about trusting, like, five hundred of them all at once.”

“Yeah, but if we time it right, there’s no way we can get caught.”

I had come up with the idea while not paying nearly enough attention in calculus after lunch. We needed a way to return everything else in the cave all in one go so I could stop being a lying, dirtbag boyfriend. But other than Sera, the fact was that everyone was on our side.

And we could use that.

“If we start buzzing on Friday that there’s going to be a big return on Monday, everyone will do our work for us over the weekend.”

“Yeah, but then Hennigan’ll lock down the school. He’ll probably patrol it himself just to catch us.”

“But the drop-off point doesn’t have to be at the school. That’s the beauty of it. We start the buzz and Hennigan will find out. He’ll put loads of pressure on the school, but it won’t be at the school.” I waited for a second for effect. I think I inherited my mother’s affinity for drama and was only now seeing it. “It’ll be at Hennigan’s house.”

“What? Are you trying to get caught?”

“No, seriously. That’s the one place that Hennigan would never expect. I heard from some guys in English that he lives just a block or so away from school, and Kimberlee’s following him home today to make sure. But if it’s true, kids could totally storm the place during lunch and Hennigan wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.”