Cypress Alley

Chapter 8

I threw my bag into my locker tiredly. My bag was filled to the point of bursting with history revision, books, textbooks and whatnot. I was aiming for an A this time, or my GPA would be under serious threat. Eliza, on the other hand, didn't seem so worried about the test - her bag only contained her lunch and her casebook. Although, despite her fairly light load, Eliza looked much more tired than I was. 

"You know what, Elijah?" she said. "You'd make my life so much easier if you just agreed to follow Wendy at lunch."

"Not this again," I sighed. Eliza had been arguing about this ever since she woke me up at 4:45 am. "I'm not going to put any effort into following her today. I have a test to study for and unlike you, I actually care about my grades."

"But can you study near Wendy?"

"Fine," I grumbled, then added quietly, "but that doesn't mean I'll be keeping an eye on her - or anyone else for that matter."

Eliza skipped off to maths, clutching her notebook tightly against her chest, while I filled my arms with sheets of revision. Hopefully, I would get some quiet time during maths to focus on my revision.

The hour passed by so slowly that I felt like it should have been the end of the day. Thankfully,  Ms Garcia took no notice of me in class, and I didn't get in trouble for not doing my worksheets.  Eliza met me outside our science classroom with furrowed eyebrows.

"Wendy did absolutely nothing in maths," she huffed. 

I smiled sheepishly. "I didn't do much work either. I tried to study for history but it's so boring I thought I would fall aslee-"

"No! Not like that!" she hissed. "I mean she didn't do anything suspicious. She was doing her work all right, but it was just maths."

I sighed loudly enough for Eliza to hear. "You can't expect her to be plotting her next murder 24/7." Eliza's eyes lit up and I immediately regretted what I said.

"Her next murder?" Eliza asked slyly. "Her next murder?"

"I mean...." I trailed off. Eliza would never let me hear the end of that. "I mean if she was the murderer."

"And that's what we'll find out," she declared. She looked around excitedly. "I wonder who we should interrogate first."

"How about no one?" 

"We need some alibis, and we have to find out if anyone was anywhere suspicious that night or doesn't have an alibi."

"Ok..." 

Mrs Hunter led our class into the science lab. Eliza scooted her chair over to the corner of our desk. That way, she was close enough to Veronica and her friends to listen to their conversation. I sat with my back against the wall, as far as I could get from them. But they were speaking so loudly that I could still hear them.

"Dude... that party was sick!" said a boy whose name I didn't know. Since the semester had just started, I was still getting to know the new people in my class.

"Thanks," said a boy named Anthony.

"So, Ant had a party," whispered Eliza. "But when?"

"Who?" I asked. What kind of a name was Ant?

"Anthony," replied Eliza. "You see the boy with the half shaven, half bird-nest hair and the square glasses?"

"I know who he is," I said. "I just didn't know you called him Ant."

"Everyone calls him that," said Eliza, as if I should have known that. I rolled my eyes. Eliza leaned over slightly to continue eavesdropping, even though I could hear perfectly well from where I was sitting.