We Were Liars | ONC 2020 ✔

Lab Rats

TWO WEEKS AFTER

Lark stared at me like I was a two-headed sea serpent, her mouth falling open.

Her gaze shifted to my outstretched hand. She gingerly stuck out her palm and shook. Her skin was soft and smooth, almost like a baby's. "Yes," she answered, her composure regained and her voice snooty. "How did you know?"

"Nat called you that the other day."

Her jade eyes flitted over my form with increasing interest, her pale hand lifting from the handshake and fluttering to her mouth. "You're the kid Nathan was beating up on. The rat." She didn't say the word like it was a curse, but with a strange sort of fascination---like I was an intriguing experiment she wished to hold down on an operating table and dissect.

I swallowed nervously. "Yes, I am. You're his girlfriend, aren't you?" I was making assumptions---something I rarely did, but I was desperate to get 'Death' off my back. Lark could be the missing key, the link needed to prove Nat's guilt.

She tossed her ponytail off her shoulder, tapping the side of her face with one long fingernail. "I suppose you could call us that."

Perfect. She'll know something for sure.

"Did he ever say anything about---" I started, but she instantly cut me off.

"Oh, wait, I suppose I shouldn't be talking to you. Nathan hates you, you know. You ruined like, his only source of income." She pouted. "He rants about how much he wants to kill you a lot." I couldn't stop the shudder that travelled through my entire body at her words. Nat wants to kill me. Before I could ask her any more questions, Lark turned away. "I mean, Nathan isn't the best boyfriend ever, but he'll be angry if he sees me talking to you, and I'm not really in the mood to get dumped."

"But we're lab partners!" I protested.

"Which is something I can't help, but whether I speak to you or not is something I can help," she said with a casual shrug of her slim shoulders.

"We'll have to speak eventually when we perform joint experiments," I asseverated. I had to talk to her. She was, in this moment, my only hope to stop the murders.

"Until then..." Lark performed the motion of zipping her lips, locking them, and throwing away the key. I stifled a groan. She would no doubt keep her mouth shut from now on. She didn't seem like the loose-lipped type of girlfriend, unfortunately for me. What made it worse was that she appeared extremely loyal to her drug-dealing boyfriend, so I couldn't very well tell her Nat was a murderer in an attempt to sway more information over to my side.

As I tinkered around with the flasks in front of me, mixing chemicals accordingly in complete silence, a sinking sensation pooled in the pit of my stomach. 'Death' hadn't messaged me since this morning---or so I believed, but perhaps I had missed a message. After all, I'd left the phone in my backpack for a while during lunch. The feeling was undescribable, but somehow, somehow, I knew something was going to go wrong.

I released the flasks and yanked the burner from my pocket, ignoring Lark's shocked expression. Just as I had feared, six new messages, sent at twelve thirty-five in the afternoon---two hours earlier---was displayed proudly on the screen. I clicked on them as fast as I possibly could, my eyes scanning the texts.

Why don't you ever reply to me, Canterbury? That's not very nice. It's only polite to reply to someone's messages. Remember your manners! Haha

But anyhow, I've got something coming up during...what class do you have? Never mind. Just wait for, hmm, the end of eighth period, I believe. It'll be awesome.