The Life and Death of Lauren Conway: A Companion to Without Mercy Read Online Free PDF

the dorm.
    With an I-was-only-trying-to-help shrug and that bland, uncomfortable smile that allowed a glimpse of her too small teeth, Nona slipped through the open door to the dorm.
    “Grrr.” Lucy glared at Nona’s back as they followed the supercilious girl inside and all of them headed up the stairs. “Who asked for her opinion anyway?” She said it loud enough for Nona and everyone around them to hear.
    “She’s such a poser,” Nell whispered as they reached the second floor.
    With one last haughty look over her shoulder, Nona peeled off on the second floor. The metal door banged shut behind her, echoing through the staircase.
    Lucy, who was always a little nervous anyway, seemed to have taken Nona’s well-placed barb to heart. “You know, I hate to admit it, but she’s right. If I love him, I should be able to trust Brad. I should.”
    “He has to earn it.” Banjo walked up the final flight of steps, her guitar in its camouflage case across her back. “Haven’t you been listening in group? Isn’t that what we all have to do? Earn trust? Earn respect?” Her green eyes twinkled beneath the shag of her bangs. “Such horse shit.” She headed into her room and the lock clicked loudly behind her.
    Lauren left Lucy fretting about Brad’s wandering eye as she unlocked her own door and slipped into the room. Everything looked the same as when she’d left. Her pillow was still wadded in the corner of the bed, the impression of her body where she’d leaned against it still visible and all of the papers, books and pens she’d left on her desk were in the exact same position. Her laptop was still on, an open invitation if anyone was looking. The images running across its monitor were pictures of Lauren in various activities.
    Everything appeared just as she’d left it.
    And it felt the room hadn’t been searched. She’d memorized the exact position of her things before leaving and with her nearly photographic memory, she could ascertain if anything had been disturbed.
    It hadn’t.
    Nor was there any odd scent, no residual evidence that an intruder had stepped into her supposedly private domain.
    Fleetingly she wondered what neat-nick, by-the-rules Dean Burdette would think of the messy room. No doubt she’d have the hissy fit of all hissy fits.
    Too bad.
    Lauren had more important things to think about. But she couldn’t let on that she was worried; she had to play the game and allow whoever was on the other side of that hidden camera to think nothing was out of the ordinary.
    Acting as if she hadn’t a care in the world, she slid onto her desk chair, picked up her lit book with its dog-eared page of Beowulf and placing one heel on her bed, crossing her legs and settled in to study. Or at least pretended to for the next forty-five minutes. She didn’t care about Grendel dying in agony or how she was supposed to write an essay on the monster’s role in the epic poem. Not tonight, not while unseen eyes were noiselessly observing her every move. Aware of the hidden camera, she flipped the pages, but didn’t read a word. She couldn’t. Not when she thought back to chemistry class and her sudden bit of insight that she was a target. His target.
    What a fool she’d been.
    Hoping to block the camera’s view with her body, she closed her textbook with one hand and opened the bottom drawer of her desk with the other. As she pulled out a box of markers, she let her fingers scrape the bottom of the drawer above, knocking down the tiny flash drive she’d stashed there while she had been in the bathroom showering earlier.
    Thank God it was still there!
    Usually, she kept the drive with her at all times, sometimes tucked into the ripped seam of her bra, other times in an empty shampoo bottle, still others stashed in an empty insertion tube for a tampon, but she hadn’t wanted to take a chance that the moisture in the shower room would destroy it tonight, nor that she might be searched before the prayer meeting