And Then I Found Out the Truth by Jennifer Sturman Page A

serial.”
    “What’s a serial?” I asked, since Natalie had been struck temporarily mute.
    “Like, a guy who’ll be really serious about one person, but then he dumps that person after a week and moves on to the next person, which will last a week, and then he dumps her and moves on to the next person. And so on. A serial.”
    “Are you absolutely sure?” I asked Gwyneth. “We’re talking about the same Edward Vargas?”
    “He goes to Dalton, right?” she asked Natalie.
    Natalie nodded, still mute.
    Gwyneth shrugged again. “Same guy.”
    Natalie’s face had gone so white it was starting to scare me. She was even paler than Gwyneth. Meanwhile, Gwyneth seemed unaware of having single-handedly reduced Natalie’s entire world to jagged shards of dashed hope.
    “It might just be rumors,” I rushed to tell Natalie before she could pass out or anything. “You know how little things can spin out of control. Somebody hears something and tells someone else and the next thing you know there’s a story out there that’s totally different from reality. It’s not real evidence. It’s hearsay.”
    “Hearsay,” Natalie repeated softly.
    Then she said it again, more firmly this time, and it was like the word suddenly switched on her inner prosecutor.
    The color came rushing back to her face, and she pushed her tray to the side and grabbed a pad of graph paper and a mechanical pencil from her bag. “I want the details,” she said to Gwyneth. “Names, dates, known associates, suspected accomplices — anything you can give me about this allegedly serial behavior.”
    And it was like we’d accidentally stumbled onto Gwyneth’s secret area of expertise. She reeled off who had done what to whom and when and how they’d done it like she had a database stored in her head. It was also the only topic I’d ever seen animate her. Her face actually moved more than the bare minimum required for words to pass from her lips as she told Natalie everything she’d ever heard about Edward Vargas.
    Which turned out to be a lot. According to Gwyneth, Edward had been cutting a swath through the city’s female population since the sixth grade. I couldn’t imagine how he’d found time to do all of the things she said he’d done when he was so busy with MIT and Caltech and everything, but apparently he was an accomplished multitasker.
    When Gwyneth was finally tapped out, Natalie leaned back in her chair and studied the paper before her, shaking her head in stunned disbelief. “The data here is so inconsistent with what I observed on an empirical basis when we met. He seemed so genuine.”
    “What are you going to do?” I asked.
    Even Gwyneth was curious enough to ask. “Yeah. What?”
    “I don’t know,” said Natalie. Her voice sounded strangely unfamiliar to me, and I realized it was because I’d never heard her be indecisive before.
    When she spoke again, though, it was with her usual crisp certainty. “But I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

Twelve
    Sadly, while Gwyneth was full of information about anything to do with people hooking up in Manhattan, selected parts of the Hamptons, Palm Beach, and Aspen, she was useless when it came to more urgent matters like what might have happened to Quinn in Mr. Seton’s office that morning.
    But that didn’t stop her from thinking we were better friends now than ever before, and when Mr. Dudley canceled class, citing the number of absent students and an unspecified conflict, which probably meant he had an audition, she followed me up to the library without asking where I was going or why.
    Prescott’s Upper School was housed in two adjacent brick-and-stone town houses, and the library stretched across what had once been the attics of both buildings. Now the space was bright and modern, with skylights in the sloping ceilings and study carrels tucked in among the bookshelves. It would’ve been a pleasant place just to hang out and read, but Gwyneth peeled off without