And Then I Found Out the Truth by Jennifer Sturman

compromising service to everyone else in the neighborhood. By Tuesday morning, the administration had located the server, still in the storage closet but plugged in and humming with so much activity it was practically smoking, and by Tuesday afternoon, they’d started identifying the students involved and alerting their parents.
    As school scandals went, this was pretty major — it definitely accounted for the whispering the previous day. It also explained Patience’s bizarre behavior. She hadn’t been on her way to see Dr. Penske — she’d been on her way to see Mr. Seton, the headmaster, to try to prevent Grey from being expelled.
    And the scandal was still unfolding. Mr. Seton was determined to root out anybody who’d had even the slightest involvement.
    “It’s like a total witch hunt,” Gwyneth told me. “Seton interrogated me for an hour yesterday, but Grey and I haven’t been speaking since he stepped on my Tom Ford sunglasses, so I was completely out of the loop.”
    Meanwhile, the two guys in the black suits were from a computer security firm. The site had already been shut down, but they were supposed to be analyzing the network traffic and data logs and all of the other digital evidence to see if they could identify additional culprits.
    The bell rang then, and we headed off to our separate classrooms. The whispering in the hallways continued between classes, but now that I knew what it was about, it didn’t bother me. Only when Natalie and I got to lunch and were talking the whole thing over did I give it any more thought.
    I had to admit, I never would’ve guessed Grey was capable of something like this. I could count the interactions I’d had with him on one hand, and I didn’t need more than part of another hand to count the total number of words he’d said on all of those occasions put together. And while getting the poker site up and running might not require a lot of speech, it would definitely require more than staring idly into space.
    But as Natalie pointed out, Grey was probably only a follower in this situation. “And it’s not just Grey,” she said. “The dubious legality of online gambling, particularly targeting the high school demographic, and the decision to use Prescott resources were substantial design flaws, but otherwise this was a well-conceptualized operation. The reason Headmaster Seton is still rounding people up is that nobody they’ve caught so far has the intellect and personal magnetism to pull this off.”
    “Who does?” I asked. “Have the intellect and personal magnetism, I mean.”
    “I can’t say for sure, not without proof, but I have a theory,” said Natalie.
    “What’s your theory?”
    She gave me an odd look. “Can’t you guess?”
    “No,” I said.
    “You can’t?” “I can’t.”
    “You’re absolutely certain you can’t?”
    I felt like I was talking to Gwyneth again. “Absolutely certain.”
    “Think about the people who’ve already been caught. What do they all have in common?”
    “I don’t really know any of them, except Grey, and I wouldn’t know him if we weren’t related. And I have my doubts about that, but nobody will let me test his DNA.”
    “You don’t need to know them well or be related to them — you just need to know there’s only one person who’s sharp enough to think this up and who they’d all follow off a cliff, and you must know who that is, because you’d follow that person off a cliff yourself.”
    I could hear Charley’s voice in my ear, asking what following someone off a cliff actually meant — was it a real cliff, and if so, what was at the bottom, because if it was water or a stack of mattresses or a trampoline that was one thing, but if it wasn’t, that would be something completely different — but I tried to concentrate. I couldn’t imagine following anybody at Prescott anywhere, except Natalie, and, obviously, Qui —
    I didn’t consciously finish my thought, but the answer must have