Truly Devious

Stevie takes the Ellingham coach into nearby Burlington to meet her parents. David is also on the coach, and she notices that he is well-dressed for the occasion and looking rather handsome. He asks Stevie if she wants to talk about what happened between them the other night, but Stevie tries to brush him off, still embarrassed by their makeout session. When the coach arrives in Burlington and Stevie gets out to meet her parents, she is shocked when David introduces himself to them and asks to join them on their outing. Stevie’s parents clearly “[like] what they [see]” (306) because they welcome David to join them. Stevie is furious but hides her anger and tries to be on her best behavior.

Meanwhile, at the restaurant, Stevie is annoyed with David, who is “charm[ing] [her parents] half to death” (308). When asked about his parents, David claims that his mom is a pilot and his dad runs a fertilizer plant. Stevie doesn’t believe him, but her parents seem to buy the story. David manages to calm Stevie’s parents down about the death of Hayes. By the end of the dinner, Stevie realizes that her parents will let her stay at Ellingham because they like David and think she is in a relationship with him.

On the coach back to Ellingham, Stevie lashes out at David. Her parents only let her stay because they think Stevie “landed some rich, preppy boyfriend” (312). She calls David a liar for making up stories about his parents, and David admits that he and Stevie both have complicated situations with their parents, and he was only trying to help. They arrive at Minerva, but Stevie finds herself drawn to David, and she goes to his room. He tells Stevie that he likes her and thinks they are similar. They kiss again, but Pix again interrupts them by knocking on David’s door. He tells Stevie to hide in the closet, and he goes with Pix, who says that Charles needs to talk to David about something.

 Stevie is left alone in David’s closet, and she starts snooping through his things. David’s nice possessions convince Stevie he is wealthy, and she looks through his laptop. Suddenly, David returns and is furious with Stevie for going through his belongings. When Stevie says she just wants to know the truth about his parents, David replies that his parents are dead and orders her to leave his room. In 1936, Robert Mackenzie is questioned. Robert explains that Mrs. Ellingham was a social woman, and being stuck on the mountain for so long was making her restless and causing friction in her marriage with Albert. He notes that the Truly Devious letter was sent directly to the house, not to Ellingham’s business office, and he truly believes that Iris, Alice, and Dottie are all dead.

In the days following Hayes’s death, life at Ellingham goes on. Security increases around campus, but the common belief is that Hayes died in “an accident of his own making” (330). After all, his prints are found on Janelle’s ID and the golf cart used to move the dry ice. David refuses to talk to Stevie, and when Janelle confronts Stevie and asks about what happened between her and David, Stevie refuses to talk. One day, Stevie decides to approach Hayes’s ex-girlfriend, Gretchen. Gretchen is devastated by the loss of Hayes, but she is more angry than anything because she thinks she will be called “a monster” if she speaks ill of the dead. Gretchen explains that Hayes borrowed $500 from her last spring, and she confronted Hayes about paying her back because

Hayes’s YouTube show was profitable. She says that when she and Hayes were dating, he conned her into doing a lot of his homework, and then she learned that several people were doing Hayes’s work for him. Gretchen broke up with Hayes after he threatened to plant drugs on a security guard who caught them sneaking off campus, and Hayes gave an “Oscar-worthy” performance that “came out of nowhere” (340) to convince the other students that Gretchen cheated on him. Stevie asks Gretchen if she thinks Hayes wrote The End of It All, and Gretchen says no because Hayes never did his own work.

Stevie returns to Minerva and finds Pix preparing to pack up Hayes’s room. Stevie realizes that Hayes’s things will soon be gone, which means that a mountain of potential evidence is about to disappear. She offers to get started for Pix, and once Pix leaves, Stevie takes Hayes’s room key and starts snooping through his belongings. She finds entire walls covered in fan art sent to him, and she calls Hayes’s room “a tribute to Hayes” (346). She finds Hayes’s laptop, which has an unusual scrape down the front, and when she looks through his files, she realizes that Hayes was out of any good ideas for shows. She learns that The End of It All was written on June 4th, and Hayes lied about writing it at home in Florida. The show was written at Ellingham, and Stevie wonders why Hayes would lie. She sneaks out of his room, but David catches her in the hallway. Stevie tries to apologize, but David refuses to forgive her. Stevie tries to tell David that Hayes didn’t write the show that made him famous, but when she tells him about Gretchen and what she learned about Hayes’s behavior last year, David accuses her of “making a hobby out of the death of [her] classmate” (351). He mocks Stevie for suggesting that Hayes was murdered. On “THE BATT REPORT,” Germaine Batt publishes the story of Hayes Major’s tragic death and the effects of his loss on the community of Ellingham Academy.