I Dare You

by Jeff Ross

  Copyright © Jeff Ross 2021

  Published in Canada and the United States in 2021 by Orca Book Publishers.

  orcabook.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: I dare you / Jeff Ross.

  Names: Ross, Jeff, 1973- author.

  Series: Orca soundings.

  Description: Series statement: Orca soundings

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210095423 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021009544X |

  ISBN 9781459828018 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459828025 (PDF) |

  ISBN 9781459828032 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8635.O6928 I2 2021 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951469

  Summary: In this high-interest accessible novel for teen readers, amateur filmmaker Rainey has to deal with the aftermath of a prank gone wrong.

  Orca Book Publishers is committed to reducing the consumption of nonrenewable resources in the making of our books. We make every effort to use materials that support a sustainable future.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Tanya Trafford

  Design by Ella Collier

  Cover photography by GettyImages/Davil Wall (front) and

  Shutterstock.com/Krasovski Dmitri (back)

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  24 23 22 21 • 1 2 3 4

  Orca Book Publishers is proud of the hard work our authors do and of the important stories they create. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or did not check it out from a library provider, then the author has not received royalties for this book. The ebook you are reading is licensed for single use only and may not be copied, printed, resold or given away. If you are interested in using this book in a classroom setting, we have digital subscriptions with multi user, simultaneous access to our books, or classroom licenses available for purchase. For more information, please contact digital@orcabook.com.

  ivaluecanadianstories.ca

  To my parents

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  We thought it would be funny.

  “Keep the camera low. Try to get the middle of people. No faces,” Jordan said. “Make sure you get the school sign in a bunch.”

  I tilted the tiny screen so it was facing up, then held the camera low around my waist.

  There were about fifty kids across the street, waiting for buses outside our town’s only private high school.

  “Remember the plan?” Jordan asked. I nodded, trying to keep my attention on the screen and not shift the angle. “Make sure once we start whaling on one another, you don’t get our faces.”

  “If I do, I can fix it in post.”

  “Post?” Rowan said. “What the fuck’s post?”

  “Post-production. Like, where I’ll edit the video and stuff.”

  Rowan looked annoyed by this.

  “Better to get it out fast and make sure it looks real,” Jordan said.

  “It will,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’re good at this shit, aren’t you.”

  I checked the screen again.

  “So I should punch you in the face, right?” Rowan said.

  Rowan has one of those big round heads with a short tuft of hair on top. Jordan, on the other hand, is your regular square-jawed athletic type. Styled and stiff black hair. Bright blue eyes.

  “No, don’t fucking punch me in the face. Just make it look like you are.”

  “I’ll try, but I ain’t no stuntman.”

  As Jordan and Rowan walked down the block to cross the street, I moved into position. Jordan had handed me this camera an hour earlier, and I was still trying to figure out how everything worked.

  The pickup area for the buses was crammed between the street and a brick-rimmed flower garden. This meant the fifty or so kids waiting for buses were packed in close to one another. So when Jordan and Rowan rolled into the middle of them, kids started tripping over one another trying to spread out. I moved, keeping the camera low and marking a time where the crowd was visible but what Jordan and Rowan were doing was out of frame.

  I could start the video right at this spot when I began editing. As I moved closer, the garbled words of the kids became clearer. If anyone said anything clearly enough to be heard, I would make it more garbled. Before I even got to the curb, half a dozen kids had their phones up, filming. Jordan and Rowan were keeping it tight though. They kept pulling each other into headlocks and flailing around so their faces were always either down or turned to the weed garden.

  “What the hell, guys!” A big dude wearing a tank top and shorts, even though it was just the beginning of spring, grabbed at Jordan and Rowan, trying, I guess, to separate them. Other than this one dude, though, no one else stepped in.

  Sirens rattled the air. They were close. They likely didn’t have anything to do with us, but it added to the drama. Jordan gave Rowan an extra bang in the stomach with his knee, shoved him away and took off running across the street. Rowan went down on the ground, then jumped up and ran along the sidewalk away from the school. The big guy took a couple of steps after Rowan, then stopped. I made sure I got the school’s sign in the frame one last time before I shut off the camera and backed away. As I was crossing the street, I heard someone say, “Who the hell were those guys?”

  I walked the block and a half to where we’d left Jordan’s car and sat down on a bench. There were kids everywhere. Along with the high school, there was an elementary school just down the street. I hadn’t been sitting for more than a minute before the lights flashed on Jordan’s BMW and the doors unlocked. Without looking up, I opened the back passenger door and got in.

  “Did you get it?” Jordan asked as he pulled away from the curb. He was breathing heavily, his face a bright red.

  “Yeah, it’ll look good.”

  He drove us two blocks north, turned left and there was Rowan, sitting on the bleachers of a ball diamond. Rowan swung off the bleachers and opened the passenger door before the car had come to a full stop.

  “Did you get it?”

  “I think it’ll look legit,” I said.

  “What about our faces?”

  “None as far as I could tell.” I’d already hooked up the camera to my laptop and transferred the file. I was scanning through the footage and hadn’t found any spots where you could clearly see Rowan or Jordan. They could be any two high-school kids.

  “What about everyone with their cells?” Rowan asked.

  “We’re two white guys outside a private school. That’s about as anonymous as you can get,” Jordan said with a laugh. “How fast can you get that up?”

  “I’m working on it,” I said, slamming my teeth down on the repetition that was dying to come out. Working on it, working on it, working on it. I left it to ride in my mind, trying to push the words out by focusing more closely on the screen. They kept swirl
ing, but I was determined not to tic out right then.

  “Does it matter where we upload it from?” Jordan asked.

  “No. I use a VPN.”

  “Listen to this dark-web shit,” Rowan said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A virtual private network. It just means my location is hidden. It looks like I’m sending from somewhere in Alberta or whatever.” Whatever, whatever, whatever.

  “So you can get it circulating in a bunch of places right away?”

  “Yeah, it’s not going to take much editing.” I whistled and made that little grinding motion with my molars, and instantly I felt better. Evened out. If only for a moment. The radio was playing loudly enough that Jordan and Rowan could pretend they hadn’t heard me.

  We pulled up outside a café, and I shut the lid on my laptop.

  “You have the file on your computer?” Jordan asked.

  “For sure,” I said, and then that started circling. For sure, for sure, for surrrrre. I waved my hand a little, trying to calm my mind. To push away the desire to repeat those words. This whole situation was really heightening my anxiety, and when that happened I ticced out more.

  “We’ll take the camera back to Best Buy right now,” Jordan said. I handed him the camera and he slid it into its box along with the transfer cable. “See you tomorrow, bruh. This is going to be awesome.”

  “You’ll see it start circulating soon,” I said.

  “Take it easy, Rainman,” Rowan said as I was closing the door.

  Chapter Two

  People call me Rainman partly because my name is Rainey and partly because of that old movie with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. I don’t actually mind it. If nothing else, it gets the fact that I have Tourette’s syndrome out in the open when I meet people. Someone introduces me as Rainman, and the new person will say, “Like in that movie?” And I get to explain that my name is Rainey and, yeah, kind of like the movie except the guy in the movie was autistic and I have Tourette’s, which is totally different, but like the guy in the movie I’m a genius, and then we all laugh until I start ticcing out.

  I wish I could stop having words and phrases rolling out of me all the time. I mean, I know I’m doing it. The words pop into my head and something tells me I have to get them out. I can sometimes hold them back for a while, but only for so long. When I was younger my parents made me go see psychiatrists and speech therapists. That went on for a few years, until they either got tired of bothering or figured it wasn’t causing me any harm. I’ve never had swear words be a problem. Even when I tic out on the last word spoken, I don’t end up swearing.

  I don’t mean that I don’t ever swear. Sometimes I do. Who doesn’t?

  I have good friends. I get decent grades. And yeah, I’m embarrassed by it now and then. Would I like it to go away? Sure. But then, who would I be without it?

  I’m a sophomore now. I’ve been in school with Jordan since kindergarten, and we’ve always been friends. Rowan moved to our area a year ago, and the two of them became inseparable immediately. It might have been because of the wrestling team, or maybe they just hit it off. Who knows? I didn’t feel threatened or anything, because that would be super weird.

  The wrestling team was all I could think about with this whole fake fight scene. Then I looked it up, and wrestling season was over and William Fairfax Private School didn’t even have a team. The only sport running was basketball, and it was still at the beginning of the season. Plus, the Fairfax team was in a completely different division. I could have asked Jordan what they were doing, I guess.

  Maybe I should have.

  I set my bag and computer down at an empty table and asked the woman sitting nearby to keep an eye on it. She gave me the nod we coffee-shop dwellers give one another. I went to the counter and ordered a decaf coffee. I don’t know if caffeine affects my tics or not, but I decided ages ago not to risk things that aren’t worth it. So regular coffee might taste better, but I’ll never know.

  Back at the table I settled in and quickly finished trimming the video. I made certain the beginning was abrupt. Like I was someone who’d just seen something and was fumbling with my phone. I watched the whole video without sound to make certain Jordan’s and Rowan’s faces never showed.

  Then I listened without watching it, making sure I didn’t hear anything but shouts and grunts and curses. Jordan said it had to seem like they were from Fairfax. So someone saying, “Who are these guys?” wouldn’t work.

  Finally I watched and listened to the video. It played really well. It looked like a cell-phone video, but there was something a little better about it. Like, I got the angles right, and the scuffle seemed way more violent than it had in reality. I set the editing program to render the video, then opened Hootsuite so I could post the video to all the different social media accounts I’d created over the previous year.

  My interest in video started with one of those “What do you want to be when you grow up?” things at school. A bunch of people had come to our school to talk about various careers. Most of the kids weren’t serious about it at all. They just went and hung out with the guy from the video-game company. There was a woman from a public-relations firm that focused on a client’s online presence. Her talk was about how social media presence is everything these days. How traditional media is dying. How people don’t watch TV or read newspapers. Everything is online, and it all needs to be delivered, discussed and dissected in real time. At the end of the talk, I kept asking her more questions.

  When time ran out and she had to go, she said, “Honestly, what I like most about this job is how I can control a message. We really think about what goes out. Once the message is out there, it’s our job to track it. We make certain that what we want to say and how we want it to be seen stays clear. If it starts to change, like if people alter our message somehow, or put up contrary opinions, we’re ready to reinforce our message and set out to make their message look false.” She got really juiced talking about all this and eventually, in quiet tones, admitted that every public-relations firm has numerous social media accounts under different names so messages can be bounced around. “It would take a lot of digging to prove that, though, so don’t bother. And I never said this.”

  I was already into film, though living in Resurrection Falls, I wasn’t confident I’d become a famous director someday. I just wanted to get better at filming and editing. But this whole controlling-the-message thing really grabbed me as well. I started creating different social media accounts just to see how hard it would be to do. I gave them each a different personality with their own pictures and avatars. Based on the type of person I’d created, I subscribed them to different groups and interests. I learned a ton about politics and sports. But mostly what I learned was how easily people get crazy about the stupidest things.

  It was hilarious a lot of the time. I’d go into one of these discussion boards, put up an opposing view and then watch the carnage. It was pretty sad how easy it was to get people riled up.

  So in the coffee shop that day, I set three accounts of fake local students to comment on how crazy the fight at Fairfax was. I had them asking if anyone had filmed it. I got the video up on a video channel, then released a slightly shorter version on a couple of other sites. After that I liked, commented on and tagged the video through several other accounts. Finally I used one of my “mom” accounts to post the video on a local moms’ board, knowing it would get a lot of traction there.

  Once everything was in motion, I went to the counter to get something to eat. I had to wait behind three people before I could order a cinnamon bun and refill my coffee. Back at my computer five minutes later, I checked in on my accounts. The number of likes and retweets was spinning. The numbers kept rising. I quickly scanned them. One early comment bothered me. I’m a senior and don’t know who these guys are.

  I went to one of my Fairfax accounts, logged in and replied, You know everyone in the school ? LOL! I waited and watched.

 
A few seconds later the same person replied with No, but I know a lot of ppl.

  Someone else wrote, Isnt that Dylan or Devon? Grade 10? (I think). I didn’t reply to this. I just waited and, sure enough, someone else wrote, Not Devon, but I think grade 10. A few more replies popped up and then people started posting their own videos. I tagged all the ones where the guys’ faces were fully obscured. Jordan and Rowan had really done a good job of keeping themselves turned so that no one could get a clear shot.

  The videos were all the same. The same girl going, “Oh my god, what are they doing?” The same big guy coming in and grabbing at Jordan and Rowan. I mean, of course they were. This all really happened. Still, it was cool to see the different angles. I wondered what it would be like to put them together and make a full fight-scene film. I downloaded a bunch of them in case I wanted to try to piece that together someday for fun.

  I waited until the first post had been liked over a hundred times and the video had more than fifty comments, then shut down my computer, finished my cinnamon roll and started to think about what we could do next.

  Chapter Three

  By that evening the video had gone viral. A local newscast played parts of it, connecting the fight with a growing “unease” among teens. The clip talked about how we, as teens, are disaffected, bored, unconnected and lost. Fighting in front of a school was happening because we wanted to feel something.

  It was all bullshit, and hilarious, but I saw the look on my mom’s face after she showed me the clip, and I decided not to laugh.

  “Is this happening at your school?” she asked.

  “Not that I’ve seen. But I pretty much keep my head down and mind my own business.”

  “So you haven’t seen anyone fighting at the school?”

  She looked so concerned. It was sad.

  “That’s the private school, right? Fairfax? One of the kids must have challenged the other to a trust-fund-off,” I said. She didn’t seem amused, although my dad laughed at that one. “No, honestly, kids mostly get along at my school. It’s easier that way.” This was mostly true. I mean, my school was like any school. There were little groups that hated on one another, individuals who got angry with other individuals for little or no reason. But it was mostly a peaceful place.