Outside my building, on the stone stoop, four shadowy figures loitered. When the tallest spotted me, they all turned to stare, like I was what they’d been waiting for.
I was afraid it was Dylan, Mike, and the other Crave jocks, ready to stab me to death with a new “1” pin. I was too tired to run, though.
As I got closer, even though they were trying as hard as they could to look tough, I had to breathe a sigh of relief.
“Moore, Guy, Drik, and Mason,” I said, walking up. “What the hell are you—”
“Shh!” Moore said, waving me closer. He had a black case in his hands.
Drik, who had on a scarf and long coat that made him look like a Dr. Who wannabe, looked around nervously as Mason hissed, “Keep it down.” A thick kerchief covered most of her head, almost like a burka, only there were little Pokemon printed on it.
“Fine,” I whispered. “What’s up with your bad secretive selves?”
Guy had on a real black leather jacket, and I had to admit, he almost pulled off the tough-guy thing. He looked me over like he was frisking me with his eyes.
“It’s true. The pin’s gone,” he said to the others.
“You did quit,” Moore said with a thin smile.
“Were you at the hospital? How’s the girl?” Mason asked.
“Erica? Fine. She’s okay. What’s going on? Finally going to tell me what ‘Vanuatu’ means?”
Moore handed Drik the case. “Something big is going down. We want to make sure someone other than us knows about it.”
“Someone we can trust. In case something happens to us,” Guy intoned mysteriously.
“Happens to you? The only thing that would happen to you guys is you’d get abducted by aliens at a Battlestar Galactica convention.”
All four eyed me. “This is serious,” Moore said. “Serious.” He said it slowly, to make it clear they wouldn’t put up with any more geek jokes. “It’s about what happened to Mr. Eldridge.”
I heard a laptop hard drive whir to life. Drik was booting Moore’s rig.
“You mean the accident?”
Moore’s face remained unmoved. “The police don’t think it was an accident.”
I furrowed my brow so hard I felt the skin at the back of my head tighten and pull. “Please. How do you know what the police think?”
“I maybe . . . sort of . . . hacked into their system,” Drik said as he spun the laptop toward me.
My eyes went wide. There on the screen, in glorious black and white, was a blurry video image of someone’s driveway.
Moore put his finger near the screen. “This is the footage the police are looking at from Mr. Eldridge’s security camera.”
My mouth got as round as a Cheerio. “How did you . . .?”
“We just did. Watch.”
Drik clicked and a figure dressed in black pants, shirt, and ski mask climbed over Mr. E’s fence. The figure fidgeted under the car, then slipped back over the fence. The clip was on a loop, and after a second, it played again.
“Holy crap!” I shouted.
“Indeed. No magic there. His brake line was cut,” Moore said. “Stupid amateur job. The police have no idea who that was, yet, but we’re going to do a big story about it in the school paper for our first issue.”
My eyes were glued to the screen as the figure slid under the car again. “Who is it?” I asked. “Dylan’s psychotic, but he’s way bigger than that. Wait. Can you zoom in on his feet?”
“His feet? Why?” Drik asked.
“Tell you in a minute.”
Moore nodded and Drik made a little square around the feet by dragging his finger across the touchpad, then clicked on a magnifying-glass icon a few times. The picture got bigger, but it was also getting all blocky. Even so, I thought I could see them pretty clearly: two shoelaces glowing so brightly they looked as if they’d been bleached.
It was Ethan.
14
Silly me. I was thinking we should go to the police, what with Ethan having attempted the murder of Mr. Eldridge and all.
When I suggested it, Drik immediately got a wild psycho look in his eyes and screeched, “No!” so loudly it echoed down the whole block. “Do you have any idea how illegal it is to hack into police files?”
I reached up to pat him on the shoulder. “A little perspective, okay? I’m pretty sure they’d make an exception if you helped solve an attempted murder.”
“First off, I didn’t say it was Ethan, you did. You say they’re shoelaces, but at that low resolution they could just be lines on his sneaker, or shadows from the fence,” Drik said.
“Really? What about the rest of you? Don’t any of you see the shoelaces?”
They all shrugged. The only real response I got was from Moore, who mumbled something like, “It really is hard to tell.”
“Fine!” I said. “I’ll go to the cops myself!”
Guy, who’d been leaning against the concrete banister, pushed himself up straight. “Let’s say you’re right, it is Ethan. Hey, I think it probably is, but do you really think the police will believe you about two blurry shoelaces when the student you’re accusing just stole your girlfriend? They’re still looking at you cross-eyed over the gym collapse.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me how that little problem could’ve been solved if you Pulitzer Prize winners had managed to publish one lousy issue!”
Moore shrugged guiltily. “The bottom line is we can’t prove it’s Ethan. And the only way we got Drik to show us their files in the first place was by swearing we wouldn’t go directly to the cops with anything we found.”
“Oh, great. Just great,” I said. “So what do we do?”
A low wind whipping around her headscarf, Mason exhaled through her mouth. “We can try to force the issue. We’ll finish our exposé, tell people how the grant was publicized the week before, how it was common knowledge Regis was having a flu epidemic . . .”
“And,” Moore added, “how an anonymous witness thinks they saw Ethan Skinson running away from Mr. Eldridge’s home the night of the accident, which is pretty much true. That may bring out more witnesses.”
“Just as long as no one mentions the security video,” Drik said.
“Look, I hate to be the one to point this out, again, but you’ve been working on that issue for months. With Eldridge in the hospital, you don’t even have an adviser. How are you actually going to print something now?”
Moore stiffened. “We still have access to the office. We’ll put it together after school tomorrow. Marathon session. Faking a purchase order to pay for the printing should be easy enough. We can have it online by midnight, and the print version all over school by morning. Fast enough for you?”
“And what are you going to do when the cops ask for the name of your witness?” I asked. “Or the Cravers show up to kick your asses for accusing their glorious leader?”
“Reporters never reveal sources. We’ll say our witness is afraid of the Crave and won’t come forward. The police probably haven’t released the tape because it’s so blurry, but this may make them think twice. At least it’ll come out that Eldridge was attacked,” Moore said.
“Caleb’s right, though,” Guy said. “There’ll be major blow-back from the Cravers.”
“Which is, like, more than half the school,” I mumbled. “And you don’t even need half the school for trouble. All you need is Dylan.”
Everyone got real quiet after that. A few of them looked like they were going to start sentences, but no one got a word out, until finally I said, “Look, Ethan’s a major asshole. I’ll do anything I can to help you take him down. I don’t care if the plan’s stupid or not. At least it’s a plan.”
Drik slapped his hand against his shoulder, then stuck his arm out at an angle. “We who are about to die, salute you, Caesar.”
“Dunne, we could use your help putting it together,” Moore said. “Providing an anonymous insider perspective . . .”
“Whatever,” I answe
red. “I’m tired. I’ll see you tomorrow after school. Bring your running shoes.”
When I finally got inside, Joey was sprawled on the couch, reading The Rule of Won. He looked up at me when I came in and shook his head.
“This is one steaming load of crap,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said as I closed the door.
“The girl worth it?”
“Turns out, no.”
He sat up. “Then what’d you read it for?”
“How else was I going to figure out it was a load of crap?”
He laughed. “It only took me the first page. Everything else okay?”
I thought for a second I could tell him about Ethan, but really, what could he do?
“Yeah, fine.”
He gave me a classic GP Joey look. “Why’re you lying?”
“I’m not!”
It was a reflexive response, but once I’d said it, I felt like I should stick to it.
There was no snappy comeback. He looked hurt.
Trying to change the subject, I asked, “How’s business?”
He narrowed his gaze and said, in a slightly higher-pitched voice that I think was supposed to be an imitation of mine, “Yeah, fine.”
I knew what I was supposed to say next. I was supposed to say, “Why’re you lying?” But I didn’t. I just headed into my room.
I had one hell of a time trying to get to sleep. The only thing that calmed me was remembering that Erica seemed okay, and was probably better off being out of school right now.
By the time I crawled into the kitchen to make myself breakfast, I was still thinking about asking Joey’s advice, but he’d already left.
Mom was still there, though. The sweet smell of brown-and-serve sausage filled the kitchen, and I heard the sizzle of frying eggs. She was making me breakfast.
With our schedules clashing, I hadn’t seen her for days. It dawned on me that while I’d been spending my time chanting for a murderous psycho, she had been working like crazy to pay the bills. I felt not so much stupid as guilty, like I should have been helping, or, God forbid, working myself, or at least focusing on school like she wanted me to, or at least making her breakfast.
The feeling worsened as I rode the bus alone. When I got to school, I felt like everyone just somehow magically knew I was involved in a plan to blow the whistle on their beloved Crave leader.
The stray looks kids gave me in the halls seemed piercing. Landon pointedly ignored me. At least Dylan didn’t come rushing up for a chant. When I passed him in the hall, he just touched two fingers to his eyes, then pointed at the spot on my collar where the pin used to be.
At lunch, I felt like a rat wandering into an aviary full of starving owls. Ethan, Vicky, Dylan, Mike, and Grace were all at the same table, hunched over and whispering. I couldn’t take it. I just grabbed an apple, turned around, and sat in the library pretending to read a magazine.
The rest of the day, wherever I went, I swore I could hear people whispering. I wanted to grab a random Craver and tell them exactly what was going on, but aside from getting Drik into trouble, I wasn’t sure they’d believe me. Some of them probably wouldn’t believe anything except what Ethan told them.
Isn’t that my wallet in your hand, Ethan? With my money and my ID in it?
Uh, nope!
My mistake. It must be yours.
The second the last bell rang, I was out of the classroom, eager to reach the trailers without being seen. As I raced down the hall, I kept looking over my shoulder, watching people spill out of the rooms, making sure no one was eyeing me. I figured I was home free until I rounded the corner that led to the rear doors.
Dylan, Mike, and some new, similarly stocky friend of theirs were there.
I seized up, just for a second. I figured it would look like I was up to something if I reversed course, so I decided to walk right past them. Yeah, right.
“Going somewhere, Dunne?” Dylan said, stepping in front of me.
I looked at him. Actually, I looked at his chest. “You hear the bell?” I said as calmly as I could. “School’s over. I’m going home.”
“You always go out the back?” the new one said.
They couldn’t possibly know about the newspaper meeting. Could they?
I shrugged in a really exaggerated way. “Sometimes.”
Dylan poked me on the shirt, right where the pin used to be. His finger was as strong as the rest of him looked.
“A lot of people are disappointed you quit,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I’m disappointed a lot more people didn’t quit the club after Erica tried to kill herself.”
“What is she, your girlfriend?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “But she’s a friend.”
“She’s a crazy bitch,” Dylan said. “She was going to get exactly what she wanted, but she couldn’t deal with it, so she tried to bring the rest of us down with her whining. I mean, so what if Eldridge had an accident?”
The mysterious third person nodded. “Want to make an omelet, you gotta crack some eggs.”
Not knowing when to shut up, I opened my big mouth and said, “It wasn’t an accident.”
They all looked at one another. I was thinking I’d opened up a whole can of worms, but Dylan just sneered and said, “Of course it wasn’t an accident. We imanifested it.”
Right.
Remembering Mike as the vaguely reasonable one, I turned to him. “You guys going to beat me up for quitting, or can I get going?”
Mike nodded at Dylan. “Let him go.”
Dylan twisted sideways, giving me just enough space to get through the door.
“Yeah,” he said as I passed. “We can always imanifest an accident for him, too.”
When I reached the parking lot, I wanted to look back to make sure they weren’t watching, but I didn’t want them to know I was worried about them, so I kept walking until I could duck behind one of the trailers. There, I stopped and peeked back. The rear door was swinging shut, as if someone had just opened it, but there was no one in sight. That didn’t mean anything. Lots of kids left the school that way. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the door swung open and a few stumbled out, no members of The Rule goon squad visible.
I told myself they’d just happened to see me and wanted to scare me. It was probably nothing, so I didn’t even mention it when I entered the moldy old trailer where the newspaper club now met.
Moore and Mason tapped away at laptops. Two huge bottles of Diet Pepsi were open on either side of them and a plastic bag sat between them, chips, pretzels, and other munchies jutting from the top. Drik was pulling a sheet of paper from the printer.
Even from the door, I could read the headline: “The Rule of Lies.”
Guy wasn’t there, but I didn’t think much of that yet. Didn’t have much of a chance to, since Moore nearly shoved me into a chair and started grilling me about the Crave. Who spoke? What did they say? How are things run? The answer to most of his questions was Ethan.
“It was pretty much by the book until I staged my little rebellion,” I told him. “If Ethan hadn’t canceled my password, I could log you guys into the message board.”
Mason shook her head. “Don’t worry. We’ve been following that for weeks.”
“Oh. Drik get you in there, too?”
When I said that, they all looked at me like I should already know. Drik said, “Someone sent us a password anonymously.”
“We thought it was you,” Moore said.
I shook my head. “Nice. Someone else is on our side, huh?”
“Maybe,” Mason said as she went back to her typing. “Where’s Guy? He should be here by now.”
Moore flipped open an old battered cell.
“Guy, we’re here, where are you?” he said. His face got funny as he listened to the response. “What do you mean? You’re our Hercules, man! You wimping out on us? Now? I don’t believe you! Half the articles are yours! But . . .”
Moore snapped his phone shu
t. “He’s not coming. Says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea anymore, that we should let the police handle it.”
Drik and Mason looked stricken. “But he spent a month on the history piece.”
“He said we could run it, but without his name.”
“Wow,” Mason said, shaking her head. “Wow.”
Moore slumped back in his chair as if someone had let all the air out of him.
Drik’s shoulders twitched. “He didn’t tell the police about the video, did he?”
“Hey, calm down,” I said. “He’s probably just scared. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the Crave’s scary.” If I was the most level-headed of the bunch of us, we were in big trouble.
“Yeah,” Moore said absently. “Freaking Vanuatu.”
“Aghh! Would you tell me what that means already?” I said. “It’s driving me nuts.”
He shook his head. “Work for it. It’s not hard to find out if you try.” He turned to the others. “Still in?”
They nodded.
Despite the growing creepiness that hung over the trailer, especially as it got darker and the air grew thicker with mold, we all pitched in. Once Moore ran out of things to ask me, I was handed a copy of what they had so far and asked to proofread it.
It was pretty good stuff, laying out the facts about how what the Crave had accomplished wasn’t so much miraculous as occasionally criminal. There was also an editorial piece on how destructive the basic ideas of The Rule are, how it blames victims for their misfortune, creating an excuse not to help anyone, even an excuse for oppressing people (because, after all, you could only oppress someone who wanted to be oppressed, so why not oppress them?), how it refuses to acknowledge that sometimes tough choices have to be made in life, how it ridicules the notion of self-sacrifice and holds up greed—the right to get whatever you want, whenever you want it—as some kind of ideal.
I even liked Guy’s history piece. He traced the supposedly shocking and new ideas in The Rule of Won back to two books that first appeared at the turn of the twentieth century: Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World from 1906 and The Science of Getting Rich, published in 1910. That second one says the universe is made of a kind of thinking material that picks up on your desires and eventually manifests them. It, at least, also says you have to take some action to get what you want. A hundred years later, it seems we’ve moved backward.
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