B00B9FX0F2 EBOK

by Baron, Ruth

  “Just making sure,” said Gavin. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re only moping or if that’s the new you.”

  Cole was too distracted to respond. Ambling down the hall ahead of them was Greg, arm slung over the shoulders of his girlfriend, Winnie. The couple lingered outside Mr. Drick’s room to punish unwitting bystanders with a kiss. Gavin told him to look away. “Why torture yourself?”

  “I’m not tortured,” Cole answered stiffly. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  Cole had many talents. Lying was not among them.

  “How evolved of you,” Gavin drawled. “Because watching those two dock between classes bothers me into a boil. And I’m not even her ex-boyfriend. Greg didn’t steal her from me. He stole her from you.”

  History passed in a tide of dates and facts, none of which sank in on Cole. His mind was on his personal history, which happened to be seated two desks up and one row over.

  Winnie. Concert choir soloist, all-county tennis, animal shelter volunteer.

  Winnie. Whose long auburn hair draped across her back in thick vines and hadn’t been cut since last year, when Cole suggested she continue to let it grow. “Think of the points you’ll score with admissions officers when you finally donate it to Locks Of Love,” he advised.

  Winnie. Known once as Cole’s first kiss, now as his chief competition for valedictorian and forevermore as his faithless, backstabbing ex-girlfriend.

  Winnie. Or, as Gavin dubbed her in the postbreakup era: Whinny. Cole tried to get across that homonym humor worked only written, not spoken, but it didn’t matter to Gavin. “It only needs to be funny to me,” he explained.

  It wasn’t funny to Cole. Nothing about Winnie was funny. Not since the eve of the SATs, when the school’s underground newspaper broke the story that she’d dumped him — before she’d dumped him. At the time of the article’s publication he dismissed it as preposterous and went so far as to e-mail the reporter his demand for a retraction. The response he got from the mysterious gossip columnist WaldaWinchell@SHSmuckraker.com read:

  I stand by my story. And I stand by you. You deserve better. Chin up, Cole. WW

  Still, Cole wrote it off. “Psychological warfare,” he told Gavin. “Whoever started this rumor wants to knock me off my game before the test. It’s a joke.” He wasn’t laughing when Winnie cut him loose two hours later at the exam site. She scurried away from him and right over to Greg, who awaited her with open arms and #2s. Every analogy in the exam Cole suffered through read You are to Winnie as warden is to escapee.

  Winnie. The source of the dark circles under his eyes, the reason his experimental Fluffernutter soufflé declined to rise, and the cause of his dangerous flirtation with an A-minus average.

  That flirtation had become a full-blown affair. As class drew to a close, Mr. Drick relinquished their graded essays, along with a helping of dandruff. Cole’s essay was branded with a big red B. Cole was aghast. To him, B stood for “Better up your game or it’s a safety school for you, bub.”

  “You’re slipping, bro,” Gavin hooted after class. “Keep this up and Whinny will grab the top spot out from under you.”

  “I’d like to see her try,” Cole snapped, stifling the dread that she was nipping at his heels — and what his parents would do if they found out. “She’d have to tear herself away from Greg long enough to bank some study hours first.”

  “You do nothing but study. And cook. How’s that working out for you?”

  “And how did you do?” The only subject Gavin liked better than history and Cole’s shortcomings was Gavin himself.

  “Dunno,” he breezed. “I picked up someone else’s essay instead. Guess who got an A+?” He spotted Greg exiting the classroom, looking around, and proceeded to read aloud: ‘A comparison between American and international serial killers reveals several notable differences.’ I wonder what those are. Do you think he’s about to tell us?” Alerted, Greg made a beeline for the twosome. Winnie followed, leashed, as Gavin continued his dramatic reading.

  “‘Perhaps most striking is that when selecting victims, Americans tend to adhere to far more rigid criteria than their worldwide counterparts. An American serial killer knows his victim; an international serial killer discovers his victim.’ What kind of messed-up mind writes about serial killers for history? Oh, hi, Greg.”

  “What are you doing with my essay?”

  “Just admiring the prose. Mr. Drick thinks it’s top-quality work. Care to let us in on your secret? I’d love to learn how you turn a phrase.”

  Greg snatched his paper. “Keep your hands off my stuff.” He looked at Cole, looking at Winnie. “That goes for you, too.” Cole watched them go, wondering why Gavin bothered to get in Greg’s face.

  “Because you won’t. And someone has to stop him before he wrecks the curve with his cheating.”

  Cheating?

  “Do you really think that essay sprang from his brain? Greg couldn’t string two sentences together with barbed wire.”

  It was the widely held but never confirmed suspicion that the administration instructed Greg’s teachers to go easy on him (the smoking slackers had no opinion on the subject). Without his talented feet, the soccer program would be in tatters. Cole didn’t doubt that the faculty juked the curve in his favor, but they’d never abide out-and-out cheating.

  “Winnie probably helped him,” Cole offered.

  “Maybe. Or maybe she’s cheating, too.”

  “Now you’re just fantasizing. And since when do you care about the curve, anyway? You don’t even want to go to college.”

  Gavin kicked a loose pen down the hall. “What I want is to see justice done. Greg and Winnie committed a crime on you, my friend. They turned you into a joke. All you’ve done since then is wallow. And your cooking hasn’t been the same. Last week’s cupcakes were seriously sub-par.”

  “You had three.”

  “Barely! It was all I could do to lick the crusted frosting off the wrappers. You’re slipping. Actually, you’ve slipped. You are down on the ground, flailing, like a helpless, overturned bug. Keep this up and someone’s liable to squash you.”

  They turned a corner. Greg and Winnie had stopped up ahead at a table where tickets to the winter formal were on sale. Cole stared.

  “You’re doing it right now!” Gavin griped.

  “Doing what?”

  “Brooding. Either get over it and move on or don’t get over it and get back at them.”

  The thought had a certain appeal. But he doubted he had the stomach for revenge. “What would I even do?”

  Gavin gleamed. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something. And it’ll be fun. I promise.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Somewhere nearby, someone was crying. Crying or choking on a Jolly Rancher. Cole couldn’t be sure which.

  He stood up. The library was sparsely populated. Greg and Scott were the only people at the computer bank, roosting over the unit Gavin had secretly rigged to bypass the school’s content controls. Cole ditched his work and ducked into the stacks to investigate.

  He paused in the dusty poetry aisle. The sound was coming from the other side of the next shelf. Nonfiction, Aer-Bio. Cole padded to the middle of the aisle, slipped out a volume of German verse and pretended to look captivated by the abundance of syllables as he eavesdropped. Through the cracks came the whisper-talk of a familiar voice. Winnie.

  Walk away, Cole. He edged closer to the stack, absently turning a page in the book he wasn’t looking at. Between the shelf and the top of the books he glimpsed a shifting sliver of Winnie. The swoop of her autumn-colored hair, her nubbin earlobe or the bat of an eyelash. Back when he and Winnie were together she was forever dusting her face, assuming from his constant gaze the presence of an errant lash. Even at the height of their relationship he was too shy to admit he just liked looking at her.

  She wasn’t the one doing the boo-hooing, but there was an uncharacteristic tremor in her voice. Cole had never seen or heard Winnie cry, not e
ven the day she tried to teach him her backhand and he accidentally backhanded her face. First she corrected his grip. Then she plugged the blood spurting Old Faithfully from her nose. She did not shed a tear when she dumped him for Greg, either. But there, deep in the library, Cole detected something she’d never made him privy to. Something like vulnerability. It unnerved him. What else was there about Winnie he didn’t know? What else besides the fact that she DROPPED YOU do you need to know? he could practically hear Gavin ask.

  The tears were dribbling out of her best friend, Andrea, a perfect specimen of homo dramaticus and known to be mortally in touch with her emotions. Over the course of his relationship with Winnie, he’d had the misfortune to observe her three states of being: crying, scheming, and mocking. As a result, they’d never gotten along. Cole saw no reason to try to change that now, and was half a step away when he distinctly heard Winnie murmur his name.

  She’s talking about me? She’s talking about me!

  He aimed his ear at them, straining to listen but catching only snippets from Andrea’s half of the conversation. “ . . . you don’t know how it feels . . . can’t let anyone find out . . . especially Cole . . . ”

  Cole examined the evidence: tears, adversity, and a vow that above all, the subject of the discussion will never be revealed to him. Together the pieces could form only one picture.

  Andrea was secretly in love with him.

  Except she hated him. And among the few assumptions Cole felt reasonably confident making about girls included the hunch that one would never, ever express interest in her best friend’s ex, especially if they want to remain best friends. Still, he might as well be sure. Because what if she really did like him? More important, would Winnie care?

  Cole sidled closer to the stack, squelching the misgiving that there was anything wrong with soaking up a private conversation. If they didn’t want to be overheard, they’d text.

  Suddenly a voice broke open the vacuum-sealed library air behind him. “Magst du Goethe?” Cole fell forward, startled, groping at the books before him for purchase, only to shove them flapping through the stack right at Andrea and Winnie’s feet. They locked eyes on him through the breach. Cole caught sight of himself in their expression and cringed: a perv in training. Andrea hurtled off, wailing. Winnie picked up a fallen book and glanced at the title and back at Cole, eyebrows in attack formation.

  “German poetry?” Implied if not verbally tacked on was really?

  style="text-indent:5%;">Cole worked his guppy mouth for a response, but the answer came from elsewhere. “Ja, danke,” said the owner of the voice that had sent him sprawling in the first place. A dark-haired girl was reaching through the gap to pluck the book from Winnie’s grasp. “Deutsch Poesie ist mein Favorit. Und Sie?” Winnie merely puffed out a breath and walked away.

  Cole blinked at the girl before him. She wore red-and-white-striped knee-high socks, a black skirt, and a yellow cardigan over a shirt that ruffled limply at the neck. Her face was winged with dark eye shadow and her hair pulled into two uneven, rubber-banded pigtails. The overall effect was positively Dr. Seussian. On whether this particular strain was heartwarming Seussian or creepy Seussian he was undecided. Then she spoke again.

  “Ich mag Faust, weil sie Satan Funktionen.”

  Creepy Seussian. Definitely.

  “Sorry,” Cole said, backing away slowly. “All I caught was ‘Satan.’”

  He pivoted and took off, leaving Cindy Lou Who-The-Heck-Is-She to Gesundheit by herself.

  Cole looked for Winnie but she had vanished along with Andrea. The bell rang and he returned to the study carrel for his things only to find Greg and Scott lying in wait. Cole took care to avoid eye contact, remembering a nature program in which a field biologist urged the audience to never, ever look a primate in the peepers.

  >“Something I can do for you guys?”

  >Scott shot Greg a look. “Did I or did I not tell you to stay away from Winnie?”

  >“You did not. You told me to keep my hands off your stuff. Is that what Winnie is to you? Stuff?”

  Greg’s nostrils flared and he swung tentatively at Cole’s books, as though to send them spilling to the floor. But he lacked commitment; the pile only moved a couple of inches toward the lip of the table. He was miscast in the role of Bully.

  “ . . . Do you want to give it a second try?” Cole offered.

  “You know that jerky little kid in everybody’s family?” asked Scott. “The loud cousin who comes over to your house on the holidays and gets his cruddy fingerprints on your comics and breaks your PS3 before he’s even walked in the door?”

  “How is Wonder Woman these days, Scott?”

  “Then he sees your dog. And all the pooch wants to do is sleep. But this kid won’t let him. Goes straight for him, chasing him all over the house. And your dog knows he’s just a kid. But there’s only so much crap he can take from a snot-nosed brat who wants to ride him like he’s a horse. So you warn him. You tell him to leave the dog alone. How would he like it if you pulled his tail? But this kid doesn’t listen. Nothing you say is enough to get through. So when the dog finally sinks his teeth into the little bugger’s apple cheeks, part of you feels sorry for him ’cause he’s gonna have that scar for the rest of his life. But the rest of you is glad. He deserved what he got.” Scott swept the table clean. “You’re that little kid, Cole. Only nobody’s gonna feel sorry for you when you get your face bit off.”

  “I’m confused. In this scenario, is Greg the mutt? Or Winnie? ’Cause I thought she was just stuff.”

  Greg was perhaps not (yet) a bully, but he was a devoted boyfriend. He leaned in close. “Don’t talk about her like that. Don’t even think about her. She doesn’t think about you.”

  “The bell rang, guys.” The gentle reminder came from Mr. Chetley, the assistant soccer coach and rookie Web design teacher. No one moved. “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem, Mr. Chetley,” said Greg, secure that Cole had received his message.

  “Gregor, my dad is Mr. Chetley,” said the teacher with his bouncing imitation of a Southern California accent. “I told you I’m cool with Chetley. Or even Chet. It’s all good! What happened with the books, Cola?”

  “Cole’s just a little clumsy,” said Greg. He and Scott left, Chetley hounding them all the way out the door with an invitation to join his Protest Club. Gavin was president, and so far the organization had yet to protest anything save the administration’s rules against protest.

  Cole gathered his littered books, aware that he’d pay for getting little work done with little sleep tonight. He didn’t care. He was thinking about Winnie, in direct disregard to Greg’s instruction. She had to think about him sometimes. Even if only to breathe relief that she’d traded up. There had to be a way to make her think about him more, and in a positive way. Maybe the key was to make her think less about Greg, or to think less of him. What would it take to open her eyes?

  Cole was on his way out when he caught sight of the computer over which Greg and Scott had roosted. An idea took shape. He’d be late to Calc, but a five-point deduction on the day would only amount to a .001-percent nudge to his grade for the year, assuming no absences and adjusting for a one-two point differential on pop quizzes. He figured he could weather it.

  Cole launched the computer’s search engine and examined its recent history. Greg had neglected to empty the cache. The most recent page was a Wikipedia entry. The subject: American serial killers. It took him just a moment to find what he was looking for.

  Perhaps most striking is that when selecting victims, Americans tend to adhere to far more rigid criteria than their worldwide counterparts. An American serial killer knows his victim; an international serial killer discovers his victim.

  Gavin was right. There in black-and-white pixels was hard evidence of Greg’s cheating. Cole printed the page, as well as a dozen of the most recent Web sites Greg and Scott had visited. He left with a ream of paper and the swagger of a private citi
zen carrying a concealed firearm. He had the gun and the bullet to put an end to Greg and Winnie’s relationship. All he had to do now was aim and pull the trigger.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PainAuChoCOLEat: You there?

  ShesGottaGavIt: regrettably

  PainAuChoCOLEat: We need to talk.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Come over.

  ShesGottaGavIt: cant

  ShesGottaGavIt: busy

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Too busy to punctuate?

  ShesGottaGavIt: punctuation is for sheep

  ShesGottaGavIt: in my world the semicolon has slaughtered the commas and periods which is why this sentence might be hard to read

  ShesGottaGavIt: plus the ? is king?

  ShesGottaGavIt: it can go wherever it wants?

  ShesGottaGavIt: it?s mad?ness?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Never mind.

  ShesGottaGavIt: dont hate

  ShesGottaGavIt: i didnt make the rules

  ShesGottaGavIt: sup

  PainAuChoCOLEat: So I was thinking.

  ShesGottaGavIt: you should really stop that

  ShesGottaGavIt: less thinking more baking

  PainAuChoCOLEat: FYI I’m trying out a peanut-butter-cup cheesecake tonight.

  ShesGottaGavIt: why do you hurt me

  ShesGottaGavIt: a single peanut could make me explode in flames

  ShesGottaGavIt: you know this

  ShesGottaGavIt: your mother tried to kill me

  PainAuChoCOLEat: That was an accident.

  ShesGottaGavIt: she poisoned me with chicken pad thai

  PainAuChoCOLEat: She didn’t know you were allergic to peanuts!

  ShesGottaGavIt: i wear a medic alert bracelet

  ShesGottaGavIt: we both know she wants me out of the way

  ShesGottaGavIt: before i turn her darling yalie wannabe into a blue devil

  ShesGottaGavIt: or worse

  ShesGottaGavIt: a vol

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Tomorrow I’ll make a tart.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Happy?