Fighting Chance

by B K Stevens

  Joseph nodded slowly. “I agree. Cautiousness can frustrate, but often is wise.”

  He shot a smile at Berk, but Berk didn’t even look at him. He threw himself back on the couch, folded his arms across his chest, and stared at the wall.

  Graciana picked up a yellow pad. “I made a list of people to interview. I think we should work in pairs, so both people can compare their impressions. Matt and Berk can be one pair, and Joseph and I—”

  “I’ll work with Joseph,” Berk cut in. “You take Matt.”

  She looked surprised, then erased what she’d written. “Okay. Berk and Joseph, Matt and me. Let’s split up interviews. The head basketball coach—that’s an important interview, and both Berk and Joseph are on the basketball team and know him well. Matt and I can take Ms. Quinn. Dr. Lombardo—another important interview. Berk, can you and Joseph handle that? Matt and I will take Ms. Nguyen. Next, Paul Ericson, captain of the basketball team. A very important interview. Berk, you and Joseph—”

  “No,” Berk said. “You take that one.”

  I rubbed my hand across my mouth to hide a smile. Months ago, Berk had been late to practice twice, Paul had chewed him out in front of the whole team, and Berk had never forgiven him. I understood how Berk felt. Paul should’ve taken Berk aside—that’s what I would’ve done. On the other hand, Berk had never been late again. Things like that are hard to call.

  Graciana sped through the list, assigning one person to Berk and Joseph, one to her and me, not seeming to follow any pattern. “We can talk to them at school or at their homes,” she said, “or wherever they feel most comfortable. I can usually borrow a car when I need to, and it seems like Matt can, too. What about you, Joseph? Berk?”

  Joseph’s head slumped. “I do not yet have a license. My mother says before I attempt the test, I must increase practice. She has reasons. Often, when it reverses, the car does not go where I wish.”

  “And my mom’s stingy with her car,” Berk says. “So no, I can’t always get it.”

  In fact, he wasn’t getting it at all these days, not since he’d flattened a mailbox two weeks ago. His mom had taken his driving privileges away for a month. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to mention that.

  “Well, interview people at school, then,” Graciana said. “Next, let’s draw up a list of questions.”

  We all nodded. There’s no stopping Graciana once she gets going. I didn’t disagree with anything she’d said, but sometimes she makes me feel like I’m on a bike, trying to keep up with a train.

  “We’ll start with softball questions,” she said. “That’s standard interview procedure. We’ll ask about Coach Colson’s contributions to the school, why he was special, what their favorite memories of him are. Then, when they’re relaxed, we slide in tougher questions.”

  “These tougher questions,” Joseph asked, “what are they?”

  Graciana sat back. “That’s a tough question. We want to find out if Coach mentioned a conflict with anyone or said someone threatened him, but we can’t ask about that straight out. If we do, people will think it’s strange. We need questions that will get at the information in a less obvious way.”

  I shrugged. “We could lie a little. We could talk about how upbeat Coach always was and then say, ‘Lately, though, he seemed down, like something was troubling him. Did you notice that?’ Maybe that’d get people talking.”

  Berk half-snorted. “How would it get people talking? It isn’t even true. Did Coach ever tell you he was feeling down?”

  God, Berk can be annoying. I strained to keep my voice calm. “I said it was a lie. I’m hoping Coach told other people more than he told us. Maybe telling this lie will make people open up about the truth.”

  “An oxymoronic approach,” Joseph said, “yet it might work.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. Neither did Berk. He probably didn’t know what “oxymoronic” means, either.

  Graciana nodded. “I agree. We’ll try that. Any other ideas?”

  Berk’s turn to shrug. “We could say, ‘Most people thought Coach Colson was a great guy. Do you know any trouble he ever got into?’”

  That wouldn’t work, I thought, but didn’t say it. I didn’t want Berk to think I was criticizing his idea because he’d criticized mine.

  “That wouldn’t work,” Graciana said. “People aren’t going to give us negative information to put in the newspaper. They’d be afraid of making people mad.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “we could say, ‘Tell us one thing about Coach Colson that most people would be surprised to hear.’”

  Berk did his half-snort again. “That’s brilliant. You think someone’s gonna say, ‘Well, most people would be surprised to hear he once did something that made Bobby Davis hate him? That Bobby Davis had an obvious reason to kill him’? Give me a break!”

  I was too mad to say anything. Graciana and Joseph stared at him. Then Graciana spoke, quietly. “Obviously Matt doesn’t think anyone would say that. But most people will naturally start by saying how friendly and helpful Coach was. This question might make them move beyond that. We might learn things we don’t know yet, and that’s the point of doing interviews.”

  “Fine.” Berk looked off to the side. “I guess everybody has good ideas except me.”

  Joseph’s cell phone rang, and he glanced down. “Apologies. My mother.”

  He spoke to her in another language—Swahili, he’d told me once—and closed his phone. “Additional apologies. She must attend a meeting and wishes me to stay with my sisters. She is coming to drive me home.” He stood up.

  Berk stood, too. “Can she drop me off? Then I won’t have to call my mom for a ride.”

  “Come off it, Berk,” I said. “You don’t have to call her anyway. I’ll give you a ride.”

  “I’d rather leave now. Thank your mom for the cookies, Graciana.”

  He shot upstairs without looking at any of us. Joseph paused awkwardly, lifted both hands to face level, praised the cookies, and left.

  Now it was just Graciana and me. After we came up with several more questions, she said she’d type them up, make copies, and schedule interviews. She paused.

  “I don’t know Paul Ericson well, and you probably see him all the time. Could you set that interview up?”

  I didn’t see Paul often, actually, now that basketball season was over, but I didn’t mind. “Sure.” I stood up. “Those were great cookies. Thank your mom for me?”

  “Sure.” She picked up the empty plate. “Did you and Berk have a fight?”

  “Not exactly. He’s mad at me about something, but he’ll get over it.”

  “I hope so.” She paused. “Matt, do you think the interview teams are okay? Maybe you should work with Joseph, and I should work with Berk.”

  I laughed. “So you don’t want to work with me, either. Mr. Popularity—that’s me.”

  “It’s not that. But I’d been thinking you should be on one team, and I should be on the other, to make sure all the interviews get done right. God, that sounds conceited. But Berk’s resisting the whole idea of doing interviews, and Joseph has language issues. He might miss some nuances.”

  I laughed again. “Maybe I’m the one with language issues. Joseph probably knows what ‘nuances’ are. I don’t.”

  She laughed, too. “Okay. I’m sure they’ll do fine. Anyway, you and I probably have all the important interviews.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I must’ve missed a nuance. Why are ours more important?”

  She blushed. “Because I manipulated the lists. I gave us the people Coach Colson was closest to, and I assigned the people who aren’t likely to say anything helpful to Berk and Joseph. I tried not to be obvious about it.”

  “You weren’t. It slid right past me. You kept talking about how important their interviews are.”

  Graciana grimace
d. “They’re interviewing important people. But Lombardo won’t reveal anything—she’s too slick, too focused on protecting her image. And I never got the impression Coach Colson and Coach Tomlinson were close. Is that right?”

  “It’s right,” I said, amazed she’d noticed. “Tomlinson never showed Coach Colson much respect, never let him make decisions—he treated him like an amateur, maybe because he taught social studies instead of phys ed. I don’t think Coach Colson liked him much.”

  “That’s what I thought.” She looked pleased with herself. “Tomlinson will just spout clichés about teamwork. I figured that was a throwaway interview. We’ve got the ones that count.”

  As I drove home, I felt bowled over by how sharp Graciana is about picking up on things, how subtle she is about managing things. I’d known she was smart, but this was—well, sneaky. I had to admit it was probably better she and I had the more important interviews. But she’d manipulated all three of us, and we’d never realized she was doing it. Sometimes, I felt close to Graciana. Other times, I felt like I never knew what was going on in her head. It threw me off.

  I drove past Berk’s house. There’s something else that’s throwing me off, I thought. For years, Berk and I had hung out together, stood up for each other, talked about stuff we didn’t talk about with anybody else. Having him treat me like an enemy was messing me up.

  Hell, I decided. I hate this. I drove back to his house and rang the doorbell. Mrs. Widrig seemed surprised to see me.

  “Sorry it’s so late,” I said. “Can I talk to Berk for a minute?”

  “Of course. But weren’t you with him at Graciana’s house?”

  Berk must not have told her we weren’t getting along. Well, I hadn’t told my parents, either. “This is about something that happened after he left. Okay if I go to his room?”

  She said fine, and I raced up the stairs I’d raced up probably thousands of times before. Berk’s door was open, so I walked in. He was at his desk, playing some online game.

  “Berk, this is stupid,” I said. “We’ve gotta talk it out.”

  He didn’t look away from the screen. “Yeah? You wanna talk about your big date with Suzette Saturday night?”

  Damn. “How’d you hear about it so fast?”

  “It’s all over school. Plus Suzette posted it on Facebook. Dinner and a movie. Sounds nice. I thought you weren’t going to ask her out.”

  I sat on his bed. “I wasn’t, but I got mad at you, for being so mad at me. And if you want the truth, she pretty much asked me out. So you must’ve been right—she must like me. I’m sorry that hurts your feelings, but we’ve gotta find a way to deal with it.”

  He turned in his chair to face me. “Do you like her?”

  I lifted my shoulders. “I’d never thought about her that way before. I mean, she’s pretty, she’s friendly, but I’ve never had special feelings for her.”

  He winced. “Maybe you’ll get ‘special feelings’ Saturday night.”

  “I might. I might not. Either way, we can’t let this ruin everything. We’ve been friends too long.”

  “I know.” He let out a sigh. “I’ve felt lousy, too. I know I’m being a jerk. I know you can’t help it if she likes you. But I can’t stop feeling mad. It’s stupid.”

  “It’s not. If it’d happened the other way around, I’d feel mad, too. But let’s try to get past that. Why don’t we do something tomorrow night?”

  He winced again. “Dinner and a movie?”

  Not much of a joke, but it was the first friendly thing he’d said since Monday. “Maybe not. We can hang out, watch TV, whatever. If you feel like yelling at me, go ahead. If you wanna take a swing at me—”

  “No way. You know too many defenses.”

  I grinned. “You should’ve come to krav last night. We learned some good ones. How about it? Want to do something tomorrow night?”

  He thought it over. “Yeah. And I know what I wanna do. I wanna go back to Richmond, to the bar where Davis hangs out. I wanna park across the street, watch for him, follow him, see where he goes. These interviews—maybe none of these people knows anything that’ll help. Davis does. I wanna get things moving. How does that sound?”

  Going to that neighborhood on a Friday night, hanging around that bar, following a killer—it sounded like the dumbest idea I’d heard in a long time. But I hated to say no right when Berk was starting to act normal again. “It sounds risky. We could ask Graciana if—”

  “No. She’ll try to talk us out of it, or she’ll take over, like she does with everything. If we do this, it’s gotta be just you and me. We don’t tell Graciana, or Joseph, or anybody. Okay?”

  I didn’t like it. But if we didn’t get out of the car, how dangerous could it be? And I needed to make things right with Berk. “Okay,” I said.

  Twelve

  Graciana works fast. She caught up with me before lunch on Friday and said she’d arranged for us to interview Ms. Quinn after school.

  “That’s the list of questions,” Graciana said, handing me a typed sheet. “Let’s take turns asking them. You want odd-numbered questions or even-numbered ones?”

  I didn’t have time to figure out which questions felt more comfortable, but if I picked even, she’d have to go first. “Even,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said, and was gone.

  In the cafeteria, I spotted Paul Ericson sitting with his girlfriend, Carolyn Olson, and a couple of her friends. Paul and Carolyn had been homecoming king and queen, and they were a sure bet to be king and queen at prom, too. Girls gush about how handsome Paul is, and as for Carolyn, “pretty” doesn’t cover it. She’s the same type as Suzette—great hair, great body, really sweet face with big, sparkly blue eyes—only more so. The few times I’d talked to her, I hadn’t even tried to make eye contact. I’d just concentrated on not drooling.

  I walked over to their table and did the what’s-going-on, nothing-much routine. Carolyn gave me a full-wattage smile.

  “Looking for advice on how to be a good team captain?” she said. “I’ve heard lots of talk about you.”

  I blushed. I couldn’t help it. Probably, almost anything she said to me would make me blush. “I don’t take that seriously. I wanted to ask Paul about something else. Some members of the martial arts club are helping Graciana Cortez with a special issue of the school newspaper, a tribute to Coach Colson. We’d like to interview you, since you’re captain.”

  Paul frowned. “An interview? What kinds of questions?”

  “About what made him special, favorite memories, like that. Would some time this weekend work, or after school next week? It’ll take about fifteen minutes.”

  Paul ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t have much to say. I wasn’t all that close with him. Ryan Croft probably knew him better, or Sean—”

  Carolyn gave him a playful little slap on the arm. “What are you talking about? Those guys didn’t know him half as well as you did. You’re the captain. You should do an interview. You’ll have lots to say. Will there be a picture?”

  “There could be,” I said. “I guess.”

  “There should definitely be a picture.” Now Carolyn was rubbing Paul’s arm, tilting her head, smiling up at him, trying to get him to look at her. “A big picture, on the front page.”

  “I’ve had my picture in the school paper before. It’s no big deal.” He stared down at the table. “Look, I’m gonna pass. I’m awful busy. My folks dumped a bunch of extra chores on me, and—”

  “That’s perfect.” Carolyn gave me another one of those smiles. “Paul’s parents told him he has to work on the lawn at the lake house on Sunday, to get it ready for summer. It’ll take him the whole afternoon, and he’ll have to take breaks. You can interview him there. You know where it is, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” It’s a great place. Paul’s parents have the team
over for a cookout every fall.

  Paul shook his head. “I shouldn’t make Matt drive all that way.”

  “All that way!” Carolyn slapped his arm again. “It’s twenty minutes, silly. It’s nothing. Matt doesn’t mind—do you, Matt?”

  “No,” I said. It’s closer to forty minutes, but I didn’t feel like disagreeing with Carolyn about anything. “We don’t mind.”

  “We?” Paul looked up. “Who else would come? Berk?”

  “No, Graciana,” I said.

  One of Carolyn’s friends perked up. “Ooh, Graciana. Maybe Carolyn doesn’t like that so much.”

  Carolyn gave her a sour look. “I’m not worried. Let Mrs. Bixby worry. My man doesn’t go for that type. Paul, if you don’t do the interview, people will think it’s strange.”

  He gave up. “Fine. Whatever. Sunday afternoon at the lake house, fifteen minutes.”

  “Great. Thanks.” I took off. It was weird Paul hadn’t wanted to do the interview. Coach had treated him almost like an equal, more than a kid, and Paul always talked how great he was. But maybe Paul was worried he’d get too emotional.

  Anyway, Carolyn sure had him wrapped around her little finger. As I got my food, I grinned, thinking about it. It must be great having someone that gorgeous as a girlfriend—but since it was Carolyn, it must be rough, too. Carolyn’s father is a pastor, and she’s signed some pledge about saving her first kiss for the altar. She definitely wasn’t saving flirting for the altar, though. I thought of all the arm-rubbing and smiles and playful little slaps. And they’d been going with each other for about two years, and I’d heard she didn’t think they should get married till they graduated from college. Over four more years of having her paw at him without even giving him a kiss—man. Paul must be a strong guy.

  Then I thought about what Carolyn and her friend had said about Graciana, and I stopped grinning. So Suzette wasn’t the only one who thought something was going on between Graciana and Mr. Bixby. Seniors were talking about it, too, and they were the ones who’d know Graciana best. I’d been hoping maybe Suzette was wrong, but chances didn’t look good.