Shooter

by Caroline Pignat

  “So, let’s say there is some second shooter,” Hogan says. “What makes you so sure it’s me—or even a guy?”

  Okay, maybe we are jumping to conclusions. I have to agree with him on that—at least until he says what he says next.

  “You’re acting hysterical. Both of you. Typical. Let me guess—you’ve got your periods, right?”

  So much for facts and rational thinking.

  “Oh you did NOT just say that!” Izzy retorts in her melodramatic way—one that only seems to further support Hogan’s ridiculous theory. “What is it with you guys? Blame PMS. Yeah, that must be it, because it can’t possibly be the idiot males that are driving us crazy!”

  “I’m just saying,” Hogan yells over her, “I could as easily accuse one of you. C’mon, Iz, you’re no poster child for mental health.” He swings his hands up to make air quotes and accidentally knocks the phone from her hand.

  “Watch—” she shouts, and fumbles, but the phone falls and hits the floor. Isabelle bends and picks it up, cursing when she sees the shattered screen. “Great, just great.”

  I take a deep breath. “Look,” I say, trying to calm everyone down, for Noah’s sake as much my own. He’s ramping up again. “Things are getting out of hand. We don’t have proof. It could have been some guy—”

  “Or girl,” Hogan cuts in.

  “Or girl,” I continue, “just running away from the danger. We don’t even know for sure that there IS a second shooter—”

  “Oh, there is.” Xander is still sitting on the ground, and his monotone can be heard from behind the camera lens.

  “Wait…what?” I turn to him. We all do. “What are you saying?”

  “There are two shooters, and I can prove it.” He presses the button and takes one last picture. Then he lowers his camera to reach in his backpack. We stare at him expectantly.

  Maybe he has a photo of this mysterious second shooter. If anyone saw Maxwell Steinberg’s accomplice, Xander did. He sees everything, or so it seems. But as he pulls his hand out of the bag, it isn’t holding a photo, or a box, or even another camera.

  Just a gun. A black one, like the ones in Max’s photo. Xander holds it at arm’s length, pointing it right at us. He closes one eye. And, finger on the trigger, Xander squeezes.

  Click.

  HOGAN

  I am on him seconds after I see the gun. My body reacts even before my brain registers.

  BANG!

  The shot rings out against the cement walls and it hits me—right in the chest—as I dive in front of the girls. I land face down with a thud. The tile cold and hard against my cheek.

  So this is it, I think. This is how I die. On a bathroom floor. Just like Randy.

  I’ve pictured it a million times since Randy died. Imagined myself dead a thousand ways. Accidents. Illnesses. Even suicide. Only I never did anything about it.

  Didn’t even have the balls to do that, eh, Hulkster?

  But it’s done now.

  Only…

  Only, I don’t want it.

  I don’t want to die.

  I fight for a breath but it isn’t coming. Panic washes over me as I gasp.

  Is this how it felt, Randy?

  “Hogan!” Alice rolls me over onto my back and I look up at the stain on the ceiling tiles. The air vent. The glow around the lights. My chest aches. Alice puts her hand on it, but it won’t help. I’m sure my heart is bleeding out.

  But she doesn’t get Izzy to call 9-1-1. She doesn’t start CPR, even though my breath is gone. Instead, she sits back and sighs.

  “Holy, Hogan, you scared the hell out of me.” Alice wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and I see yellow on her palm. On her fingers. It leaves a smear on her face.

  Is that…is that paint?

  Alice helps me sit up and I finally take a deep breath, surprised to discover that I can, surprised to see my fur is splattered with yellow, not red. The gun is on the floor. A paintball pistol. A RAP4, just like Randy and I used to use.

  A toy.

  I feel like an idiot. A bruised idiot. But it looked so real from the other end of the barrel.

  Xander sits in his corner, hands over a gash on his forehead.

  “Noah,” Alice explains to me. “He hit him with his broom handle.”

  “It isn’t real,” Xander whines as he rubs his skull. “It’s a paintball pistol. He didn’t have to hit me.” He scowls at Noah, who has retreated once again to the far corner, both hands cupping his ears, hat rolled down over his eyes.

  “Shut up, Xander,” Izzy says, moving to sit on the red gym bag, where she’s trying to get her phone to work. Glad to see she’s so concerned about me.

  “I was just showing you,” Xander continues. “You asked who the shooter was.” He touches his scalp, examines his fingertips. “I’m bleeding! He made me bleed!”

  “I’ll show you bleeding.” I get up and grab Xander by the throat. I feel my blood pulsing through my body as I slam his head against the metal stall. “You can’t just go around pointing guns at people, shooting people.” Slam! I push him again. Slam! “Even if it is a paintball gun, you moron.”

  Alice grabs my arm and I let go and Xander sinks to the floor. What I really want to do is beat the snot out of him for scaring the girls. The entire school, really. And yes, I admit, for scaring the crap out of me.

  “I know. I know.” Xander coughs. “That’s what I told him.”

  “Who?” Alice asks. “Maxwell?”

  Xander nods.

  “What else do you know?” she says, but her voice isn’t accusing. And I realize, then, what she’s on to. This guy knows all about Maxwell Steinberg and his psycho plans. If anyone can protect us, all the kids at St. F.X., ironically, it’s Xander.

  He looks at us, at me and Izzy and Alice and even Noah, like he’s thinking about whether or not he should say it. I move to grab him by the throat again, ready to squeeze it out of him, but Alice cuts in front. Her boldness shocks me. For all she knows, he does have another gun, a real one, in that bag of his. But if she’s concerned about the gun on the floor or the one that might be in his bag, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she squats down in front of him. Smiles, like she does, with her eyes. Speaks in her gentle voice.

  “It’s okay, Xander,” she says, softly. “It’s going to be okay. Just tell us. Tell us all of it.”

  ISABELLE

  He’s got to be kidding me. “You’ve been sitting there the whole time,” I blurt from across the room, trying to stay as far away from him as possible, “the whole time…and you never told us anything about what you know?”

  Xander blinks. “You didn’t ask.”

  “Well, we’re asking you now, geek,” Hogan says, his tone a language all its own. One Xander obviously doesn’t speak, because he continues to just sit there, blinking at us like he doesn’t know what the question is.

  “It might help,” Alice says, like she’s a translator or something, “if you ask him something specific.”

  “What is this guy Maxwell up to?” I say.

  “What do you numbnuts have planned?” Hogan squats down and pokes him with his thick finger.

  I think of the explosions I heard in the hall. “Is he going to blow up the school?” I look at the paint gun. “Or shoot us as we leave? Or what?”

  Who knows what crazy things this guy has come up with.

  Xander looks at the floor, trying to avoid Hogan, which is kind of hard considering he pulled him back up to standing and is right up in his face. “I don’t know…he wasn’t supposed to…I thought it was—”

  “Well?” Hogan snaps.

  Xander stalls. Like how my phone does if I’ve opened too many apps at once.

  “Give him a second,” Alice says. “Let him think.”

  Whose side is she on, anyway? Let him think? What is there to think about? Either he’s in on it or he isn’t. Why waste time waiting for him to come up with more lies?

  “Do you have any more guns?” Hogan pokes
him again.

  “No, just the—”

  “Do you want to hurt us?” I’m still trying to make sense of this whole crazy thing. Is it a prank? Or are we in real danger here?

  “No!” Xander looks up in surprise, like I’ve said something crazy. “Why would I want to—?”

  “Hello?” I snap. “You brought a gun to school. What? Is it for, like, show-and-tell?”

  Hogan picks up the pistol and drops it in the sink out of Xander’s reach.

  “It was a mission,” Xander says, like that means anything. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt, I—”

  “This isn’t some stupid game,” Hogan says, getting up in his face again.

  “What happens next?” I ask. If anyone knows something, it’s got to be him. “This is serious, Xander. You’re, like, messing with people’s lives here!”

  Xander looks panicked. He should. Maybe he’s finally getting how big of a deal this is.

  “Well?!” Hogan yells, throwing up his arms like some big hairy gorilla. “Spit it out!” I half expect him to start pounding his chest like King Kong. But seriously, Xander’s driving us all nuts.

  “Stop!” Alice yells, and she gets between Xander and Hogan. All one hundred pounds of her. She puts her hand on Hogan’s chest, like that’s going to stop him. “You have to let him think! Give him time to answer,” she says, sternly. And, surprisingly, Hogan steps off.

  Xander slumps to the ground and takes a few deep breaths as Alice moves to sit cross-legged in front of him. Close, but not touching. What is she waiting for? Xander is the key to getting all our answers. About Maxwell. About the shooting. About how the heck we can end this thing. Xander clenches his jaw. Stares at the floor. He seems as confused and scared as we are.

  Finally she speaks, soft and steady. “This wasn’t the plan, was it?”

  Xander glances up at her with a look of relief. Like someone actually gets it. “No. This was not the plan. Not at all.”

  “What was supposed to happen?” she asks gently.

  Xander takes another deep breath. “Our next mission.”

  “Jumping on the bandwagon?” I snort. “That’s original.”

  No one knows who the original guys are. Lots of kids bragged about copycatting those X-morons with pranks of all sizes. Some copycats got caught, thankfully, but I heard that the original X-Men never were. And that they were planning something big for the year end. Just what I needed. Some geeked-out idiots wrecking prom.

  Alice glances at the yearbook cover. The red X in a circle. The yellow paint on her fingers.

  “The X-Men characters…they’re from comics, right?” she asks.

  I want to yell at her to focus. Seriously. Now is not the time to chitchat about his stupid hobby.

  “Xavier and Magneto,” he says, reaching for his encyclopedia. He shows her a picture of two characters: some bald guy in a wheelchair and another one in a helmet and cape. Just like those dumb doodles on every boys’ bathroom door.

  “Alice,” I say, “we don’t have time—”

  She holds up her hand, as if shutting me up. I kid you not.

  “X-Men,” she says, to Xander. “Kind of like you guys—you and Maxwell?”

  “And the rugby team,” I mutter, crossing my arms, “and about a dozen other wannabes.”

  “But you started it,” Alice says, completely ignoring me. “You and Max. You guys are the original X-Men?”

  Xander nods, smiles faintly.

  Wait…what? That’s not possible. Maxwell? And this guy? These are the masterminding pranksters that have been making my life a living hell? He can’t even finish a sentence.

  Hogan leans in, interested now. “So the ping pong balls, the skeleton, the plane, the streaking, all those pranks—that was you?” He almost seems impressed. Shocked, actually.

  Xander nods. “Well, it was mainly Max. He did it. I just took the pictures and kept a log.” Xander shuffles through the photos once again and pulls out a bunch. Max with his arm around the skeleton. Max wearing nothing but his cape and helmet. Max holding a bag of ping pong balls. Max and a foil penis. Max shooting paintballs at the grad mural.

  Alice almost loses it when she sees that one. “I spent weeks—” She clenches her jaw.

  “So you prank people, whatever.” Hogan picks up the gun photo once more. “But is this lockdown just another stunt?”

  “I thought it was,” Xander admits. “My job was to hit the security cameras with paint pellets. But when Max started shooting out the display cases, and I saw smoking holes in the walls where there should have been paint splatters, I realized that Max’s gun was real.” He looks down, ashamed. “And that’s when I ran.”

  I can’t tell if he’s embarrassed by the prank or the fact that he ran away.

  “Wait,” I say. “Why the display cases? It seems kinda lame compared to all the other things you did.”

  The tips of his ears redden. “Max did that for me. He told me he’d find a way to get back at Mr. Strickland for kicking me out of Yearbook. For never putting my pictures on display. Max said they were good enough to hang in a gallery.” For a second, he looks almost proud. “He said that my pictures, the ones of him, especially the ones from today’s mission, would be famous.”

  “If you call ‘on the six o’clock news’ famous,” Hogan mutters.

  So, it was part of Max’s plan to not only do these things, but to keep a record. To be infamous. My stomach twists. This changes things, because it means this mission is much more than just another prank. I look at Hogan. And Alice. They know it too.

  Alice leans in a bit closer. “Can you tell us anything about Max’s plan?”

  Xander frowns.

  Clearly he can’t. Or won’t.

  I lift my phone. Enough of this messing around. Obviously the cops didn’t hear that shot and aren’t coming to save us. I’m not talking to Bri, but in this case, I’ll make another exception. I need her to tell the cops what we know.

  “We should let the police deal with this. That’s their job, right? Let them ask the questions.” I press the start button a few times but the screen stays black. I groan. Mom’s gonna kill me. This is my third one this semester. “Nice, Hogan. You broke my phone. It’s dead.”

  “Don’t blame me,” he says. “You’re the one throwing it around.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure your parents will replace it.” His tone makes it sound like an insult.

  Yes, they probably will. After a long lecture. But doesn’t Hogan get it? Don’t any of them understand? That phone is our only link to the outside world. That phone is our only chance of passing on what we’ve figured out about this whole mess. About Xander. And Max. The police might know his name, but not what we know. One text from me would make all the difference.

  “I don’t suppose any one of you guys have your cell…or your flip phone on you?” I say, knowing the answer even as I ask.

  Ugh! Of all the people to be locked up with.

  XANDER

  X-MEN MISSION LOG

  APRIL 15, 2016

  OPERATION LIGHTNING

  STREAK

  I thought Max would be mad when he found the blue 120-page notebook in my backpack, when he read my journal, when he saw that I’d been writing Mission Logs. I told him that I have to write things down, like how my Social Autopsies help me figure stuff out. I was terrified that he would not invite me on any more missions. But he wasn’t mad. In fact, he was excited. Said it was a great idea because, “How else will they get how amazing we are?”

  I don’t know who they are. But I sure like hearing Max say that we’re amazing. I sure think he is. Like, capital-A Amazing. Max is a genius, I think. Or very close to it. His mind, like mine, doesn’t work like anyone else’s. Only, unlike me, Max never apologizes for being different. Just like how Magneto never apologizes for being Magneto.

  The other thing I noticed about Max is that he is always watching. I need the Tank, and chemicals,
and lots of time to develop what Max sees and knows instantly. “Opportunities”—that’s what he calls them—a moment to make a difference. Max sees those all the time. Sometimes they look like bad choices, because they are technically against the rules, like breaking into the school at night, or making our own grad mural, or when he blew up a whole garbage can full of ping pong balls during an assembly. That one was my favorite. Though I wasn’t too fond of having to spend hours the night before painting a red X on every ball. Mom is still wondering where her red nail polish went.

  But Max has vision. He sees the hidden opportunities that everyone else misses. Like fire drills. And rugby games.

  Lots of people were saying the X-Men missions were done by the rugby team—even some of the players started bragging. So, right as the St. F.X. team started to play, this guy came running across the field wearing a purple cape, red Chuck Taylor All Stars, a red metal helmet—and nothing else. All the fans cheered and screamed as he streaked through the game. I knew it was Magneto because of the helmet (worn to protect against telepathic attacks). And I knew it was Max, because that helmet had gone missing from the display shelf in Comic Corner after his shift the day before. I took seventeen pictures as he crossed the field with Coach Dufour and three players in pursuit. Then he jumped the fence and disappeared, but the crowd cheered on.

  Max proved three things that day:

  1. The rugby players had nothing to do with the X-Men missions.

  2. Magneto totally rules!

  3. Max is faster than their fastest players. HE should get MVP.

  But mostly, it proved what I concluded long ago: Max is brilliant. I never saw that opportunity. It would never have occurred to me to streak across the field. But Max saw it and took it. He is a mastermind.

  I wish I could know what Max is thinking, what he’s planning next, but no one knows how his unique mind works. And Max doesn’t even need Magneto’s helmet to keep people out of his head.