CHAPTER 14

JILL THOUGHT SCOTT was a little creepy. She initially interviewed for the task of Brown State Swim Team manager with Scott as he was the team captain. She found it difficult to look him in the face, but she forced herself to in spite of the totally groadie scar tissue that train-tracked around his ocular region. But that wasn’t all of it. He could be mean, too. He had a nasty temper, to the point that Jill thought that he probably had some undiagnosed rage issues.

One time, in the locker room, a Brown State swimmer had snapped another swimmer’s butt with a wet towel. The intended snappee dodged the attack and instead the towel grazed Scott’s leg. It took the whole relay race team and their backup anchor to pull Scott off the towel snapper. He had wrapped the towel around the young man’s neck and was pulling it tight and threatening to make him eat his own swim cap.

Scott was reprimanded behind closed doors, but didn’t even have to step down as team captain. Jill wondered if he knew someone who knew someone.

When Scott isn’t angry, he’s decent guy, Jill thought. He always reimbursed her for the gas money that it took to drive him around on official Brown State swim business. He got her a good deal on BSST merch from the campus bookstore. And of course, that one time she got too drunk at a frat party and he randomly passed her walking back to her car, he convinced her not to drive, let her crash in his dorm room on the couch, and didn’t try any funny business. He even took her to Brown Hot Bagels the next morning and bought her breakfast.

Running a couple of errands was the least she could do for a guy with poor depth perception.

But that night she had been waiting for too long. She called Scott for a status update.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Where are you?” Jill said. “I’m outside the chapel.”

“Turn off your lights and park around back. I’m still going to be a few minutes,” Scott sneered.

“What’s going on? This is for the swim team?”

“It most certainly is,” he assured her.

“Well . . . hurry up.” Jill said, but Scott had already ended the call.

• • •

Roheed burst into Charlie’s apartment. He was sweating and breathing in short ragged bursts. It was apparent to him very quickly that no one was home, especially when he saw the note on the table in Charlie’s unmistakable, third-grade-esque, printed handwriting that read: Inspired. Writing at the library if you need me.

Roheed caught his breath, wiped his brow, and headed back to the Yellow County Community College campus, where he had just come from.

• • •

There was a full moon that night; appropriate, considering the subject matter of Charlie’s movie script, In Sheep’s Clothing, and also appropriate because things were about to get downright wacky.

Outside the chapel, Chris’s car pulled up to where Jill’s was only moments before. Around the corner of the chapel, Jill was watching the snart video for, like, the thousandth time. She didn’t notice Chris’s car parking and Chris, Jonathan, and Tammy exiting the automobile and heading towards the chapel.

Charlie was still at the library, typing like one of those proverbial monkeys on one of those proverbial typewriters. Roheed burst into the large, open room where Charlie was and startled him. Charlie hit save on his word processing software and looked up.

“Whoa there, little buddy,” he said. Then he saw Roheed’s blackening eye. “What happened to your face?”

Roheed was out of breath. “A black eye . . . from the eye guy.”

“What?”

“That Brown State swimmer.” Roheed leaned against a bookshelf of young adult literature. A drop of sweat fell off his brow onto a well-read copy of The Magician’s Nephew. “Scott, I believe.”

“He punched you?” Charlie couldn’t believe it. How could someone punch Roheed?

“And disposed of my phone. He said he was going to redecorate Jonathan’s wedding.”

“Jonathan’s wedding at the chapel?” Charlie gasped.

“Yeah.” Roheed knew, and he knew Charlie knew he knew, so it was weird that Charlie had said that bit of exposition out loud.

“You can see it from here,” Charlie said.

They ran over to the large window overlooking YCCC’s quad. The window took up the majority of that side of the building to make up for the lack of windows on the other three sides, per the original intended use for the building as Cell Block D of the East Yellow County Correctional Facility. Chris, Jonathan, and Tammy were approaching the chapel. Jill’s car was parked around on the other side.

“What’s Jill doing at the chapel? She said she was doing Brown State business,” Charlie said, and then exchanged glances with Roheed. Without saying anything more, they took off running out of the library.

• • •

Chris, Jonathan, and Tammy entered the chapel, expecting to see it set up for the wedding the very next day. But when they entered, Chris gazed around, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Jonathan thought that there must have been some sort of mistake, and Tammy thought that she didn’t really know her son that well and that he had terrible taste if that was how the wedding chapel was supposed to be decorated.

Once she realized that something fishy was afoot, Tammy could tell that the chapel had been decorated beautifully. There were white and blue flowers, ornate ribbons, and even candles and a yellow carpet leading to the front of the room where the vows were meant to have been said. But now it looked like Andrew W.K. had partied there harder than he’d ever partied before. The flowers were trampled. The candles were broken. The carpet and the ribbons were ripped from their places and tossed aside.

Jonathan’s eyes followed the yellow carpet road to where Scott sat on an overturned pew on the chapel’s stage, wedding cake smudged on his Brown State T-shirt, size XL for the Xtra Large amount of carnage he had wrought in the Yellow County Community College Chapel. He had a switchblade in one hand and he was gouging out one of the eyes of the groom wedding cake topper. He looked up at the trio with fire in his eye—the look of insanity. Tammy was no longer happy that she had come along; she now wondered if the wedding would happen at all. In fact, she wondered if they were going to make it out of the chapel unscathed.

The words “Oh my!” escaped Tammy’s lips as Scott flicked his wrist and one of the eyes of the groom wedding cake topper popped out and rolled across the floor, coming to rest at her feet. She felt sick.