Charlie pulled up to school and saw the commotion at the front entrance.
He stepped out of his car and felt the pain shoot up his leg, but it was better after a night’s sleep. Or as much sleep as he could muster, replaying the tombstone image over and over in his head. He locked his car and reflexively looked over his shoulder before heading up the walk.
He saw the graffiti and immediately wondered, Is it the Game? Or is it just ugly reality? Mr. Walker was already up on a ladder, trying to scrub it off, but it was no use. The head of facilities came around the corner carrying a plywood board.
Charlie got to his locker and dialed the combination. Inside, he found something unexpected. Sitting on top of his mess of books and gym clothes was the familiar silver box with a scarlet ribbon. He didn’t have to open it to know the bracelet was inside.
The message was loud and clear:
You’re not going anywhere.
The loudspeaker crackled over the grand lobby of the school. Kenny had just walked in with Vanhi, who was horrified and furious over the graffiti.
“It’s disgusting,” Vanhi said. “What kind of a fucking world do we live in?”
Kenny was feigning as much indignation as possible. “It’s terrible,” he managed weakly.
“Of course, it could be the Game.”
“It could.”
Vanhi spun around on Kenny. “You didn’t?”
“No! Are you kidding me? Did you?”
“No,” she said dourly, as if she hadn’t but might as well have, thinking of her box.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter if it was the Game or real.”
Vanhi gave him a wary look.
“It’s out there. That’s how some people think. At least now it’s in the light.”
Vanhi raised an eyebrow at him.
Then the loudspeaker called for Kenny Baker, Eddie Ramirez, and Candace Reed to come to Mrs. Morrissey’s office.
Vanhi cocked her head, eyebrow still up, but didn’t say a word.
Mr. Walker was slow.
He was slow because of his limp, the result of bad medical care when he was a child. He was slow because when God was passing out brains, he was at the back of the line. That’s what his father had always told him: Some people got seconds, but you just got scraps.
He walked down the hall, foot dragging, giving the same answer about the graffiti to the students who pestered him: “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
So he was lame and dumb, but it never bothered him. The world just moved along at its own pace. The kids marked up the walls, and he wiped them clean. The kids threw paper on the bathroom floor, and he picked it up.
I may be white trash, but you’re dumb white trash, and that’s worse, his dad liked to say.
Everything as it should be.
But not today. Today would go horribly wrong.
His walkie-talkie crackled and Elaine Morrissey summoned him to her office.
The Dragon Lady?
She didn’t deal with the Mr. Walkers of the world. But he knew what he had to do. The voice had told him.
When he walked in, the students were already there, the ones he expected.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Walker,” Elaine Morrissey said. She didn’t sound thankful at all.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you know these students?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Mr. Walker cleared his throat, which was catching on him. “What I mean to say, ma’am, is that I don’t know their names but I have seen them before.”
Mrs. Morrissey sniffed, a short, sharp intake through her nose. She was pretty, or had been, but the stress had lined the skin around her eyes.
“And where do you recognize them from?”
“They’re the ones that—”
Mr. Walker stopped short. This is bad, Dingus! (His brothers had always called him that—Dumb Dingus—but he didn’t like the Dumb part.) Are you stupid? Why are you about to tell her what you did?
But he knew why! Because of what the voice had told him.
“They’re the ones messing around in the boiler room.”
Mrs. Morrissey nodded, as if that confirmed what she already knew. “Have you seen this before?” She showed him a photograph of the boiler streaked with the grisly pentagram.
Kenny felt a bead of sweat run down his temple. He wiped it with his shoulder and hoped no one noticed.
Mr. Walker squinted at the photo. “Yes, ma’am, I have.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“A star.”
She seemed satisfied with that. “Is it still there?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And why not?”
Walker steadied himself. This was it! Do what the voice said!
You’re too dumb to lie, his father always chided him.
But he had to, today. Or the voice would do what it said.
“Well, ma’am, I cleaned it up.”
Kenny’s face twitched. That was a lie. The Vindicators had cleaned it up.
“Why would you do that?” Mrs. Morrissey snapped at him.
Walker looked confused. “Ma’am, that’s my job? To clean stuff?”
Mrs. Morrissey blew out air through her mouth. “You didn’t think I needed to see it first?”
Keep going, Dingus, he told himself. You’re doing good.
“Well, now that you mention it, ma’am, I guess so.”
“And before that, you let these students into the room?”
Mr. Walker hung his head in shame. That part was true.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why?”
“The Mexican gave me twenty dollars.”
Mrs. Morrissey and Eddie both flinched, their eyes meeting and almost causing them to laugh in disbelief. But they let it go silently and the tension set back in.
“Okay. And what did they do in there?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. I didn’t stay. But the lady had a camera.” A thought occurred to Mr. Walker, and he got genuinely excited and forgot how nervous he was. “I bet she took that picture there!” He pointed to the photo in Mrs. Morrissey’s hand.
She nodded impatiently. “And the time before that?”
Kenny looked up. So did Eddie. There was no time before that. Not with Mr. Walker.
Now Walker felt his blood pumping in his temples. This was it. He had to follow the voice’s instructions exactly.
“The first time, ma’am? I let that boy in by himself.” For emphasis, Mr. Walker added, “The Mexican.”
“That’s not true!” Eddie blurted out. The whole time he’d had a calm, smug demeanor, like everything was unfolding as he’d expected. But suddenly he was apoplectic.
Kenny gasped, the worst poker player on earth. But then he realized that’s exactly what he should be doing, under this version of events.
Mrs. Morrissey, on the other hand, didn’t seem the least bit surprised. “Did he have anything with him?”
“Another twenty.”
“Anything else?”
“Just some paint.”
“What?” Eddie blurted out. He nearly came out of his seat. His looked to Kenny and Candace, as if he’d find support from them.
“That’s all for now, Mr. Walker,” Mrs. Morrissey said.
When he was gone, she turned to Eddie.
“What do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Ramirez?”
“This is crazy! He’s lying.”
“Mr. Walker is lying?”
“Yes!”
“Mr. Walker.”
“Yes.”
“And why would he do that?”
Eddie froze. He had no idea. Mr. Walker was a man-child and easy to manipulate, but you could ask him what his PIN was and he’d tell you, if he knew what a PIN was. How could Eddie know that a voice had called Mr. Walker that morning, sounding strangely like Walker’s dead father, telling him that if he didn’t blame the Mexican and say his words right, people would kill his ninety-year-old mother, who lived at Green Oaks Memory Care Unit at 1422 Caldwell, room 328, and him, too?
“I don’t know,” Eddie answered desperately. “Maybe someone paid him.”
“Like you paid him?”
Eddie opened his mouth to protest, then stopped.
“Do you deny paying him twenty dollars to get into the boiler room?”
“No. I mean, yes. I did it once. To get the story. It was an important story.”
“Important for you. For your résumé?”
“No, for the school! I mean, for me, too, but that’s not why—”
She waved her hand, cutting him off. The Dragon Lady was in full terror mode. “So you admit bribing him once, just not twice.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
“Right.” He sounded deflated.
“You can make this better for yourself if you just tell the truth.”
“I am telling the truth! I was trying to investigate the picture. I didn’t draw it.”
“You drew the picture to create the story.”
“No! I swear. Don’t take my word for it,” Eddie cried out. “You can test the blood!”
Kenny froze in place.
“How convenient!” Mrs. Morrissey snapped, starting to lose her decorum. “You just heard Mr. Walker say he cleaned it up. And now you say ‘test the blood.’ When you know it was just paint!”
“No, no, no! The test tube! I took a sample. It’ll be Kenny’s blood, I swear on my life.”
“Kenny’s blood?”
Morrissey looked as if her eyes were going to pop out of her head.
“He’s in a group, they’re freaks.…”
“It’s a computer club,” Kenny said softly.
“He’s got cuts on his hand!” Eddie cried.
“From the Tech Lab,” Kenny said. “Building the robot.”
“Test the blood!”
“And where would this ‘test tube’ be now, Mr. Ramirez?” Morrissey asked.
“I gave it to Candace. I knew Kenny would try to find it in my stuff.”
All eyes turned to Candace.
“Well, Ms. Reed?”
Candace met Morrissey’s gaze and said coolly, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Eddie’s jaw dropped. He looked around the room, feeling betrayed, baffled, outraged. His hands moved like he was going to make some gesture along with words that would make it all better, but nothing came out and the hands just hung there, defeated.
“I gave it to her,” he said again, perplexed.
“Mr. Baker, you’ve been awfully quiet. Who’s telling the truth? Mr. Ramirez? Or Mr. Walker and Ms. Reed and common sense?”
Kenny felt sweat running all down his rib cage. It was a miracle his shirt wasn’t soaked through. He realized he was gripping his chair arms too hard.
“It always felt like a fake story to me,” he said softly, feeling a last little part of himself stretch to its limit. “Eddie just wanted it so badly.” Snap!
Mrs. Morrissey squeezed her eyes shut and pinched her nose before glaring at Eddie. She seemed to have lost all composure. “Do you have any idea how much I don’t need this right now? It’s bad enough I have to deal with this horrific graffiti and the goddamned election making everyone crazy. Unless you drew that, too, Mr. Ramirez?” she asked coldly.
“You think I would write that?” He put his face in his hands.
Then he looked up, as if a last, saving thought had occurred to him.
“How did you even hear about this?”
“I received an anonymous tip this morning.”
Eddie’s eyes widened hopefully. “An anonymous tip! You’re going to blow up my life over an anonymous tip?”
Mrs. Morrissey was calm now. She had him. It was time to switch from hunt to feast. “Oh, and by the way, how did you discover this story, in your version of events?”
Eddie’s shoulders sank.
He was beaten.
“An anonymous tip,” he said, so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him.
He would be expelled. He could appeal, but it wouldn’t matter. That would take months. Maybe years. And he would lose. Columbia would never, ever take him. Or anywhere else.
He was an investigator—a good one—yet he couldn’t see any way out of this. The web around him was suffocating.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Ramirez alone,” Morrissey said, sending a chill through the room. Kenny and Candace were already up and slinking out when she added, “Don’t think I’ve forgotten you were part of bribing Mr. Walker to break in. Don’t test me again.”
Candace said, “Okay.”
Kenny added, “Yes, ma’am,” as his parents had taught him.
“Oh, and Mr. Baker, about that injury in the Tech Lab?”
He froze.
“I’m going to need you to sign a release. I don’t want to hear about this later. I trust that won’t be an issue?”
“No, no issue.”
She nodded, already turning toward Eddie.
Later, Eddie would leave her office, too, alone, the hallways empty with class in session, thank God, because before he could reach the privacy of the bathroom stalls, he would break into tears and slump down on the floor of the hall.
His life was ruined.
And he wasn’t entirely sure how or why.