High and Dry (5 page)

I took out my phone and sat back down. Tapped the messages icon and scrolled through it.

There were twenty texts from Bridget to me, all time-stamped from last night. That wasn't the horrifying part. The horrifying part was the twenty texts from
me
to
her
in return.

Apparently, I was bringing sexy back. In explicit detail.

“Find my flash drive by the scholarship deadline Friday afternoon, or Ellie gets an eyeful,” said Bridget.

“You're blackmailing me!”

“You didn't give me a choice.”

I clenched my fist beneath the table. “She dumped me. Why would she care?”

“
You
care, though, don't you? You think you still have a chance.”

Her smugness knew no bounds. She wasn't the cat who ate the canary—she was the cat who bred canaries in captivity and force-fed them to
each other
, then had a foie gras–style feast off one epic, stuffed bird.

I shook my head, incredulous. “You sat there in your room all night, pretend-sexting me, and using my phone to write back?”

“It's pretty basic, Dix. But thanks, I thought it was clever.”

I laughed for like two hours. Leaned back in my seat and clasped my hands behind my head.

It made her nervous. “What? Why are you laughing?”

“You stupid, horrible … I could hate-kiss you.”

“What?”

“You've given me an alibi!”

It took her a second to realize I was right.

“Show these to the sheriff's deputy.
Don't
show them to Ellie,” I ordered.

Bridget's dark red lips parted in a wide smile, exposing her teeth. “Guess that means you're helping me.”

I guessed it did.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

AFTER MOM'S TRIUMPH WITH FRESH START, MY PARENTS
could've moved on to the next town to work their magic, but Granddad enjoyed having us nearby, and my dad enjoyed his position teaching at Lambert College. Plus, I think they wanted to keep me in the district to prove Fresh Start was a success: “Look! Palm Valley has such a wondrous school system now, we want our
own
kid to attend. We would never dream of leaving!”

What my mom and Fresh Start failed to comprehend was that the teachers were only half the problem. The real reason everyone had been bombing tests and never participating in class was because they were terrified of upperclassmen. The bullying of freshmen and sophomores was a religion and a sport, with the combined zealotry of each.

If, as a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, you're constantly calculating which route in the hallway is least likely to lead to disfigurement or dismemberment, or wondering who'll steal and destroy your homework assignment, piss in your lunch bag, “decorate” your locker, or follow you home for more secluded beatings, it's tough to give a crap about your grades.

So how do you stop bullying? By giving everyone a group to
run with; a group to call home; a group to protect them. From the moment freshmen arrive now, they belong to something. A team. A program. An after-school extracurricular.

The second to last week of eighth grade, boosters from the high school show up in the parking lot to recruit prospects. Competition is fierce. Over the summer you can change your mind, but you have to have something else lined up, or someone to swap with who won't stab you in the back at the last second. The first, best, and only hope for survival is to claim an identity as quickly as possible before stepping on campus.

It doesn't really matter what you choose; it just matters
that
you choose, or else you'll be orphaned and labeled a nomad, ripe for exploitation and daily beatings, and no one—I mean, no one—can protect you.

Upperclassmen aren't supposed to interact with freshmen or sophomores unless they have permission from your group. Anyone who violates this rule is subject to lawless vengeance, appropriate to the size of the violation and the temperament of the group that's been provoked.

The library is no-man's-land, and by junior year the rules loosen up a little. Senior year, anyone in your class can interact unless the leader of a group's put out an injunction against you.

As head songbird,
Sound of Music
Maria could've banned me from her party, but I think she found it entertaining to watch me flounder and drown.

It was obvious who your group was. You moved in packs,
between classes, before school, after school, on the weekends. Without a group, you were a sitting duck.

Ryder Lennox was the most gifted athlete at Tumbleweed Junior High. He was a shoo-in for any sport, in high school and beyond. We became friends during sixth-grade Little League, but we both chose soccer for our group freshman year of high school.

I was accepted to the team no problem, but Ryder got orphaned from sports after failing the drug test. With no one to protect him, he spent all his time fending off attacks from upperclassmen. One-on-one he might've been okay, but the fights were always lopsided. I tried to help him, but I was tied up in soccer every day. If I walked with him in the hall, bullies had to leave us alone or face the wrath of every cleat and beckham, but Ryder hated having a babysitter, hated relying on anyone.

My parents tried to intervene, too. They offered to let Ryder live with us for a while, but that just made the situation worse. Things got ugly with Ryder's mom. She felt really insulted, like we'd been saying she wasn't good enough to take care of Ryder, but it was his older brother, Griffin, we were worried about. He'd dropped out, and was urging Ryder to do the same. I wouldn't have blamed Ryder if he'd done just that.

I asked him once, “
How could you do it? How could you mess up your whole high school life by taking drugs the first week of school, when you knew they'd have the test?”
He just told me I didn't understand.

We drifted apart. Ryder barely showed up at school. When he
did, he got jumped, and the longer he stayed away, the worse his return would be. He was hospitalized twice.

And then one day, spring of freshman year, the beatings stopped. I wanted to ask what had changed, but he wasn't exactly forthcoming, and I was so relieved he was okay that I didn't push it.

Sophomore year, I got a girlfriend—Bridget—and by then Ryder and I barely saw each other. Junior year, I got a second girlfriend—Ellie—and we hung out even less. Then last August he asked me if I wanted to make some easy cash.

I should've said no.

I should've done a lot of things.

A FAVOR FOR A FRIEND

I LOGGED IN TO THE LIBRARY SYSTEM AND PRINTED OUT THE
ID numbers of everyone who'd been there second period on Friday. Bridget promised to meet with her source and give me a list of their names by the end of the day. She was due at choir rehearsal right when school let out, and I had history last period, so she told me she'd place the names in an envelope and tape them to the underside of the desk closest to the window.

At lunch, I took my usual spot at the soccer table, next to Patrick Penrose, the head of our group and also our goalie. He was tall and kind of bulky, muscular but not so much a brick house as a mud house that swayed and leaned with the wind. Soccer balls stuck to him; he had an uncanny ability to put himself in their path. Off the field he was pretty chill, but he took the game seriously and he was determined to keep a clean sheet this season to impress college scouts.

Patrick was always organizing trips to Maxwell Park and Wildwater Kingdom. His cousin worked there and helped us bypass the endless lines by calling ahead on his walkie-talkie, claiming our last ride had broken down and shooting us straight to the front. For
this he was rewarded with “superior customer service” pay bumps each quarter.

I opened my thermos of coffee and took a swallow. It was cold now, but it was still tinged with the hair of the dog that had bit me and hadn't let go since Ellie ditched me at Café Kismet.

There seemed no reason to sober up today. I'd been framed, blackmailed, and presented with a false alibi, all before noon.

“Top it up?” Josh said quietly, waggling a miniflask under the table.

I was surprised. I didn't think Josh liked me. When I got moved to defense this season, Josh was bumped to second string. I used to play center forward, the glory position, sort of the equivalent of quarterback in football, but coach had decided my particular skill set was better utilized elsewhere.

Now we were both fullbacks, but Josh only got to play if I needed a break or got benched for fouling someone, and he resented me for it. In contrast, I never gave Delinsky, my own replacement for center forward, a hard time. The game was the game. Maybe this was Josh's way of making peace and saying there were no hard feelings anymore?

I accepted the offering and drunkenly observed my fellow classmates for the rest of the hour.

The sheriff's deputies didn't even try to be discreet. They called someone new out of the cafeteria every two minutes. I enjoyed Fred's perp walk in particular; it was probably the most terrifying moment of his life.

I probably should've jotted down the names of everyone who was summoned, because one of them had driven my car and dumped
West Side Story
Maria at the hospital, but I was too out of it to think clearly, and I was bracing myself for my follow-up interrogation.

The strange thing was, nobody seemed to care about Maria Salvador. Or at least, no one was talking about her. Every conversation I overhead was about how “annoying” and “unfair” it was that the final college-counseling sessions had to be rescheduled to accommodate the investigation into her overdose.

Palm Valley High was a cold-ass place, but it was not without irony: the conscientious people who'd set up their college meetings for today would get screwed, and the slackers like me, who'd signed up later in the week, wouldn't be affected.

I stumbled into history class early, dehydrated and fighting off a headache, and sure enough Bridget's envelope was there, under the desk by the window. The location she'd picked was perfect because on Monday nights for the last several months I always did a favor for Ryder. All I had to do was make sure the window was unlocked when I left, and on Tuesday he'd give me forty dollars. Easiest money I ever made.

Most of the time it was a cinch, but every once in a while I ran into trouble, like maybe a kid stayed late to talk to Mr. Donovan, or Mr. Donovan himself lingered to organize the supply closet, in which case I was supposed to draw a small red X on the back of
Ryder's lock with a wax pencil as I passed by his locker on my way out.

Today was an easy day—I unlocked the window before anyone else arrived—and I was happy for it, until I remembered I had no one to spend the forty dollars on, not anymore.

Ellie was only one classroom away, right behind us, but she may as well have been on the moon. I got a sickening thought: had she dumped me because forty dollars wasn't enough to take her to nice places? Just as quickly, I dismissed the theory. We'd been happy before I had any money. We'd been happy going to free events and occasionally watching DVDs with her brother, Jonathan. We'd been happy.

So why did she end it?

Mr. Donovan taught history and served as the debate coach. He was widely regarded as the best teacher at Palm Valley, definitely the best hire of Mom's and a shining example of how to teach “to the test.” (Conveniently, Fresh Start also wrote and sold the quarterly tests used to measure whether students were learning above, at, or below their grade levels.) My mom's crowning achievement was tying teacher salaries to performance. If they failed to meet their student achievement quotas, they'd lose pay, and their pet projects, deemed frivolous, would lose funding as well. Donovan's efforts were single-handedly responsible for keeping the debate team alive.

He was the kind of teacher whose enthusiasm made you feel embarrassed for him. He even wore jackets with patches at the
elbows, a parody of a professor. It was like, protect yourself, dude. Why do you have to make it easy for us to mock you? Have some self-preservation.

The debate kids (the lincoln-douglases) loved Mr. Donovan, though. They fed off his enthusiasm. It fueled them, and the rest of us couldn't touch them. They were nerds, but they didn't care, because they didn't need our approval or acceptance. They were what the groups were supposed to be but hardly ever were: close-knit, insulated. Tight. And they were this way because they wanted to be, not because of an arbitrary choice they made freshman year that lumped their fates together.

Maybe that's why Ellie had taken up with Fred. Maybe that earnestness appealed to her.

I held my textbook up as a cover and opened the envelope Bridget had left me. The list was thirty people long. I rolled my eyes and glanced at the first four.

Danny: freshman, category unknown. Great. I'd have to figure out which group he ran with and get permission to talk to him.

Sound of Music
Maria, head of songbirds: I could talk to her tonight after soccer, during the girls' choir rehearsal. (It didn't hurt that Ellie would be there, too.)

Josh, my fellow beckham: the simplest to approach. He also had history class with me.

Jennifer, consigliere of chekhovs (the tiny, elite group of AP students who studied dead Russian lit. Derogatory nickname: cherkoffs). Bridget had drawn an arrow and written, “She's in my
English class and I saw her trying to crib off my exam last year.” (Doubtful, I thought. It was probably the exact opposite.)

I was already exhausted and bored by the list. My motivation to solve the “Case of the Missing Flash Drive” waned with each passing minute of class. My order of priorities was as follows:

1.     Win back Ellie

2.     Find out who framed me

3.     Win the game against Agua Dulce

56.   Laundry