Wickedpedia Read online

  “Are you okay?” asked Winnie.

  He tested a fingertip to his nose. The pain was dizzying, but there was no blood. Then why was his face wet?

  “That’s drool,” Andrea supplied.

  “What happened?”

  Andrea answered for Winnie, as if she didn’t trust her best friend to stick to her talking points. “You got aced. The fräulein here was trying out for the team and you bumbled right into the path of her serve.”

  The girl cradling Cole’s head looked back down at him with concern, fanning several fingers in his face.

  “Wie viele Finger ich halten up?”

  Cole’s eyes throbbed with each bounce of the ball. “Does anyone understand what she’s saying?” he moaned.

  Winnie snatched the ball from Andrea. “Say ‘three,’ Cole.”

  “Three?”

  “Hooray, he can still count,” griped Andrea, hustling Winnie away.

  “Wait!” Cole tried to lurch to a seated position only to swoon back into Lila’s arms. “Please. I need to talk to you.” Winnie pulled away from Andrea and faced him. Her shoulders rose and fell visibly with each breath, a sure sign that his time was limited.

  “Talk.”

  Here’s your opening, Cole. Don’t muck it up now. “How do I look?” Smooth.

  Andrea leaned in. “She’s not your mirror, Cole.”

  Winnie stayed Andrea with a hand. “Like you could have a broken nose and are in need of medical attention.”

  Beneath him, Cole felt German girl/Lila/tennis assassin twinge.

  “Feels swollen, is all. It’s not that bad.”

  “I’d call it a vast improvement,” offered Andrea, eyes on her phone.

  Cole ignored her, focusing on Winnie. But her gaze skittered.

  “Put some ice on it,” Winnie advised. “Lots. Is that it?”

  Cole wondered the same thing.

  They’d been allies. Confidants. Pals. Now he lay before her, concussed, and the best she could muster was a suggestion that he pack his snotty nose with ice.

  “I came to see how you were doing. I saw you in the hall after Drick’s class. I was …” Useless. Unworthy. Distraught. “… worried. I’ve never seen you like that. I hated it.”

  Winnie’s expression seemed to soften. There, in the bite of her lip, was the seed of a connection.

  “And then I heard you and Josh had some kind of fight at his soccer game.”

  Winnie bit down harder. A good sign. Andrea broke off from her texting. A bad sign.

  “You don’t miss much, do you, Cole?” Andrea said, looking up from her phone. “Probably because your beady little eyes are never off Winnie for long.” Cole left for dead any notion he ever had that Andrea harbored an interest in him. “You spend your days watching and waiting for Josh to slip up so you can swoop in.”

  Suddenly Cole felt stripped to his least dignified underwear: tighty-whities, the underwear left over when everything else had already been worn twice, the underwear of last resort. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Please. You’re so obvious, Cole. You came here to give Winnie a shoulder to cry on, hoping she’d pour out her heart about Josh and realize what a prince you look like in comparison. You think she deserves better. A poet. A disciple. A personal chef. You.”

  “Ich möchte jemanden, der für mich backen,” said Lila in a scrambled alphabet.

  “No one’s talking to you, Brunhilda.”

  “Is she right, Cole?” asked Winnie.

  Yes, but … “No,” replied Cole. “I’m a terrible poet.”

  Winnie didn’t laugh. Instead, she closed her eyes. When she opened them a moment later, it was all over. “I have to go. I’m late meeting Josh.”

  “You remember Josh,” said Andrea. “Her boyfriend?”

  The word fell on Cole like a sandbag. “Don’t you mean her ex-boyfriend?” He looked at Winnie. “The one you broke up with because he copies his work straight off of the Internet and can’t tell Hannibal Lecter from Count Chocula? The ex-boyfriend who was dragging you down?”

  Winnie’s jaw tightened. “No, she meant my boyfriend. The one I did not break up with just because he’s under all kinds of pressure with soccer and class and college applications, and let Scott convince him to take a stupid shortcut. The boyfriend I am still with because he doesn’t cling to me or crowd me or make it impossible for me to be anything other than perfect. I mean my boyfriend. Not my ex-boyfriend. Not you. You and I are not getting back together. Ever.”

  She and Andrea departed, leaving Cole alone, with his wounded pride thudding in his gut. And Lila. He wriggled from her clutches.

  “Es tut mir leid,” she said as he wobbled to his feet, grabbing the ball. “Sie ist nicht würdig.” Cole needed no translator to tell him what she’d said. The meaning was clear by the quality of her tone: serrated. “I agree,” he breathed, wandering out.

  Lila watched him go, then said aloud to herself, “Keine Sorge, Cole. She’ll regret it.”

  Cole placed an empty cardboard box beside his bed and faced his desk. One by one, he removed all things Winnie.

  First date. Dinner at the Golden Phoenix. Pan-seared jade dumplings. Abalone lotus. Mexican Coke. Tacked to his bulletin board was the scrap of paper he’d unrolled from the fortune cookie they shared.

  Fortune Not Found: Abort, Retry, Ignore?

  “It’s an omen,” teased Winnie.

  “We have no fortune. We’ll make our own,” Cole said.

  The fortune went into the box.

  ShesGottaGavIt: what the dilly

  One-month anniversary. Winnie’s gift to him. A mix CD. “Forget You,” Glee-cast version. “Defying Gravity,” Wicked. “Baby,” Justin Bieber. Gavin said it was one Disney Radio single away from a tween top forty. Cole suspected Gavin was right about her taste, so he couldn’t tell him about the bonus Miley Cyrus track she’d secretly embedded at the end. Besides. He kinda liked it.

  Into the box.

  ShesGottaGavIt: you see my chick is one of a kind

  ShesGottaGavIt: i know you wish your chick was a rider like mine

  ShesGottaGavIt: when you see my mission know my shortys a dime

  ShesGottaGavIt: what she doing with them chicks

  ShesGottaGavIt: she be skipping the line

  Yearbook. Page 57, Model UN, Winnie and Cole, elected co-secretary-generals. Page 63, Winnie and Cole win the superlative, “I’m Never Wrong.” Inside cover, Winnie’s inscription. I can’t believe it’s over!! Next year seniors, then college!! But first, summer!! Feldman’s, fireflies, and goose bumps! Next to it, Gavin’s inscription. Ditch Winnie and come with me to the beach! Winnie did the ditching.

  Tear out the pages, put them in the box.

  ShesGottaGavIt: do you not like my busta rhymes

  Photo. Winnie, helmeted for a ropes course. Scaling a wall and looking up into Cole’s lens, mouth open in a waving flag of a grin. Box.

  Photo. Prom. How should he stand? Smile with teeth or without? Where should he put his hands? On her hips, arms stiff, posed like an action figure lacking elbow joints. Box.

  Ticket stubs. Box. Postcards. Box. Invitations. Playbills, carnival-game prizes, valentines, birthday cards. The leather bracelet she bought him on a trip to New York. He had to psych himself up to feel cool enough to wear it. Box.

  When he was finished, his desk resembled an archaeological dig. Half-emptied drawers, half open. Constellations of thumbtack holes in his bulletin board where he’d affixed photos. Vast desert spaces on his desktop created by the absence of Winniabilia.

  Had he only been Winnie’s glorified placeholder? Did she have no one better to hang around with until Josh came along? Was every memory he had of their relationship counterfeit?

  Cole’s computer dinged again with another message from Gavin.

  ShesGottaGavIt: whenever you feel like acknowledging my existence

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m here.

  ShesGottaGavIt: let me take you out
>
  ShesGottaGavIt: to drown your sorrows

  Cole looked at the box, at all the mementos he’d purged from his desk. Not one of them was genuine. It wasn’t enough that Josh had taken her away. Now they’d taken everything he’d once known to be true, too. It wasn’t fair.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m thinking we should drown Winnie and Josh instead.

  ShesGottaGavIt: !

  ShesGottaGavIt: See what I did there?

  ShesGottaGavIt: Punctuation!

  ShesGottaGavIt: Capitalization!

  ShesGottaGavIt: You’ve shocked me into grammar!

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I’m going to get back at them.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Sorry, passed out.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Are you for real?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Josh.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Scott.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Andrea.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Winnie?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Winnie.

  ShesGottaGavIt: I feel like a proud papa.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Look at my boy.

  ShesGottaGavIt: All grown up.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I want to do to them what they did to me.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Turn them into depressive shells of their former selves?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Embarrass them.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Make them hate each other.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Ruin them.

  ShesGottaGavIt: And how are you going to do that?

  PainAuChoCOLEat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Truffle

  Gavin clicked the link.

  Josh Truffle

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  ShesGottaGavIt: I was unaware Josh had a Wikipedia page.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I got the idea from that story you told me about Andrea’s dad. Keep reading.

  Josh Truffle (born June 1, 1995) is an American high school student and soccer player for the Springfield High School Raiders of Springfield, Connecticut. He led his section with fifteen goals in 2013, attracting the attention of numerous scouts for Division One college soccer programs. However, Truffle saw his future go down in flames after revelations of systematic cheating in several SHS classes.

  It went on, outlining Josh’s humiliation in class and on the field. But Cole didn’t stop there. He unloaded every detail about how Josh snaked Winnie, and made up a few scuzzier ones, to boot.

  ShesGottaGavIt: I like the part where you have Josh and Winnie running a slave trade out of the locker room.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: I only wrote that to see if you were reading closely.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: So what do you think?

  ShesGottaGavIt: I think it’s a step in the right direction.

  ShesGottaGavIt: But if you want real and lasting payback, you need to do more.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Like what?

  ShesGottaGavIt: Like

  ShesGottaGavIt: Make them hurt each other.

  ShesGottaGavIt: See, if Josh knocked your teeth out, you wouldn’t be surprised.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Because he’s your enemy.

  ShesGottaGavIt: But if I knocked your teeth out …

  ShesGottaGavIt: It would come out of left field.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Because we’re besties.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: It would be a betrayal.

  ShesGottaGavIt: Unfortunately, that’s where my wisdom ends.

  ShesGottaGavIt: I don’t know how to set one of them against the other.

  Cole remembered something Winnie had said in the tennis bubble. It had been Scott’s suggestion that Josh turn to Wikipedia to source his work.

  PainAuChoCOLEat: Maybe I do.

  Gavin came over later and they worked all night fine-tuning Josh’s page and constructing four more, one each for Andrea, Scott, Winnie, and Mr. Drick. Gavin argued that Drick deserved the mischief for his habit of capricious grading. By then Cole was feeling just punchy enough to agree.

  Shortly before dawn, Cole finally felt ready to deliver their work into the world. “Do you think this will work?”

  Gavin cracked his neck. “You’d better hope so, because I don’t have the energy to keep hatching revenge plots with you. If this doesn’t put them in the ground, you’re on your own.”

  Cole wondered about that as he gave the pages a final once-over. They seemed to be missing something. A final thumbed nose. He had an idea and began to type, revising each page with one or two sentences.

  “What are you doing?” asked Gavin.

  It was childish. It was spiteful. It was over the top. But it was the finishing touch that made him feel strong, like he’d just rocked twenty pull-ups with ease before his entire gym class. His blood rumbled in his veins like rapids and he took a big, confident, gladiator breath as he presented the final product to Gavin for approval.

  “I can’t put them in the ground for real,” he told Gavin. “But I can do it for fun.”

  Gavin’s eyes gleamed as he drank in Cole’s additions: Deaths. For Josh, Scott, Andrea, Drick — and Winnie. Each one tailored to the subject and the wrongs committed. “The student surpasses the master. I didn’t know you were so twisted.”

  Neither did Cole. But the ends of his enemies had come naturally to him. Still, it wasn’t like it meant anything. He wanted them to feel pain, but he didn’t want anyone dead. This part was just a joke.

  Until later that day. When it wasn’t.

  Cole paused near the entrance to the high school and took in his surroundings. He wanted to remember this moment. A few dried and curling leaves still clung to the oaks guarding the entry. A single frozen crust of snow was pasted to the pavement. It was all that remained of the storm that had crashed through two weeks before. The warm front that had replaced it melted away everything else, including Cole’s melancholy. Behind him lay life with Winnie. Before him lay … something else. Something good. A renewed focus on academics. Valedictorian. An Ivy. Italian vowels and six figures and the mind-numbing job his parents wanted for him. But he would also have his chef’s kitchen. And without fantasies of reuniting with Winnie to distract him, his cooking would get back to form. Maybe the something awaiting wasn’t necessarily “good.” Maybe it was just “better.”

  He joined the stream of students filing into the school, prepared to dine on the gossip of Josh and Winnie’s undoing.

  But there was no feast to be had.

  He passed not one, not two, but three cliques devoted to spreading of bad news. Nobody asked him for his ex-boyfriend take on the allegations he had unleashed onto the Internet just hours ago. Something was off.

  “Yeah, something’s off!” exclaimed Gavin when he found Cole at his locker. “We were too busy crafting their demise to remember to leak the pages! No one’s talking about them because no one knows they exist!”

  Cole suggested that remedying that wouldn’t be too hard, but Gavin warned him not to get cocky. “It’s not like one of us can just Tweet it. We have to cover our tracks. The best thing would be for someone else to break the story for us.”

  Cole spun out his locker combo, thinking. He didn’t know such a person. They might have to take their chances, create a fake Facebook profile or something and hope it couldn’t be traced —

  Something flapped in his face. A sheet of paper taped to the inside of his locker door. Attached to it was a yellow sticky. Neither of them had been put there by Cole.

  “What is it?” asked Gavin.

  Written on the sticky were the words, Here’s a preview of a story that will hit later today. Hope you like it. Still standing by you. Alles liebe, WW. The document was a printout of a Muckraker article dated today. Cole scanned the piece, headlined “Soccer Stunner.” “Looks like someone else beat us to it.” Cole lowered his voice and read the article. “I think there is someone who could help us out,” he said. “Somebody who owes me one. The same somebody who left this for me to find. Walda Winchell. Writes for the Muckraker.”

  Gavin shook his head. “I don’t like it. Everyone knows ‘Walda Winchell’ is an alias. She could be G
ossip Girl for all we know! How can you trust her? She broke into your locker. Besides, she’s German. You can’t trust a German. They eat flammekuchen and pfannkuchen by the handful.”

  “German?” Cole’s eyes fell stupidly on the Alles liebe written on the sticky. He looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of rainbow tube socks, Birkenstocks, and black hair disappear around a corner. He took off after her, deaf to Gavin calling his name.

  The next corridor was empty. The classrooms that lined it were locked, their teachers yet to arrive for first period. There was only one way to go, and Cole launched into it.

  The girls’ bathroom.

  Lila was perched on a sink with her phone, her reflection revealing she was well ahead in a game of Words with Friends. Cole stopped in his tracks This was a place in which his kind was not supposed to trespass. Like a fairy fort.

  Lila put her phone away. The look on her face was not one of indignation. She looked … pleased. Almost tickled. “First time here? Is it all you’d imagined?”

  “You speak English.”

  “Kind of hard not to in America.”

  “You’re also Walda Winchell.”

  “To my readers,” she chirped, extending her hand. “You can call me Lila. Don’t worry. I used soap and everything.”

  Cole shook her hand, warm to the touch.

  “You’re wondering why I let you think I was German.”

  “Among other things. Like how you broke into my locker.”

  “Sorry, trade secret. So are you going to give me your review?”

  “Review?” He felt like a racquetball, smashed off her racquet.

  “Of my piece. You like the lead? It’s fair and balanced? You feel the players are accurately represented?”

  “I think it’s your finest work yet,” he said.

  She grinned. “I didn’t go after your precious Winnie too hard?”

  Then he remembered why he’d followed her inside.