Wickedpedia Page 5

  “Like I said. Finest work yet. Except it’s incomplete.”

  No more grin. “Excuse me?”

  “There’s more to the story. I’d hate for you to release this only to find out you missed the biggest part.” He held out his hand for her phone. “May I?”

  She turned it over, curious. Cole used the browser to call up Josh’s Wikipedia page. “I found it online last night,” he said. “I’m surprised no one else has. Read.”

  It took her all of five seconds to find the part that made her eyes widen.

  * * *

  Cole refreshed the Muckraker’s website all day. He was sitting next to Gavin in Chetley’s class, working on their Web designs, when the story finally hit. Cole smacked Gavin in the side and nodded at the screen. The story read almost exactly as it had on the hard copy Lila left for him in his locker.

  Truffle’s future is not the only one left in question. With their star center forward on academic probation, the SHS varsity soccer team is suddenly without their greatest weapon. But according to the Wikipedia page of one teammate, the season is not lost. An examination of Scott Dare’s page yields this interesting tidbit: It was at his suggestion that Truffle take the shortcut that ultimately led to his benching. And who has been designated Truffle’s replacement at center forward for this all-important moment when college scouts are making their visits?

  Scott Dare himself.

  More as it develops …

  Gavin was disappointed. “Walda didn’t mention that the Wikipedia profile says he’s supposed to die a gruesome death.”

  Suddenly the door slammed open, gunshot loud. The class jumped as one. Standing and seething in the door was Josh.

  “Hey, Josh B’Gosh,” said Chetley. “You’re early for class. Don’t I have you next period?”

  Josh ignored him as he stalked up to Scott, whose baseball cap tilted just off-center. He only managed to get one “dude” out of his mouth before Josh filled it with his fist.

  Scott was on the floor and smiling blood where Josh had split his lip. Josh leapt on top of him and sank a flurry of punches before Scott could raise his own arms in defense. Cole and Gavin stood with the rest of the class, giving the struggling pair a wide berth as Scott tried to scrabble to his feet. Cole lost sight of them behind a row of desks, but could hear the awful smack of knuckle on skin and wet grunts of both guys as they struggled for control. It took what felt like minutes for Chetley to intervene, and even longer to succeed. His glasses were knocked askew as he thrust himself between the two and pushed Josh back.

  “Office! Now!”

  Josh’s face was scratched on one side as he yelled, tearing the lining from his vocal cords, “He comes, too! He set me up! He’s taking my spot on the team!”

  Scott was goateed in blood. Cole thought he might be missing a tooth. “What are you talking about?!”

  “You wanted me to get caught so I’d get kicked off the team and you could take my spot on the roster!”

  Gavin looked at Cole. Jackpot.

  Everything that happened was Josh’s fault, Scott decided. He was the one who’d let his grades slip. He was the one who begged for help. All Scott had done was show his friend how to fluff his grades with a few Internet-related shortcuts. Scott had been getting away with it for years, and Josh could, too — so long as he followed a few simple rules.

  Paraphrase. Typos. Get a name wrong here, a date wrong there.

  And, above all, settle for a B. Never get greedy for As. But Josh got greedy. And he got caught. Now that he was riding the bench, Scott would play first string. Scott would score the goals. Scott would score the ladies. Scott would be the star.

  Dusk was the color of a bruise when Coach blew the final whistle and the guys trudged off to the showers. Scott stayed behind. Up and down the field he dribbled, ironing out the kinks in his footwork. He lined up a row of balls before the goal and punched them in, the net shuddering with every successful shot. There were a lot of successful shots. Good enough to make his case. Good enough to —

  Plunge him into the dark. With no warning, the field lights went out.

  Scott shut his eyes and opened them. He saw only blackness, and the phosphorescent inkblot wake that bright lights leave in their sudden absence. There was a flutter at the back of his neck. He groped at the bug or the bird or the hand that had brushed him.

  Nothing was there. All he felt were his fine, sandy-blond hairs. They stood on end.

  Scott waited for his eyes to adjust, remembering the stories his parents liked to tell about his childhood fear of the monsters under the bed. Scott couldn’t remember far back enough to know whether those stories were BS, but at least he wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore. He was too old for that stuff.

  Usually.

  Now, alone at night on the broad, flat expanse of the soccer field, the dark did not feel like just the dark. The something else was near, the something other than him. Scott had the sensation of standing on the middle of a wild, frozen lake, and the ice beneath his feet was cracking.

  Snap.

  Scott jumped. Had he heard something? A twig breaking? Or was it in his head?

  Rustle.

  He could see a little better now, and made out the white skeleton of the goal. The sound had come from behind it, somewhere in the grove that marked the end of the school’s property.

  “Hello?”

  Scott listened, but heard only the wind through the branches. He walked past the goal, to the edge of the trees, forcing his gait to resemble a stroll. “Hey,” he called.

  No answer. It was a squirrel. A woods sound. A nothing to worry about.

  Smack-whoosh-chunk.

  A large and heavy something bashed him, square in the back of the head.

  Scott face-planted into the frozen ground. Now there was light. Lots of it. The whiteout light of pain. He rolled to his side and whimpered. A loose tooth clinked inside his mouth. Great.

  Crunch.

  Crunch.

  Crunch.

  Footsteps on the frosty, crystalizing grass. Scott’s eyes focused on a soccer ball nearby. Was that what had hit him? Someone was watching from the trees and beaned him when he wasn’t looking? Two potshots in one day? Scott got to his hands and knees. Time to clean someone’s clock.

  Crunch.

  Crunch.

  The footsteps stopped right above him.

  “I am going to destroy you,” Scott said, looking up.

  Just in time to get stomped on his face.

  Then, nothing.

  Then, the throb in his head.

  Then, eyes open.

  He was lying prone in the dark, on a damp, tiled floor.

  And he couldn’t move.

  “Hello?” he called. There was no answer.

  Something was husked around him, squeezing his arms against his sides and pressing his legs together, like he was limbless, a fish wrapped in a net.

  A net.

  A soccer net. Someone had knocked him out and bundled him into a soccer net.

  “Okay. Ha-ha. Good joke. You can let me go now.” There was only silence.

  “Hey, can anyone hear me? I need some help.”

  No help came.

  Scott took a deep breath and flexed every muscle in his body. The nylon net pulled against him, etching its pattern into the flesh of his face, arms, and shins. The net stretched.

  Push.

  Yes. He could feel it. A hairsbreadth of room between him and his cocoon. If he could make that much room, he could make more. Enough to shimmy his arms up in front of him. Enough to win the use of his fingers. Enough to slip free.

  Push harder.

  He set his jaw and doubled down, glazed in sweat, arching his back and puffing out his chest.

  Push!

  The net yawned, expanding and elongating. Just a little more room and he could slide his greasy arm into play.

  He didn’t have a little more. His muscles gave out and the net reasserted itself, a thousand tiny bungee
pythons. Scott shriveled to the cold embrace of the floor, opened his mouth, and screamed into it. He screamed and screamed, screamed until his voice grew ragged.

  “This isn’t funny!”

  He hurt. All over. His arms and legs and hands and knees and skin. The net was wrapped so tightly that every attempt to move was agony. The pain fractured his thoughts like an icebreaker. But one thing was clear.

  He had to get out.

  Scott took a deep breath and forced up another shout.

  No one called. Just a strange bwop and the sound of his gasps and the net narrowing against his skin. Something skittered down his temple and across his ear. He yelped and floundered. Was it a cockroach? A spider?

  Bwop.

  There it was again.

  Bwop.

  Scott concentrated on the sound. Now it was familiar.

  Bwop.

  And there was an odor. Chlorine. Metal. Funk. The locker room? It was the team. Some kind of prank. Hazing for the new captain.

  “Ha-ha. Come on, guys. Enough already. Joke’s over.” His voice reverberated off the surfaces around him. There was no other sound, save —

  The lights came on, humming and fluorescent. Scott twisted his head and squinted at his surroundings. He was in the shower room. A leaky showerhead bwopped water droplets. Someone had finally heard him. A coach, a custodian.

  “Hey! Help! I’m in here!”

  Bwop.

  “I know where you are, Scott.”

  Bwop.

  Someone entered the shower room and passed through his field of vision too fast to identify, and laid something down on the floor before him. The electric air pump Coach used to prime the soccer balls.

  Bwop.

  “Can you help me? Someone left me here wrapped in this net.”

  The person crouched down and whispered in his ear.

  “That would be me.”

  The voice. He knew that voice.

  Bwop.

  “People say you have a big head, Scott. But it could get bigger.”

  The air pump’s needle was rammed into his neck. It was not designed to break skin, and bent slightly, threatening to snap, before stiffening and sinking deep into his flesh. It took a moment for the sensation of pressure to become one of pain. Scott wanted to scream but could do little more than gurgle. Something was filling his throat, fast.

  Blood.

  The pump was triggered, and air bubbles the size of coffee crystals flooded his carotid artery and zoomed up, brain-bound.

  “Please!” he choked. “Stop! I’ll do anything! I’ll asdfgds —” Bubbles lodged in his cerebrum, short-circuiting his power of speech. His body went limp.

  Bwop.

  A troop of smaller, deadly bubbles hunkered down in his brain. Everything started to go dark in Scott’s eyes as his heart stopped and his lungs begged for air that wasn’t coming. In the corner of the shower room was a soccer ball. His eyes settled on it.

  He died looking at it, wondering who would start center forward now.

  Bwop.

  Scott Dare

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  * * *

  Scott Dare is an American high school student, soccer player, and Grade-A moron. He gained notoriety at Springfield High School for setting up his best friend, teammate Josh Truffle, in a plagiarism scandal that saw him removed from the team, only to be replaced by Dare himself. Dare self-identified as the school’s star striker, though the consensus deemed him middling at best.

  Fittingly, he died of a swelled head.

  The school was closed for the rest of the week while the police investigated the scene.

  Cole spent that time in a fog. No baking. No studying. No scheming. Just Cole’s thoughts of his classmate, now a corpse, and the people he’d left behind. His parents, who would receive his mail for months, maybe years to come. His friends, who’d hold out on upgrading their phones because they didn’t want to lose his goofy jokes, banked in voice-mail messages.

  He and Gavin had joked about Scott’s death. And then he died. The police were releasing few facts, but Cole couldn’t help feeling that he’d somehow set it in motion. “How?” Gavin had asked. “What are you, God? If so, I have a bone to pick with you. If not, don’t be stupid. We don’t even know what happened.”

  When the student body was finally allowed to return, the showers in the boys’ locker room were still cordoned off with police tape. Complaints of post-gym BO reached a record high and the rule prohibiting body-spray canisters from school grounds was temporarily lifted.

  Cole (Lightning in a Bottle) and Gavin (Cool Tsunami) dressed after a dodgeball game, notable for the listlessness of its participants. No one was in much of a mood for violence. All anyone could think about was Scott.

  “Dude bit it right over there,” said Gavin, nodding at the bank of showerheads. Cole didn’t look. “I heard he was hooked on ’roids, took one injection too many — and burst.”

  Was he scalded to death by the notoriously temperamental showers?

  Had he slipped, his cantaloupe head rupturing merrily on impact?

  Or was his death the consequence of some arcane hazing rite gone awry?

  Details were still few. The police refused to comment before results of the autopsy were in. With nothing to go on, Springfield speculated. “One thing’s for sure,” said Gavin. “He left quite the mess. Can you imagine taking a shower in there now?”

  Scott was in the shower, Scott was in gym class, Scott was everywhere. At his locker, in the makeshift memorial of candles, teddy bears, and yearbook photos. In the hallways and the cafeteria and the library, in the cracked faces of the girls who hadn’t known they’d crushed on him until he wasn’t around to be crushed upon. On the black armbands worn by the soccer team, whose season was now officially in jeopardy. In the words of the teachers, all of whom had taken a crash course in grief counseling the day before.

  One of whom was eager to put his newly acquired skills for empathy to good use. Chetley had abandoned his lesson exploring HTML in favor of exploring the grieving process. “We’ve experienced a tragedy,” he began class. On the chalkboard he’d written the word catharsis. He was wearing an armband, too. “And we need to talk it out.”

  “Watch us grieve our way to Thanksgiving break without a class,” murmured Gavin.

  “I was on Twitter when the news hit,” said Chetley. “I couldn’t believe it. It was a bad joke. But a look at my Twitter timeline confirmed it. Every post for miles around was hashtagged DareIsDead. I went numb.” Chetley placed his hands on the back of Scott’s empty chair. “I say we change that. I say from now on we hashtag DareToDream.”

  “You could tell by looking at that there was a lot going on,” said one student, eager to get in on the emoting. “Scott was a sensitive guy. He was real. And complicated.”

  This offended Gavin most of all. “Come on. Let’s be real. Scott was about as complicated as algae.”

  Chetley looked up from doling comfort. “That’s enough, Gavver.”

  But it wasn’t enough for Gavin. “Just because Scott is dead doesn’t mean he’s worthy of our tears. He was an overprivileged, under-talented aspiring bully and professional cheat. The only person I can think of at this school qualified to refute that is Josh Truffle. If I find out that he’s grieving the loss of the guy who stole his spot on the soccer team and may have cost him his shot at college, so will I.”

  Cole wondered the same thing, and so was someone else. Lila tracked him down in the cafeteria, where the lunch staff ladled out gloppy helpings of spaghetti.

  “I figured a foodie like you would brown-bag it,” she said, accompanying him to the table he shared with Gavin.

  “I always suspected the sudden death of a peer would throw me off my game. Now I know it’s true.” Why did Cole feel the need to be quippy around her?

  “For you and others, it would seem.” She didn’t ask to join them, but Gavin was in no position to deny her a seat with a forkful of noodl
es in his mouth. Also, she was a girl, and welcome by nature. “My sources say Winnie was so distraught she had to beg her English teacher for an extension on a paper due today. That’s not like her, is it?”

  Of course it wasn’t. “Why do you care? Are you writing an article about her?”

  Lila glanced at Gavin.

  “It’s cool,” said Cole. “You can trust him. Gavin, Lila. Aka Walda Winchell.”

  “Charmed,” said Gavin, offering his hand. Lila regarded it as though it were sticky with syrup, but took it anyway and squeezed — hard. “Big fan,” he squeaked as she pulverized his hand.

  “You were saying? About this article?”

  “I’m writing an article. It’s about Scott’s death. And the key figures involved.”

  “Winnie wasn’t Scott’s friend.”

  “But Scott was Josh’s best friend. And Winnie is Josh’s girlfriend.”

  Cole didn’t answer. His attention was on a commotion two tables over.

  A trio of soccer players stood next to a woman with a length of shimmery, undulant hair. A cameraman framed the shot as she readied her microphone. “Before we’re kicked out would be great.” The cameraman nodded.

  Lila was fizzing. “What is she doing here?”

  Local TV news reporter Spring Showers spoke to the camera. “I’m here at Springfield High School, the scene of the gruesome death of senior soccer player Scott Dare.”

  “Looks like she’s getting the story,” Gavin said.

  “With me are three of his teammates, Harper Caldwell, Wesley O’Shea, and Vincent Cicala. Boys, on behalf of everyone at WSPG, please accept my condolences. We’re very sorry for your loss. Can you describe the mood here at SHS?”

  “It’s pretty … bad?”

  “Like … not good?”

  “Everybody’s … down?”

  “I’m sure it has been very hard. How are you coping?”

  “It’s tough.”

  “I mean, Scott died.”

  “Right here in school.”

  “Do you feel that the administration is doing everything it can to keep you safe?”

  It was then that Cole noticed the silence in the cafeteria. There was no eating or chatting. There was only watching.