Get Even (2 page)

The idea that Father Uberti had personally requested an errand from John Baggott was ridiculous to the point of being farcical, but short of calling John a liar, Coach Creed had little recourse.

“An emergency,” Coach Creed repeated.

“Yep,” John said with an affable grin. He patted Theo on the shoulder. “We should hurry.”

Coach Creed shook his head in disgust as John led Theo up the hill. “You’re pathetic, Baranski,” he called out. “You too, Baggott. I’m not done with either of you.”

Margot stood rooted in place long after Coach Creed had stormed off across the field and the rest of sixth-period gym class had filtered back to their assignments. It took her a moment to realize that three figures still ringed the top of the hillside, silhouetted against the bright afternoon sunshine: Kitty Wei, Bree Deringer, and Olivia Hayes.

They looked at one another, shifting their glances as if they were all thinking the same thing. An hour ago, a revenge plot against Coach Creed would have generated no obvious suspects. But now, Bree’s best friend would be at the top of Father Uberti’s list. One degree of separation from an actual DGM member was too close for comfort. Should they abort or not?

All eyes drifted to Kitty. She’d know what to do.

Without hesitation, Kitty drew her hand across her chest, from her left shoulder to her right, giving the signal, then dropped her arm to her side and strode away.

Margot let out a slow breath. The message was clear: their plan against Coach Creed was a go.

TWO

MARGOT GNAWED AT THE STUBBY NAIL OF HER LEFT INDEX
finger as she filed into the gym with the rest of her AP Government class for Friday’s assembly. The white noise of student chatter punctuated by the occasional squeak of rubber soles against the highly polished maple floor faded into the background as her nerves overwhelmed her. Margot was crawling out of her skin—almost as if it was her first mission with DGM instead of her seventh—and it took every ounce of self-control not to flee campus at a full sprint and beg her parents for a transfer to the local public high school first thing in the morning.

Calm down
.

Margot had known exactly what she was getting into when she agreed to join Don’t Get Mad. She remembered the moment vividly, as if only two hours had passed instead of almost two years. Freshman religion class, and Kitty, Margot, Bree, and Olivia had been randomly grouped together for a community service project. The four of them had virtually nothing in common: no mutual friends, no shared interests whatsoever. But when it came time to choose an outreach program for the project, all four of them picked the same one—an antibullying awareness group.

No surprise, really. There was a huge disparity between the wealthy students at Bishop DuMaine and their scholarship classmates, between those with privilege and those without. Bullying was rampant—from rich girls who label-shamed poorer students to locker-room fights and lunch-hour shake downs—and Father Uberti had turned a blind eye. All he cared about were high test scores and athletic championships, both of which boosted enrollment.

So during an afternoon study session when the conversation turned toward the latest hazing incident at school, and Kitty half-jokingly commented that someone ought to give the varsity football team a taste of their own medicine, Margot—who had experienced firsthand what happened when an administration allowed bullies to rule unchecked—had agreed. DGM had been born.

Still, the stress of what they were about to do was taking its toll. Margot squeezed her eyes shut and took a slow, silent breath through clenched teeth.
Remember what Dr. Tournay says: panic is a state of mind—quiet the mind, quiet the panic.

Margot inched her way toward the bleachers; the excitement in the gym was palpable, increasing Margot’s antsiness. She had to remember that she was doing something important. She couldn’t go back in time and erase the nightmare that had been junior high, but she
could
make sure that no one else had to endure the same bullying, or be driven to the same desperate decision that she had made four years ago.

Just as her nerves began to steady, something heavy barreled into her from behind, knocking her off-balance. Her eyes flew open as her backpack sailed through the air from the force of the impact, hitting the floor of the basketball court so violently the flap ripped open, spewing its contents in all directions.

Her assailant spun around, flipping his own mostly empty backpack onto the ground next to her oversize cargo pack in a display of outrage. Rex Cavanaugh.

“What the hell, freshman?” Rex bellowed. “Watch where you’re going.”

Margot swallowed the biting comeback forming at the tip of her tongue as she eyed the entrails of her backpack strewn across the gym floor. The remote control! She dropped to her knees, frantically retrieving her belongings. If the remote was damaged or lost, the mission would fail.

Rex snatched his bag off the floor next to her. “Great manners. Not even a ‘sorry.’ Idiot.”

Pens, loose papers, an array of notebooks. But no remote. Margot seized her bag. She ripped open Velcro pockets and unzipped countless organizational compartments, rifling through her supplies in search of the palm-size remote.
Please be there.

Inside the laptop sleeve her fingers closed around the plastic controller, intact and unharmed. Margot sighed. Crisis averted.

The loudspeakers crackled as the facilities manager set up a microphone. The assembly was about to start.

The near disaster with the remote galvanized Margot’s resolve. She caught up with her class and filed diligently into a row of bleachers, remote gripped firmly in her hand. She didn’t dare scan the gym to find Bree and Olivia, but she spotted Kitty right away, on a bench in the first row next to Mika Jones. Kitty looked so calm and composed, dressed simply in jeans and a blue and white Bishop DuMaine running jacket, her long black hair swept up in a tight ponytail, which swished from side to side as she whispered to Mika. Margot wondered if Kitty really felt so at ease or whether it was all a facade.

The side door flew open, and Father Uberti marched into the gym. Short and wiry, the school principal was meticulously groomed as always. His salt-and-pepper mustache and Van Dyke beard were neatly trimmed, his dark, wavy hair—dyed, Margot was relatively sure—tamed with a healthy dose of sculpting wax. He moved quickly; the black capuche he wore over his long cassock fluttered about his shoulders, and the tassels of his cincture whipped back and forth from the ferocity of his stride. His entire demeanor was cocky, and before he got halfway across the floor, Margot realized why.

Two Menlo Park police officers followed him into the gym.

All of Margot’s panic returned in an instant. Never in her most far-flung calculations had she anticipated law enforcement.

What if they got caught? She’d get arrested, or worse—kicked out of school. She’d lose any chance at Harvard or Yale and her parents . . . Her parents would kill her.

Margot’s right leg bounced up and down on the bleacher so furiously she was sure the entire row could feel the reverberations. Through her sweater sleeve, she gripped her knee, trying to squeeze it into submission, but her heart was racing out of control, her upper lip already damp with perspiration. Panic attack in three . . . two . . . one . . .

“Are you okay?” a voice said, close to her ear.

Margot let out a strangled squeak as she spun around on the bench and came nose to chin with a boy.

“Are you okay?” he repeated.

Margot opened her mouth to say something, but the capacity for rational thought had momentarily abandoned her. All she could do was stare at the most beautiful face she’d ever seen.

Not that there was anything particularly unique about him. His hair was a typical California blond—streaked by the sun with dark undertones. His skin was tan, and together with broad, muscular shoulders suggested a preference for spending weekends on a surfboard in Santa Cruz. But add in the off-kilter grin and the slightest hint of spicy aftershave, and it set Margot’s heart thundering in her chest once more.

“Sorry,” he said, with a smile that listed to the left like an unbalanced ship. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t scare me,” Margot forced herself to say.

“Oh!” His eyebrows pinched together in confusion. “Okay. I just . . . It looked like I startled you.”

Crap, Margot. Try not to sound like such a jerk.
“I mean,” she started, “I was just thinking. About classes. I have a big paper due.”

“On the third day of school?”

“Um, yeah,” Margot rambled on. “It’s an extension class. At Stanford. That’s where my mind was. Why I was tense. No other reason.”
Oh my God, stop talking!

The boy blinked several times, then smiled again, tilting his head to the right as if attempting to compensate for his crooked grin. “I’m Logan Blaine,” he said simply. “I’m new here.”

“M-Margot,” she said, stumbling over her own name like a halfwit. “Margot Mejia.”

“Nice to meet you, Margot.”

Margot was about to respond, when a current of laughter rippled through the gym. Coach Creed stood near the top of the bleachers, glaring down at the round face of Theo Baranski.

“Baranski!” Coach Creed barked, louder than was necessary. “Why aren’t you in your seat?” He swept his arm across the gym in a grand arc. “The entire school is waiting on
you
to start this assembly. Would you like to tell us why you’re having difficulty finding someplace to sit?”

“I . . .” Theo glanced down at the bench. There was a tiny sliver of space left at the end, maybe enough room for a fourth grader to squeeze half his skinny butt onto, and Theo was neither skinny nor a fourth grader. Margot cringed, waiting for the inevitable barrage of abuse from Coach Creed, but unlike yesterday, Theo was spared the humiliation. A freshman girl at the end of the bench stood up and slid into the row behind, leaving enough room for Theo to sit.

“Saved by a girl,” Coach Creed said with a laugh. “How sad.”

Logan leaned forward, his lips close to Margot’s ear. “Is he always such an asshole?”

“Coach Creed?”

“Yeah. That guy deserves a public flogging.”

Margot glanced at Logan, then fixed her eyes on Father Uberti as he approached the microphone. She squeezed the remote control more tightly.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, he does.”

THREE

BREE WATCHED FATHER UBERTI PULL THE BLACK LEATHER
tassels of his cincture through his hand, letting them slap against his left leg. “Everyone find a seat.”

The gym quieted instantly. No one whispered, no one laughed. Even John was completely silent; his eyes, like everyone else’s, were fixed on the microphone.

“Thank you,” Father Uberti said, without an ounce of sincerity. He cleared his throat with unusual violence, as if to punish his vocal cords for insubordination. “I’ve called this assembly today to address a threat that has weaseled its way into the very soul of our school.”

He paused and placed his hand over the cross that hung around his neck as if to convey the special hurt that had been inflicted upon him. Bree fought the urge to puke in her lap.

“We want to begin this school year on the right foot—free from the constant menace of the anonymous student or group of students known as DGM.”

Silence. Bree had expected an outbreak of stunned murmurs, but apparently the subject of the assembly was about as unforeseen as Liberace coming out of the closet.

“In order to shut DGM down,” Father Uberti continued, “we need your help. Your information. We have with us today Sergeant Callahan from the Menlo Park Police Department to discuss the illegal”—he paused again, for special emphasis—“I repeat, the
illegal
actions of this group.”

Bree covered her mouth with her hand to hide her smile as Sergeant Callahan stepped to the microphone. She loved the element of danger in each DGM mission, so much so that she usually volunteered for the jobs that might get her in trouble, such as breaking into the school gym over the weekend to install an unsanctioned video playback device in the AV room. In some ways, she almost wished she would get caught. Expulsion from Bishop DuMaine would be a surefire way to piss off her dad. And even if he did follow through on his oft-repeated threat to send her to a convent school back east, it would totally be worth it to see his disapproving face turn purple with impotent rage.

“Good morning.” Sergeant Callahan’s tone was crisp and efficient. “At the request of Father Uberti, Menlo PD has implemented a hotline for anonymous tips on DGM. We ask that you keep your eyes and ears open. Any clue, no matter how insignificant it seems, could lead to possible suspects.”

John rested his chin on Bree’s shoulder. “Sounds like a witch hunt,” he whispered.

Yeah, and I’m the witch.

“Thank you, Sergeant Callahan.” Father Uberti shook his hand, then addressed the student body once more. “We hope these steps will lead to the apprehension of the perpetrators whose mean-spirited attacks on our students have plagued Bishop DuMaine for the past three semesters.”

Mean-spirited?
Bree closed her eyes to keep from rolling them. Father Uberti could not give less of a crap about the mean-spirited bullying that went on at his school. And if he wasn’t going to do anything about it, Don’t Get Mad would.

“Now, to introduce a short video presentation by the leadership class, your student body vice president, Kitty Wei.”

Six inches taller than Father Uberti, Kitty had to tilt the microphone all the way back and bend forward at the waist to reach it. “Good morning, DuMaine Dukes!” She smiled wide, her voice steady. “Let’s face it, there’s a part of each of us that kind of envies DGM.”

A buzz of whispers swelled through the gym. It sounded to Bree like the students of Bishop DuMaine agreed.

“But we want to make sure our school is a safe, caring environment for everyone,” Kitty continued. “So we’ve put together a short video about what we can do to honor and uphold the name of Bishop DuMaine.”

Kitty straightened up. Quickly, casually, she tucked a nonexistent strand of hair behind her right ear. It was an innocuous movement, one every girl in school made a dozen times a day without noticing.

It was the signal Bree had been waiting for.

Kitty smiled. “I hope you’ll enjoy our little presentation,” she said, and backed away from the microphone.

Kitty watched Father Uberti out of the corner of her eye as he pulled an oversize remote control from the depths of his cassock and aimed it at a small window near the top of the far wall. The video player inside the AV room whirred to life, projecting a clear, ten-foot-tall image of the Bishop DuMaine logo on the screen above her head.

Generic Muzak played as a montage of photos faded in and out, depicting students of every shape, size, and color laughing, posing, eating lunch around the outdoor quad. It was the kind of teen utopia adults envisioned for their kids, all perfectly understanding and cooperative and nice, the parental illusion of a modern high school. Only the students at Bishop DuMaine knew better. High school was a vicious place.

The Muzak faded and a light voice chimed in. “At Bishop DuMaine, we’re a family, a team working together for the good of our school and of each—”

Kitty’s heart leaped to her throat. The image on the screen froze, then blipped as the piggybacked player Bree had installed over the weekend took control of the playback.

As promised, Margot’s tech had worked perfectly.

A new image popped onto the screen: a bedroom, messy and disheveled. A sinewy arm yanked a chair into view and the burly figure of Coach Creed plopped down in front of the camera.

“I’m Richard Creed,” he said, his best shit-eating grin plastered across his face. “But you can call me Dick.” He wore a blue wifebeater two sizes too small, and his bulky arms looked as if he’d oiled them up with an entire tub of Crisco. He jabbed a thumb at his chest. “And I’m here”—he paused and pointed to the camera—“to give you three reasons why I’m going to win
America’s Next Fitness Model
.”

“Oh my God!” Coach Creed’s roar pierced the silence of the packed gym. Kitty couldn’t see him, only hear the general ruckus from the upper bleachers as he pounded his way downstairs.

Father Uberti grabbed Kitty roughly by the shoulder. “What’s going on?” he hissed. “What is this?”

Kitty looked down at him and desperately wished she had even an ounce of Olivia’s acting skills. “I have no idea,” she said, trying to sound utterly bewildered. “The video started and then . . .” She let her voice trail off, and her eyes drifted back to the screen.

The video jump-cut to a new scene of Coach Creed seated behind an ornately carved wooden desk. Behind him, full floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked each side of a large window. The blinds were open to bright sunshine cascading across the front lawn of Bishop DuMaine Preparatory School.

The entire gymnasium heaved one air-sucking gasp. Everyone recognized that view.

“My office?” Father Uberti growled.

“Reason number one,” Coach Creed said, gesturing to the library on either side of him. “I’m not just a fitness guru, I’m an academic.” He leaned back in Father Uberti’s leather chair and propped a sneaker-clad foot up on the desk next to a framed photograph of the Pope. “Which makes me smarter than the average model, without sacrificing beauty for brains.”

“Douche!” someone yelled.

The next scene showed a full-body image of Coach Creed dangling from a pull-up bar. In addition to the skintight tank top, he also sported a pair of circa-1975 blue running shorts trimmed in gold, so inappropriately short that Kitty was terrified his man parts might peek out through the leg hole as he pulled his chin up over the bar. “Forty-nine,” he counted, his voice grunting with fatigue.

The audience erupted into laughter.

“Turn it off!” Coach Creed screamed. He tore across the basketball court and ripped the remote from Father Uberti’s hand. He marched toward the booth, pointing the useless device at the window. “Work, you dumbass. Work!”

On the video, Creed strained into another chin-up. “Fifty.”

He let his body fall to the floor. “Reason number two: fifty pull-ups,” he panted. “One for each year of me. Dick Creed only gets better with age.” Coach Creed struck a bodybuilder’s pose. “Yeah, you like that?”

Peals of laughter threatened total chaos. Father Uberti grabbed the microphone. “Mr. Phillips,” he said. “Get the AV room open. Now!”

The facilities manager was at the door already, searching his ring frantically for the correct key. Kitty smiled to herself. It wasn’t there. Olivia had stolen the AV room key, and Bree had disposed of it after installing the video player. After several seconds, Mr. Phillips ran from the gym, probably to fetch the duplicate set.

Coach Creed threw the remote to the ground and sprinted to the locked door, wringing the handle with his meaty hands. “Someone open this fucking door!”

The screen changed again, and the gym quieted as every student and half the teachers sat on the edges of their seats in anticipation. The new setting was a backyard pool. It was an overcast day, but the gray haze didn’t stop reality-show auditionee Dick Creed. He lounged on a beach towel by the water’s edge, his blue tank and track shorts discarded for a pair of swim briefs. His aging, overly tanned skin hung limply from his body, and his stomach resembled a deflated balloon, a combination of taut and flabby that reminded Kitty of Captain Kirk in the old
Star Trek
episodes her dad so dearly loved.

“Reason number three.” He cocked his left eyebrow. “Let’s face it, Dick Creed is a sexy piece of man meat. The ladies love it, can’t get enough of it, and will tune in every week for more, I guarantee.” He picked up a glass of sparkling wine and toasted the camera. “Smart, strong, and sexy. Dick Creed is all three and more. Don’t you think that’s worth an audition?” He winked and the screen went dark.

No one moved. The gymnasium held its collective breath. Father Uberti stopped screaming for Mr. Phillips, his jaw frozen midword, and even Coach Creed stopped pounding his fists against the AV room door as one final image faded onto the screen.

Black type against a white background, in an unmistakable custom font that looked like it came from an old-fashioned typewriter.

Compliments of DGM