Stealing the Game (11 page)

I heard the crack and felt the cartilage shift in my nose. My eyes filled with tears, and blood shot out of my nostrils. I staggered a couple steps backward.

Masterson took advantage of that moment of dizziness to spin to his right and shoot the layup.

22–22.

My team gathered around me in concern.

“You okay, dude?” Gee asked. I felt his hand on my arm, steadying me.

The others said stuff, too.

Sit down, Chris.

Put your head back.

No, put your head forward.

Pinch the bridge of your nose.

They were just floating voices to me.

At some point the fuzziness cleared and I found myself sitting on the grass, my head bowed. Rain was pinching the bridge of my nose as I was pressing a cloth against my nostrils, soaking up the
blood.

I looked up and saw Jax pulling his polo shirt down over a bare chest. I realized I was mopping up my blood with his T-shirt.

Before Jax had his shirt all the way on, he was marching straight for Rand. “What the hell was that?”

“An accident,” Rand said, but in a smug tone that said he didn’t care if it was or wasn’t.

“You’d better keep your animals on a leash, Rand!” Jax snapped. His face was filled with fury and his hands were clenched into fists.

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted this game, man. You wanted a chance to win back what you owed from your last bet, remember? I only did it because I figured you were such a hometown
hero, the high school Golden Boy, that you’d be good for it. But if you want to call it off, just give me the money right now.”

Jax stood frozen a moment, as if trying to decide something important. Then he just sagged, his fists opening. His eyes were downcast, like a dog who’d just been hit with a rolled-up
newspaper.

“What the hell?” Roger said. He was kneeling next to me, but now he stood up. “This game was just so your brother could win back a gambling debt?” Roger scowled at me.
“Did you know that?”

The bleeding had pretty much stopped, so I tossed aside Jax’s T-shirt. I stood up, too. My nose ached, but that wasn’t the pain that hurt most. It was the pain in my gut from
realizing that Jax had used me and my friends. And that he had become the kind of guy who owed money to a piece of scum like Rand.

I picked up my hoodie and turned toward home. I wanted to say something to my friends, but I was afraid that if I did, I might start choking up. So I walked away.

“I guess that’s a forfeit,” Rand said.

Jax said something and Rand said something back. I wasn’t listening anymore.

Then my phone rang. Theo.

“Yeah?” I said, more angrily than I wanted.

“Bad news,” Theo said.

Was there any other kind?

“
I
’
VE
been on the phone with several people from Stanford Law School. Admissions, the dean’s office,
and—” Theo said.

“Don’t turn it into a musical production, Theo,” I said sharply. “Just tell me what you found out.”

“Wow. Is this your way of saying thanks for doing you a favor?”

My nose was throbbing and I couldn’t get that look on Jax’s face out of my head. He’d looked…
defeated
. I’d never seen that expression on him before. It
scared me.

“Sorry, man. Rough day,” I said to Theo.

“It’s about to get rougher, dude.”

I took a deep breath. “What’d you find out?”

“I told them I was doing a background check for a job and I needed to confirm that Jax had been enrolled there and was currently on leave.”

“But we already knew that.”

“Yes, but…” Theo paused for dramatic effect.

“But what?”

“They said he had been accepted, but he had never enrolled.”

I stopped walking. I needed to catch my breath. Had someone just snuck on me and whacked me across the back of my head with a baseball bat?

“What?” I mumbled numbly.

“Okay, to recap: Stanford says Jax never took any classes there. Ever. I talked to three different people, just to make sure.”

I looked back across the park to the basketball courts. Rain, Roger, Gee, and Tom had left. Gee and Tom were walking together. Rain and Roger were pedaling their bikes in opposite
directions.

Fauxhawk and his team were heading for the parking lot. Jax followed, talking expressively, his hands waving. He looked like he was pleading. Another thing I’d never seen him do
before.

“What does all this mean?” I said aloud. By
all this
I meant everything that had happened since Jax had returned home. His selfishness, his squirrelly behavior, his scummy
friends.

Theo thought I meant just the Stanford thing. “Well, it means that either Stanford University is lying, or Jax is.”

I nodded. It was pretty clear which one was lying. “Can we just keep this between us, Theo?”

“No prob. Everybody’s got family secrets, man.”

“Great. And I really appreciate all you’ve done. You’re a heck of a detective.”

“True,” he said with a grin. “But I’m starting to think you ain’t half bad yourself.”

I shrugged. “I’ve still got a ways to go to figure all this out before my parents find out.”

Theo looked uncertain. “Good luck with that. In my experience, parents have a creepy way of finding stuff out no matter how hard you try to hide it.”

I knew that was true, but I hoped this time would be an exception.

DEAD
silence.

Except for the tapping.

Principal McDonald sat behind his desk tapping a pencil eraser shaped like a chess knight on his desktop.

Tap…tap…tap…

I sat in the chair across from Principal McDonald nervously tapping my foot to the beat of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” It was the only song I could remember at the
moment, and it helped distract me from the fear eating through my stomach.

Tap…tap…tap…

Officer Crane stood next to me tapping his handcuff case hopefully, as if praying for me to make a run for the door so he could show off his cop skills by tackling and restraining me like a calf
in a rodeo.

Tap…tap…tap…

Each tap of the pencil, foot, and handcuff case sounded like an accusation:
Chris…Chris…Chris…

“Let me start, Chris,” Principal McDonald said softly, “by thanking you.”

Thanking me?!
Did my eyes bulge out of my head eight inches like in cartoons?

Even Officer Crane made a surprised sound, as if someone had just flicked his ear.

“Thanking me?” I think I said it aloud this time. The pounding of blood in my ears made it hard to hear.

Principal McDonald smiled. He had long, scraggly gray hair and a black-and-gray beard that made him look like an Irish poet. You half expected to see him with a constant wind in his hair, a wool
scarf, and a gray sports jacket with suede patches on the elbows. Instead, he wore black jeans and white T-shirts with “inspirational quotes” on them. Today, his T-shirt said:

All his shirts said stuff like that, lots of them by people I’d never heard of. (Rain gave him one of her one-word poem shirts with the word future on it. Did she mean he was our future,
in that we’d all look like him someday? Or did she mean that because he was older he could see our future better? Or that he was trying to make a better future for all of us through
education? See how complicated her shirts could be? Anyway, he wore it every Friday.) He told us at our welcoming assembly that his shirts were billboards for the mind. “Why should Nike and
Pepsi and Pizza Hut get all your attention?” he’d said. “A lot of people think middle school is just preparation for high school. But I think of it as its own world. Middle school
is like Middle-earth.”

That got a big round of applause and laughter from the nerd herd.

“For those of you who haven’t read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or
The Hobbit
, or at least seen the movies, Middle-earth is a fictional continent in an imaginary
time in Earth’s past where magical things take place. I can see some of you making faces when I mention magic. ‘What’s the old dude yammering about?’ you’re whispering
to your equally skeptical neighbor. Well, what is magic really but that sensation you feel in your scalp when you see something amazing that you can’t explain? That’s what we’re
going to do here. We’re going to show you amazing things, then we’re going to teach you why they’re amazing. And the explanation will be even more amazing. Middle school will be a
time of magic and wonderment.”

I think he oversold it. I hadn’t found the magic yet.

Principal McDonald was a chess champion of some kind, with an international ranking. Theo and Rain know more about that stuff than I do. But his office was packed with all kinds of chess stuff
that he received as gifts from grateful students. And the students weren’t just kissing up. Kids and parents alike genuinely liked him. Even though I was sitting in his hot seat, I had to
admit he was a pretty good guy.

“Yes, thank you, Chris,” he said. “Because I’ve been in school my whole life. First, as a student, all the way until I got my master’s degree. Then as a teacher,
and now as an administrator. I’m how old now?” He seemed to do some math in his head. “Sixty-one or sixty-two? Whatever. Thing is, I’ve been in school for over fifty years,
and I thought I’d seen everything. Every day is predictable and has been for decades. For example, when Officer Crane here attended this school about twenty years ago and I was his English
teacher, I could tell he would end up either in the police force or in the military.”

“You could?” Officer Crane said, surprised.

“Please, Daniel,” Principal McDonald scoffed. “That wasn’t even a hard call.”

Officer Crane shrugged, looking oddly satisfied with that explanation.

Principal McDonald focused his high-beam attention on me.

His intense gaze was drying out my eyes and it was getting hard to blink.

“I thought I’d have no more surprises as an educator. But here you are today. In my office. With a police officer. And for the first time in, oh, fifteen years, I’m
surprised.”

I said nothing.

Principal McDonald stuck a pencil into his sharpener, which was shaped like a chess rook. It whirred for a few seconds, and he pulled out a dart-sharp pencil. “Shall we get
started?”

AFTER
learning about Jax’s big lie, I couldn’t face going home yet, so I walked out of Palisades Park and just kept
going west until I hit Newport Avenue, a busy street crowded on both sides with strip malls and fast-food restaurants. My smashed nose was pulsating like one of those beating hearts that are always
getting ripped out of chests in horror films. My Tell-Tale Nose.

My cheeks had puffed up toward my watery eyes, shoving them into a squint. When I came to a Jack-in-the-Box, I went in and bought a Coke. Without saying anything, the redheaded girl behind the
counter also gave me a small plastic bag, which I filled with ice from the softdrink machine and pressed against my nose.

Sweeeeet. The pulsing stopped. Cool relief spread through my nose and cheeks.

I kept walking, the Coke in one hand and the other hand holding the ice to my face. I got a few strange looks; some people even walked far around me, as if worried I might attack them. But
others noticed my basketball clothes and seemed to guess what happened. A couple guys even gave me sympathetic nods, as if to say,
Been there, dude.

Been there. But no one had been
here
. Here was some mystical Middle-earth place I had been teleported to, where nothing made sense:

A place where my brother might never have attended Stanford Law School. But then what had he been doing all these months?

A place where my brother owed money to a total tool like Rand/Fauxhawk. The old Jax would have never even known a creep like that.

A place where Jax acted scared all the time. I’d never seen him afraid of anything before.

Here was a place with lots of questions.

And zero answers.

I hated Here.

When I passed Chipotle, I realized how close I was to my favorite comic book store, Comics, Toons, & Toys. I usually went on Sundays and browsed for over an hour, not just picking up my
usual favorites (Wolverine, Daredevil, Batman, Deadpool, Hulk, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Walking Dead, Punisher, etc.), but always searching for some new series or an old gem that would inspire
me to work on my own comic more. Anything by Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Ed Brubaker, Garth Ennis, and a bunch of other geniuses.

As I got closer to the store, I started to feel better. I didn’t have enough money to buy anything, but I knew that just looking at the colorful costumes on the glossy covers would
distract me from the pain in my face from Masterson and the pain in my brain from Jax. Undoubtedly, after being pulverized by some supervillain, Batman would have to pull his broken parts together
and come up with a clever way to defeat his foe with the superior powers. Maybe I’d get some good ideas for my comics—or my life.

Then I saw something I’d never seen before.

Something that made the pain in my face evaporate.

Something that made me stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk, unable to take another step.

Something that made my mouth drop open as if I’d seen a three-headed mermaid riding a two-tailed unicorn.

Brooke Hill coming out of the comic book store. Carrying a bag filled with comics.

BROOKE HILL!!!!!!!

IN
MY
COMIC BOOK STORE!!!!!!

I almost didn’t recognize her, because she usually wore expensive clothes that sparkled and glittered. She was the richest girl at school and she dressed the part, complete with fancy
shoes and sweaters so soft they must’ve just come right off a lamb. No nylon backpack for Brooke; she carried a black leather briefcase with brass buckles, which looked like it should contain
secret plans to take over China.