Rivals (6 page)

Maggie’s heart
sank in her chest.
Smooth move, bro
.

“We don’t
admit to anything,” she said, before Brent could get them in any more trouble.
“If you have any questions for us, we want a lawyer here before we say anything
else.”

Weathers
sighed and took another bite of eggs. He chewed very slowly and then took a
newspaper out of the inside pocket of his jacket. He unrolled it and threw it
on the table where they could both see it. The front page was taken up almost
entirely by a grainy black and white picture of Maggie holding a broken-down
car over her head while Brent raced backwards to catch it. The headline read
simply WHO ARE THEY?

“The picture
was taken with a cell phone camera in poor lighting conditions. There’s not
enough detail for the local police to identify either of you,” he said,
reaching for a tea cup. “I kept your names out of it. But that’s just
delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later—probably in the next
twenty-four hours—someone is going to come forward and say they recognize
the clothes you’re wearing in that shot. Or maybe somebody else saw you two
last night jumping around like monkeys. I won’t be able to stop them all.
And then the world is going to want to talk to you, all at once. You’ll have
no privacy after that. The media will hound you constantly. And that’s just
the start of it.”

“I don’t
suppose the FBI runs a Secret Identity program,” Maggie tried.

“No, we do
not. We do, on the other hand, enforce the law. The owner of that
junkyard—or that chimney—may press charges and then I’ll have to
arrest you. I don’t want that. I think there are other things we can do with
you two.”

“What, like
dissect us in a lab somewhere?” Maggie asked.

“Margaret
Reynolds Gill!” Grandma said. “You will not take that tone in the presence of
company.”

Company
, Maggie thought.
Yesterday at the
hospital you told him to get out. Now he’s your best friend
. As usual Grandma’s behavior made no sense to her.

Weathers
finished his breakfast and left. Grandma wrote Brent a note so he could get
into school late and then sent him off. Before Maggie could go, however, she
had one more thing to say.

“You made a
mess of things, young lady, and there’s consequences for that. When you get
home from school today your hi-fi will be gone from your room.”

“My… hi-fi?”
Maggie asked. “What’s a hi-fi?”

“That overly
loud music system you were listening to yesterday! I don’t know where you hide
the record player,” she said, and Maggie’s eyes went wide—apparently
Grandma had never heard of iTunes, “but I’ll find it and confiscate that, too.
No music as long as you continue to act like this!”

“Don’t you
dare,” Maggie said. The music was the one thing that could calm her down.
Without it she thought she would go crazy. “And what are you going to do to
punish Brent?”

“Nothing. I
know that last night’s rumpus was your idea,” she said to Maggie. “You leave
your brother alone. It may be too late to save you, but he’s a good boy and I
won’t have him corrupted.”

“That’s not
fair!” Maggie whined. “Always when Dad punished us he punished us both
equally. He made sure we both knew what we did wrong.”

“I am not your
father,” Grandma said.

Which was just
painfully obvious. Maggie grabbed her backpack and stormed out of the house,
not even waiting to get her note. If the vice principal at the school gave her
trouble about coming in tardy, she would—well—there were lots of
things she could do.

For Brent that
first day back at school was… interesting. It became clear very early in the
day that everyone had seen the paper—and that they knew exactly who was
shown in that photo. His teachers all made a point of acting like nothing had
happened. In English class Miss Holman didn’t even look up when he slipped in
and took his seat. For every class after that it was much the same. The
teachers barely acknowledged his existence. When he held up his hand they called
on somebody else. When class ended, they bent quickly over their desks and
made a show of working on papers. The teachers knew something had changed but
they didn’t want to acknowledge it.

The students,
however, reacted differently.

In every
class—in every hallway—in the lunchroom—he was the center of
attention. At lunch he got his macaroni and cheese and his chocolate milk like
everyone else and went to sit down. Normally, because your popularity was
determined by who you sat with and what table you had, it was next to
impossible to find a good seat. That day when Brent looked around for a place
to sit, an entire table opened up. It wasn’t that kids got up to make room for
him. Everyone just seemed to slide down a space or two and suddenly there was
a whole table that wasn’t being used.

He sat down
and unwrapped his plastic knife and fork. He bumped his tray and it made a
clinking noise as the plate jumped. The cafeteria fell silent.

Which was
weird. Normally you couldn’t hear yourself think in there. A couple hundred
kids who had been quiet all morning in class suddenly had a chance to talk to
each other and the resulting noise was, well, loud.

Now you could
hear every time somebody shifted in their seat and their clothes rustled.

Brent looked
up and around at the people sitting near him. A lot of them were looking down
at their own trays. A lot of them were looking at each other. Which was how
it should be. But then—a sizeable minority of them were looking right at
him. Staring at him.

As if they
thought he might do something interesting, and they didn’t want to miss it when
it happened.

He finished
his lunch as quickly as he could and headed for his locker. Lucy was waiting
for him there, but before he could reach it he had to pass by a group of girls
who were all walking together, clutching their books against their sweaters.
He saw the way their hair shone as it bounced with each step. He could see
their white teeth gleaming as they smiled. One blonde girl turned and
whispered something to a brunette, who promptly blushed. They were popular
girls and they had never looked at him before, but now their eyes followed him
as he walked toward them.

“Hi, Brent,”
the blonde said. Her name was Jill Hennessey, and she was the richest girl in
the school. He knew she was also dating the captain of the soccer team. And
now she was smiling at him.

She was a
senior
. It did not make any sense. He was a sophomore,
and therefore did not exist yet in the school’s social ladder.

The brunette
giggled. Her name was Dana Kravitz and she was the captain of the school’s
color guard. She was only a junior but Jill had taken her on as a protégé and
now she was the second most popular girl in school. A week ago he would have
bet good money she didn’t even know his name. Now she caught his eye for just
a fraction of a second, blushed again, and looked down at her boots.

“Hi,” he said,
and every pair of eyes went wide. Some of the girls, hangers-on in Jill and
Dana’s circle, straightened up as if they were coming to attention. The girls
didn’t stop walking but it seemed to Brent they had slowed down to a lazy
stroll. He had no idea what he was supposed to do.

“Uh, how’s it
going?” Brent asked.

“Us? We’re
fabulous. And you? Are you glad to be back among us?” Jill asked. She and
her friends were even with him now and they had to turn their heads to keep
looking at him.

Brent
shrugged. “Sure. Well, um, I guess I’ll see you around,” he said.

“Definitely,”
Jill said, and walked past him. The circle followed—but Dana Kravitz
glanced back over her shoulder and made eye contact with him again. And
blushed. Again.

When he got to
his locker Lucy was bouncing up and down in impatience. “I have to get to
social studies,” she said, “but I have so got a mission for you.”

“A mission?”
Brent asked. He had no idea what she was talking about. “Did you just
see—that was Jill Hennessey and Dana Kravitz, right? I didn’t just think
it was them?”

“Yes, I did
see. I saw how shameless they were, definitely. I think you’re absolutely
right that they were looking at you, and that that’s something they would not
have done before, which I think should tell you something very important about
girls like that.”

Brent shook
his head as he worked the combination of his locker. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?
I mean, I haven’t actually
done
anything. I still
feel
like the
same person. But everybody’s acting so weird.”

“Yes, those
girls
are
weird,” Lucy confirmed. “But
you know how it is. School can be very boring and we all get excited when
something new happens, and now you’re the flavor of the week. I wouldn’t get
your hopes up about Jill and Dana, Brent. They’re interested now, but how long
could that possibly last? If I were you I would focus more on girls in your
own social circle, you know, girls who have known you your whole life and
always found you interesting and attractive, even before you became a
celebrity, girls who—”

“Oh, come on,
Luce,” Brent said. “There aren’t any girls in this school like that. You’re
right. I’m just—” he thought of Weathers sitting in his kitchen,
“—front page news. In a week or so they’ll probably walk right past me
again and not even say hi. So what’s this mission?”

“Mission?”
Lucy asked. There was something wrong with her face. Her mouth was all
bunched up and she had her eyes closed. Like she was about to cry, or sneeze
or something. Then she opened her eyes again and nodded and got back to
business. “Yes. Your mission. Should you choose to accept it, ha ha ha.
Yes. I thought—I mean I’m not sure how you want to handle this, but you
are who you are now and there are certain things that will be expected of you,
certain stereotypes you’re going to be measured against and I figured it might
be good to get started right away—”

“Started with
what?” Brent asked.

“Fighting
crime, of course.”

Brent laughed.
Then he looked at her face. And laughed again. But she was serious. “Crime.
Here at the school? Is somebody stealing extra composition notebooks out of
the supply closet?”

“It’s a little
worse than that,” Lucy told him.

Completely
serious.

Classes ended
for the day. Maggie changed and headed out to the practice field, watching the
football players go through their drills. Her first day back to school had
been a little different from Brent’s. She had made plans to see all her
friends at lunch, but when she got to the cafeteria not a single one of them
was there. Maggie was a high school senior. She knew exactly what that meant.

Perhaps even
worse, not a single boy had looked at her all day. Which was unusual, but
she’d kind of expected it. Most of the cute boys were complete brain-dead
twits and they looked for girls who were just as stupid as they
were—girls they could take advantage of. Maggie was used to being stared
at, especially when she was wearing her field hockey uniform which showed off a
serious amount of leg, but she knew the football players weren’t looking for a
girl who could run faster than they could and beat them up without trying if
they got a little too affectionate.

So they were
ignoring her. It wasn’t just that they didn’t say hi. They never had before.
But they weren’t whistling at her. They weren’t making rude comments to each
other about her body. And they made an all-too-obvious show of not meeting her
gaze for so much as a second. As if she wasn’t a girl at all. As if she were
some weird species of sea creature that was probably slimy to the touch.

So when one of
them threw a pass that went a little too long and the ball bounced crazily
across the grass toward her, she dashed over and grabbed it before Mark
Hockenberry, the starting quarterback, could reach it.

He stared at
her in confusion, then glanced back at the other players. “Little help?” he
asked, when she just stood there smiling at him, balancing the football on her
index finger.

“Sure,” she
said. She pulled her arm back and threw the ball at Hockenberry as hard as she
could.

Because he was
a jock and because he had a reputation for never flubbing a pass in his entire
athletic career, he made the mistake of trying to catch it. She’d known he
would. The ball hit him in his armored sternum and knocked him backwards
across the lines painted on the grass. He slid ten yards before he came to a
stop. And lay there, groaning.

Maggie
frowned. She hoped, sort of, that she hadn’t hurt him.

But then he
sat up and held the ball in the air. The rest of the team cheered and rushed
over to help him up and pat him on the back. And still, they didn’t so much as
glance at Maggie.

“That was
unnecessary, Maggot,” someone said behind her.

She whirled
around and saw Jill Hennessey standing there, with Dana Kravitz close by but
just a few steps behind. Maggie and Jill were not exactly what you would call
friends. They were both on the field hockey team, and they had worked together
to win a lot of games. But they never went out for pizza together after a
victory. More tellingly, they did not have each others’ numbers in their
respective phones.

“It amused me,
Pill. And I crave amusement. What do you want?”

“Not a thing
for myself,” Jill told her. “However. An associate of mine had a question
that I thought you could answer. If you’d like to earn a little goodwill from
the student body.”