Chapter 12
Rick was dreaming, and he knew it because he couldn’t think of a single thing that would make him go back into the girls’ locker room at the stadium.
Except maybe he was wrong and this was real, because that was how it felt.
The smell of disinfectant and sweat strong in his nostrils, the drip drip drip sound of a showerhead, not quite turned off, as the water hit the tile.
That tile, so white from bleach, next to those bright, bright lockers.
He wiped sweaty palms on his jeans, and that felt real, too.
He wasn’t in the main area of the locker room, but tucked into an alcove with a bench, a design built in to give young bodies the flimsy fiction of privacy in a room where there was none.
The alcove made him feel claustrophobic, but he didn’t want to leave it, either.
Rick had never felt more like an animal tucked into a burrow, shivering and silent, waiting for the fox to go away.
Something was out there, waiting, and it wasn’t friendly. Now that he realized it, he heard the breath of the creature, faint but there, the wheezing echoes reaching him where he sat huddled against the bay of lockers. Rick tried to quiet his own breathing.
A laugh startled him, making him freeze. The sound loud but lacking any joy. It was a hyena’s cackle, a predator’s exultation at prey run to ground.
The laugh morphed, becoming a ghastly parody of a song, the words bubbling and gasping from a ruined throat.
Who’s that come a-prowling, come a-growling here to fight?
Rick touched a shaking hand to the locker next to him to steady himself, wishing that voice would stop, the song end.
It was a fruitless wish, and he knew it—after all, when had wishing gotten him anything before?
If wishing worked, his mom wouldn’t have exhaustion-purple eyelids and two jobs.
He’d have a dad who gave a shit and showed up, not a fucking phantasm, an empty space like a wound you couldn’t quite leave alone.
If wishes worked, Rick thought, he’d be like other students at his school, dreaming cotton-candy-colored futures, their only worry what major to pick or what apprenticeship to go after.
But they didn’t and he didn’t, so wishes didn’t do shit.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
He wasn’t even sure where he’d heard that, but it rang with truth.
Rick’s hopes and dreams were small, monochrome in their simplicity, but that didn’t stop him from wanting them more than anything.
Didn’t stop them from being big to him, important, and so easily ripped away that he tried not to even think about them too hard for fear they’d pop like a soap bubble.
The singer was tapping out a rhythm now that sounded suspiciously like Rick’s own heartbeat. Wildcats! Wildcats! Wildcats!
Suddenly tired of the game, Rick lurched forward, stepping around the corner of the little alcove he’d been tucked into, even though that was the last thing he wanted to do. His limbs were heavy, weighted, but propelled, like he was an awkward puppet being moved by a novice puppeteer.
He took the last step out into the main space of the locker room and found himself facing Claus the Wildcat like they were two gunslingers in an old western. Except the mascot was sitting, and neither of them was armed.
Claus clapped his paws together, the material making a muted sound. The voice coming from the stuffed head of the wildcat should have been equally muffled, but their chant came out crystal clear. Who will send them crawling, send them bawling home tonight?
Rick moved forward with heavy feet, his hands stretching out even though he didn’t really want to know, didn’t want to see who was inside.
An eerie laugh came from Claus, still sounding like something that would come more from a hyena than anything feline. The laugh died, morphing into a whisper. Wildcats, Wildcats, Wildcats!
Rick’s hands shook as he reached out, grasping Claus’s cloth head, yanking it up and away before he could talk himself out of it.
Bryce. Blue-lipped and waxy-skinned. And dead. Very, very dead.
Rick shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was, and for a second the sheer horror of the situation made him feel like his muscles and bones were going to burst right out of his skin.
Bryce threw back his head and laughed, his arms wrapped around the middle of the mascot suit that he still wore. “You look like you’re going to shit your pants.”
“I’m a little surprised I didn’t,” Rick admitted, swallowing down his sick feeling.
Bryce cocked his head. His filmed-over eyes reminded Rick of hardboiled eggs as they examined him carefully. He dropped his gaze, spreading out his hands like he was stretching them, his skin mottled in the pale whites and blues of a corpse. “Was it you?”
Nausea crept up from Rick’s gut to his throat despite his efforts. “Was what me?”
He clucked his tongue, and Rick was grateful that he couldn’t see it because, oh god, what would his tongue look like?
“Don’t play with me, Hicks. Did you kick my bucket?
Help me shuffle off this mortal coil? Did you murder me, Rick Hicks?
” He snarled then, the flesh around his mouth cracking and curling away, revealing teeth, gums glistening in the fluorescent lights of the locker room.
“Because this ghost won’t give up, Hicks. ”
Rick forced words past numb lips. “I didn’t. I didn’t kill you. I’ve never murdered anyone.”
Bryce’s head cocked again, too far, much farther than a head should be able to go, his grin grotesquely large for his face.
He sprang up, his movements more insect than human.
He scuttled closer, lightning fast, until his face was next to Rick’s.
His tongue came out then, blue-black, impossibly long as it licked chill saliva along Rick’s cheek.
“Are you sure, Rick? Because someone killed me.” His voice dropped to a whisper, wheezing again, like his lungs had holes in them.
“Someone we know? Because I didn’t put up a fight, Rick, did I? ”
Rick choked off a scream, not moving beyond the uncontrollable shake of his body.
Bryce waved a hand in front Rick’s face.
“Not a mark on me, Rick, except a three-day-old hickey from Ellie Mayfair. Nothing under my nails.” He flared his fingers in a magician’s movement.
“Someone we know. You might see them every day. Drive them to school. Drool after them in the hallway. Fight them on the track.” His voice was barely a whisper now.
“Or walk by them every day and never see them at all. A shadow, a ghost, a nobody right up until they gut you like a fish.”
That tongue came out again, licking at Rick’s ear.
He was panting, his heart a hummingbird flutter.
“Someone’s coming, Ricky my boy.” The whisper caressed Rick’s cheek, as intimate as a dream lover. “Who’s that come a-prowling, come a-growling here to fight?”
Rick’s breathing stuttered as fear locked up his spine.
“It can only be a Wildcat,” Bryce whispered, “’cause the Wildcats can’t be beat!”
Rick jackknifed up from the couch, body quaking, sweat soaking his T-shirt. He pushed shaking fingers through damp hair and knew, deep down in his bones, that he wouldn’t fall back to sleep anytime soon.
—
Sunday morning brought rain and a crick in Rick’s neck.
He’d been right. It had taken him a long time to fall asleep after his nightmare, and by the time he did, it was in a weird position.
Between the pain in his neck, the leftover bruises from his tussle with Paxton, and the grit in his eyes from crappy sleep, Rick wasn’t in the best of moods.
Even being at the Lopez house wasn’t helping much.
“Maybe you should go take a nap.” Martina was nestled into a pile of blankets at one end of the old, ratty couch the Lopezes kept in their basement.
Rick was cocooned in an orange-and-green afghan, the stripes set in a sawtoothed pattern that had somehow survived the seventies.
It was old and worn but happened to be his favorite.
The blanket was unofficially his whenever he came over, serving as a comfort object even if he didn’t actually own it.
The basement had an old entertainment center against one wall, its shelves full of board games, puzzles, and books, with a TV glowing in the middle.
Dani and one of Martina’s cousins, Caleb, were in front of it, each flopped over a beanbag chair as they played Minecraft.
The walls were painted a warm, golden kind of color, spotted here and there with framed art.
Worn light blue carpet kept scrupulously clean lay under Rick’s feet, or would have done if he hadn’t put them up on the coffee table in front of the couch.
The room itself was a comfort object to Rick.
And yet, the second he closed his eyes, all he saw was Bryce’s broken face, which made him never want to sleep again. Bryce’s face hadn’t even looked like that in death, but it didn’t matter. Rick shuddered.
“Why should I go take a nap?” Rick asked. “When I’m so comfortable where I’m at?”
“Because that’s the most words you’ve said in an hour. You’ve been replying in grunts and monosyllables.”
“I like them,” he said. “They’re great.”
Martina tossed a throw pillow at him.
Rick batted it away. “Sorry, I’ll be nice.”
“Don’t be nice, be useful. Help me discover what the survivor club—since we one hundred percent will not be murdered—has in common so that Camryn will think I’m brilliant and fall right into my arms. I want complete swooning.
Eyes filled with gratitude. As my ride-or-die, you’re supposed to make this happen. ”
Rick couldn’t help smiling at her, even if it was tight-lipped. “I will do anything to help Camryn see that you’re brilliant. But I would do it anyway because then we’d also, you know, survive?”
“Surviving is great. Thriving is better. She could be the love of my life,” Martina said. “You don’t know, and I won’t know either if we don’t figure this out.”