Chapter Three CASEY
Chapter Three
CASEY
Unlike most schools where you have to watch out for the jocks with Y chromosomes, Fairview Prep was a matriarchal society lorded over by the queen bee herself: Shelby Carothers. She had an endless font of meanness in her. Her anger issues might not have been so bad on their own, but she was also the daughter of an ex-NBA player and thus a good foot taller than the entire student body. On a good day, my head crested her hip bone. She could have tossed me around like a rag doll if she had the inclination to do so. Her meaty fists could have closed over my windpipe and snuffed out my life in mere seconds. It would have happened eventually, I’m sure, if I hadn’t ingratiated myself to her from the start. I was a scholarship student at Fairview Prep. The lowest rung on the social ladder. However, I had something Shelby desperately needed: a brain full of useless trivia facts and not much going on in the way of a social life.
Fairview Prep was filled with so many bright young minds that even the bullies making fun of the nerds were nerds themselves. Everyone knew Shelby loved her beloved quiz-bowl team, and everyone also knew that Nicole Sanders had recently quit due to Shelby’s tyrannical leadership style. And now they needed a fourth player to round out the team.
When our paths crossed, the day Shelby’s vicious brown eyes landed on me and mischief sparked, I knew if I wanted to walk away with all body parts intact, I had mere seconds to act.
“I can join your quiz-bowl team. I’ll do it! You need me!”
The words had barely left my lips by the time Shelby had grabbed ahold of my collar and started to twist.
Already, my life was starting to flash before my eyes. I was too young to die! I’d never tried sushi! I didn’t know what it felt like to be kissed! I had a half-eaten Hershey’s bar stashed in the side table next to my bed!
Then she narrowed her eyes, weighing my offer like an ancient Roman emperor trying to decide my fate with the flick of a thumb. Up, I’d live. Down, I’d get thrown to the lions.
“Fine. We’ll start now.”
At lunch, Shelby invited me to eat at her table, and I could not refuse her offer. The universe reminded me of that as I trailed behind her, passing pitiable Hillary Vickers, who was standing at her locker with sopping wet hair and a soggy uniform, evidence of a prelunch swirly. She trembled as Shelby and her cronies passed by—expecting more brutality—then her eyes fell on me, and I thought I’d see pity, maybe even fear on my behalf. Instead, her eyes narrowed in confusion. Her lips parted as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Shelby wasn’t dragging me behind her. There were no threats. It looked like I was following her willingly. And I suppose in a sense, I was. Standing in Shelby’s shadow was the safest place to be at Fairview Prep. Becoming one of her minions was wrong on a moral level, sure, but I couldn’t get bogged down by lofty concepts like ethics. I didn’t have the luxury. It was about survival more than anything else. Hillary Vickers had a rich mommy and daddy who could nurse her wounds and buy her a new uniform and ease her suffering with endless therapy sessions. I had a chain-smoking grandmother who worked two jobs and thought beat-up shoes from Goodwill were a splurge for my back-to-school attire. In other words, I had no choice.
Before I joined, Fairview Prep’s middle school quiz-bowl team was mediocre at best, but in my eighth-grade year, we were unstoppable. Partly because Shelby made us practice three nights a week, and partly because I had a preternatural talent for quick buzz-ins. I mean, not to brag, but even Alex Trebek would have sat up and taken notice of my nimble thumbs.
Still, Shelby would stand at my side during practice. “Faster! Faster !”
Her mom would knock on the basement door. “Yoo-hoo! Anyone want some Cheetos Puffs?”
“ Not now, Mom !”
There was only one other team as good as ours, and it was our all-male private school counterpart, Hillandale Academy.
And guess who went to Hillandale?
Phillip Woodmont.
He was the shining star on the Hillandale team, quick on the draw with his buzzer, just like I was.
I actually remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him. It was on a Saturday afternoon—a time when other kids our age were out riding their bikes, lounging aimlessly in front of the television, enjoying their lives. It was tournament day, which meant my grandmother had dropped me off on the curb of some randomly assigned public school, and I was left to rot there for eight to ten hours. The tournament experience consisted of quick bursts of action thickly sandwiched between hours of downtime.
I’m sure I’d tried to bring a book or something, but there was no way Shelby was having that. We were seated on a cold tile floor, trying to get far enough away from the bathrooms so that we didn’t have to listen to every single flush but near enough to the auditorium so that we’d know when it was our turn to duke it out in front of a crowd brimming over with tens of fans.
Shelby was forcing us to endure round after round of last-minute warm-up questions when I looked up and saw the Hillandale boys making their way toward us.
There were four in total—each one drastically different in size, so much so that it was like seeing a giraffe and a mouse in the same posse.
To say they were good looking would have been a stretch. None of us were turning heads. We were middle school quiz-bowl participants. Hello , there wasn’t a good haircut or a stylish article of clothing in the entire vicinity.
Still, though, I thought Phillip was ... cute. Maybe the way his braces glinted off the light was really attractive to my midpubescent brain. Maybe his starched uniform and the way it hung off his slim shoulders really called to me.
Whatever it was, something about Phillip compelled me to smile and wave at him as his team walked by us. Phillip caught my wave and stared down at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. His look of consternation was my first hint that I might have messed up.
The second hint came when Shelby grabbed my hand and forcibly yanked it down. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “We aren’t friends with the enemy!”
I paid for that wave.
My buzz-in thumb was arthritic by the time I made it home that evening, and I’d had my head chewed off for losing to Hillandale. Never mind that Shelby herself had cost us the win, wrongly answering three easy questions.
What followed after that day was a tension-filled quiz-bowl season that saw us neck and neck in the standings with Hillandale. We’d perpetually swap first and second place with them depending on the week.
As far as Shelby knew, the most interaction I had with Phillip was onstage when we’d stand across from each other, posed behind our respective tables, buzzers in hand, facing off in a way that felt deeply, life-alteringly serious, but was, in fact, not .
However, the truth is Phillip and I formed an illicit friendship that Shelby never found out about. On tournament days, I liked to eat lunch as far away from Shelby and the crew as I could get, which usually meant finding a weathered bench outside, facing an all-but-empty school parking lot. I’d repeated this same routine a few times up until one day, while I was working through a turkey sandwich my grandmother had packed me, when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of someone approaching my bench, and I looked up to see Phillip standing there. He’d taken off his blazer and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He looked shy. His eyes didn’t quite meet mine when he pointed to the opposite end of the bench and asked if he could sit.
I jolted into action, quickly shoving aside my bag to clear a space for him. “Of course, yeah.”
He sat, and though it was clear he meant to join me—there were plenty of other empty benches outside he could have claimed—we didn’t immediately rush into conversation. Deep in the throes of middle school, we were still sprucing up our social skills. Seasoned conversationalists? Not even close. We were all but silent as Phillip unloaded his lunch. I carefully appraised his decadent spread: warm pasta, fluffy garlic bread, proper silverware. The sight of his expensive name-brand soda convinced me to push my Dr. Cola off to the side of the bench, out of view.
“Turkey?” he asked, referring to my sandwich.
I held it up. “Yeah, with provolone.”
It gave me great pride to proclaim I was eating a type of cheese one step up from childish American.
“My favorite,” Phillip said with a small smile.
His blue eyes were so kind behind his glasses that I couldn’t help but match his smile with one of my own as I pointed at his food. “Your lunch looks good too. I love garlic bread.”
His dark brows shot up. “Oh! Want some?”
He was already holding out a slice for me to take, and in return, I offered him the other half of my sandwich. Though he was perfectly willing to give me some of his pasta, I was too embarrassed to accept it. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself slurping spaghetti in his presence, but we did go halfsies on my chips and his brownie.
I can’t even recall what we discussed that day. Our respective schools? Our current classes? Our interest in quiz-bowl trivia? The only thing that lingers now is the warm feeling I had while sitting there with him, indulging my little crush and hoping that maybe he felt the same way about me.
From that day on, Phillip would always seek me out during lunch on tournament days, and though we became friends, I never dared to tell him that I thought he was cute or hinted that I would have liked us to move beyond that. I mean, talk about a wasted opportunity. All those unsupervised hours! We could have been making out in public school bathrooms, making out under public school bleachers, making out in public, period. But instead, we were playing adversaries. Shelby kept a tight leash on me and the rest of our team, ensuring there was no possible way I was going to cross enemy lines, and she scared me enough that I wasn’t even tempted to try to see Phillip outside of our secret lunches. There’d be other boys down the road, surely. Right then, staying on Shelby’s good side was all that mattered to me.
I didn’t care all that much about the quiz-bowl team, but I did care about keeping Shelby happy, and at the end of our season, when we were at district finals and only one team could advance on to compete at regionals, she wasn’t going to stand idly by and let fate decide for us.
“We’re going to sabotage them.”
I still remember the three of us—her minions—looking at her like she was talking complete gibberish.
“What do you mean, sabotage them?” I asked.
She looked around, worried for a second, before leveling her gaze on me. Her eyes felt like two sharp daggers. “Keep your voice down, idiot. You want us to get caught?”
Well ... it didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. We’d only be held responsible for attempted sabotage, not the real thing. The tournament organizers would threaten to call our parents; we’d be released from the competition, forced to take the L , and then we’d get to go home early. It kind of sounded nice when I thought about it ...
Shelby pulled a small plastic tub of peanut butter out of her bag.
With a villainous smile, she informed us that Jake, one of the key players on Hillandale’s team, had a severe peanut allergy.
I remember gasping in horror. “You could kill him!”
“Oh, relax ,” she said with an exaggerated eye roll. “Fine, if you’re too much of a pansy for that, I also brought some laxative stuff my mom uses sometimes.”
She went digging in her bag for it.
“That’s still horrible.”
“It’s just going to make him poop his pants. Big deal.”
I didn’t like any of it. Cheating was bad enough but poisoning someone! I wanted nothing to do with it.
My other teammates—Lindsey and Anika—remained silent. Shelby had tortured them into submission. They knew better than to speak up. I was too useful to her to suffer the same fate, but my insubordination that day went one step too far for her.
Shelby shoved the bottle of liquid laxative into my hand. “You’re going to do it.”
I tried to push it back to her. “No. I’m not.”
“Do it,” she bit out with venomous rage. “ Or else .”
Lindsey started sniffling then, obviously scared of Shelby’s threat. “Just do it, Casey! Stop arguing with her.”
I snorted because this was all absolutely ludicrous. “Do whatever you want to me, but I’m not poisoning someone. It’s stupid.”
I crossed my arms—case closed.
Shelby’s mouth curved into a smile. “No, you don’t understand. It’s not what I’ll do to you . It’s what I’ll do to poor Lindsey here.” She dropped a hand onto Lindsey’s shoulder and squeezed. “You wouldn’t want her suffering because of you, would you?”
Diabolical.
Obviously now , as an adult, I see that Shelby was an actual psychopath in need of serious help. I should have immediately run to an authority figure and ratted her out, but I was thirteen and naive enough to think that Shelby really did hold all the power in the world.
I yanked the laxative bottle out of her hand as if I was going to play her game. I wasn’t. I just needed Shelby to think I was a willing participant in her stupid plan so she’d leave Lindsey alone. There was no chance in hell I was going to physically harm someone for the sake of a quiz bowl . Get real.
It took me all of ten minutes to come up with a new plan. One that didn’t involve forcing Jake to drink a bottle of medicated sludge without him realizing (which, by the way, was never going to work). My new plan was still wrong, and I fully expected to get in trouble for it. I was damaging public property, but I reasoned that at least this way, no one would get hurt.
All it took was a pair of scissors I found in the school’s art room. The auditorium was empty when I walked in with them concealed in my hand. We weren’t due to take the stage for another thirty minutes. There was no one acting as security, no one lingering around. The quiz-bowl organization could barely get volunteers to conduct the tournament itself, for god’s sake. Most of the time, they were an overworked and underpaid collection of teachers who were solely in it for the free Subway sandwiches the organization provided. Not one of them was trying to linger in here on their off time.
Up on the stage, there were two long rectangular tables on which rested four buzzers each, connected to the floor outlet by long black rubber cords. I walked to Hillandale’s assigned table, picked up the buzzer Jake usually used, trailed my hand down the long cord a few inches, and then quickly made a tiny cut in the rubber so small that no one would notice it unless they knew to look for it.
Then I spent the next thirty minutes worrying over what I’d done. I had sizable pit stains on my red polo shirt by the time our school was called to take the stage for competition. A mediocre round of applause greeted us as Shelby shoved me out from behind the curtain. The Hillandale boys were already at their table, poised and ready to take us on. I worked up the courage to look over at them, trying not to be too conspicuous about it. I didn’t want to give myself away, but my nerves slipped free of my tight control the moment I realized the setup was all wrong. They’d switched around their assigned spots. Jake wasn’t in the middle. He was at the helm now. Phillip had swapped places with him, making it so he and I stood directly across from each other when I took my position and picked up my buzzer.
Shelby growled in annoyance under her breath and then spun around to face me.
“Jake is here. Why ?”
Earlier, I’d assured her I’d gone through with the plan, which wasn’t a lie. I did go through with the plan, just not her plan.
“Trust me,” I whispered with a small shake of my head.
We were already drawing attention to ourselves. Shelby needed to cool it if she didn’t want to blow our cover.
I adjusted my shirt and listened halfheartedly as the moderators ran through the rules and then introduced us each by name. There couldn’t have been more than five people in the crowd. One guy in the back was the janitor waiting for us to clear the room so he could finish his job for the day.
“Contestants, please pick up your buzzers. The first round is about to begin.”
My hand shook so fiercely that I doubted I’d be able to buzz in. My stomach squeezed with anxiety, tightening into a knot so tight that I could barely look up from my table, not even at the seated row of moderators.
“Question number one. The first civilizations arose around 3500 BC in this region known as the land between the riv—”
I buzzed in before he could even finish.
The moderator nodded my way. “Fairview Prep.”
“Mesopotamia,” I answered confidently.
“Correct.”
My teammates hooped and hollered, jostling me with their congratulations. It only made me feel worse. I shouldn’t have been on fire that first round, but I was, so much so that there was no chance for Phillip to realize what I’d done to his buzzer. Once I finally worked up the nerve to peer over at him from beneath my lashes, I was surprised he didn’t look angry. On the contrary, his eyebrows were tugged together as he studied me, impressed and intrigued.
I glanced away quickly and gulped, focusing all my attention on the moderators for the second round: English literature.
“In this novel, a character protects his sister Georgiana and plans to marry Catherine de Bourgh’s daughter.”
Their team buzzed in faster than we did.
“Hillandale.”
“ Pride and Prejudice ,” Jake answered.
“Correct.”
“In this novel, Cardinal Richelieu’s plan is thwarted by d’Artagnan and a small group of swordsmen.”
Shelby and I buzzed in at the same time.
“Fairview Prep.”
Shelby nodded for me to take it.
“ The Three Musketeers ,” I answered.
Murmurs grew louder at Hillandale’s table, drawing stares from everyone in the auditorium except for me. I couldn’t trust my face to remain neutral if I looked over and saw them inspecting the cut in the cord. I would give myself away in an instant.
The arguing grew louder.
I could barely make out Phillip saying “This isn’t right.” And by then, my palms were so slick I could barely get a decent grip on my buzzer. The granola bar I’d eaten a few hours earlier was churning in my gurgling cauldron of a stomach.
The moderator began the next question, but Phillip interrupted him.
“There’s an issue with my buzzer!” he called out. “It’s been broken this whole time!”
Well, there it was: the beginning of the end.
I could see my bleak future play out before my eyes. The police would be called; they’d investigate and see the cut in the cord. An experienced detective would know just how I’d achieved it. He’d sweep the art-room scissors for fingerprints, find mine on them, and then I’d get thrown into the clink. I could kiss my future goodbye. Adios, middle school; hello, juvie .
The moderators paused the questions. There was chatter and chaos. I stayed perfectly still, keeping my attention down, my eyes on my feet. While Phillip tried to explain the issue to the moderators, a bead of sweat rolled down my forehead. Shelby hissed at me to “Keep it together.” She knew if we were pulled into separate rooms for questioning, I’d crack like an egg within the first five minutes.
Eventually, exasperated that they weren’t taking him seriously, Phillip circled around his team’s table and tried to walk over to the edge of the stage in an effort to speak to the moderators one on one, but he never made it there. In horrifying slow motion, I watched his feet tangle with his buzzer’s cord, and then he tumbled forward and face-planted down onto the stage, hard enough to crack his glasses. As if to add insult to injury, when he pressed up off his hands, blood dribbled from his nose.
I didn’t even think before I rushed to help him up, ignoring Shelby’s scornful gaze and growl of agitation as I left my post.
When I reached Phillip, my hand wrapped around his bicep, and I tried to tug him up. He looked at me, dazed and embarrassed.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—” Then I winced and shut up, realizing my contrite words were all but proclaiming my guilt.
It was too late to rewind, though. Phillip was nothing if not astute. His expression changed in an instant, closing off with hardened betrayal. He put two and two together easily enough. He knew his cord had been cut. He knew he’d been sabotaged. And right then, as I leaned over him, he deduced somehow that I was the catalyst to his demise, the source of this embarrassing middle school moment that would apparently bury deep into his psyche forever.
He shook off my grip and stood to leave the stage, presumably to find a bathroom so he could clean up.
When Phillip returned a few minutes later with toilet paper shoved up both nostrils to stem the blood flow, the competition picked up right where it had left off. There would be no investigation, no police presence. There would barely be a pause. These tired moderators (the ones who were volunteering their time) were unwilling to hear Hillandale’s continued arguments and were most certainly uninterested in a makeup match. Even if they were game to redo the first few rounds, the auditorium was promised to the chess club starting at 4:00 p.m. We had to clear out soon, no matter what.
They did acknowledge Phillip’s buzzer was broken and gave him a spare one, but it didn’t matter. We had a solid lead, and after the last round, Hillandale had no hope of catching us. We finished on top and progressed to regionals.
The moment the competition ended, I booked it offstage and out of the auditorium, running like I was headed for a getaway car in the form of my grandmother’s beat-up 1998 Pontiac Grand Prix.
I yanked open her passenger’s side door, tossed my backpack inside, and jumped in, slamming the door closed behind me like an afterthought.
“Drive!” I shouted at her.
With all the speed of sap drip, drip, dripping from a tree, my grandmother turned her head to look at me and cocked a haughty white brow. “Girl, I’m not sure who you think you’re talking to with that tone, but it ain’t me.”
Then she stubbed out her cigarette, took her sweet time fiddling with the radio until she settled on a song, and pulled away from the curb slow and steady. My knees were bouncing up and down as we edged out of the parking lot. I didn’t look back to see if Phillip was coming after me. I held my breath through that entire drive home.
My grandmother killed the engine after we’d pulled into our driveway, but she didn’t get out. She tapped a red nail on the gear shift, waiting.
Eventually, she asked, “Something you want to tell me?”
I thought about it for all of half a second before deciding I’d be taking this particular transgression to my grave. “No.”
“Right, then, let’s get inside,” she said, no hint of judgment. “I’m about to start supper.”
I never knew if Phillip lodged an official complaint with the quiz-bowl organization or if he tried to take the issue any higher. All I know is that I couldn’t sleep for a week after I cut that cord, because I was so scared that the consequences of my actions were going to come back to bite me in the ass. I never did tell my grandmother what I’d done, and the shame and weight of my lie ate away at me. It might have continued on like that forever if karma hadn’t stepped in.
On the day of the regionals competition, Shelby came down with a terrible stomach bug. She couldn’t even make it out of the bathroom. Our team had to forfeit our match, and that was the end of my middle school quiz-bowl career.
The case grew cold. No quiz-bowl moderator ever came knocking on my door. There was never a warrant out for my arrest.
I made peace with my mistake and moved on from it, deciding that everything worked out the way it was meant to.
Except now of course I realize I was wrong.
Karma isn’t finished with me yet, and Phillip seems intent on getting his due.