CHAPTER
ONE
The first time I looked death in the face, I blinked and it was gone.
They say your life is supposed to flash before your eyes, but all I remember is the moment after. The adrenaline that filled me, knowing I survived. The weightlessness of having dodged a bullet. Literally.
Watching someone else die was different.
The details are the hardest to forget. The smell of cinnamon and pine furniture polish. The sound of glass breaking at the front door. And worst of all, the way Travis Shepherd’s eyes froze as the life left his body.
It’s been more than a month since Anthony and I watched Steven Westbrook shoot Shepherd, his former classmate, in the chest. Since then, I’ve been unofficially expelled from the Wheatley School, grounded for what’s quite possibly the rest of my teenage years, and exiled from my friends.
I know that having my phone, computer, and social life taken away is my parents’ way of ensuring I have nothing to do all summer but think about the things I’ve done. If only they knew the whole story—the one that starts with a thirty-year-old photo of a missing student and ends with watching his killer die on the floor of his own foyer—they’d understand that I could never not think about what I’ve done.
I would give anything to be able to close my eyes and not picture the blood blossoming around the hole in Travis Shepherd’s chest. If I could, I’d stop it from happening in the first place.
Even though he killed four people, including a five-year-old boy. Even though deep down, I believe that Travis Shepherd deserved to die.
Or maybe that’s what I want to believe, because if I’d gone to the police instead of Alexis Westbrook that night, Shepherd would be alive.
It was like a horrible move in a game of checkers—a move where bam, all of the kings get captured. Shepherd is dead, Steven Westbrook is in jail, and Headmaster Goddard is in hiding. The only person at Wheatley I thought I could trust—Ms. Cross, my favorite teacher—disappeared without a trace.
As for me, I’m the Knight that got kicked back to New York. Right back where I started, but so, so far away from the person I was.
And every day that goes by without word from Ms. C, I can’t help but wonder if she was a pawn all along.
I still don’t know where I’m going to school in the fall. My parents said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” which obviously means no one wants me. There was a time I would have made that work in my favor. Now, I mostly just stay out of their way and hope I don’t end up at a school where everyone either has a baby or a probation officer.
I technically haven’t been expelled from Wheatley. Yet. My disciplinary hearing has been postponed until July, because of “internal restructuring.” Which is a fancy euphemism for the fact that Wheatley, formerly Massachusetts’s number-one secondary preparatory school, is up shit’s creek.
The administration of the mighty Wheatley School has fallen and now Jacqueline Tierney, aka Dean Snaggletooth, is the last person standing. Maybe she’ll wind up running the place. If you ask me, they could use a womanly touch over there, even though Tierney has all the femininity of a jockstrap.
Anyway, none of that matters because the board is almost certain to turn my suspension into an expulsion, which will mark my second expulsion from a school this year.
The official citation in the letter Dean Tierney sent home said I “assaulted another student.” I guess they were willing to give me a break for using a Taser on Larry Tretter, the boys’ crew team coach and Travis Shepherd’s accomplice, since he’s currently in jail for conspiracy to commit murder.
The version of the story I gave Tierney and my parents is that I used the Taser on Coach Tretter because he was beating the crap out of Casey, Travis Shepherd’s son. Then I took a couple shots of my own at Casey, just for being a Class A douche.
My parents were probably too pissed at me to dig further into what happened. My dad wanted to know why, if I had to kick a boy in the balls, I couldn’t wait to do it until we were off-campus. My mom just wanted to know where I got the Taser.
Their reactions probably explain a lot about why I am the way I am.
So my sentence for being not-officially-but-basically-expelled was virtual confinement to our apartment until the hearing. At first it wasn’t so bad, because I had a ton of schoolwork to finish. Then I turned in my final exams and realized I had no purpose in life. I was a prisoner in my own home. Except I think I’d prefer actually being in jail, because then I wouldn’t have to see my parents every day.
I told my dad this, and he didn’t think it was very funny. He decided I needed an attitude adjustment in the form of going to work with him.