This choice: You want to manipulate the girls' soccer team • Go Back...Chapter #32A Troublemaker Amongst the Troublemakers by: Seuzz   Yumi knows all about the troubles on the girls' soccer team. She's friends with the Garners, after all. Not just Eva and Jessica, who were on the team last year and who still get a constant earful about the team's troubles, but also their brother, Marc, who is dating one of the troublemakers. Yumi has mostly shut her ears to it all.
So it's not until you start following threads on x2z that you learn just how fucked up the scene really is.
The trouble traces back to the cheerleading squad, of all places. (It seems like all the troubles at the school trace back to the cheerleading squad, eventually.) Eva and Jessica were on the soccer team until the end of their junior year, until they got conned into trying out for two of the six vacant cheerleader positions at the end of summer. When they made it—to their own surprise and dismay—they had to quit the soccer team, and that threw everything there into chaos. With Eva and Jessica on the soccer team as allies, Anita Nuevo would have won the election for team captain in a landslide. Instead, she barely topped her rival, Tara Weston.
Anita has said that she's forgiven Eva and Jessica for their apparent desertion and betrayal, but no one really believes that Anita—who has a reputation for nursing grudges behind a stony, do-not-fuck-with-me demeanor—means it. Certainly the Garner sisters have told Yumi (and Lin and Cindy and Jenny Ashton and who knows who else) that they no longer consider Anita a friend.
Then, into this witch's brew of anger and recrimination, of ambitions thwarted and ambitions only realized by the skinniest of margins, stepped Hannah Westrick, a star soccer player from Eastman High who transferred schools at the beginning of the year for reasons no one has ever fully figured out. She and Anita instantly got crossways with each other—"Anita thinks Hannah wants her job," Jessica has told Yumi—and Hannah has found herself heading the anti-Anita faction.
Or maybe she put herself there. She is a very bold and forward girl.
Things got even more complicated when Hannah, within a few days of the start of school, started going out with Marc Garner. Well, going out would be a gross understatement. Busting bedframes would be nearer the mark, according to Jessica, who is alarmingly frank about what her brother is getting up to with Hannah. And since Marc is the captain of the boys' varsity soccer squad and should be working closely with Anita, that's another point of vexed contention between Anita and her friends and the Garner triplets.
That's what you knew about before you checked the sewer that is the WHS stream at x2Z. And in that stream you find posts and threads and memes devoted to attacking Hannah.
They're all anonymous, but it's not hard to guess who is behind the gleefully malicious gossip about Hannah's latest drunken escapades; the swear-to-God-it's-true posts reporting that she's been sucking the cocks of certain football players behind Marc's back; the stories about how she got chased out of EHS for trying to seduce the boyfriend of Jenny Taylor, the girls' varsity soccer captain. And so on.
Worst of all are the memes. The nicest are the ones showing pictures of a disheveled Hannah dancing drunkenly at a nightclub. Worse are the pictures of aborted babies, and of sloppy, distended vaginal lips, that have had Hannah's name or features photoshopped into them. Creepiest, though, are the pictures of pentagrams, and black candles, and goats' faces with the gnomic warning It's coming to get you attached.
Anita and her best friend, Dominique Hughes, are also targets of some of this abuse, but at nowhere near the volume or intensity. It looks like a pretty one-sided war.
But it's not sympathy for Hannah that tempts you intervene into this fight. It's the memory of the fight you just helped Chelsea win. That was fun. And in this fight you see a chance to manipulate both sides (or all three sides, for there's also a party of stout neutrals) the way you helped Chelsea manipulate her rivals.
And which side would you help to win? Before you decide that, you'll have to see what the ground looks like from inside the fight.
Your boyfriend chortles softly the next morning on the ride in to school, when you tell him what you want to do. "That's my girl," he says, and he rubs your thigh. His smile reveals the wolf inside: the wolf that answers to the name "Chelsea Cooper."
* * * * *
Friday morning. You share a second-period English class with Anita, but you decide to make Hannah your first capture. You aren't friends with her, not really, but you're well acquainted with each other through your friendship with the Garners. But it's Jessica who looks up expectantly when you approach Hannah in fourth-period German—for the two girls sit next to each other—but you only smile at her and pass on by. Hannah does a double-take as she looks up at you from her phone.
"You busy this afternoon or tonight?" you ask. "Free to get together?"
"For what?" she asks. Her expression is blank, and her tone blunt.
"To talk about something." You add an "Um" when Hannah only stares back.
You had a ready-made excuse in your back pocket when you rehearsed this approach last period during your deadly dull Chemistry class: I wanna talk to you about my boyfriend, you were going to say. And Marc. But mostly my boyfriend. But about what your boyfriend thinks of my boyfriend. Please? But you hadn't taken Jessica into account when you came up with that bit of bait, and you don't want to complicate things by saying such things in front of her.
So you can only lift your eyebrows very high and add, "Uh, please?" as Hannah gapes dumbly at you, and as Jessica stares on with open interest.
"Okay," Hannah says at. "When do you—?"
"How about right after school, get it over with so it doesn't get in the way of anything else? Would that work?"
"Sure, I guess. But—"
"Does The Flying Saucer work for you? Four-fifteen, four-thirty? My treat."
"Yeah, alright." Her brow furrows with puzzlement.
"Great, thanks, I'll see you there." You wheel about and return to your desk. Your face burns with embarrassment, less from that very awkward approach to Hannah than from having to do it in front of Jessica. You wonder if she's going to say anything to her brother about it.
Maybe that's why it seems that you catch Marc giving you a curious stare when you walk into sixth-period Calculus after lunch.
* * * * *
When you suggested The Flying Saucer to Hannah, it wasn't because you had a particular plan in mind for getting a mask onto her. Insofar as you had a plan, you were thinking about some of the dark booths in the back, but that smacked of desperation, even to you.
But when you get there, you find you could hardly have planned things better. The parking lot is in the back, hidden from the street by clusters of buildings on three sides, and just as you're getting out of the car, a silvery Subaru minivan pulls in and parks next to you. Hannah waves at you from behind the tinted windows.
You waste no time yanking the passenger-side door open. "There's someone in there I don't want to run into," you blurt out before Hannah can ask you what you're doing. "Mind if we find someplace else?"
"No," she says, "but—"
But you're not giving her any chance to speak, not now and not earlier. You've got your bag in your lap, and you unzip and rummage inside it for the mask. "Before we head out, though," you interrupt her, "there's something I want to show you. Actually, that's the whole reason It's this."
You give her a real good, close look at it, by shoving it into her face. The back of her head bounces off the driver-side window, and she slumps to the side. You push her back and wedge her in place.
Only now that it's over does your heart begin to race. You wipe the palms of your hands on your jeans.
Ten minutes pass before the mask comes out of her. Where you're parked, between two cars with the snub nose of her minivan pressed against the back wall of The Flying Saucer, there's no one to spy on or bother you, so you have lots of time to study your soon-to-be identity.
She's a big girl, but in an athletic way—the feminine equivalent of a football player, you suppose. She's tall, for a start, probably six feet, and she has the kind of wide shoulders and wide hips that would make a good football tackle. Now that you think about it, you remember Eva and Jessica talking about Hannah from the scrimmages they played against Eastman their junior year. One of the most terrifying things on the playing field, they told Yumi, was the sight of Hannah bearing down on you, like an avalanche.
Her face is more handsome than pretty, you'd say. There is something leonine about it. Her eyes are narrow, set between a broad forehead and high cheekbones. Her nose seems flat; her smile wide and lazy. Then, too, she has a great mane of dirty-blonde hair, full of body, that when free drapes down around her shoulders, but which she usually keeps knotted in a fat ponytail that trails down her back.
You tilt your head and study her. Yes, you decide. By blacking her nose and drawing some whiskers along her upper lip and cheek, and letting down her hair ... That by itself would make her a passable imitation of the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz.
When the mask comes out of her, you seal it up with the golem paint and return it to her face. "What the—?" she gasps as she opens her eyes.
"Drive us out to Acheson," you tell her. "You have to do what I say. Don't you?"
Hannah, her eyes very wide, swallows and nods.
"Good. I'll get in the back, and then we'll go."
"Get in the back?" Hannah says faintly.
"Sure. I have to change clothes. Faces too. But that'll have to wait till we're in Acheson." You have the following choice:  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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