Gotcha (18 page)

He tilts his head, puzzled.

“They would kill me.”

“I think you’re exaggerating, Katie.”

“You’re right. They wouldn’t kill me. They would torture me slowly, painfully, and for the rest of my life I would be known as the person who snitched on the Gotcha players.”

“You’re getting carried away...”

My mind takes me back to that phone conversation I had with Warren after Tyson’s party. What was it he said? “
You know what happens when you anger the Gotcha Gods.”

He’s right. The Gotcha Gods will haunt me for the rest of my life.

“The Gotcha Gods?” Mr. Fetterly asks.

Did I say that out loud?

“C’mon, Katie. I think this game is beginning to get to you.”

I look directly into his eyes. “You’re right, Mr. Fetterly, it is. I will take my suspension and miss grad. There is no possible way I can give you the information you’re looking for.”

Mr. Fetterly looks sad. “You go home and think about it, Katie. If you change your mind, come and talk to me.” He pushes a piece of paper across his desk. “Now that I know the game is still being played, I’ll find out who the other players are anyway. It might just save us both a lot of trouble if you’d write their names down now, before you leave.”

I shake my head.

“They’ll never know how I found out.”

“Oh yes they will,” I tell him. “It’s those Gotcha Gods...”

Mr. Fetterly regards me closely. “Would you like me to make an appointment for you to talk with someone?” he asks gently. “Like the counselor? It doesn’t matter that you’re under suspension.” I can feel him staring at me.

“No thank you.”

There’s a pause, and then he’s all businesslike again. “Okay then, I’ll be phoning your parents this afternoon,” he tells me. “You’re free to leave. Please don’t come back to the school until such time as you are invited to do so, or until you’re willing to talk to me again.” He wheels his chair back to the computer and, shaking his head, resumes his typing.

I limp out of his office and past the school secretary. I go straight to the front door and hobble across the schoolyard and down the street. Once again I have the feeling that I’m just an actress in a bad made-for-
TV
movie and if I were to look back, I’d see Paige standing at a window watching me leave, her arms crossed, a smirk on her face.

I don’t worry about being tagged on my way home. Everyone is still in school. When I arrive home, I reach into my jacket pocket to get my key. I put it into the slot, but when I turn it, I notice the door isn’t locked. That’s odd. I know for sure that I locked it when I left this morning. I glance at the driveway and then down the street. Mom’s car is nowhere to be seen.

I turn the knob slowly and push the door open. Right away I can see that someone has been in the house—or is still there. Looking down the hall toward the living room, I notice closet doors hanging wide open. The cushions on the couch have been pulled off and tossed onto the floor. My rational brain tells me I should get the hell out of here, but I also sense that the pieces of the puzzle don’t fit. The door was unlocked. It was not a forced entry. We own nothing valuable, nothing worth stealing. Why would someone be tearing our house apart?

Very quietly I step into the kitchen. Drawers have been pulled open and are left hanging on their hinges. Food has been pulled out of cupboards and dropped on the counters or the floor. How strange is that? Why would someone go through the kitchen cabinets? What would they hope to find here?

And then I hear footsteps in the hallway above my head. They’re clomping down the hall toward the stairs. I stand frozen where I am. There’s no way I can get out of the kitchen before the intruder makes it downstairs. The person is making no attempt to walk quietly. I listen to each
footstep on the stairs. Fifteen steps in all, and then they reach the main floor. They turn the corner to the kitchen. I swear my heart stops in my chest.

“Katie!”

“Dad?”

It takes me a moment to recognize him. He is days unshaven, and his hair hangs in matted strands. I can smell his body odor from across the room. His eyes are wide, startled to see me here.

“Why aren’t you in school, Kittiekat?” he asks.

“I’ve been suspended.”

“You have?”

I nod. “What brings you home?” I look around at the mess. He does too.

“I was looking for something I left here.”

“What was that?”

“Oh, just something,” he says vaguely. “Nothing important.”

“Are you looking for money, Dad?”

His eyes light up. “Have you got some, Kittiekat?”

I shake my head and sink into a kitchen chair. “I gave it all to you, Dad.”

He looks confused. He closes his eyes and shakes his head a little.

“You haven’t answered my e-mails,” I tell him.

“No, I’m sorry. The librarians have discouraged me from going into the library. That’s where I went to use the computers, and to work.”

“Work?”

“Uh-huh. Do my trading.”

“Maybe if you go have a shower and a shave and pick out some clean clothes from your closet, they’ll let you back in.” I can’t believe he’s gone downhill so fast. Was I so blind that I missed all the clues that he was heading this way? Wasn’t it just a few days ago that he was telling me he considered himself a lucky guy and that he was going to make me proud of him?

He looks down at himself, as if he didn’t realize the state of his personal hygiene. Then he shakes his head. “Did you say you had some money I could borrow, Kittiekat?”

“No,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice steady. “I told you that I gave you all my money, which really wasn’t my money to give, which you knew. You told me you were going to invest it and triple my investment. I believed you, Dad.”

He’s staring at me, bewildered. It just makes me madder.

“I didn’t know you gambled, Dad. I would never have lent it to you if I knew that.”

His chin drops and he studies his feet.

“And now I’ve been suspended from school because of that stupid Gotcha game. Any day now I’m going to have to tell my entire grade that I lost all the money they trusted me with. I won’t tell them I gave it to you, Dad, to lose. That would be way too embarrassing. I’ll tell them I used it as a deposit to save my space at some college next year. Of course, I won’t be going to college next year, or any year, because I’ve been suspended from school indefinitely,
so I won’t be able to graduate. And I may not even be alive after the Gotcha Gods find out what I’ve done.

“The Gotcha Gods?” he asks quietly.

Our eyes meet. His are just vacant pools, as if his soul has been sucked clean away. That makes his and mine both. A flood of tears overwhelms me, and I drop my head onto my arms. A long time later I feel a light touch on my shoulder, but I don’t look up. I hear him leave through the front door.

The morning drags on. I don’t leave the kitchen chair. Hopelessness is a paralyzing drug.

Eventually I move to the living room and flake out on the couch. I flick on the
TV
, and the talk-show host’s face appears on the screen. It’s like I’m sliding faster and faster down that waterslide, each day closer to the time when I’ll make my own nightmarish appearance on his show.
You really didn’t see the inherent problems with investing the Gotcha money with your gambling addict father, Katie? C’mon. Everyone else knew he had a problem.
I flick the
TV
off.

At noon the telephone rings. I don’t answer it. Who could I possibly want to talk to? But it starts ringing again a few minutes later. I pick it up and slam it back down. It starts to ring again.

“What!”

“Katie, it’s me, Mariah.”

“Oh. Hi.” Just hearing her voice brings a lump to my throat.

“I know what Paige did, Katie. It’s horrible.”

I can’t respond. The lump has strangled my vocal chords.

“Everyone’s talking about it. They’re all furious with her.”

I swallow, hard. “She only ratted out me, ’Riah. No one else.”

“I know. She told me.”

“How did it get this bad between us?” My voice is cracking but I don’t care.

“It’s the game, Katie. It’s cursed.”

I can only sigh.

“Joel and I are coming over after school,” she tells me.

“What for? There’s nothing you can do.”

“We have to think of something.”

“This is not your problem.”

“You just hang tight. We’ll be there soon.”

I hang up the phone.

After cleaning up the mess that my dad created, I go back to sitting at the kitchen table, just watching the traffic go by. Eventually I see Joel and Mariah coming down the road together. I let them in and Joel crushes me in a huge hug. My eyes fill yet again, but I soak up his strength. When he lets me go, Mariah does the same thing. I feel an infusion of their energy, a sense of connection, and I begin to let go of the despair. Their presence alone brings me relief.

“Joel, you took a chance, being outside and not linked.”

“You’re worth it,” he tells me, smiling warmly.

I shake my head at his foolishness, but I feel a warm glow on the inside.

“We have a plan,” Mariah says, pulling open the door to our fridge.

“You do?” I ask, surprised. Joel plunks onto a kitchen chair and pulls me into his lap, wrapping his arms around me. I feel more energized by the moment.

Mariah pulls out a block of cheese and begins slicing. “We’ve decided that Paige’s actions have changed everything.”

I nod. “They sure have for me.”

“The sense we’re getting,” Mariah says, pointing the cheese knife at Joel and then back to herself, “is that Paige is about to self-destruct.”

“Self-destruct?”

“Yeah. She immediately realized her error in ratting on you. She may have achieved what she wanted—getting you suspended—but it backfired. In the cafeteria at lunchtime, Tyson began chanting, ‘Paige squealed, Paige squealed, Paige squealed.’ After a few minutes, someone else began to say ‘Oink Oink’ after each of Tyson’s ‘Paige squealed.’ Before you knew it, half the room was chanting ‘Paige squealed,’ and the other half of the room was replying with ‘Oink Oink.’”

“Oh my God.” Part of me is intrigued, glad that Paige is getting it back, but the other half of me is feeling queasy. Paige and I were friends for a long time. I know she’ll be mortified, and I actually find myself feeling bad for her. “What did she do?” I ask.

“She just picked up her things and went out the door. Tanysha went with her. The chant got louder and louder as
they walked away. They went out the front door, and we assume they went home.”

“She’ll never show her face at school again,” I say quietly.

Mariah brings a plate of cheese and crackers to the table. “I know,” she says. “It’s pretty sad.”

I move off Joel’s lap and we eat the snack quietly.

“So what is your idea?” I finally ask them.

“Well,” Joel says, looking at me thoughtfully. “The most important thing is to get you back to school, right?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Is that the most important thing? Or is it to win Gotcha?”

“You still intend to play?” he asks.

I shrug. “I haven’t figured anything out. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

“What exactly did Fetterly tell you?”

“He said that if I ratted out everyone else who is still in the game, he’d shorten my suspension to two days, and I could go to grad.”

Mariah’s eyes widen. “But you said no?”

“There are some things worse than not going to grad,” I tell her. “Though I am worried about what will happen to my whole year if I can’t write exams.”

I see the look that passes between Mariah and Joel.

“What?” I ask them.

“We were thinking...” Mariah says.

“You were thinking what?”

“That you can’t rat everyone else out.”

“Duh. I figured that out for myself.”

“But you also can’t stay suspended because of Gotcha.”

“Right. So where does that leave me?”

Mariah glances at Joel and then back at me, “You have to take the Gotcha money to Fetterly and tell him you can’t rat everyone out, but you are turning it over to him to do with as he pleases. Maybe he could create a Gotcha scholarship or something. But that would make the game officially over, you haven’t squealed on anyone, and the money could be used for something worthwhile. I think everyone would find that more acceptable than any of your other options.”

I look first at Mariah, then at Joel. “You guys are nuts.”

“You don’t think it will work?” Mariah asks.

“I know it won’t work,” I tell her—because there is no money, but I can’t tell them that. “What would Tyson and Warren do to me if I turned it all over?”

“They’d be a whole lot madder if you turned them in,” Joel says. “And right now that is what they’re worrying about. They know a person like you is not going to throw away her entire year of school for the Gotcha game.”

“Thank you, both of you,” I tell them. “I’ll think about it, but I don’t know...”

“What choices do you have?” Mariah asks.

I can only shrug. That momentary feeling of connection with my friends is fast fleeting.

“Katie,” Joel says, “there is not an easy solution. But this might be the best compromise.”

“Yeah, tell Tyson and Warren that.”

“I know,” Joel says. “They won’t be happy. But at least they’re not suspended.”

“And in a way, they both save face. Neither of them has to lose the game,” Mariah adds.

“That’s true,” Joel says. “I didn’t think of that.”

I hear my mom’s car pull into the driveway. I look at the clock and see that she’s early. “Uh-oh,” I tell them. “I think Mom’s heard from Fetterly. You guys better leave.”

“Will you think about what we said?” Mariah asks.

“Yes,” I lie. I hear the car door slam. “Go out the back door,” I say. “Quickly. I don’t know what she’s going to be like.”

Joel takes my face in his hands, kisses me and follows Mariah out through the back door of the house just as Mom comes in the front.

Mom’s face is pale and she’s puffing as she stomps into the kitchen. When she spots me at the table, she stops dead in her tracks. “What the hell is going on?” she demands.