Haze (5 page)

“Marcus Tam,” I said, remembering what Jeremy had told me in the weight room.

Abby's eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, it was about Marcus. What do you know?”

What did I know? Nothing that would lead anybody to plow into Jeremy with a car. “That the team covered up the hazing part of it. That Jeremy…I think he feels responsible.”

She nodded.

“But, Abby, that still doesn't mean Jeremy's accident had anything to do with Marcus. Did you mention this to the police?”

She dropped into Jeremy's desk chair. “I told my parents, and Dad blew up at me. He doesn't want to believe anyone would hurt Jeremy on purpose. I tried the police, and they pretty much patted me on the head. They think it might have been a drunk driver.”

She was trying not to make a big deal of it, but her voice shook when she got to the head-patting part. The surest way to piss Abby off: treat her like a little kid. “I promise not to blow up at you. Or to pat you on the head,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “If I find the proof and bring it to the police, they will have to listen to me. Think about it. Coach had a lot to lose if the truth got out.”

I wasn't so sure. “Marcus Tam—that was three years ago. The police must have investigated it then. If anything was wrong, it would have come out. Jeremy was going to prove it was hazing. So what? It's in the past. Marcus Tam has been dealt with. You have to think about other possibilities. What if Jeremy's hit-and-run really was just an accident?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You don't believe that.”

“No,” I said. “But I'm thinking about who benefits with Jeremy out of the picture. It's not Coach. He's lost one of his best swimmers. What about Steven? They're seniors now, and Steven's been eating Jeremy's wake for years. Jeremy can't race now, and suddenly Steven's our top-ranked swimmer. Not a bad place to be, especially with college applications due.”

“You think this was about
swimming
?”

I crossed my arms. “Swimming is important.” A poster of Michael Phelps was on the wall. How could she talk like that in front of him?

“You don't kill somebody over swimming,” she said.

“You and I don't,” I said. “Does Steven strike you as a balanced individual?”

“Just because you don't like him doesn't make him the bad guy,” Abby said.

“And just because you want to believe in Coach doesn't mean he's innocent. All I'm saying is, we have to work with the facts.” “Right,” I said, looking around Jeremy's room. “So let's find the facts. Where does Jeremy keep his laptop? You wanted Droid to take a look at it.”

She frowned. The desk was empty. “I'd have thought…” She spun around in the chair. “I don't know.”

We looked in every place a laptop might reasonably be stored. In the closet. In backpacks. And in places that made no sense at all, like in drawers and under Jeremy's pillow. “He wasn't out for a run,” Abby said, looking in his closet.

“Huh?” I looked up from under the bed.

“His good sneakers. They're still here,” Abby said. “He wore these to run in. His old ones are for the rest of the time. Those are the ones he must have had on.”

“You didn't see what shoes he was wearing?”

She shook her head. “The police kept his clothes. Evidence.”

I sat up on the bed. The carpet had a worn patch, over by the desk chair. I cleared my throat. “He was supposed to meet me,” I said, finally looking up at Abby. “At six. He would have had his running shoes on for that.” A serious athlete like Jeremy wasn't likely to risk injury over anything as stupid as wearing the wrong shoes.

“So wherever he was going when he got hit by the car, he thought he would have time to come back and change.”

Maybe. Or he had changed his mind about the run and didn't bother to let me know. But the run had been his idea. “The night before the accident, I think he wanted to tell me something,” I said. I explained how Steven and Nate had interrupted us in the weight room.

“Maybe he was going to show you his proof,” Abby said.

I shrugged. There was no way of knowing. Not until Jeremy woke up. “What about his cell phone?” I asked. “Do the police have that too?” Maybe someone called him, or he had called someone. Maybe that would give us a clue.

Abby shook her head. “It wasn't found.”

“I don't see it around here, do you?” I slid open the top drawer of his desk. For somebody who lost his keys all the time, Jeremy seemed very organized. The drawer was full of plastic bins with labels. Pens. Pencils. Erasers. Calculator. Flash drives.

Abby laughed. “I gave him those bins, as a joke. He was always borrowing my stuff because he couldn't find his. I'm surprised he actually uses them.”

I wasn't sure how well he used them. There were pens in the ruler bin and an eraser in the bin for flash drives. I didn't see any flash drives at all. I had a few of them. Thumb-sized backup, about the size of Abby's tiny Swiss Army knife. Droid and his friends used theirs for swapping movies and software around. “No laptop. No backup drives. Does that seem weird to you? Like maybe he hid all his computer stuff?” I asked

“Or somebody took it,” Abby said slowly.

I closed the drawer. “Who else would have a key?”

“A teacher could get in, I bet,” she said. “Coach could.”

I dropped my head into my hands. She was back on Coach again. It didn't fit. He hadn't even been at the party. But somebody—either Jeremy or whoever had taken his laptop—thought there was something in Jeremy's files worth hiding. His computer, his flash drives, even his phone were missing. It was too much of a coincidence. We needed that laptop.

“I'm going to try and check Steven's room,” I said. “I'll get in. Trust me, okay? The computer might be there, or there might be something else there that can point us in the right direction. Just…lay off Coach in the meantime.”

Abby studied me. “I'm going to suggest to Mom and Dad that they collect Jeremy's laptop. Just for safekeeping, while he's in the hospital. That way, they'll find out it's missing and tell the police. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. Something occurred to me. “Wouldn't the police already have come in here, looking for his phone?”

Abby shrugged. “Nobody said anything to me about a missing laptop. That's all I know.”

I hesitated. I didn't want to fight with her. “Abby—what do you really think we're looking for? What kind of proof are we talking about?”

“Photos,” she said. “Proof that Marcus died because of hazing. Proof that Coach Gordon was there.”

chapter twelve

After we snuck Abby out, Droid and I raced to Coach's office—the one in the main building, not the one by the swimming pool. Coach was nowhere in sight. The door was closed, and a typewritten page was taped to it. At the top it said:
Swim Team Roster
. Red Cap was reading it. As we drew near, he turned away, a smile on his face. He raised a hand to Droid and I, as if we were his fan club, there to cheer him on.

Droid gave him a halfhearted high five. I was already staring at the list.

Bram Walters. My name was there, under the sophomore category. Droid's wasn't. But of course—his real name wasn't Droid. It was Danilo. Danilo Martinez. I scanned the list again.

Droid wasn't on it.

I backed away. Droid's eyes met mine. His chin was stuck high, his eyes too bright.

My mouth tasted like sawdust. We had both worked so hard. “Droid, man.”

“Hey, dude. It's all right. Congratulations,” he said. “You deserve the spot.”

I smiled, but there was a sinking feeling in my chest. “It wasn't supposed to be just one of us.”

Droid shrugged, but it was too casual. It looked forced. “You'd better get going,” he said. “Coach wants to see you all at nine o'clock. See? It's there, on the bottom. Poolside meeting. Probably one of his famous pep talks.” He made finger quotes around “pep talks.”

“Droid—”

He shrugged again. “Catch you back at the room.”

I headed to the pool on my own.

I spent Monday morning swim practice thinking over my plan. I wanted to get a look in Steven's room. So as I backstroked through the water, staring at the ceiling, I reviewed the facts.

Someone had gotten into Jeremy's room. And from what the police had said when Abby's parents called them, there wasn't a lot of hope of finding out who. They weren't even sure it was directly related to the hit-and-run. Someone might have taken advantage of the fact that Jeremy was in the hospital, they said. Someone might have grabbed the chance to steal his laptop.

If the missing laptop had done one thing, it had convinced me that Abby was onto something. An accidental hit-and-run? Maybe. An accidental hit-and-run followed by the victim's room being robbed? It didn't take a rocket scientist to see something was off.

Abby was right. Coach could have gotten access to Jeremy's room. But as head boy, it wouldn't have been hard for Steven to come up with a reason to visit the dorm office either. And that was where the spare keys were kept. So Steven also could have done it.

End of lane. Racing turn. My recovery was too slow.

Maybe Jeremy had hidden the laptop himself. But where? If he had hidden it, he must have thought something could go wrong. So he would have put it where someone, either his parents, Abby or me could find it.

But where?

Water rushed past me. I had an outside lane, not the greatest. Outside lanes are slow. You feel the wake more. I could tell by the push of the water that someone was ahead of me—I was fighting somebody else's waves.

If Abby was right and this all tied into Marcus Tam's death and whatever proof Jeremy had, stealing the computer made sense. But what if it wasn't that? What if I was right, and Steven was behind it? What could be on Jeremy's laptop that Steven didn't want anyone to see?

Maybe Steven had sent Jeremy emails. Threats. Maybe he had tried to warn Jeremy off the team.

Maybe the computer, and Jeremy's phone, had to do with whatever had gotten him out of bed in the middle of the night. Maybe he had been going to meet somebody. Maybe he had been on his way to meet whoever ran into him with their car.

Down and up again, dolphin kick. Break the surface and go.

I pulled harder. My body shot through the water. That's the best part of front crawl—when your body feels it was made to move through water. I wasn't fighting anyone's wake now. I focused.
Swim
. Almost there.

End of lane. I hit the wall. Surfaced.

Practice ended. Coach called us over. Our first meet was still more than a month away, so there was plenty of time to decide who would compete in what event, he said. He had a good feeling about this year. If we played our cards right and stayed strong, we had a shot at the statewide championship. He looked at Steven when he said this.

I was halfway out of the pool area before he finished talking. The other guys made for the showers. I went straight to the locker room. Steven's varsity jacket hung on the hook at the end of the aisle.

I swiped his keys out of his pocket, then dressed faster than I ever had before, yanking my pants up over wet legs. I ran out the door.

I reeked of chlorine, but I had the keys.

I nodded hello to the two boys I met on the way to Steven's room. My hair was dripping. Steven had five keys on his keychain. One was the key to his BMW. I let myself what-if about that one for half a second before I got back to the business of unlocking his door.

The room was scary neat. Hotel-room neat. As head boy, Steven had no roommate, but even so, shouldn't there have been socks and sweatpants lying around? The room was perfectly clean. The burgundy bedspread looked like it had been ironed into place, and even the pillowcase was smooth. There was a spiral-bound notebook on his desk alongside his computer. Nothing else. Everything was lined up at right angles to the edge of the desk. The chair was pushed in. Books were lined up on shelves according to size. There were no pictures of friends thumb-tacked to the bulletin board, just a class schedule, a school calendar and a swim-team roster. No posters.

The room even smelled kind of bleachy, as if someone had used cleaning products in it recently. I shivered.

I closed the door behind me. It was risky. I wouldn't know if Steven was coming, and I couldn't get out easily. But that was better than someone seeing me in Steven's room and telling him about it.

If Jeremy's laptop was here, it wasn't in plain sight. I checked under the bed. Nothing, not even a dust bunny on the hardwood floor. I started my search. The desk drawers were compulsively organized. And when I got to the closet, I shivered again. The blazers were on the left, all facing the same way. The shirts were next, arranged by color. Then the pants. They were arranged by color too. Everything was lined up. There was nothing wrong with a clean room, but this? This creeped me out. Even Mom wasn't this organized.

I exhaled. How long had I been here? I had to get out before Steven got his hands on a spare key. I moved to the door and listened, making sure there were no footsteps in the hall when I opened the door.

I made it as far as the stairs before I met Steven. He held a set of spare room keys from the front desk, complete with a large, orange keychain. His real keys were heavy in my pocket. I made a fist around them. I would have to find a place to ditch them outside, somewhere between the pool and the main building when no one was looking.

I nodded as we passed. “Good practice.”

He nodded back but stopped walking. His eyes narrowed. I felt his stare as I continued down the stairs.

chapter thirteen

I texted Abby that evening to tell her I hadn't found anything in Steven's room. She was going to visit Jeremy after school, so we wouldn't have a chance to talk. Droid and I spent the time after study hall blowing each other up in an online game. He kicked my butt as usual. Maybe it would make him feel better about not making the swim team.