The Champions
By Kara Thomas
()
About this ebook
It was the deaths of five cheerleaders that made the town of Sunnybrook infamous. Eleven years later, the girls' killer has been brought to justice, and the town just wants to move on. By the time Hadley moves to Sunnybrook, though, the locals are more interested in the Tigers, the high school's championship-winning football team. The Tigers are Sunnybrook’s homegrown heroes--something positive in a town with so much darkness in its past.
Hadley could care less about football, but shortly after she gets assigned to cover the team's latest championship bid for the school newspaper, one of the Tigers is poisoned at a party, and almost immediately after, Hadley starts getting strange emails warning her to stay far away from the football team.
It's becoming clear Sunnybrook's golden boys have secrets, and after a second player is mysteriously killed, Hadley’s beginning to suspect that someone wants the team to pay for their sins. Or does this new target on the football team have something to do with what happened to the cheerleaders all those years ago?
As an outsider in Sunnybrook, Hadley feels like she's the only one who can see the present clearly, but it looks like she’s going to have to dig up the darkness of the past to get to the bottom of what’s happening now. Luckily, there are still some Sunnybrook High grads who never left--people who were around eleven years ago—and if she can just convince them to talk, she might be able stop a killer before another Tiger dies.
Kara Thomas
Kara Thomas has written for everything from her high school newspaper to Warner Bros. Television. She is a true-crime addict who lives on Long Island with her husband and rescue cat. She is the author of The Darkest Corners, Little Monsters, and The Cheerleaders. To learn more about Kara and her books, visit her at kara-thomas.com or follow @karatwrites on Twitter and @karathomaswrites on Instagram.
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The Champions - Kara Thomas
Chapter One
The list is up.
I haven’t seen it, but there’s no other explanation for the sounds coming from the end of the hall—squeals of joy, gasps. And crying.
There’s been a lot of crying this morning.
I’ve been parked outside homeroom for the past ten minutes, with my back to my locker. I’m at school way before the first bell because my bus driver comes too early. I have a driver’s license but no car, so most days I ride my bike. But this morning it’s storming, so badly that the sound of rain pelting the roof woke me up before my alarm.
I check my phone: seven minutes to the first bell. Since the front doors opened, there’s been a steady stream of dance team hopefuls flowing down the hall, chins lifted, making their pilgrimage to the bulletin board outside the auditorium.
There are a lot of hopefuls this year. Sunnybrook’s dance team took home three first-place trophies in Orlando last spring, a record for any high school at a single national competition. I heard so many people tried out for the team last week that they held auditions over three days instead of the usual two, and the athletic director finally hired an assistant coach.
Sobs draw my attention from my newspaper notebook, where I’ve been scrawling idly. Down the hall, between the vending machines, a girl, definitely a freshman, is crying into her phone.
I hug my knees to my chest, wishing I could disappear. It feels wrong being a voyeur to her devastation. At the same time, I want to go to her and tell her it’s not the end of the world she didn’t make dance team, that nothing that happens within these halls really matters.
That’s a lie, though, isn’t it? Every disappointment, every win, every slight that occurs in this building feels like the end of the world because this is our world. We spend most of our waking hours here, making sure we’re the necessary level of involved. Padding our college résumés, forging alliances, gaining favor with the teachers who write the best recommendations. All for the vague promise that something better waits beyond these walls.
I don’t get the chance to say any of this to the freshman, of course. The first warning bell rings and she’s gone, along with the rest of the girls. None of them noticed me here at all.
—
Homeroom is swarming with pirates.
My classmates are wearing hats, eye patches, bandanas. Gavin Steiger has traded in his usual outfit of gym shorts and a Sunnybrook Football tee for a Jack Sparrow costume.
You got a mirror?
he asks me, even though we’ve never spoken before.
I shake my head, but the habitually silent girl seated next to me is already handing Gavin a compact mirror. He examines the smudge of black on his lower lash lines and grins at his reflection, prompting the girl to giggle at the tinfoil he’s strategically placed over some of his teeth.
At my old school, a straight guy tidying his eyeliner in homeroom would be mocked into oblivion, but Gavin is a six-foot-three football player, so no one says shit to him.
The coordinated effort to dress up on an eighty-degree day in the middle of September has to be a football thing. The Sunnybrook Tigers—formerly the Warriors—won two consecutive state championships, and with a potential third win on the table, it seems like no one is immune from football fever.
It’s near impossible to get tickets to games, and every business on Main Street has a Proud Supporter of Sunnybrook Football poster in their front window. Last year, a record number of football players signed with D1 colleges, and all anyone can talk about is where this year’s seniors will end up.
Some shrieking outside the classroom pulls my attention away from my homeroom teacher, who is trying to secure a stuffed parrot to the shoulder of his polo with a safety pin. The noise startles Mr. Fiorella into dropping his safety pin.
The shrieking is happy. I can’t see the source, but I picture a gaggle of dance team girls, holding each other by the forearms, jumping up and down. We made it!
Mr. Fiorella sets the parrot on his desk and makes his way to the door. He lets out an exasperated Ladies, please, the bell is about to ring
before returning to his desk, crouching in search of the dropped safety pin.
While I wait for the bell, I occupy myself with my newspaper notebook. The first meeting of the year is this afternoon, and I’ve been compiling a list of articles to pitch. I slip my pen from the binding and absently scrawl pirates? while the desks in the room fill.
I don’t look up until I hear the thud of a backpack hitting the chair in front of me.
Hey, Hadley.
Alix Maroney smiles at me. She’s wearing her Sunnybrook Dance Team sweatpants and a white tank top, the thickness of the straps carefully calibrated to avoid a dress code infraction. Her golden-brown waves are held back by a red-and-black-striped pirate’s bandana, and she’s wearing big hoop earrings.
It’s not fair to look that gorgeous at seven-fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. Alix also has the nerve to be genuinely, unfailingly nice, in a way that makes you feel like a spotlight has beamed on you, exposing just how not nice you actually are to anyone who might be paying attention.
And people here don’t really pay attention to me, even though my mother is the superintendent of schools. Mom and I have different last names, which keeps me somewhat under the radar, but Alix lives across the street from us. When we moved in a year ago, her parents had us over for a barbecue, and Alix snuck me up to her room, where she had a bottle of prosecco hidden away. We tipsily pored over her yearbook together, Alix giving me the rundown on which teachers to avoid.
Alix has made it a point to be friendly to me ever since that day. I return her wave and lift my pen, use it to gesture around the room. What’s with all—
It’s Tyler,
Alix says. He committed to East Carolina.
She can only mean Tyler Curtin, running back, Sunnybrook’s best player. I suspect Alix herself is behind the coordinated effort to celebrate a Tiger signing with a Division 1 college.
Alix is one of the captains of the dance team. In addition to being nationally ranked, the girls are basically Sunnybrook’s cheerleaders—they dance at every football game, and the night before, they decorate the players’ cars and gym lockers for good luck.
Being captain of the dance team is a big deal in itself, but Alix is also dating Cameron Burnham, the quarterback. The Burnhams are basically the Manning family of high school football. Cameron’s dad was Sunnybrook’s head coach until he died of pancreatic cancer ten years ago. Burnham Senior played football at Wake Forest, and so have Cameron’s three older brothers. None of them have made it to the NFL—yet—but Cameron’s oldest brother, Dylan, is currently the head coach of the Sunnybrook Tigers and the reason they’ve won two consecutive championships, to hear everyone talk about him.
The final bell rings, and Mr. Fiorella corrals the stragglers into the classroom as music crackles through the PA system. Judging from the whooping and the chants of Tyler’s name, I assume it’s the East Carolina fight song.
When it’s finished, I join in on the dutiful clapping for Tyler, then flip back to the list in my notebook. Changes to the SAT exam, new security initiatives. It’s probably pathetic to care about a school newspaper as much as I do, but Ms. Kirk, the advisor, promised to pick a new editor in chief soon, and I want it so badly that thinking about it makes me feel like I’m going to puke.
My early action application to Columbia is due in a few weeks. I have a 4.0, and my SAT scores are above average. But there’s no shortage of above-average students applying to one of the best schools in the country for journalism.
Mom keeps telling me it doesn’t matter where I get my bachelor’s degree, but the evidence says otherwise. Jodi Kantor went to Columbia. Bob Woodward went to Yale, and Katharine Graham went to the University of Chicago.
I’ve dreamed of being a journalist since I was a kid, sneaking away pages of my dad’s copy of the New York Times, memorizing the names in the bylines. If I want to write for the biggest paper in the world someday, I need to be better than above average now.
I don’t want editor in chief. I need it.
And Peter Carlino is the only thing standing in my way.
—
I spend the rest of the day with my guts in knots over the newspaper meeting. I don’t even know if Ms. Kirk is actually announcing the new editor in chief today, so I focus on my list of ideas for the next issue.
I decide I’m going to pitch the security upgrades story. The Guardian program the board is going to propose at the meeting at the end of the month would give the school district more power to monitor students’ social media use and flag anyone who is supposedly making threats. It’s basically an excuse to spy on students, and even my mom, the superintendent, knows that Guardian is a shitty idea. If more students learn that the administration wants to create a police surveillance state online, there might be enough pushback to make the program fail again.
I do a quick change after my last-period gym class and head down the hall to Kirk’s classroom. For once, I’m not the first one here. Good turnout today, although it’s always like this for the first meeting of the year. Eager-faced freshmen, hands folded over brand-new notebooks. A handful of new juniors and seniors, probably panicking over a lack of clubs on their résumés.
I sit in the first row and pull out my own notebook, smooth down the peeling corner of my Notorious RBG sticker. By the last bell, every seat except one is filled.
Everyone sign in.
Ms. Kirk strolls into the room, winks at me. I already have a sign-in sheet prepared. I pass it to the girl sitting next to me while Peter Carlino stumbles through the doorway, his sneaker soles squealing against the linoleum, drawing the attention of the entire room. His gaze volleys between the open seat next to me and the one all the way at the back of the room, by the door. Peter has a perma-derp expression on his face that’s exponentially more infuriating whenever I remember he’s probably going be salutatorian.
Finally, he shuffles to the front of the room and takes the seat next to me, avoiding my eyes.
My body seizes up as if I’ve been shoved into a pool of frigid water, even though Peter and I have a few classes together. I stare ahead, at Kirk’s whiteboard, at the chapters she’s assigned from Wuthering Heights to her junior English classes. Newspaper meetings are all I have to look forward to at school, but after everything that happened last year, the thought of having to work closely with Peter almost makes me want to quit.
Kirk perches on the edge of her desk, having extricated herself from a group of chatty freshmen. She coaches varsity softball—she played while she was at SUNY Cortland—and she grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. Kirk was my English teacher last year, and she had an endless supply of stories about horny livestock that made us laugh so loud the teacher across the hall would come over and ask us to please shut up.
Kirk gently knocks the heels of her Sperrys against the side of her desk, sipping from a coffee-stained Dunkin’ cup. Everyone signed in? Cool. Time for the first-meeting-of-the-year spiel.
Don’t expect to write the articles you want if you don’t show up for meetings. Deadlines will be tighter for the September issue, since Kirk had to cancel the first meeting for an emergency root canal last week and we’re already halfway through the month.
Kirk does not say anything about choosing a new editor in chief, which makes the cloud of doubt that has been hovering above me all day grow bigger. What if it’s not me?
It has to be me. I’m the only one who actually cares about the paper. Last year’s editor in chief was a checked-out senior, which meant I was the one who spent hours editing the layout, tweaking the drafts of articles, chasing down late ones. I volunteer for every unpleasant task because I want editor in chief more than anyone, and Kirk knows it.
I know no one deserves anything in this shitty unfair world. But I earned this.
Kirk sets her coffee cup on her desk. Okay, so, first issue.
A couple of the freshmen, bolder than I could ever be, shoot their hands into the air. Kirk ignores them, nods to me. Had-Dough, any ideas?
I will the flush in my cheeks to go away because of how mortifying it would be if anyone saw how validated this makes me, that I get first pick, that I have a nickname from the most beloved teacher in the building.
They’re going to propose the Guardian program at this month’s school board meeting,
I say casually. I want to do an editorial about why it’s a bad idea.
Mmm,
Kirk says around a sip of coffee. Peter is already writing about Guardian.
Peter Carlino doesn’t even have the decency to look up from his doodle, the shithead. I am wordless, the silence in the room unbearable, until a freshman girl raises her hand, turns the shade of a beet. The girls’ tennis team is undefeated so far.
She is in tight shorts, a Sunnybrook Tennis T-shirt. An emissary from the team, no doubt, sent by her coach to secure a spot in the sports section of the paper. This happens a lot with athletes. This girl will probably never show up for another meeting.
I like it,
Kirk says. Since we’ve jumped to sports…you all know what I’m going to say next, right?
I bite the side of my tongue.
Who’s going to do a piece on the football team?
Kirk asks.
The room is quiet enough to hear only the sound of Peter Carlino clicking the top of his mechanical pencil.
I’ll do it,
I say finally.
The smile Kirk flashes me isn’t enough to loosen the knot of disappointment in my gut as she goes around the room, listening to everyone’s pitches. At 2:59, Kirk slides off her desk and I’m sure she’s going to say it, that she forgot to mention she picked a new editor in chief—
Email me your first drafts by Friday,
Kirk says.
Everyone scrambles out of their seats, not wanting to be late for sports practice, or to miss the three o’clock bus. Everyone except Peter Carlino, who falls into step beside me, despite my efforts to beat him out of the classroom.
I find my voice when we reach the hall. When did you tell her you wanted to write about the Guardian program?
Peter shrugs. I saw her earlier today and asked.
Kind of a dick move,
I say.
You could have done the same thing.
There’s a lot more I want to say. Like Why can’t you write a review of the new Marvel movie or something? He’s already won the journalism scholarship everyone thought I would win, and he may even edge out his best friend, Dan Zhang, for valedictorian. Peter’s made himself nearly unbeatable, packing his schedule with AP classes for extra GPA points like a Russian figure skater. He plays golf and the trumpet, and will be a shoo-in for whatever college he wants. Why does he need this too?
Have fun with the football team.
A smirk forms on Peter’s mouth, one I know will live rent free in my head until we graduate and I never have to see his stupid face again. Maybe you’ll pick up a few tips on winning.
Chapter Two
The bus drops me two blocks from home. This morning’s rain disturbed the mulberry trees lining my street, and the pavement is littered with overripe berries. I go out of my way to step on a couple, imagining Peter Carlino’s head with each satisfying squish.
I can’t stand the thought of going straight into our house, an eighteenth-century farmhouse that still smells like the old owners, so I head through the gate to the backyard and check on the bowl of Meow Mix I left on the deck last night.
The bowl is empty again, but there’s still no other sign of Archimedes. Mom says raccoons are probably eating the food and my denial is becoming an expensive hobby. Still, I fill the bowl every day, and whenever the Missing Cat posters with Archimedes’s face and my cell number get weather-worn, I hang new ones on the telephone poles around town.
The black cat lived under the porch at our old house from the time he was a kitten. Dad was the one who started feeding him and named him, but Archimedes really only ever trusted me enough to give him the occasional ear scratch. He wouldn’t even let anyone else near him.
When Mom dropped the bomb that we were moving from Long Island to upstate New York and I’d have to start at a new school for my junior year, I freaked out for obvious reasons. The hill I chose to die on was that Archimedes needed to come with us.
It took all three of us—me, Mom, and my brother, Cole—to wrangle the cat into a carrier. Cole was wearing oven mitts, but Archimedes still shredded his forearms and bit Mom almost clean through her thumbnail.
The cat screamed the entire four-hour car ride up to Sunnybrook. When we let him out in the backyard of the new house, he immediately scaled the fence and disappeared. We haven’t seen him since.
I refill the bowl with dry food before heading to my room. When I shake my MacBook out of hibernation, my school email loads, with a new message from Ms. Kirk sitting at the top.
Hey! Coach Burnham says you’re welcome to sit in on practice tomorrow afternoon. Also, if you swing by the athletic office between 2:50 and 3:00, he can probably give you an interview
. Not trying to micromanage, but make sure you talk to a few players as well! This is going to be great—thanks for stepping up, as always.
I’m so stuck on the first line of the email that I barely register the compliment.
I can’t think of anything I would rather do less than watch the football team practice tomorrow. I know what a big deal it is that the Tigers might win a third consecutive championship, but I wouldn’t be able to explain what a first down is with a gun to my head.
I feel a tremor of panic deep within me. This article can’t suck. Not after what happened with The Other Champions.
It was my idea to write a story about the dance team this past spring, after I heard that the girls had to raise thousands of dollars themselves to be able to attend the national championship in Florida. Bake sales, car washes, countless hours spent on top of practice, competitions, and homework.
I sat in on practices for a week, building my case that the dance team deserved more recognition and funding than they got. In my article, I argued that the members of the dance team are athletes who put their bodies through as much training and practice as other sports teams. Kirk told me it was the most well-researched and well-crafted piece of writing she’d ever read from a student.
But it still wasn’t good enough. I still wasn’t good enough—or at least, I wasn’t as good as Peter Carlino.
His taunt from earlier lingers, like a splinter lodged under my skin. He had to remind me that he won the Susan Berry Prize, a five-hundred-dollar journalism scholarship awarded to one student every year for an exceptional piece of writing. On top of the cash prize, Susan Berry’s parents pay to send the winner to Columbia’s Summer Journalism Workshop.
That was the part that sucked the most—missing out on getting to spend a week at my dream school, learning from the best journalism professors in the world.
I remind myself it beats being dead, like Susan Berry.
Susan never got to go to Columbia, her dream school, because she was murdered at fifteen, alongside her best friend, Juliana Ruiz. Both girls were cheerleaders, back when Sunnybrook High School still had a cheerleading team.
The gruesome way Susan and Juliana were killed would have been newsworthy in itself, but if you Google Sunnybrook, New York, the first thing that autofills after football team is the term cheerleader deaths. Five cheerleaders total died within a few weeks of each other, eleven years ago. A car crash, the murders, and then a suicide.
Mom neglected to mention that we were moving to the Town of Death when she told Cole and me she’d accepted a job as the superintendent of a small school district upstate. Despite Sunnybrook’s history of murder and mayhem, taking the job was a no-brainer for her. She never came out and said We need to worry about money, but after everything that had happened earlier that year, it was pretty obvious we needed to worry about money. Dad’s legal fees had drained our savings, and my brother was going into his sophomore year at University of Pennsylvania. Long Island is one of the most expensive places in America to live, and Sunnybrook’s offer was almost double what Mom was making as a superintendent in Suffolk County.
So here we are, in a bucolic town north of the Hudson River, with its postcard-worthy Main Street and legendary football team. Now that all the unpleasant stuff with the cheerleaders is a distant memory, home values are skyrocketing, and Brooklyn millennials are moving to Sunnybrook in droves to start perfect little families.
Sunnybrook, by all accounts,