Fadeaway by E. Vickers (ebook smartphone TXT) 📗

against his tongue. He wants to swallow it so badly, but his head is foggy and he’s not sure he should.

Is it for the pain? Or is it poison?

Poison, he remembers. They’re all poison.

He turns toward the sound of the voice and draws air into his nose, ready to spit the poison right back in the person’s face.

That’s assuming the voice has a face and a person to go with it. Sometimes, down here, they don’t.

“Swallow it,” says the voice, grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking his head backward.

And because, really, that’s what he wanted to do all along, he swallows it.

“Good,” says the voice, and then Jake lets his head fall back to the pile of rags, already soaked with his sweat and snot and tears.

When was the last time you saw Jake Foster?

In the locker room, after the game.

Did he do or say anything unusual?

He didn’t do or say much, so maybe that was unusual. But he played the entire game. Dude had to be exhausted.

And after that? Who did you leave the game with?

My whole family. Well, except my brother Kade. You probably remember him, huh? Kade Martin? Goes by Kmart? Don’t worry, he’s the Flagstaff PD’s problem now.

So you went home for a while. Did you go to the party at Coach Cooper’s house after that?

Yeah. Everybody did.

Everybody except Jake.

That’s true.

Did Jake party?

No.

Did he drink at all?

No. He never smoked anything, either, if that’s your next question. He’s clean for pretty much the same reason I am, and I already told you mine.

Is there anybody else you think we should talk to? Anybody on the team who didn’t like Jake?

Seth Cooper, I guess.

Why is that?

Dude was always weird about Jake. Told him he hated him before the game.

We’ll look into that. So, the last time you saw Jake was back in the Ashland locker room, after the game. Is that the last time you heard from him at all?

Yes, sir.

And how long have you known him? How long have you two been best friends?

Both questions, same answer: since the summer before sixth grade.

Even though we were from the same part of town—the wrong part—Jake and I went to different elementary schools. The boundary cut right between our run-down houses like an imaginary line to keep us from being friends.

Until we were old enough for Junior Warriors Basketball Camp the summer before sixth grade, anyway.

You could already tell how good Jake was going to be, even as a skinny almost-sixth-grader. Watching him back then was like that feeling when a burp’s built up inside you and you know it’s going to be huge. (Jake wouldn’t even mind me saying that. He has sick burping skills.)

But in this case, everybody could tell something big was coming except Jake. He worked harder than anybody—finishing first on conditioning and still running an extra lap, always looking around during drills to make sure he was doing stuff right. Didn’t even notice the rest of us trying not to stare at him because the way he did things was the definition of right. I was already a show-off and a punk by then, but even I was too intimidated to say a word to him.

On the last day of camp, Coach Cooper sat us all down in the locker room, and somehow I wound up smashed on that too-small bench right next to Jake himself.

“I know this feels like the end, boys,” Coach said, “but this is actually where it begins. Sixth grade for you, first year as head coach for me. It might take some time to build the program up to where I want it to be, but by the time you boys are seniors”—he waved a finger down the line at all of us, stopping on his own kid, Seth—“we’re going to be state champions. I’m making that promise to all of you today, and I will do whatever it takes to keep it.”

We’d all seen the trophies in the case outside the gym and the banners hanging from the rafters like flags from some battlefield. We knew that all the old guys around town asked “When did you play?” and if you said one of those years, you got your soda paid for or an extra token for the car wash.

But we were all too young to actually remember the last time the Warriors had won it. We just knew it was back before the last guy, Coach Braithwaite, had lost his edge. Those were his boxes piled in the corner. He was so old he should have been retiring anyway, but the rumor was that the boosters and the school district had pushed him out the door after what happened that season.

Which was why Coach Cooper was the one trying to give us the pep talk as we sat there, still sweating from a full day of drills and scrimmages. “Winning isn’t everything,” he said, and this deep, disturbing V wrinkle took over his forehead. “It’s the only thing.”

There was so much fire in his eyes and spit at the corners of his mouth I didn’t dare tell him that didn’t really make sense. But Jake, he was drinking it in like Gatorade after suicides.

Then we heard a soft knock on the locker-room door, and there he was. Coach Braithwaite: the man, the legend, the dinosaur.

“Sorry to interrupt your speech,” he said. “You always were a fine leader, Seth.” That confused me for a second, until I realized that Coach Cooper and his kid must both be named Seth, and maybe that was why the new head varsity coach was willing to run the sixth-grade camp. I wondered if having the same name as your dad would be annoying (because if somebody says “Seth” in your house, how do you know they’re talking to you and not the other one?) or really nice (because if there’s one last Sprite and somebody wrote “Seth” on the bottle, you could be