one walk, one hit, and no runs through seven innings. The Cal State Fullerton Titans are winning by three, but nobody in Bayview cares all that much now that a relief pitcher has taken over for Cooper.
“I’m so happy for him,” Addy beams. “He deserves this so much after…you know.” Her smile falters. “After everything.”
Everything. It’s too small a word to cover what happened when Simon Kelleher decided to stage his own death almost eighteen months ago, and frame my sister, Cooper, Addy, and Nate for his murder. The Mikhail Powers Investigates Thanksgiving special rehashed it all in excruciating detail, from Simon’s plot to trap everyone in detention together to the secrets he arranged to leak on About That to make it seem like the other four had reasons for wanting him dead.
I watched the special with Bronwyn while she was home on break. It brought me right back to the year before, when the story became a national obsession and news vans crowded our driveway every day. The entire country learned that Bronwyn stole tests to get an A in chemistry, that Nate sold drugs while on probation for selling drugs, and that Addy cheated on her boyfriend, Jake—who turned out to be such a controlling trash fire that he agreed to be Simon’s accomplice. And Cooper was falsely accused of using steroids, then outed before he was ready to come out to his family and friends.
All of which was a nightmare, but not nearly as bad as being suspected of murder.
The investigation unfolded almost exactly the way Simon planned—except for the part where Bronwyn, Cooper, Addy, and Nate banded together instead of turning on one another. It’s hard to imagine what this night would look like if they hadn’t. I doubt Cooper would’ve almost pitched a no-hitter in his first college game, or that Bronwyn would have made it to Yale. Nate would probably be in jail. And Addy—I don’t like to think about where Addy would be. Mostly because I’m afraid she wouldn’t be here at all.
I shiver, and Luis catches my eye. He raises his glass with the determined look of a guy who’s not about to let his best friend’s triumph turn sour. “Yeah, well, here’s to karma. And to Coop, for kicking ass in his first college game.”
“To Cooper,” everyone echoes.
“We have to plan a road trip to see him!” Addy exclaims. She reaches across the table and taps Nate’s arm as he starts gazing around the room like he’s calculating how soon he can leave. “That includes you. Don’t try to get out of it.”
“The whole baseball team will want to go,” Luis says. Nate grimaces in a resigned sort of way, because Addy is a force of nature when she’s determined to make him socialize.
Phoebe, who shifted closer to Knox and me as the game wore on and other people left, reaches out to pour herself a glass of water. “Bayview is so different without Simon, but it also…isn’t. You know?” she murmurs, so quietly that only Knox and I can hear. “It’s not like people got any nicer once the shock wore off. We just don’t have About That to keep tabs on who’s being horrible from one week to the next.”
“Not from lack of effort,” Knox mutters.
About That copycats were everywhere for a while after Simon died. Most of them fizzled out within days, although one site, Simon Says, stayed up nearly a month last fall before the school got involved and shut it down. But nobody took it seriously, because the site’s creator—one of those quiet kids hardly anyone knows—never posted a single piece of gossip that everyone hadn’t already heard.
That was the thing about Simon Kelleher: he knew secrets most people couldn’t even have guessed. He was patient, willing to wait until he could wring the maximum amount of drama and pain from any given situation. And he was good at hiding how much he hated everyone at Bayview High; the only place he let it out was on the revenge forum I’d found when I was looking for clues to his death. Reading Simon’s posts back then made me sick to my stomach. It still chills me, sometimes, to think how little any of us understood what it meant to go up against a mind like Simon’s.
Everything could have turned out so differently.
“Hey.” Knox nudges me back to the present, and I blink until his face comes into focus. It’s still just the three