Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,33
pretend I’m one of the scouts, and you could be you, and we could make sure you’re ready for anything they throw at you.”
“I’m fine, Dad. I’ve talked to people before.”
“I just wanna make sure nothing you say distracts them from what you do on the court.”
He held the phone several inches from his ear. His dad hadn’t figured out that telephones transmitted his voice the whole way; he didn’t need to close the distance with volume.
“How’d those motivation videos go?” his dad shouted. “The ones I sent Coach Bryant?”
“What videos?”
“The ones I made for him, pumping you up?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hm. Must not have used them yet. Well, what I say in there is important—stay focused. Eat, breathe, sleep, basketball. I even asked if you could get out of some classes—”
“I need to take classes, Dad.”
“Not when you’re in the league, you don’t. Trust me. This is big for us, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good.” There was a long lull before his dad added, “Anything else going on you wanna talk about?”
Aiden hung on the line for a second. There were a million things he wanted to talk about. His girlfriend had gone missing, the man the school had assigned to look for her seemed to think he was some kind of a suspect, and wherever she was, she might not even be his girlfriend anymore.
“No, I’m good. I’ll call you after the game.”
When he got back to his dorm, Peter Novak was waiting outside, leaning against the exposed stone of the wall. “You look pissed,” Peter said as he approached.
“I’m not,” Aiden mumbled, going straight for the door.
Peter followed him in without asking permission. Aiden swapped his warm-up jersey for a cloth Redemption sweater and tucked his book bag in the back of his closet. Checking on Peter over his shoulder, he took the Apex from the front pocket and rolled it into a pair of socks.
Peter was more focused on the photos above Aiden’s desk. “Holy fuck, buddy. Look at all this basketball. You ever do anything other than basketball? Friends? Girls?”
“I have a girlfriend, remember?”
“Right. You should put a picture of her up here.”
Aiden dropped a few textbooks onto his desk. “Was there a reason you were here?”
Peter pulled his eyes from the photos and turned to sit on the desk, straight on top of Aiden’s textbooks. “Right. So, I was thinking, about the whole Emma thing.”
His chest tightened. “What about it?”
“I know something. That I didn’t tell you. And I think you deserve to know it, now that she’s missing and all.”
Aiden froze, raising an eyebrow.
“She was being followed.”
“What?”
“By a couple of people, I think.”
“What?”
“I know, it sounds ridiculous. But I’ve got two classes with her, and a couple weeks ago, I started noticing these people hovering around, wearing black hoodies with the hoods up—”
“Everybody wears black hoodies. It’s basically the uniform.”
“Yeah, but these people were different. They were there for her, I could tell.”
Aiden thought about it for a minute. “You know, I heard extreme paranoia is a symptom of Apex—”
“They were real,” Peter insisted. “Not moving, not talking, just lurking around corners, watching her.”
Aiden pulled one of the textbooks from under him. “I was with her all the time; pretty sure I’d have noticed. I think your brain might be fried.”
“You were with her. They’d have been hiding from you too!” Peter lowered his voice. “Do you know who Evan Andrews is?”
Aiden stopped digging through his bag for a second. “Yeah, sure.”
“I saw him watching you two the other night. From a bench in front of the chapel.”
Aiden swallowed. He did know Evan, and he had seen him around a lot lately.
“It’s not just him, though. Something else is going on.”
Peter reached in his back pocket and unfolded an old newspaper page, cut to a single article. The headline read: Prep school student awaits trial for drug distribution.
Aiden stared at it for a full minute. The date was September 26, 1995. That was three weeks ago. He tried to read the text of the article, but quickly realized he couldn’t; it was just a series of obscure symbols where the words should be.
“Is Emma really on trial?” he asked, his voice cracking. “What newspaper is this from?”
Peter pulled it back. “That’s the crazy part. It’s not a real newspaper. Somebody just made it—I think it’s a threat.”
“A threat?”
“Someone printed a fake newspaper, saying this could happen, if she doesn’t do what they want. Look here.” He pointed to the last sentence of the article.