High and Dry by Sarah Skilton Page A

up, if you’re such a team player all of a sudden,” he said. “Just take the game off.”
    I wiped a tense hand down my face. “Oh, God. You bet against us, didn’t you?”
    â€œA thousand,” said Ryder quietly. “It could pay off triple.” He glanced around the trailer, at the filth coating every surface, the empty beer cans on the floor, and the stained mugs filled with cigarette butts and moldy coffee. “Thought I could skip town.”
    We stared at each other.
Shit
.
    The sounds of gunfire and chaos in the other room abruptly stopped. “Yo, baby b,” Griffin’s hoarse voice called from behind the door. “We need your expertise.”
    â€œWhere’s he been all day?” another voice wanted to know.
    â€œHe went to school this morning,” Griffin responded. Both voices erupted into high-pitched, hysterical laughter.
    â€œDuty calls,” Ryder said, a bitter edge to his voice. He stood up and offered me his hand. “Are we on the same page for all this, or what?”
    I ignored his hand. Did “same page” mean forgetting about the flash drive, or did “same page” mean fouling Steve for cash? Did “same page” mean leaving the history window unlocked again on Wednesday? Had we agreed to something, and I’d been too buzzed to realize it?
    â€œAren’t you coming?” I said, heading to the door.
    â€œNo, Charlie,” he said in a tired voice, as though I were kind of slow, “I’m not going back to school today.” He tapped his nose. “The nose knows.”
    There was a vibe in the air I didn’t like. I just wanted to be back on the sidewalk, away from the trailer homes and out in the fresh air, away from my friend and all the ways our paths had separated since Little League.
    Griffin appeared in the doorway. His hair was greasy, his face pockmarked, and he’d developed a bit of a sag around his belly since I’d seen him last. He’d scared the hell out of me when we were kids. He once pinned me down and made me drink an entire bottle of Seagram’s Jamaican Me Happy.
    Maybe I was never meant to like alcohol but always meant to drink it anyway. Maybe I wasn’t into the high, I was into the familiarity.
    Griffin clamped a hand on Ryder’s shoulder and tucked a container of orange Tic Tacs into Ryder’s shirt pocket, patting it protectively. He looked straight at me and chuckled, showing off a rotten tooth.
    â€œGo get ’em, killer,” Griffin said. I didn’t know what he meant, but something about the words bothered me. It was just a feeling I had, that something was horribly wrong. And on the walk back to school I realized what it was.
    He’d been wearing a Flynn Scientific baseball cap, exactly like the one worn by the driver of my car on the hospital security tape.

WHEN RYDER THREW THE BAT
    SIXTH GRADE. SUMMERTIME IN A NEW TOWN. NO SCHOOL , no homework, no responsibilities. It should have been a carefree couple of months, a chance for me to meet my classmates outside of school and show up at homeroom on the first day with an entire team of built-in friends. Mom signed me up for baseball the moment we moved to Palm Valley; we just made the cutoff date.
    It was a good plan in theory, except for my all-encompassing fear of the Little League coach, Coach Tierson (a.k.a. Tears You One). He wasn’t just a big guy; he was a red-faced spittle shooter, who, as far as I could tell, hated children. He was like a snapping bulldog on a leash, so close to throttling you that if it weren’t for the choke chain of potential lawsuits, you’d be in pieces scattered all over the field.
    My first mistake was showing up in a clean uniform the first day of practice. Everybody else on the team had broken theirs in; their pants and jerseys were smudged with dirt, grass stains, even dots of blood. Their gloves were dark with sweat marks. Their cleatswere