Gotcha

by Shelley Hrdlitschka

  He’s staring at me, bewildered. It just makes me madder.

  “I didn’t know you gambled, Dad. I would never have lent it to you if I knew that.”

  His chin drops and he studies his feet.

  “And now I’ve been suspended from school because of that stupid Gotcha game. Any day now I’m going to have to tell my entire grade that I lost all the money they trusted me with. I won’t tell them I gave it to you, Dad, to lose. That would be way too embarrassing. I’ll tell them I used it as a deposit to save my space at some college next year. Of course, I won’t be going to college next year, or any year, because I’ve been suspended from school indefinitely, so I won’t be able to graduate. And I may not even be alive after the Gotcha Gods find out what I’ve done.

  “The Gotcha Gods?” he asks quietly.

  Our eyes meet. His are just vacant pools, as if his soul has been sucked clean away. That makes his and mine both. A flood of tears overwhelms me, and I drop my head onto my arms. A long time later I feel a light touch on my shoulder, but I don’t look up. I hear him leave through the front door.

  The morning drags on. I don’t leave the kitchen chair. Hopelessness is a paralyzing drug.

  Eventually I move to the living room and flake out on the couch. I flick on the TV, and the talk-show host’s face appears on the screen. It’s like I’m sliding faster and faster down that waterslide, each day closer to the time when I’ll make my own nightmarish appearance on his show. You really didn’t see the inherent problems with investing the Gotcha money with your gambling addict father, Katie? C’mon. Everyone else knew he had a problem. I flick the TV off.

  At noon the telephone rings. I don’t answer it. Who could I possibly want to talk to? But it starts ringing again a few minutes later. I pick it up and slam it back down. It starts to ring again.

  “What!”

  “Katie, it’s me, Mariah.”

  “Oh. Hi.” Just hearing her voice brings a lump to my throat.

  “I know what Paige did, Katie. It’s horrible.”

  I can’t respond. The lump has strangled my vocal chords.

  “Everyone’s talking about it. They’re all furious with her.”

  I swallow, hard. “She only ratted out me, ’Riah. No one else.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “How did it get this bad between us?” My voice is cracking but I don’t care.

  “It’s the game, Katie. It’s cursed.”

  I can only sigh.

  “Joel and I are coming over after school,” she tells me.

  “What for? There’s nothing you can do.”

  “We have to think of something.”

  “This is not your problem.”

  “You just hang tight. We’ll be there soon.”

  I hang up the phone.

  After cleaning up the mess that my dad created, I go back to sitting at the kitchen table, just watching the traffic go by. Eventually I see Joel and Mariah coming down the road together. I let them in and Joel crushes me in a huge hug. My eyes fill yet again, but I soak up his strength. When he lets me go, Mariah does the same thing. I feel an infusion of their energy, a sense of connection, and I begin to let go of the despair. Their presence alone brings me relief.

  “Joel, you took a chance, being outside and not linked.”

  “You’re worth it,” he tells me, smiling warmly.

  I shake my head at his foolishness, but I feel a warm glow on the inside.

  “We have a plan,” Mariah says, pulling open the door to our fridge.

  “You do?” I ask, surprised. Joel plunks onto a kitchen chair and pulls me into his lap, wrapping his arms around me. I feel more energized by the moment.

  Mariah pulls out a block of cheese and begins slicing. “We’ve decided that Paige’s actions have changed everything.”

  I nod. “They sure have for me.”

  “The sense we’re getting,” Mariah says, pointing the cheese knife at Joel and then back to herself, “is that Paige is about to self-destruct.”

  “Self-destruct?”

  “Yeah. She immediately realized her error in ratting on you. She may have achieved what she wanted—getting you suspended—but it backfired. In the cafeteria at lunchtime, Tyson began chanting, ‘Paige squealed, Paige squealed, Paige squealed.’ After a few minutes, someone else began to say ‘Oink Oink’ after each of Tyson’s ‘Paige squealed.’ Before you knew it, half the room was chanting ‘Paige squealed,’ and the other half of the room was replying with ‘Oink Oink.’”

  “Oh my God.” Part of me is intrigued, glad that Paige is getting it back, but the other half of me is feeling queasy. Paige and I were friends for a long time. I know she’ll be mortified, and I actually find myself feeling bad for her. “What did she do?” I ask.

  “She just picked up her things and went out the door. Tanysha went with her. The chant got louder and louder as they walked away. They went out the front door, and we assume they went home.”

  “She’ll never show her face at school again,” I say quietly.

  Mariah brings a plate of cheese and crackers to the table. “I know,” she says. “It’s pretty sad.”

  I move off Joel’s lap and we eat the snack quietly.

  “So what is your idea?” I finally ask them.

  “Well,” Joel says, looking at me thoughtfully. “The most important thing is to get you back to school, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Is that the most important thing? Or is it to win Gotcha?”

  “You still intend to play?” he asks.

  I shrug. “I haven’t figured anything out. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell happened.”

  “What exactly did Fetterly tell you?”

  “He said that if I ratted out everyone else who is still in the game, he’d shorten my suspension to two days, and I could go to grad.”

  Mariah’s eyes widen. “But you said no?”

  “There are some things worse than not going to grad,” I tell her. “Though I am worried about what will happen to my whole year if I can’t write exams.”

  I see the look that passes between Mariah and Joel.

  “What?” I ask them.

  “We were thinking...” Mariah says.

  “You were thinking what?”

  “That you can’t rat everyone else out.”

  “Duh. I figured that out for myself.”

  “But you also can’t stay suspended because of Gotcha.”

  “Right. So where does that leave me?”

  Mariah glances at Joel and then back at me, “You have to take the Gotcha money to Fetterly and tell him you can’t rat everyone out, but you are turning it over to him to do with as he pleases. Maybe he could create a Gotcha scholarship or something. But that would make the game officially over, you haven’t squealed on anyone, and the money could be used for something worthwhile. I think everyone would find that more acceptable than any of your other options.”

  I look first at Mariah, then at Joel. “You guys are nuts.”

  “You don’t think it will work?” Mariah asks.

  “I know it won’t work,” I tell her—because there is no money, but I can’t tell them that. “What would Tyson and Warren do to me if I turned it all over?”

  “They’d be a whole lot madder if you turned them in,” Joel says. “And right now that is what they’re worrying about. They know a person like you is not going to throw away her entire year of school for the Gotcha game.”

  “Thank you, both of you,” I tell them. “I’ll think about it, but I don’t know...”

  “What choices do you have?” Mariah asks.

  I can only shrug. That momentary feeling of connection with my friends is fast fleeting.

  “Katie,” Joel says, “there is not an easy solution. But this might be the best compromise.”

  “Yeah, tell Tyson and Warren that.”

  “I know,” Joel says. “They won’t be happy. But at least they’re not suspended.”


  “And in a way, they both save face. Neither of them has to lose the game,” Mariah adds.

  “That’s true,” Joel says. “I didn’t think of that.”

  I hear my mom’s car pull into the driveway. I look at the clock and see that she’s early. “Uh-oh,” I tell them. “I think Mom’s heard from Fetterly. You guys better leave.”

  “Will you think about what we said?” Mariah asks.

  “Yes,” I lie. I hear the car door slam. “Go out the back door,” I say. “Quickly. I don’t know what she’s going to be like.”

  Joel takes my face in his hands, kisses me and follows Mariah out through the back door of the house just as Mom comes in the front.

  Thirteen

  Mom’s face is pale and she’s puffing as she stomps into the kitchen. When she spots me at the table, she stops dead in her tracks. “What the hell is going on?” she demands.

  I can only shrug. “I got suspended.”

  “So I heard,” she says, eyes bugging. As she stares at me, I see the color returning to her cheeks, but she begins to breathe harder. “Well? Are you not going to explain?”

  “I’m sure Fetterly already did.”

  “I’d like to hear your side of the story.” She drops her purse on the kitchen counter, pulls out the chair across from me and plunks herself in it.

  “I got caught playing Gotcha so I got suspended. End of story.”

  “I told you that game was bad news, Katie. Why didn’t you listen to me?”

  I shrug again. There’s no way to explain the pressure to her. She just wouldn’t get it.

  Mom stares at me until she realizes she’s not going to get an answer. Then she says, “Fetterly said he gave you an option, that you could return to school immediately if you so wished.”

  “Did he tell you what that option was?”

  “No. He said that was between you and him.”

  Grudgingly, I offer up a silent thank-you to Fetterly. “It was an impossible option, Mom. Believe me, if I took it, my life would be in serious danger.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “We’re talking a stupid game here, Katie, not organized crime.”

  “It amounts to much the same thing.”

  She just stares at me, totally exasperated.

  “Think of the bright side, Mom,” I tell her. “I no longer need money for a grad dress. And you won’t need to buy banquet tickets or photos or any of those other things you couldn’t afford.”

  “Katie, think about what you’re saying.” She leans aggressively across the table. For the first time I notice gray streaks in her hair. “You have to get into that school right now and bring an end to this. You are a smart girl! You could have a wonderful future! I can’t believe you’d get so caught up in this nonsense that you’d allow this to happen.”

  “Well I did, Mom. It’s happened. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t understand, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Help me understand it.” She leans back and folds her arms across her chest.

  “I can’t. You just wouldn’t.”

  “And you’re just going to sit there and accept that.”

  “I don’t know what else I can do.”

  I can’t look at her, but I feel her glare. It’s a standoff. I can hear her short puffs of breath. The windows rattle as a truck passes by. Eventually she breaks. “Well you better think of something!” She pushes her chair away and stomps across the kitchen, slamming shut a cupboard door. I hear the creak of the stairs and she heads to her bedroom.

  The day can’t get any worse. My life can’t get any worse. A heaviness descends upon me, and I can’t even muster the energy to leave the kitchen table. I lay my head down.

  Some time later the phone rings, but I ignore it. After six rings the answering machine clicks in, but no one leaves a message. Then it begins to ring again. “Katie, get that!” Mom hollers down the stairs. As I limp across the kitchen to pick it up, I silently pray that it’s Joel. He’s the only person in the world I want to talk to right now.

  “Katie.”

  It’s not Joel. “Warren.”

  “I hear you have a little problem,” he says.

  I know he’s panic-stricken, wondering if I’m going to turn him in, but his voice is as come-on and sensuous as ever.

  “Not a little problem. A big one.”

  “I wish I could help you out.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I do, Katie, I really do.” He says it in a way that, if I didn’t know him better, I’d believe him.

  “I don’t see how you can.”

  “Did Fetterly want to know who else was playing?”

  Warren must really be nervous. I didn’t expect him to come out with the real reason for his call quite so soon.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And did you tell him?”

  “Not yet.”

  His sigh of relief is not audible, but I hear it anyway.

  “Are you going to?”

  “It depends on how badly I want my suspension to end.”

  This time I hear the sigh. “This is quite the predicament you’re in, isn’t it?” He doesn’t need to spell out all the facts. We both know what they are. What surprises me is he sounds like he actually cares.

  “It’s even worse than you know, Warren.”

  “Really? How could it be worse?”

  “It just is.”

  “Trouble with Lover Boy?”

  “If you mean Joel, no. We’re fine.”

  He hesitates. “Then what do you mean?”

  It must be his voice. Or maybe it’s that I’ve sunk to a place so low that I just don’t care anymore. When I open my mouth I find myself telling Warren the truth. “I lost the money.”

  “The Gotcha money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How could you lose it?”

  “I just did, okay?”

  “Did you spend it?”

  “No! I lent it to someone, someone who has... disappeared.”

  “Maybe they’ll reappear.”

  “That’s not likely.”

  For a moment Warren doesn’t say anything. I even begin to wonder if he’s hung up, but then I hear a little chuckle. The chuckle grows into a laugh and then builds into a hysterical, deranged-sounding noise. I have to pull the receiver away from my ear. “So we’re all running around stalking each other for nothing?” he asks between fits of laughter.

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh my God! That’s hilarious!” he hoots. “What were you going to tell the winner when you couldn’t pay up?”

  “I have to be the winner. There is no other way.”

  That shuts him up, and instantly I regret my confession. What creepy thing will he do with that information?

  “Does Joel know about this?”

  “No. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone. I don’t even know why I told you,” I say in a whisper.

  “Well, there’s only one thing left for us to do then,” he says.

  “What’s that?” I wait to hear the details of my torture.

  “Make sure you win.”

  I can’t have heard him correctly. “Are you serious? You’re not going to kill me?”

  “Jesus, Katie! It’s just a frickin’ game! Sure, it’s been fun, but this is ridiculous. Enough is enough.”

  I’m not sure whether to believe him. “Not everyone is going to feel the way you do, Warren.”

  “I know.” He sighs.

  “And what about the Gotcha Gods?”

  “Get a grip, Katie.” He pauses, thinking. “The thing is, you need to tell Fetterly it’s over, the sooner the better. Like tomorrow. Tell him we decided to quit.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes. The game has to end tonight.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “I’ll make it happen.”

  “Why are you doing this, Warren?”

  “Because I wa
nt your body.”

  “Shut up.”

  There’s a long pause. “I do. But that’s only part of it.” He laughs and then clears his throat. “Maybe because you didn’t rat us out when you had the chance.”

  “I couldn’t. Tyson would have killed me.”

  “You’re right. His competitive gene is overdeveloped.”

  “So I still don’t get it. Why would you help me?” I ask again.

  There’s another long pause. “Because, Katie, for the first time, you’ve treated me like someone.”

  “Like someone?”

  “I know what you think of me, Katie. You think that I’m a male bimbo.”

  He’s right. I feel my face burn.

  “And maybe I am. We each do what works for us.” He clears his throat.

  I’m stunned. This is the first time I’ve ever heard him sound anything but cocky. “But I’ve always admired you, Katie. And just now, when you confided in me...” He pauses, clearing his throat again. “It felt like you might actually have some respect for me. Like maybe you do like me after all.”

  “Of course I like you.”

  “You’ve never acted like you do. You act like you think you’re better than me.”

  I’m feeling so awkward. So ashamed. How did we go from the Gotcha game to this? The worst part is I suspect he’s right. “I think I was just jealous because you beat me out for class president.” I laugh, but it comes out like a silly nervous titter.

  “I’d have handed the title over to you if I thought you’d take it,” he says. “But I know you’re too proud.”

  “You’re right. And you won it honestly.”

  There’s an awkward moment. “So how do I go about winning the game?” I ask finally.

  “Do you have my name?” he asks.

  I pause, alarmed. Have I just fallen for another Gotcha trick? Suddenly I don’t care. “Yes,” I confess. Now that I’ve told him about the money, I’m feeling a huge weight off my shoulders. Nothing has changed, but I don’t feel so all alone.

  “Perfect. I’ll be able to hang onto my bead then, and you’ll have yours. When we’re the last two people in the game, I’ll give you my bead and voila. It will all be over. No one will know.”

  He makes it sound so easy. I feel my hope returning.

  “Whose name do you have?” I ask.