“Ten laps, Pink,” he calls. “No dogging it.”
The others are laughing at me and calling out mock encouragement—their revenge for my week of no pads. To show off, I kick into high gear and sprint down the sideline. One thing that’s come out of this first week of practice—I’ve gotten really fast. None of my teammates are very impressed, because, apparently, I was always this fast. But it’s news to me—and these days, I need something to make me feel good about myself.
When the tackle comes, it’s a complete shock. One second I’m running free and the next, a big body hits me just below the knees, knocking my legs out from under me and sending me hurtling forward. I must somersault, because I see a quick panorama of sky and grass. The earth comes up to clobber me. I think I eat some of it.
Gasping, I roll over. A helmeted figure is blocking out the sun. Number 57—Bear. Aaron stands beside him, applauding.
“How’s that for non-contact?” Bear spits.
I don’t answer. I can’t. The wind is totally knocked out of me. I just lie there, wheezing.
“Oops,” he goes on, fake apologetic. “I think that might have been contact. It’s so confusing with you lately, Ambrose. You’re a friend; you’re an enemy. You’re a teammate; you’re a video dork. You’ve got amnesia”—he grabs me by the fabric of my T-shirt and hauls me to my feet—“or maybe you remember more than you let on!”
“I’ve got no pads on!” I choke, finding breath at last. “You want to kill me? It could happen, you know! And you’d get more than community service for that!”
“We had to get your attention, man,” Aaron informs me solemnly. “You’ve barely said a word to us all week.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t harm a hair on your little head,” Bear adds. “Not until we get square.”
“Get square?” I don’t know if I’ve ever been so mad. “Aren’t we square yet? All my friends hate my guts because they think I set up what happened in the band room!”
Aaron grins. “It wasn’t too hard to convince them either. I guess we’re not the only ones who figured out that the ‘new’ Chase is a phony.”
“What are you talking about?” I sputter.
“You never had any amnesia!” Bear accuses harshly. “You faked the whole thing!”
“Are you crazy?” I demand. “What’s so fantastic about forgetting your whole life that anybody would fake it? I didn’t even know my own mother!”
“Well, for one thing,” Bear returns readily, “you can act like you have no clue what you owe us!”
“I owe you nothing!” I seethe. “The fact that I used to be friends with you guys makes me sick! If you think you can push me around the way you do everybody else, think again! There’s still enough of the old Chase left to take you on. You’re lucky I don’t go straight to the cops and rat you out for swiping Mr. Solway’s medal!”
They stare at me in surprise. I can feel the advantage shifting to me, so I don’t let up. “Yeah, geniuses, I figured that out by watching you prowling the halls of Portland Street, taking advantage of the people you’re supposed to be helping. Give me credit for having the brains to see who’s sleazy enough to steal from a war hero who’s too frail to look after his stuff!”
Bear is still staring, but slow understanding is dawning on Aaron.
“You—you really do have amnesia,” he tells me.
“Yeah? So?”
“So you don’t remember. We didn’t jack that medal—you did.”
Rage floods through me, and I rear back my fist to take a swing at him. Before I can act, though, the memory flashes in my brain. The triangular case on the dresser, flipped open to reveal the gleaming five-pointed Medal of Honor at the end of its blue star-spangled ribbon. A hand reaches down for it.
My hand.
I’m totally appalled, yet it makes perfect sense. Aaron and Bear are the worst people I know, but they weren’t always a twosome. They had a ringleader. Chase Ambrose. And in those days, if they were low, he was lower.
Even before the memory returned, I should have known I did it.
Bear’s words break into my horrified thoughts. “That’s right, Boy Scout, this one’s on you. You didn’t even wait till the old Dumbledore was out of the room. As soon as his back was turned, you snatched it and tossed the case in the closet. It’s worth big money, and you owe us our share.”
“Three-way split, that was our deal,” Aaron confirms. “If we were sentenced to the Graybeard Motel, at least we were going to get something out of it.”
“I—I don’t have it.”
Bear’s brow darkens. “Don’t lie, man! I saw you jam it in your pocket and walk out of the building!”
“No—” I all but whisper. “I mean, I might have it. But I don’t know what I did with it. And if I do find it, it’s going back to Mr. Solway. Maybe I used to be a crook, but I’m not one anymore.”
Aaron steps forward. “Fine. You’re better than us now. You’re a saint. But when you took that medal—that was the old you and the old rules. So it belongs to all three of us. You can’t do anything without our okay, and we don’t give it.”
He looks totally serious, like a lawyer reading a contract.
“You make a move without us, you’ll regret it,” Bear adds threateningly.
“I regret I ever met you guys!” I shout, hoarse with emotion. I wheel away from them and flee for home, not even stopping in the locker room to shower and change. I have to put as much distance as possible between myself and those two.
As I run, hot tears of shame are streaming down my face. Since my accident, I’ve heard a lot about the person I used to be. Never did I imagine this.
I sprint harder, accelerating onto the sidewalk, outpacing even the most intense drills from practice. It’s no problem escaping Aaron and Bear.
But I’ll never be able to get away from myself.
Kimberly’s gone.
I don’t mean she’s dead or anything drastic like that. She hasn’t even moved away. Just gone from my life.
That time in the music room when she cared enough to help me out of the tuba when I was too slick with fire extinguisher foam to get any traction, I really believed that I was starting to make some progress with her. But it turns out that was wishful thinking.
In the end, she was just hanging around to be close to Chase. Now that he’s kicked out, she’s stopped coming to meetings. From an artistic standpoint, that’s probably a good thing.
Now she’s back supporting the football team, since Chase is on it again. She even watches practice, sitting in the stands, her homework binder propped open on her lap. It makes me sad, because that’s the same thing she did at video club. These days, the closest I ever get to her is when we happen to pass in the hall, and she looks like she’s trying to remember where she knows me from.
You’d think all that would make me really jealous of Chase. And it does—sort of. But the truth is, I probably miss Chase even more than I miss Kimberly. Video club is useless without him. We might as well change the name to Club, because the creativity level in that room is basically zero. The others notice it too. It’s pretty obvious when Ms. DeLeo asks who’s got footage to screen, and nobody has squat.
Even though our club is grinding to a halt, I have no sympathy for those guys. I can’t get any of them even to consider the possibility that Chase might be innocent. Or maybe they’re right and I’m the moron. Chase didn’t hesitate to lie about what happened in the music room and blame everything on our electrical cables. Whatever he did or didn’t do to Joel and One Man Band, he was just as bad as his Neanderthal pals in that way.
But he was our friend. I refuse to believe he was faking that. He was a good club member—maybe the best. He worked shoulder to shoulder with Shoshanna on Warrior, which is the greatest thing we ever produced. She should have at least taken the time to listen to his side of the story.
If there is such a thing.
Anyway, she didn’t. And neither did Hugo or Mauricia or Bart
on or even me. We were fine to benefit from his talent when he was with us, but we never really believed that he wasn’t the Chase Ambrose we used to know. And the first time something went wrong, we dropped him like a hot potato.
The whole thing depresses me to the point where I almost want to quit video club. But I’m the president; if I leave it’ll fall apart for sure. No, it’s up to me to jump-start my fellow vidiots. Even though they don’t deserve it, I’m going to make a video—any video—just to get our creative juices flowing again.
Unfortunately, I have zero ideas—that’s how blocked this Chase business has made everybody. So I take a walk up and down the street, just for a change of scenery. And I see it.
There’s a big, fat slug that’s been climbing the stucco side of our house for the past day and a half. He’s not making a heck of a lot of progress. He’s only a third of the way up after all that time, which means he’s averaging, by my calculations, like, fifteen feet per week. But you have to admire the little guy’s spirit. He’s absolutely determined to get where he’s going—which is the roof, I guess. I don’t know what’s up there for him. That’s his problem, not mine.
I decide to film his journey, inch by inch up the side, defying gravity. I’ll call it Slugfest, or maybe something lofty and inspirational, like The Ascent. Then, in editing, I can add in commentary, like he’s pushing for the summit of Everest, or maybe play-by-play from the Indy 500. That could be kind of funny—sportscasters raving about speed and acceleration and afterburners while he’s millimetering along.
Okay, it’s no Leaf Man. But hopefully it’ll get the video club going again.
I take the flip-cam out of my backpack—I always bring one home in case inspiration strikes—and mount it on my tripod. That way, I can shoot hours of video without having to cool my heels watching nothing happening. Outside, I arrange the whole setup on our side walkway, with the camera pointing up so that Sluggo is dead center of the frame. It’s not as if he’s going to zoom out of the picture anytime soon—not unless someone straps a tiny booster rocket onto his butt, or whatever slugs have back there.
I press the record button and nothing happens—no pulsing green light to indicate filming. Weird. We recharge the camera batteries every day. I try again. Still nothing. That’s when I notice the message flashing on the viewfinder: MEMORY FULL.
That’s impossible. Club rules say you have to download your footage onto a computer or a memory stick so we can wipe the camera for the next user. Ms. DeLeo is a real tyrant about it. How did this one get missed? And if the memory’s full, what’s on it?
I press the play button. The first thing I hear out of the flip-cam’s tiny speaker is a high-octane full-orchestra rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Then I see myself in a dark suit and bow tie on band risers in front of a green screen. I’m in a chair with a clarinet in my hands, pretending to play along with the fast-paced music. As I watch, transfixed, clarinet-Brendan disappears, to be replaced in a jump cut by another version of myself sitting in the same chair a few feet away. This time I’ve got a violin, and I’m fiddling like mad in furious time with the song. That goes on for a little while, and then, just as suddenly, I’m seated at a drum set on the highest riser, my arms just a blur.
It hits me. This is One Man Band! I must have started the camera, and in all the excitement, I never switched it off. Come to think of it, I never turned in the camera that afternoon. Kimberly did it for me while I was in the bathroom trying to clean up my suit, which was hemorrhaging shoe polish all over the school. And Kimberly being Kimberly, she didn’t know the rule about wiping the memory. She just put the camera back on the shelf.
Amazing! I thought One Man Band was gone forever. And here it is on this flip-cam, ready to be cut into my greatest video ever. Obviously, I won’t be able to use the tuba part, because that’s when we got attacked and the whole shoot got busted up. After all, my band can’t feature a tuba player who gets slimed with foam and trapped in his own instrument. But the rest of it—breathlessly, I fast-forward—it’s all okay. Better than okay! This could be my first YouTube video to hit the big time!
I scan right to the end, and it’s all there—Aaron and Bear raiding the shoot, Kimberly running out to get Chase, and finally the tug-of-war between him and Bear with the fire extinguisher. Even over the loud music, you can actually hear the whack when the heavy metal casing smashes Joel in the eye. I wince a little at that. No wonder half the poor guy’s face is black-and-blue. That had to hurt. I’ll bet it still does.
Also—and this is important—no smoke, no fire. No reason to fill the room with foam. Not that I ever took that story seriously. Still, it’s nice to see hard evidence.
Evidence …
I’m so wrapped up in reliving it that it takes a few seconds to realize that I’m looking at something monumentally important. All that craziness in the music room happened so fast that it was impossible to process it. But here’s a visual record that I can watch over and over again to catch every detail.
So I back up the clip to the moment Chase bursts onto the scene and run it in super-slo-mo. He looks shocked—if he planned this, he has to be the greatest actor in the world. When Bear hands him the fire extinguisher, he takes it, but he just stands there holding it, as if he has no idea what it is or why he has it. He never fires it or even holds it upright. It’s like he’s in a daze—until Bear tries to grab the thing back. Then Chase wakes up, and the struggle is on to keep it away from Bear. And when he pulls it free and it swings back and hits Joel—
Pure accident.
Maybe afterward he helped Aaron and Bear cover up what they did. But this video proves that Chase was trying to stop the attack, not to join in.
I’m practically bursting out of my skin with excitement. I want to run in fifteen different directions to spread the word far and wide. Who should I tell first? Chase? Ms. DeLeo? Dr. Fitzwallace? It’s more than just about video club; it’s about justice!
And don’t forget Joel himself. He shouldn’t be allowed to go on thinking that Chase still has it out for him. And Shoshanna—she’s a nice person and a great vidiot, but let’s face it—right now, she’d burn Chase at the stake if she thought she could get away with it. She needs to know what really happened. All the vidiots do.
I frown. It’s the weekend. None of us will be at school until Monday. This has to be done right. The school can wait, but the video club should see this footage. It’s more than just evidence. It’ll be nothing less than a demonstration of the power of the moving image to change hearts and minds. Who better than the president of the video club to make it happen?
I take out my phone and compose a text to Chase, Shoshanna, and Joel:
Urgent! Come to my house at 10 a.m. tomorrow. There’s something important you have to see. PS: I’m not trying to rope you into helping with another YouTube video.
After some agonized soul-searching, I send the same text to Kimberly, but add a line that says:
PS: Chase is going to be there.
Okay, I want to see her again.
Sue me.
There’s something important you have to see.
I stare at Brendan’s text on my phone. What’s this big deal he needs to show me? Probably nothing—chances are, he really is just trying to rope me into helping with a new YouTube video, although he says that’s not it.
I don’t care. The fact that he texted me at all is something. I haven’t heard a peep from any of the video club kids since that day in the music room. Who can blame them? They all heard how I lied about the electrical fire.
And they don’t even know about the really bad thing I did.
To be honest, I’d give anything to be part of one of Brendan’s goofball videos again. They’re always hilarious, and I could use a good laugh right about now. I can’t remember the last time I laughed. Nothing has been funny lately, and the most un-funny part is what I just found out about myself. Yeah, Aaron and Bear are jerks, my dad’s pushy, and the
video club has turned on me. But I’m worse than all of them. I’m a criminal, and the fact that I don’t remember it doesn’t change what I did.
How could I do such a thing? It’s a question that doesn’t need answering. I didn’t do it; the old me did. And it’s no mystery that the old me was capable of some pretty awful stuff. I stole Mr. Solway’s Medal of Honor from his room at Portland Street—one sleazy act of many, courtesy of Chase, Aaron, and Bear. I have no idea what I planned to do with it. Sell it, probably, and split the money with my two accomplices. But that little plan went sour when I stashed it somewhere, and then went and got amnesia and couldn’t remember my hiding place. No wonder Aaron and Bear were so suspicious of me. They thought I was holding out on them so I could keep the profit for myself. And the worst part is that I can’t even give the medal back to Mr. Solway, because I have absolutely no idea what I did with it. And I don’t know how to find out.
Maybe it’ll come back to me in bits and pieces like some of my past. But when? It could take years. What if Mr. Solway dies in the meantime? How will I ever make it right?
It’s funny—the idea of going back to Brendan’s house stings, even though I’ve only been there once before. When I had the accident, I never longed for my old life because I couldn’t remember it. But my new old life—video club and my new friends—losing that hurts a lot, since this time I know what I’m missing. And it hurts twice as much because of how quick those guys were to turn against me. Maybe that means we were never really friends, even though I thought we were. My partnership with Shoshanna felt that way for sure. When the two of us were working side by side, interviewing Mr. Solway and editing Warrior, I was positive that we were creating something amazing together. All the kids in video club were finally starting to trust me. Even Joel was kind of warming up to me. Or so I thought. I must have been nuts.
In the end, that’s why I decide to go to Brendan’s. If he’s reaching out to me, that’s a good thing.