She doesn’t turn back to me, but I can see her stiffen.

I swallow hard. “Congratulations on the Optimal Stars Scholarship.”

She does turn around then, just for a moment. Just enough that I can see the way the words have taken her whole face and funneled it down into a hard look of hatred.

—

Back in my day, the Game was an open secret, a tradition everybody knew about, even the teachers. But sometime around my senior year the Game took on a new dimension: instead of just the prettiest girls, the hottest girls, the senior boys started targeting the weirdos, the loners, and the unpopular girls, too.

But by then it wasn’t just about the pictures anymore. The big scheme was in the shakedown that came after: money, blowjobs, and behind-the-stadium handjobs demanded as payment to keep the photos from getting back to parents, sisters, teachers.

That’s what happened to Becky Sarinelli. And if Condor took the photos, he must have been the one to release them, too.

Which means: Becky was one of the few girls who didn’t pay up.

It doesn’t totally surprise me to find out the Game is still going on. Things like that have a way of carrying down, generation to generation, twisting the way viruses do, becoming more powerful and bleeding across borders to high schools around the world.

But Monty mentioned money and flashy cars, and I can’t see that he would have talked that way about any of the local boys. Even the richest kids in Barrens are still lucky to inherit their father’s old Ford when they turn sixteen.

So what kind of men is the Game attracting now?

It shouldn’t matter. Joe’s right. I should focus on what Optimal is doing now. Monty and his girl problems don’t come within a hundred yards of my business.

Except I can’t shake the feeling that they do.

Every time I close my eyes, I walk back through Kaycee’s paintings and stop behind the largest one of all: a girl barely etched in pale color, a screaming mouth and eyes rolling wide like a panicked horse, and around her, a group of men, tall and narrow as tombstones. White teeth, clean angles. Flash.

Chapter Thirty

Monday morning, Flora comes to hail me at our brand-new office behind Sunny Jay’s, where Condor works. Now not only is Condor across from me at home but he is next to me at work as well. Flora waves her arms overhead like an aircraft marshal trying to get me to wheel-in right.

“Environmental Testing Labs sent results of their tests,” she says, before I’ve even cleared the door. “We’ve been calling.”

“Already?” I ask. Normally getting results from ETL is like waiting for aliens to come to Earth with gifts.

“Lead,” she bursts out, before I can ask. “Lead five times the legal limits.”

“Is it true?” I turn to Joe.

He responds by wordlessly passing over the report: preliminary investigation of the chemical and hard metal composition of the Barrens, Indiana, public water supply. The document is short and straightforward: the reservoir is filthy, contaminated not just by lead but by trace amounts of mercury and industrial pollutants with unpronounceable names. Of course, the report makes no claims about the source of the pollution—it will be our job to link it to Optimal—but this gives us more than enough to take a formal complaint to the judge.