Read Online The Rule of Won by Stefan Petrucha - Free Book Online

about how well Vicky and I were getting along, but I had no idea why.
    Fencing soon went up around the new construction site, and our beloved Dr. Wyatt could be seen spending a lot of QT with muscular dudes in hard hats. Even he didn’t glare at me lately. Maybe it was because he’d read that police reportAll-den Moore—just Moore now by request—talked about. Oh,
everyone
didn’t love me—the school newspaper hadn’t come out yet—but with all the excitement, they were forgetting they hated me.
    Looking up, you tend to notice more things. For instance, I noticed the aforementioned Moore again between second and third period, and for a change, he wasn’t stuffing papers into something, and he wasn’t alone. He was with three other people, a girl and two guys. All of them looked sort of familiar, but I couldn’t place them. They were all headed out of the student newspaper office, walking in formation, following Moore’s lead.
    I figured I could use the occasion to ask when the article was coming out, and maybe find out what the hell “Vanuatu” meant without having to lift a finger.
    â€œMoore!” I called.
    They all stopped, like a well-oiled machine. Well, maybe not a
well-oiled
machine, heck, maybe not even a machine, but they all stopped.
    â€œGot yourself a posse?” I said cheerfully. I was saying everything cheerfully these days.
    Seeing my pin, one of them, a square kind of guy built sort of like a short door, except with more fat than muscle, moved to block me from getting closer. He was wearing a trench coat.
    â€œIt’s okay,” Moore told him, raising his hand like he might have to hold him back.
    â€œYou sure?” he said.
    Moore nodded and the square man relaxed a bit, but theother two—a lean, anxious, lanky guy in a dirty white T-shirt and denim vest who was crouching as if the ceiling were right above him, and a well-dressed brunette girl with braces, freckles, and a predatory look—kept giving me the evil eye.
    â€œMy staff: Guy, Drik, and Mason,” Moore said, pointing, in turn, to Square Man, the lanky scared kid, and the mean-looking girl.
    That’s when I recognized them. I’d known them all since grade school. All three were kids everyone had picked on, only now they were better dressed, almost cool looking, and they were together, like they were getting organized. Despite the mouth breathing and the braces, Mason’s hair, for instance, cupped her face nicely, making her look kind of pretty.
    I’d never gone in big for the picking-on thing myself. That jock Dylan from the Crave and a couple of his pals used to, but I think even they grew out of it.
    â€œSo when’s the
Weekly Screech
coming out? And, if I may be so bold, the article that clears me?”
    â€œWe changed the name,” Guy said curtly, as if I should know. “It’s
The Otus
now.”
    â€œ
Otus
is the genus that the screech owl belongs to,” Mason, the girl, chimed in.
    â€œChanged some other things, too,” the tall guy, Drik, said in a quiet voice. He seemed to be talking more to my pin than me. “We’re getting serious. For starters we’re doing a big exposé of
The Rule of Won.
”
    I laughed. “What are you going to expose? You have to admit we’ve had pretty good results.”
    Moore laughed back, through his nose. “You really think your club got the school that grant by wishing for it really hard?”
    â€œWell . . .yeah,” I said. Moore had a way of talking sometimes that was so arrogant, if he’d said, “You really think your name’s Caleb?” I’d have to wonder about that, too.
    He snapped his fingers. Mason slapped a sheet of paper into his hands, which Moore held out to me for inspection. It was a photocopy of an article from the local paper, with the headline “Screech Neck High Up for Grant.”
    Moore pointed at the date.