The club visited later, when Mom and the nurse were in the room so I knew they were real. They brought candy and flowers and history textbooks. You know, things they thought would cheer me up. They sat around the bed for most of the day, recounting with great detail and enthusiasm how heroic I looked knocking Miles out of the way right before the scoreboard hit him, and how everyone in the gym freaked out, and how I was still all over the news.
Apparently, Miles hadn’t been McCoy’s target at all. The scoreboard was meant for Celia. She had moved out of the way because she thought I was attacking her. McCoy, enraged, had tried to strangle Miles and had been dragged off by Mr. Gunthrie. A weight lifted off my chest. McCoy had slipped up. The threat was gone.
“But you’re never going to believe why he tried to drop a scoreboard on her,” said Evan.
“You know how McCoy is always calling Celia to his office?” said Ian.
“Apparently McCoy was obsessed with Celia’s mom,” Theo said, cutting to the chase. “And she got crushed under that thing years ago. Since he couldn’t have her, he settled for Celia, but Celia wasn’t . . . living up to his standards, or something. So finally he decided he’d immortalize her by dropping the same scoreboard on her that killed her mom. The cops found all sorts of incriminating stuff in his house. Journals and plans and, like, videos. Of Celia. When they got to the school after McCoy tried to strangle her, Celia told them everything, right in front of all of us. It was horrible.”
“It was so weird,” Evan added. “It was going on for two years, and nobody knew. Why wouldn’t you tell someone about that?”
“Maybe she didn’t think she could,” I said.
Theo nodded. “I believe it. I talked to Stacey and Brittney after the awards—apparently Celia’s dad got remarried a few years ago, and Celia’s stepmother was planning on kicking her out of the house as soon as she graduated, and her dad was on board. Stacey and Brittney said Celia hardly ever told them anything, and they were her only friends.”
“She has a stepmother?” I said.
“I’ve seen her a few times,” Theo replied. “Short, brown hair, looks like she should be really nice, but I’m not totally surprised to know that she isn’t.”
Was this why Tucker and Miles hadn’t questioned me all year when I said I’d seen Celia and McCoy speaking to Celia’s mother? Because they thought I was talking about her stepmother? How many more hallucinations had gotten past me because of miscommunication?
“How did no one suspect McCoy before this?” I asked.
“’Ee ’as been voted number one principal in the township three times,” Jetta said. “And ’is office was spotless.”
“Apparently he did a pretty damn good job cleaning up after himself,” said Ian. “If he didn’t have all that stuff at his house, he probably could have said Celia was making things up. At least they still would have gotten him for trying to strangle Boss.”
Theo huffed. “At least now when Celia testifies against him in court, they’ll have a houseful of hard evidence to back her up.”
“Does anyone know if she’s okay?” I asked.
“She was molested by a psychopath for two years,” Art said. “So, no.”
Only after I threatened to rip out the stitches in the side of my head did they finally tell me what Miles had done.
“He went all white,” said Art. “I’ve never seen someone lose all their coloring like that. Then he screamed at me to cut the power, and he ran over and started trying to lift the scoreboard off you. We had to pull him away so he didn’t electrocute himself.”
They all looked suddenly guilty.
“We wanted to help you,” Theo said.
“Mr. Gunthrie came back right after that,” Evan said, “with the paramedics and everything. They lifted it off you, but Miles was still there, and he made this noise—”
“And Mr. Gunthrie made us shut him in the boys’ locker room before he did something stupid, like going after McCoy in front of all those cops,” Ian finished.
I took a long draw from the straw jammed into my Yoo-hoo bottle, trying to calm myself. “Where is he? I haven’t seen him. He knows I’m awake, right?”
They shared uncertain looks.
“We ’aven’t seen ’im since,” said Jetta. “’Ee ’asn’t called any of us.”
“We drove by his house, but his truck wasn’t in the driveway.” Evan looked at Ian and Theo, who nodded. “And we checked at Meijer, but he hasn’t gone in to work.”
“I thought he might be at Finnegan’s,” said Art. “He did get banned, but I didn’t think that would stop him.”
“So none of you have seen him since the scoreboard fell?”
They all shook their heads.
A lead weight sunk in my stomach. The threat from McCoy might be gone, but there was another threat to Miles.
One I couldn’t fight.
Chapter Fifty-six