Ethan Overbee was not a man who left things to chance.
When he was in middle school, Ethan was caught red-handed selling bootleg cassette tapes on school property. He’d been in the fiction aisle of the school library selling a scratchy copy of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet to another student. To make matters worse, the library was supposed to have been closed at the time. To make matters much worse, the principal was giving a tour of the school to a group of visiting dignitaries from the Board of Education, and he and his guests rounded a corner just in time to witness the exchange of goods for money. It must have looked like a drug deal, because everyone gasped. When Ethan let the cassette tapes fall to the floor, making it clear that there were no narcotics involved, the school brass exhaled a collective sigh of relief.
The principal smiled broadly at Ethan and his customer, a fellow eighth grader at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Middle School in suburban New York, and said, “Boys, why don’t you drop by my office when you’re done here.” And he and his guests carried on. None of them looked back.
Ethan’s partner in crime, an honor student named Winston Swale, bounced from one foot to the other as he wondered how to explain to his parents that he was being suspended from school for sponsoring an illicit music-copying ring. This is exactly the scenario the principal was laying out for the two boys as they stood before him an hour later. The principal was a humorless man whose ears turned red when he was angry, and on that day they were the color of a dodgeball from the school gym.
But Ethan was Ethan, and he had stacked the deck.
Unbeknownst to the principal, and unbeknownst to Winston, Ethan had a hall pass from the school librarian. The pass gave the boys permission to use the library during their free period to work on a report about Marco Polo and the Silk Road.
When the principal called and questioned the librarian about the permission slip, she acknowledged its legitimacy. She, of course, didn’t know the boys were going to use the library to buy and sell black market goods, but the truth was, she liked Ethan and didn’t want to see him get in trouble.
“Honest, Mr. Finn,” Ethan began, almost slipping and calling the principal “Mr. Fink,” the nickname students more commonly used, “we were just taking a break from the report to swap music tapes.”
Ethan then produced a half-finished report with the title “Marco Polo and the Silk Road” emblazoned across the front page. Winston, who knew for a fact that no report writing had been attempted in the library, managed to keep his astonishment in check. Had Principal Finn flipped through the report, he would have spotted it for the fake it was. Other than the title page, it was a report about the differences between igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks.
Viewing the hall pass and report like pieces of surprise evidence presented by lawyers for the defense (in this case, Ethan representing himself and his friend), the principal decided it was just easier to declare a mistrial and let the boys off with a warning. Ethan made out nicely. He escaped without a blemish on his record and earned a reputation for outsmarting the principal. He became a kind of cult figure in his school.
Now, nearly two decades later, Ethan had once again stacked the deck. Getting the auction delisted was easy. The eBay rules on selling humans and human remains left no room for negotiation. It only took a complaint from another user to bring it to the attention of the eBay goon squad.
Getting Jared’s cell phone number was also surprisingly easy.
Because each state had its own arcane laws governing the ownership of media outlets, the network employed paid lobbyists in all fifty state capitals to protect its interests. It was a stroke of luck that their lobbyist in Salem had worked with Jared on a bill a year earlier, and that the two had hit it off. When Ethan called, the lobbyist gave him Jared’s cell number without skipping a beat.
By the time Ethan dialed Jared’s phone, he knew exactly what he was going to say.
***
“Hello?” Jared said as he answered the cell phone, a ring of uncertainty in his voice.
“Hello, Jared,” said the voice on the other end, and Jared wondered if it really was a voice, or if the brain tumor was trying to talk to him. “May I call you Jared?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know why I’m calling?”
“That depends,” answered Jared. “Are you real, or are you my brain tumor?”
The voice on the other end of the line hesitated but only for an instant.
“No, Jared, I’m not a brain tumor. I’m a man. Same as you.”
“You have a brain tumor, too?” Jared asked.