Expelled(14)

I start to shake my head no, but it hurts too much. “I’d probably just throw it up again.”

“Okay, what can I do for you, then? What do you want?”

“I want to prove that we’re innocent.”

Jude sighs. “That again.”

“Yeah, that again. Remember how we were on the news every single night? They made us the poster children for teenage delinquency. How come no one ever held a mic up to us and said, ‘What’s your side of the story?’”

“Because they don’t care. Duh.” Jude dips his paintbrush into a coffee can full of turpentine and swirls it around.

I grab his phone and turn it to video. “Today I’m talking to Jude Holz, a local painter and high school junior accused of urinating on school athletic equipment,” I say in my best local anchorman impression. “Mr. Holz, what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Shut up?” Jude offers.

“Mr. Holz, on the night of May sixth, did you put on a tiger head and give Parker Harris’s jersey a golden shower?”

He ignores me.

“Tell the truth, Mr. Holz. Did you drain your main vein on uniform number 89?”

Jude still doesn’t say anything. He’s trying to hold back a smile.

“Did you make your bladder gladder on school polyester? Did you syphon the python on a Tiger T-shirt? Tell me the truth! I want the truth!”

Jude slams his brush onto the table. “You want the truth?” he yells. “You can’t handle the truth!”

It’s a line from A Few Good Men, which we’ve seen at least ten times.

And suddenly, in a hangover-induced flash of genius, I get a totally brilliant idea. “Jude,” I say, “we need to make a movie.”

“Are you out of your freaking mi—”

“We’ll make a movie to prove we didn’t do it.”

When Jude puts his hands on his hips, he looks almost exactly like his mother. “And how are we going to do that?”

“We’re going to go around asking people questions, on camera. We’ll figure out who framed us, and we’ll expose them. We’ll get Felix Goodwin to help us make it.”

Jude looks skeptical. “That sophomore who does all those prank videos? He’s cute—I’ll give him that. But he’s not Oliver Stone.” Jude sighs. “Look, Theo, I know it sucks being kicked out of school. But at some point you’re just going to have to accept it.”

“I have no interest in doing that,” I say. “Let’s set aside, for one second, the fact that this is probably going to ruin my entire future, and yours, too, if the whole rich-and-famous artist-by-eighteen thing doesn’t work out. Don’t you think it’s weird that we obviously have an enemy? Someone framed us. Someone made sure that we got busted for shit we didn’t do. We might be going to school with a sociopath.”

Jude shrugs. “We’re not going to school anymore, dummy.”

“But what if we could find out who did it? What if we could clear our names? Don’t you want that? And what if we could prove Sasha’s innocence, too?”

Jude swirls another brush in the turpentine. “I get it now. You’re trying to be a knight in shining armor for the crazy-hot girl. That’s perfect,” he says. He sighs. “Whatever. Fine. When we fail to prove our innocence, which is exactly what’s going to happen, I’ll just submit the video as part of my application to art school. I’ll say it’s performance art.”

It’s not exactly the attitude I was looking for, but I figure that for now I’ve got to take what I can get.





13


I text Sasha and ask her to meet us on Maple Street, between the forbidden zones of Arlington and Five Points Coffee, a few minutes before school lets out. She doesn’t text me back, which I try not to worry about. Maybe she’s busy ringing up microfiber leggings and jumbo packs of Huggies. Or maybe her dad convinced her that she had better things to do than hang out with a couple of so-called delinquents.

Jude, who’s not banned from Five Points for some reason, is sucking down a quadruple-shot iced mocha. He offers me some, but my stomach still can’t handle it.

“Is she coming?” he asks me for the fifteenth time.

“It’s one of those wait-and-see sort of things,” I say.

“I hope you used my line about how it was going to be The Breakfast Club meets Blue’s Clues.”

“It’s supposed to be a documentary,” I say for the fifteenth time.

“Right. The Real Delinquents of Pinewood County.” Then he pokes me in the shoulder. “Look—there he is.”

Felix Goodwin’s hard to miss. He’s pro basketball tall, and he’s wearing a neon-orange helmet with a GoPro strapped to the top of it. He’s carrying a skateboard and a ratty backpack with crumpled papers trailing out of it.

“He’s probably on his way to make a video now,” Jude says, awe in his voice. “His last one had, like, 500,000 views.”

Felix Goodwin, aka the FBomb, is famous for recreating the internet’s best fail videos. Shot for shot, he makes it look like he’s slammed his junk on a razor-sharp skateboarding ramp or caught himself on fire after hitting a flaming gourd with a baseball bat—things that real people actually did and then posted online.