The Game Changer, стр. 7

Chapter 3

If you were a burglar in Parkwood, Missouri, the absolute best time to get away with ripping off every house in the entire town would be during the Parkwood High School homecoming game. Because nobody was at home that evening. Instead, we were all crammed into the PHS football stadium.

There were worse places. Most high school football stadiums—at least my high school football stadium—consisted of a browning, pocked field surrounded by a few wooden bleachers. PHS’s football stadium was a high-dollar behemoth of lights and sounds. The grass was manicured so evenly, there was a halfway-serious running joke that the groundsperson did it with scissors and a ruler. The aluminum bleachers were enormous, spanning the entire length of the field, and curling around partially into the end zones, and the crowd would still overflow into standing room only areas along the fence line. Even the away team’s bleachers were bigger and nicer than most schools’ main bleachers. There was a concession stand and indoor restrooms, VIP cushioned seats and a special fenced-off pit for the marching band. There was a “runaround” section of grass for the middle schoolers to be middle schoolers, and for the middle school principal to be threatening and get migraines. And it all surrounded a state-of-the-art digitized scoreboard with a huge screen for displaying players’ most menacing game faces mixed with distressing replays of bad calls.

PHS had two cheerleading squads, a nine-time state champion dance squad, a peppy drum line, a pack of shirtless, staff-toting spirit leaders, and a googly-eyed hornet mascot with a stuffed stinger poking out of its dancing bum.

Parkwood, Missouri, took its high school football seriously. And so did every surrounding town, who brought their equally-serious teams from their equally-serious stadiums to play on our turf.

I got to the game way too late to scope out a seat, so I wandered around, waiting for the action to start, checking out the sights and the people, letting my mind wander to the Knock ’em Dead podcast. I wondered if Daisy would mind if I called myself the lead investigator.

For a short period in college, I’d dreamed of being an investigative reporter on television. I’d imagined myself digging deep into stories and filling in a rapt audience as my ratings soared. I was good at research. I had a nice voice. I was a journalism major with a minor in criminal justice.

But I was also 5’3”, which, according to my professors and my advisor, was just entirely displeasing to watch on a television. To listen to them, my height basically made watching me on TV something akin to watching a really educated troll climb up out from under a bridge to deliver a murder report on goats. Didn’t make sense to me—I was cute with dark, shoulder length hair and brown eyes that weren’t troll-like at all—but in a cutthroat industry in a big city, you could just assume there was going to be something to take you out of the game. I didn’t have a gargoyle second head or a honking voice or a disproportionate amount of lumps in weird places, and I wasn’t dumb, but I also wasn’t my perfect classmate, Kirsten Mendoza. And if you don’t know who she is—trust me, you will.

So I gave up my dream of digging deep into stories on camera and regaling rapt audiences with their details. If I had to write stories about hot dogs to pay the bills, fine. That didn’t mean I had to give up my passion.

Oh. Right. The hot dogs.

As soon as the ball was in the air, I went in search of a certain new hot dog roller.

The concession stand looked like it had been hit with a bomb. Nacho cheese splatters dotted the serving counter, the floor, the metal prep table, the shoes of the trio of teens who were working. Boxes of candy were toppled and scattered, some open and spilling their Hot Tamale guts onto the tables and tile. Melted chocolate had been stepped on and tracked throughout the kitchen. The soles of the kids’ shoes stuck to dried, spilled soda splots and made sucking sounds when they walked.

But right in the center of the room, like a monarch atop his kingdom, sat a glistening, pristine hot dog roller, rolling its little heart out. Buns scattered the prep table next to it in various states of strewn, torn, and wadded. A serious-faced girl with mustard-smeared glasses carefully, almost reverently, laid new dogs across the back rollers, getting them going for the halftime rush.

“Hello, may I help you?” The most enthusiastic high school boy I’d ever seen grinned up at me, all dimples and energy, from the other side of the counter. His curly hair half-sprang from beneath the paper cap that was supposed to protect our food. His name tag said:

Tyler

PASSIONATE ABOUT: RPGs

Specifically Dragon Age: Inquisition but

Dragon Age: Origins is pretty good too for

when I’m like sick of playing Inquisition

which doesn’t happen very much.

I held up my work badge. “I’m from the Parkwood Chronicle Weekly,” I said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute about your new machine there.”

His hand twitched near the cash register for a second and he looked disappointed, like maybe good old dragon-killing Tyler had been stuck in the back with the nacho cheese catastrophe during the pre-game rush and had been waiting for just this slow moment to shine mathematically by taking my money and making change.

“Oh. The dog roller? That’s Ari’s job.”

The girl with nacho cheese glasses (Arielle, Passionate about: mermaid fiction) looked up. The other lens had relish stuck to it. She held one wiener in the air between two fingers. “Huh? What did I do?”

“You messed up somebody’s hot dog,” a boy listlessly sweeping the back said. “Way to go, brainiac.”

“What? I did?” Ari looked absolutely panicked. “I messed up your hot dog?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t even order