This choice: Money makes the world go around • Go Back...Chapter #20Money to Make Your World Go Around by: Seuzz   "When are you going to see Chelsea?" you ask Marc.
"After school. She hangs out in the gym, doesn't she? I was going to go look for her then."
"What about?"
Marc glances around. The hallway is crowded with people squeezing past, but he doesn't lower his voice when he answers. "Cheerleader stuff."
"Oh, Marc!"
"What's wrong?"
"Talk to me before you talk to Chelsea!"
"Okay," he says, but he sounds dubious. "When can you—?"
"Tonight. Call me."
"I want to talk to her—!"
"Is it really a rush? What's it about, specifically?"
He grimaces. "Okay, I'll call you tonight, around— Fuck!"
"What's wrong?"
"This is Friday, I got a date! I'm going out with Hannah!"
You smirk at him in a way that makes him blush, and poke him in his hard, taut stomach. "That's gotta be more fun than talking to me about Chelsea."
"That's why I wanna get it over with!"
"You can't talk to Chelsea until you talk to me, or you're going to make whatever it is worse. So call me this weekend."
He writhes in place. "I'm gonna be doing stuff all this weekend, probably! Oh, Jesus!"
A voice sounds behind him—"Marc!"—and he squawks and wheels as his sister, Eva, materializes at his side. "Are you bothering Kim?" she demands.
"No! I'm going! I guess I'll see you and Jess after school after all." He shoots you a beady-eyed glance, then dives into the coagulated hallway.
You follow Eva into the room, where you share AP English IV. "Did you just save him from doing something stupid?" she asks you in a suspicion-laden voice.
"I saved him from doing something," you reply, "but I don't know if it was stupid."
* * * * *
You certainly saved Marc from one stupid choice—putting himself in line to being immediately replaced by a doppelganger. But that's only because you suspect you can and will replace him later. For now you've got more strategic choices to make, and by the time the final bell has rung, you have made them.
You need a secure location, both to do work and to make replacements, but you find yourself more preoccupied with the question of money; sub-heading, the getting of. It's true that you have enough masks to get yourself the doppelgangers you are planning, and that with contributions from those you could probably finance the supplies to make the additional masks your partners-to-be will need. But the idea of controlling a substantial stream of money, to spend on yourself and to spread around, influencing and corrupting others, is too enticing to pass up. So you'll spend a mask early getting financially secure. You've done two replacements without a secure location, you can surely do a third.
Naturally your first thoughts go to the two students you know have money and enough of it to throw around: Kelsey Blankenship and Charles Hartlein. Kelsey is one of the queen bees of Westside, and would be a friend of Kim's if Kelsey had friends; the joke that privately circulates in her circle is that Kelsey doesn't have friends, she has staff. Her father owns a chain of car dealerships and is one of the richest men in the city, and Kelsey herself dresses in expensive, bohemian-Southwest clothes and drives a BMW. She was a cheerleader last year (and was on track to be captain of the squad this year, until she got sandbagged by Chelsea) and she carries herself like some kind of empress-in-exile on account of it. She is a vicious gossip though she pretends to be above all that, and really does run her little corner of Westside like it's a corporation or a government bureaucracy. So even without her money, Kelsey would be a prime candidate for duplication and replacement. She's a two-fer.
So is Charles Hartlein, the flamboyantly out-of-the-closet president of the drama club. In fact, he's a lot like Kelsey, except male, gay, and genuinely bohemian rather than pretend. But like Kelsey he is a snob (but mostly toward jocks and the preppies and the "normies") and he loves to gossip. ("If you can't say something nice about someone," he likes to say, "come sit next to me.") He runs with—and runs—a crowd of arty types, particularly around the theater, and there's very quiet because no one wants to get destroyed online by saying anything that could be construed as "phobic" talk about him running a "gay Mafia" out of the school theater. He also is reputed to have a finger on the pulse of every sub-culture at the school, including things that aren't even whispered about but which are passed around with a wink, a nudge, and the promise that horrible things will be done to anyone who breathes a word about them.
But he's also got money, even though one wouldn't know it to look at him. He dresses like he spent five dollars in a thrift store, but he has been known to toss around extravagant gifts with a flip of the wrist, just to make himself look good.
Yet, even as you reflect on the advantages to be collected from replacements in either of those spots, you are pulled in another, more tempting direction. It's as you are drifting through the hallway toward the front office—where Kim typically does her homework after school, in the conference room—that you remember the talk Mr. Staufford had with you, about all the drug dealing that goes on at the school. It was that talk that got you thinking of money in the first place.
Gary Chen. So far as Kim knows about the drug trade at school (and what Kim doesn't know about the drug trade could, in truth, just about be squeezed inside the school gymnasium) there's just one guy at school who is responsible for all the marijuana that gets sold there. If Chen were just expelled, the supply might completely vanish. Which isn't to say he's the only seller. There's lots of people who sell, but you've heard they all work for him. But maybe that's all just rumor and conjecture. But given the amount you've seen, he must be raking in hundreds of dollars a month at least.
It's an enticing thought, all that money, plus (if the rumors are correct) the power that would go with controlling the person who controls the local trade. Gary is a psychopath, a small but sinewy Asian-American who can be lethal in a fight and has a hair trigger temper. Put him in charge of a gang, and he might be able to run the whole school by himself.
But one thought will follow on another, and when you think of "gangs" and "marijuana" so close to each other, you will think of the football team. Not because they are some kind of dangerous, dope-dealing gang, but because half of them are massive users of weed, and because they also serve as security out at the Warehouse.
You yourself have never been out to the Warehouse, and Kim has only been out once, but every kid in Saratoga Falls knows of it. It is, literally, a warehouse by the railroad tracks, in the decrepit ex-industrial part of town. Every Friday and Saturday a massive, high-school-students-only rave gets held there, with school bands, dancing, drinking, drug-taking, knife fights, and upstairs orgies. (Well ... the school bands, dancing, drinking, and drug-taking occur every Friday and Saturday night. There have been some bad fights there, too. But "orgies" might be exaggeration, though there are rooms and mattresses to rent.) There are no adults on hand, probably because whoever secretly runs the place has paid the cops off, and because things have never gotten so bad that cops have been needed. Largely that's on account of the "security" teams that patrol there, made up of some of the biggest and meanest guys on the football, lacrosse, and other teams from the two high schools.
Again, Kim doesn't know much about how the Warehouse operates, but from some people she has heard that the football team doesn't just patrol the place, they secretly manage it as well, collecting and dividing a fairly substantial fee for their efforts.
Chen has his string of dealers, but whoever manages security at the Warehouse could probably take his business away from him, and right quick too.
But if you really wanted control of the Warehouse, and all the money that flows through it, maybe you should reach over and around to find the criminal elements behind it.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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