Simon Death High by Blair Burden Page A

minute of silence, he sighed as loud
as he could and slammed open the door to leave. He spotted Adam
writing next to his locker and walked over to him.
    “Did you get any info from the
cheerleaders?” Michael said as he tried to make eye contact with
him.
    “Um, no I didn't. Did you get any good
stuff?” Adam asked as he continued to write. “Well, I have to go,”
he said, not letting Michael answer his question.
    As he twisted his curls, Michael spotted
Hannah running out the school and onto the field. He thought about
running after her, to see if she got any information, but he
decided to sit next to his locker. He had enough adventure for the
day.
    Despite being on the dance team, Hannah
hated being around the jocks. One, because believe it or not, boys
made her nervous. Two, she didn't like how they stared at her like
she was a slice of seasoned meat.
    Nervously, Hannah walked onto the field
where the football players where clowning around with the
basketball players. She waved like an idiot and walked into the
center of the group. “Hi.”
    “Hannah?” they all said.
    With a smile, Hannah took a deep breath,
“I'll start by saying—”
    “That you and your gang are suspects in the
largest murder case,” said Jacob, a basketball player. He stood out
the most because he was at least six foot five. Not only that, but
had a white beard— right, who has a white beard
in high school?
    “That is what I am here to talk about. You
seriously don't think me and my friends have the power to hurt
anyone. We are all little punks. Especially, Michael—he's gay so he
won't hurt anyone. He's too nice,” Hannah said. “I'm just here to
ask if you guys know anything about Mandy Perez?”
    “Mandy, the dead chick from last year?” one
guy asked.
    “Yeah, you don't have to be so rude about
it,” she snapped.
    “You should know lots about her,” Jacob
said. “You tried to be her friend a few times—”
    “Until I realized how much of a bitch she
was,” Hannah snapped. “Excuse my language.”
    “She hung around our lockers a lot,” said
Jason, a football player. “Yeah, she would play hard to get a
lot.”
    “There is a difference between the dance
team and the cheerleaders,” Jacob said.
    “Oh, tell me about it,” Hannah sighed. “The
cheerleaders are tramps and the dance team members have class.”
    “True, but also not. Some of the younger
girls from the dance team want to be on the cheerleaders side
because you can only be a junior or senior on the team. So, the
little freshmen would do anything to be on their good side,” Jacob
explained. “Mandy was definitely the ringleader—”
    Hannah paused and a flashback came back to
her. She was a sophomore in high school and her dream was to be on
the cheerleading squad because it seemed that they got all the
attention even though she hated attention. But, they got the
attention from the boys, teachers, and got to leave early on
Fridays. Not only that, but the school paid for their uniforms,
tutoring, and anything else they needed.
    “ You're too thick to be on the team,” she
remembered Mandy laughing. “How the hell would someone lift you.
Look at your thighs for heaven's sake.”
    “ I'm only one-hundred and twenty pounds,”
Hannah had said.
    “ Sugar, but I’m only one-hundred and five
pounds.”
    “ Please, I'll do anything!”
    “ Fine, if you won't lose weight and you
want to be on the team, you have to do a dare.”
    “ What dare?”
    “ I dare you to strip and walk into the
boys' locker room—”
    “ No way!”
    “ Then, you won't be on the team unless
you get down to like eighty pounds. And we all know that's
impossible because you eat like ten times a day.”
    Hannah had cried that night. It wouldn't be
until her junior year when she became head of the dance team that
she didn't feel like an outcast. And it was the same year Mandy was
murdered.
    She snapped back to reality, “She hazed
them, right? What types of hazing would she