Anyway, several of the mourners were standing around staring in our direction. I didn’t know whether they were staring at Audrey, this picture-taking chick with pink, blue, and green streaks wound into her brown pigtails, or if they figured out I was the guy who’d found Hector.
Then, on the way to the parking lot, this minivan of a guy in a black suit and a black hat with a red feather tucked into the hatband walked up and grabbed my arm.
“Your name is Dylan Jones?” he asked. He was probably nineteen or so—his goatee made it hard to tell. He was a good couple inches shorter than me but was so square and solid, you knew he could run you over and leave nothing but a dark spot on the road.
“That’s my name,” I said.
“Do you know the North Side Monarchs?” he asked, his eyes digging deep into mine.
I’m like, “The what?”
“One of my boys told me you’re the one who found Hector when he died.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“And you don’t know who the North Side Monarchs are?”
“No, I don’t have any idea.”
His face relaxed, and he almost smiled. “I guess it was just fate, then, that you found him.”
“Fate, yeah, that’s right.”
He put out his hand for me to shake. “My name’s Alberto Hernandez. Everyone calls me Beto. I’m Hector’s cousin. Thanks for coming to the funeral.”
I’m like, “That’s all right,” and introduced him to Audrey.
“You know,” he said, “it’s not like the cops and the news said—Hector didn’t take no overdose. If he had drugs in him, someone else must’ve dosed him.”
“I never thought he took any drugs,” Audrey said, and I go, “Me either,” though truthfully I wasn’t so sure. I mean, yes, he didn’t seem like a druggie type, but then you can’t really be sure what goes on with people after the last school bell rings.
Beto stared into my eyes again. “You be careful.”
“Never anything but.”
As he walked away, Audrey goes, “Wow, that guy was good-looking. I mean, if I liked guys, that’s the kind of guy I’d like.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He kind of weirded me out the way he just came up out of the blue like that.”
Audrey nudged her shoulder against my arm. “Well, that’s just the cost of being famous, I guess.”
CHAPTER 6
Famous. Yeah, right. Fame is fleeting, they say, and they know what they’re talking about. In my case, it lasted less than a week. And to be even more specific, it changed within five seconds. On Friday, I walked into first hour, and Jason “The Growth” Groethe—who’s a big loser idiot—called out, “Hey, check it out, here comes Body Bag.”
Body Bag. What was that even supposed to mean? I didn’t put Hector into a bag. But the whole class erupted into laughter. Ha ha ha. How lame. But by the end of the day, that was all I heard—Here comes Body Bag. Even from girls.
It was all over then. A major rule of high school is that once you get a nickname, you’re stuck with it no matter if it makes sense or not. Maybe Jason figured he had to get even with somebody for his getting tagged as The Growth, but, hey, I never called him that. At least not before he came up with the Body Bag deal.
By the next week, I’d given up on getting a decent article about Hector in the school paper. Instead, I decided to interview Haley Pressler, the cheerleader’s cheerleader. Okay, yes, some people did call her “The Pretzel,” but apparently being super-hot is a pretty effective inoculation against the full-time nickname curse. Anyway, I had this idea for an article about how new kids could adjust to school, and Haley seemed like a good expert to get tips from. Besides, like I said, she was ultra-hot.
So I met her by her locker right before lunch, thinking just maybe I’d talk her into doing the interview over a burger and some fries. But no, she wanted to do it right there in the hall. So I’m like, “Okay. I mean, it’s not the most comfortable way to do an interview, but I guess it’s cool,” and just then I heard footsteps and a rustling sound behind me. Before I could turn around, some of Haley’s stupid jock friends grabbed me and yanked a big plastic trash bag over my head and shoulders.
It was the worst. You cannot see when you’re stuffed inside a Hefty bag. I couldn’t move my arms, and I was stumbling around the hall yelling, “Get this thing off me! Get this thing off me!”
All the while these idiots were chanting, “Body Bag! Body Bag! Body Bag!”
And the worst part was knowing that The Pretzel had set me up for it. No, that’s not true. The worst part was that somebody caught a video of it and pasted it all over the Internet within probably fifteen minutes.
That was the last straw. I had to do something.
CHAPTER 7
A couple days later Audrey and I were cruising to Topper’s for burgers. Like I said, I didn’t have a car, but it wasn’t so bad since Audrey had this pretty sweet champagne-colored Ford Focus, and we were together most of the time anyway, so it was cool. As we drove, I got the idea she might be getting a little tired of me complaining about the whole Body Bag situation because she’s like, “You know what? You need to stop focusing on that so much. Let it go.”
“How can I let it go? Next time I walk back into school, it’s going to be there again. ‘Here comes Body Bag. Let’s shove him in a sack and roll him down the stairs.’ ”
“You know why I think it bothers you so much?”