Boston High

Conspiracies

Tricia

The gymnasium smelled the way it always did before a big game. Floor polish, rubber, and that particular charged energy of two hundred people pretending they weren't nervous.

Boston Memorial were two wins from the state championships. You could feel it in the building — teachers walking a little faster, students who never looked at the sports board stopping to check the bracket, the cafeteria louder at lunch than it had been in weeks. The school needed this. After everything, it needed something to believe in.

Tricia stood at the centre of the court during warmup, watching her squad run the opening formation, and let herself feel it too.

She had joined cheerleading as a freshman. Fourteen years old, small, wearing borrowed kit because she couldn't afford her own yet, knowing nobody and not quite sure how to fix that. She had learned quickly that making yourself known in the wrong way was worse than staying invisible, and she had learned it the hard way. The senior girls had been precise about it — the kind of cruelty that operates through silence and small exclusions, the kind that leaves nothing you can point to and say that, that was the thing that hurt. She'd had braces then too, and glasses she hated, and the particular self-consciousness of a girl who knows she doesn't fit yet and isn't sure she ever will.

She had stayed anyway.

That was the thing most people didn't understand about her. The composure they read as natural confidence had started as pure stubbornness. She stayed because walking away would have meant they got to decide how her story went, and she had made a decision at fourteen that nobody was going to do that. Not then, not ever.

By the end of freshman year she had outworked every senior on the squad. By sophomore year she was being asked for input on formations. By junior year she was captain, and the girls who had frozen her out were gone, graduated into whatever lives they'd chosen, and she was still here.

She thought about that sometimes when things got hard.

"Tricia." Maya, her co-captain, jogged over with her hair pulled back tight and a look that meant business. "We're ready to run the full routine."

"Give me five minutes."

She needed to collect her spare kit from her father's office. She had left it there three weeks ago — the day before the shooting, it turned out, though she hadn't known that at the time. She hadn't been back to the administrative wing since. She'd told herself she just hadn't needed to. She knew that wasn't entirely true.

Today she was going in.

________________________________________

The administrative wing was quiet at this hour, most staff already at the gym or heading home. The corridor had the same industrial cleaner smell it always did, the overhead lights throwing the same flat light they always had. On the surface, nothing had changed.

She knew better than to trust surfaces.

Vice Principal Chen had taken over her father's office temporarily while he recovered. The door was closed and the light underneath it was off — he had a habit of working from the conference room when the building was this empty, said the office felt too quiet. Tricia had heard her aunt mention it.

She knocked anyway. No answer. She tried the handle.

Unlocked.

She told herself she was just getting her kit bag from the bottom shelf of the wardrobe. She crossed the room, found the bag exactly where she'd left it, and straightened up.

Then she stood there for a moment, looking at the room.

Her father's things were still mostly in place. Chen hadn't moved much — just cleared space on the desk for his own files and pushed one of the chairs to the wall. The bookshelves were the same. The framed photograph of Tricia and her mother from seven years ago still sat on the second shelf where it always had, slightly crooked the way it always was because her father always reached past it and never bothered to straighten it afterward.

She crossed to the side cabinet. The one her father kept locked.

The key was on the same hook it had always been on, behind the small clock on the shelf above. He'd never changed it, never hidden it differently, because as far as he was concerned nobody knew it was there. She had known since she was twelve. She had never used it before today.

She opened the cabinet.

Her father was an organised man. Every document in its folder, every folder labelled in the same careful handwriting she had grown up watching him use on birthday cards and school forms. She scanned quickly, not sure exactly what she was looking for, trusting that she would know it when she found it.

The unlabelled folder was near the back.

She stopped.

Her father labelled everything. She had never in her life seen him leave a document without a label. The absence of one felt deliberate — like something he had wanted to be able to deny knowing about, something he could distance himself from if he needed to.

She pulled it out and opened it on the desk.

Three printed pages. Internal school communications, on the surface — emails about a curriculum restructuring initiative, the kind of administrative correspondence that generated paper nobody ever read. She almost put it back.

Then she saw the red pen.

Her father had circled two names on the second page. Beside the first, he'd written a question mark. Beside the second, in the same careful print she knew so well, he had written one word.

Confirmed.

She read the name three times.

Mr. Callahan. History. Twelve years at Boston Memorial. Faculty advisor for student council. The teacher parents specifically requested at open evenings because he was warm and patient and genuinely seemed to like teenagers, which not all teachers did.

Tricia's hands were completely steady. She had noticed that about herself — that when something was genuinely serious, the shakiness stopped and something colder took over. She didn't question it. She just used it.

She photographed all three pages carefully, making sure the red annotations were clear in each shot. Put the folder back exactly as she had found it. Locked the cabinet. Replaced the key behind the clock.

Picked up her kit bag, walked out, pulled the door shut behind her.

The lights hummed. The corridor was empty. From somewhere far away came the rising noise of the gymnasium filling up.

She walked toward it, her expression arranged into something that looked, from the outside, like a captain with her head in the game.

________________________________________

James

The gym was loud and bright and exactly what he needed it to be.

He stood at the free throw line during warmup and let it all recede — the locker room, the bruise that had finally faded, the name he didn't know yet, all of it pushed back to the edge of his awareness where it could wait. He bounced the ball twice the way he always did. He shot. Clean.

Connor jogged past and nodded toward the upper rows. "Suits at the top."

James didn't look. "I know."

"Just another game," Connor said, grinning like he knew exactly how wrong that was.

"Just another game," James said back.

He had been saying it to himself all day. Through classes he sat in without absorbing anything, through hallways where he still caught himself scanning faces, through the locker room where he had dressed with his back to the wall without consciously deciding to. He didn't know when that had become habit. Probably around the same time as looking at every parked car twice.

Coach's pre-game talk covered the same fundamentals it always did — transition defence, box out every possession, take care of the ball. James listened the way he always listened: with the part of his brain that was already on the court. When they broke the huddle he felt the familiar narrowing, the world simplifying itself down to the things that mattered right now.

The tip went their way. James caught the outlet, pushed pace before the defence could organise, laid it up off the glass.

First possession. The gym lifted.

He was home.

________________________________________

The first half was the best basketball Boston Memorial had played all season.

James found his rhythm in the first four minutes and stayed there. He wasn't trying to do too much — reading the defence, moving before it was obvious, taking what the game offered rather than what he wanted from it. The kind of basketball that looked simple from the stands because all the hard thinking happened before the ball left his hands.

By halftime they were up eleven. In the locker room Coach kept it brief. James drank water and kept his eyes down and tried not to think about anything that wasn't the next twenty minutes.

He was almost managing it.

Then the third quarter started and he saw the man.

Far corner of the gym, behind the visitor bleachers. Standing against the wall with his arms loose at his sides, not watching the game. Watching the crowd. Scanning it slowly and methodically, the way you look at a room when you're looking for one specific thing. Mid-forties, wearing clothes that were too unremarkable in a way that felt like a choice. No programme. No kid on either team. No reason to be there that James could identify.

He filed it. Kept playing.

Third quarter, James put up nine points in four minutes and felt the gymnasium change — that specific shift when a home crowd stops hoping and starts believing. With ninety seconds left a scout came down from the upper rows and stood near the scorer's table. James felt it in his peripheral vision and didn't react. He ran his play, set his screen, caught the pass at the elbow and rose clean over the closeout.

Through and through. Nothing but net.

The gym went up.

James ran back on defence and for three seconds — just three — everything in his life was exactly what it was supposed to be.

________________________________________

Final buzzer. Boston Memorial by sixteen.

James shook hands down the line and found the scout waiting near the tunnel, young for the job, late twenties, Boston College lanyard.

"James Monroe." He put his hand out. "Derek Walsh. I think you know why I'm here."

"I have an idea," James said.

Walsh smiled. "You play like someone who understands what's happening before it happens. That's not something you can coach. We'd like to have you on campus for an official visit — sit down with the staff, talk to your family."

"I'd like that," James said. It came out steady because it was true.

Walsh handed him a card. "Good luck in the semis."

James watched him go. He stood in the emptying gym for a moment, the card in his hand, and let himself have it — the conversation he had worked three years toward, the door that was now open. He held it for as long as he could.

Then he looked back at the corner behind the visitor bleachers.

The man was gone.

________________________________________

He found Tricia outside twenty minutes later, kit bag on her shoulder, squad dispersing around her. She read his face before he said anything — the good news and the thing underneath it.

"Game first," she said.

"Won by sixteen. Scout from Boston College. He wants to set up a visit."

Her face did something real and warm. She grabbed his arm with both hands. "James."

"I know."

She held on for a moment, letting it land properly. Then, quietly: "I found something."

They walked to the east corridor alcove, empty now, the school winding down around them into its post-game quiet. Tricia pulled out her phone and handed it to him without a word.

James read through the photographs carefully. Twice. His eyes settled on the circled name and the word beside it.

"Callahan," he said.

"Confirmed. Hidden in a locked cabinet. No label on the folder."

James looked up. "Callahan's been here twelve years."

"I know."