The Enemy Hypothesis: A Brazos High Novella

shoulder. The girl can be so sweet when she’s not being a brat.
“Me too,” I say. I haven’t told anyone about my date with Mark, not even Jules. I guess I just want to hold this information to myself for now.
Maria checks her phone. “In fifteen minutes it’ll be midnight and the car will be yours.”
“I don’t think I’m gonna sleep tonight,” I say, reaching for the remote and starting a new movie. “I am way too excited to sleep.”
I bet the app will give me some kind of fancy notification when it’s midnight. And then my phone will blow up with all the texts and messages from my friends. I’ll probably be more popular than Jules’ boyfriend, if only for a little while. I already have a ton of notifications from Snapchat, but I don’t feel like reading them all. It’s probably just a ton of people telling me that I’m about to win, or asking for some favor in exchange for kudos.
With ten minutes left to go, I lean forward and take my phone from the coffee table, then open the app. I want to be ready when it congratulates me for winning. I blink when I see the dashboard. This can’t be right. The gold medal is gone, replaced with a smaller silver one under my name.
No.
No, no, no.
One hour ago, Mark Caputo moved into first place, with just over fifty thousand points, nearly ten thousand more than I have. My heart might actually stop this time. My breathing certainly does.
“What’s wrong?” Maria asks, but her voice sounds far away even though she’s sitting right next to me on the couch.
My vision blurs.
As I stare at my name in second place on the scoreboard, the clock showing just four minutes until midnight, I realize that my biggest fear has come true.
Mark Caputo tricked me.
And now he’s going to win.

Fourteen
MARK
I’ve accepted that I’m not going to win this competition, and that’s fine. But I don’t need my brother waking me up about it in the morning. I swear he must enjoy bursting into my room and calling my name to wake me up from a peaceful sleep. It’s like his favorite pastime.
“Duuuude,” he says, shoving my shoulder to rouse me from sleep. “Mark! Wake the hell up, man.”
I heave a sigh and open my eyes. “What? What could you possibly want to tell me this early in the morning?”
My alarm goes off pretty early each school day and since it hasn’t gone off yet, I know it’s early. Way too early for his crap.
Julian plops onto my bed. “Just wondering if you’re really going to sell the car for cash or if you’ll keep it. A truck would come in handy around here. We could go camping or something.”
Julian has been out of high school for four years so he doesn’t have access to the app. I guess he stupidly thinks I won, or maybe he’s just trying to get on my nerves so I’ll be forced to admit I spent the entire month being nice to people for no reason. I’ll bet it’s the second one.
I yawn and look over at my phone to check the time. It’s six in the morning, right about the time he usually gets up to go workout at the gym before heading into work. I have about a million or two notifications on all my social media apps and even more texts.
“I didn’t win,” I say, yawning again. “Now please leave me alone.”
“You better check again, little bro.”
I stare at him. For some reason, that mischievous grin of his is missing. He actually looks… serious?
Frowning, I unlock my phone again and open the app. And then I bolt up in bed.
“How is this possible?” My thumb presses the app several times as if that’ll change what it says on the screen. “This isn’t… this doesn’t make sense. I was losing last night. Now…” My eyes go wide. “Fifty thousand points?”
Julian shrugs. “Everyone is texting me saying you won. Mom and Dad are gonna freak.”
“I won,” I say, but it sounds more like a question than a statement of fact. How did I win? I was losing last night when I fell asleep, all happy and eager for my upcoming date with Abby. “This is impossible.”
“Looks possible to me,” he says, tapping my phone screen where my name is displayed big letters with a gold medal and the word WINNER flashing at the top. “I don’t know how you did it, but you did it.”
“I don’t know either,” I say, standing up and running my hands through my hair. “I’m gonna go shower.”
I do need to shower, but I really just wanted to get away from him and let this new information process. I don’t get it. This can’t possibly be true. In the bathroom, I lock the door and turn on the shower, then I lean against the bathroom door and start going through my phone notifications.
It only takes a few minutes to discover what happened last night after I had fallen asleep. Brazos High has a group Snapchat story with almost every single student in every grade added to it. When one of us posts a photo to the story, everyone in school will see it. It’s how clubs spread information about their meetings, and occasionally someone will cheat by posting quiz answers or alerting everyone that a certain teacher will have a pop quiz or a sub or a movie day. With hundreds of students at Brazos High, I don’t check the group story very often. It’s always filled with crap I don’t care about. That’s how it slipped my notice—the thing that made me win.
An anonymous user posted a video to the story last night. The video was clearly taken in secret because it shows me standing on a tennis court, talking with the assistant principal from a weird angle, like someone was hanging out behind a tree and