And Then I Found Out the Truth by Jennifer Sturman Read Free Book Online Page B

“I’m brave about a lot of things — I love the dentist, and snakes, too — but Patty’s kids strike fear in my heart. I always worry whatever they have is catching.”
    “Really, it’s okay,” I said. “Save yourself.”
    Charley flashed a grateful smile and disappeared in a streak of purple corduroy. Gwyneth was a lot more snail-like — it was part of the ennui thing — so I had several long moments to steel myself before she meandered up.
    “Hey,” she said, stifling a yawn. Her lip gloss and icy blue eyes were the only color in her pale face, and her white-blond hair hung listlessly down her back.
    “Hey,” I said back, and waited for her either to stroll past or say whatever she was there to say. Usually she only spoke to me when Patience told her to.
    “How are you?” she said.
    “Uh, I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”
    “Fine,” she said, like small talk was normal for us.
    And then she just stood there, next to me, like it was also perfectly normal for us to hang out together instead of with our respective friends, or, in my case, Natalie. Though, now that I looked around, I realized I didn’t see any of Gwyneth’s friends. I didn’t even see Grey anywhere. In fact, a lot of the seniors seemed to be missing, including Quinn and his various minions.
    “Crazy, isn’t it?” said Gwyneth.
    I assumed this was in reference to the crowd and not to the fact she was still standing next to me or to the way she could speak without moving her lips. “I don’t know if it’s crazy or not, because I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted.
    “You didn’t hear?” she said.
    “Hear what?” I asked.
    “You don’t know?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You really don’t know?”
    “No, I really don’t know.”
    “How do you not know?”
    “I don’t know how I don’t know, but I’d like to know.” I managed to say this politely, but the conversation was getting a bit frustrating.
    “They’re probably going to get kicked out,” she said.
    “Wait — who’s getting kicked out?”
    “All of them.”
    “All of who? Or whom?”
    “Everyone involved.”
    “Involved in what?”
    “The poker thing,” she said.
    To her credit, she didn’t actually say “obviously” — she just implied it. And though it took a while to get it out of her, she ultimately did tell me the whole story, and she was right: It was crazy.
    It turned out that a bunch of seniors, including Grey and several other Alliance members, had started up their own online business. And when Gwyneth first told me this, I didn’t understand what the problem was. If anything, it showed a level of initiative that seemed like a healthy departure from their usual lack of productive activity. So this shouldn’t have been a big deal.
    Except for the part where their business was targeting underage poker players, and the other part where they’d been operating the whole thing from the Prescott campus.
    Apparently there was an old server the school no longer used, and it had been gathering dust in the computer center’s storage closet. I didn’t want to know what Grey and his friends had been doing in the closet, but they found the server and decided it would be perfect for hosting a gambling site. And in another genius move, they neglected to arrange for their own Internet connection and piggybacked on Prescott’s broadband network instead.
    The insane thing was that they might have gotten away with it if they’d been less successful. But within a few hours of launching, the site was generating hundreds of hits, and by the second day they had thousands of kids logged in and playing poker around the clock, using their parents’ credit cards to place their bets. And the more people played poker, the more bandwidth the site sucked up, and that’s what did them in.
    The site went live on Friday, and by Monday, Prescott’s Internet service provider was calling, because the huge amount of bandwidth being used on campus was