The Champions

From the author of <The Cheerleaders <comes another dark YA thriller set in the same town of Sunnybrook. When a mysterious accident befalls a member of the all-star high school football team, the town''s deadly history stands to repeat itself&mdash;and the price of discovering the truth is higher than anyone could imagine.

It was the deaths of five cheerleaders that made the town of Sunnybrook infamous. Eleven years later, the girls'' killer has been brought to justice, and the town just wants to move on. By the time Hadley moves to Sunnybrook, though, the locals are more interested in the Tigers, the high school''s championship-winning football team. The Tigers are Sunnybrook&rsquo;s homegrown heroes--something positive in a town with so much darkness in its past.

Hadley could care less about football, but shortly after she gets assigned to cover the team''s latest championship bid for the school newspaper, one of the Tigers is poisoned at a party, and almost immediately after, Hadley starts getting strange emails warning her to stay far away from the football team.

It''s becoming clear Sunnybrook''s golden boys have secrets, and after a second player is mysteriously killed, Hadley&rsquo;s beginning to suspect that someone wants the team to pay for their sins. Or does this new target on the football team have something to do with what happened to the cheerleaders all those years ago?

As an outsider in Sunnybrook, Hadley feels like she''s the only one who can see the present clearly, but it looks like she&rsquo;s going to have to dig up the darkness of the past to get to the bottom of what&rsquo;s happening now. Luckily, there are still some Sunnybrook High grads who never left--people who were around eleven years ago&mdash;and if she can just convince them to talk, she might be able stop a killer before another Tiger dies.

Auteur

Kara Thomas is an unsolved mystery enthusiast who dreams of one day solving a cold case. She lives on Long Island with her husband, son, and rescue cat. She is the author of The Darkest Corners, Little Monsters, The Cheerleaders, That Weekend, and The Champions, as well as the adult thriller Out of the Ashes.

Texte du rabat

While Hadley covers the championship game for the school paper, a football player is poisoned, igniting an investigation into the team and the past crimes that took place in Sunnybrook.

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Chapter One

The list is up.

I haven’t seen it, but there’s no other explanation for the sounds coming from the end of the hall—­squeals of joy, gasps. And crying.

There’s been a lot of crying this morning.

I’ve been parked outside homeroom for the past ten minutes, with my back to my locker. I’m at school way before the first bell because my bus driver picked us up too early. I have a driver’s license but no car, so most days I ride my bike. But this morning it’s storming, so badly that the sound of rain pelting the roof woke me up before my alarm.

I check my phone: seven minutes to the first bell. Since the front doors opened, there’s been a steady stream of dance team hopefuls flowing down the hall, chins lifted, making their pilgrimages to the bulletin board outside the auditorium.

There are a lot of hopefuls this year. Sunnybrook’s dance team took home three first-­place trophies in Orlando last spring, a record for any high school at a single national competition. I heard so many people tried out for the team last week that they held auditions over three days instead of the usual two, and the athletic director finally hired an assistant coach.

Sobs draw my attention from my newspaper notebook, where I’ve been scrawling idly. Down the hall, between the vending machines, a girl, definitely a freshman, is crying into her phone.

I hug my knees to my chest, wishing I could disappear. It feels wrong being a voyeur to her devastation. At the same time, I want to go to her and tell her it’s not the end of the world she didn’t make dance team, that nothing that happens within these halls really matters.

That’s a lie, though, isn’t it? Every disappointment, every win, every slight that occurs in this building feels like the end of the world because this is our world. We spend most of our waking hours here, making sure we’re the necessary level of involved. Padding our college résumés, forging alliances, gaining favor with the teachers who write the best recommendations. All for the vague promise that something better waits beyond these walls.

I don’t get the chance to say any of this to the freshman, of course. The first warning bell rings and she’s gone, along with the rest of the girls. None of them noticed me here at all.

_

Homeroom is swarming with pirates.

My classmates are wearing hats, eye patches, bandanas. Gavin Steiger has traded in his usual outfit of gym shorts and a Sunnybrook Football tee for a Jack Sparrow costume.

“You got a mirror?” he asks me, even though we’ve never spoken before.

I shake my head, but the habitually silent girl seated next to me is already handing Gavin a compact mirror. He examines the smudge of black on his lower lash lines and grins at his reflection, prompting the girl to giggle at the tinfoil he’s strategically placed over some of his teeth.

At my old school, a straight guy tidying his eyeliner in homeroom would be mocked into oblivion, but Gavin is a six-­foot-­three football player, so no one says shit to him.

The coordinated effort to dress up on an eighty-­degree day in the middle of September has to be a football thing. The Sunnybrook Tigers—­formerly the Warriors—­won two consecutive state championships, and with a potential third win on the table, it seems like no one is immune from football fever.

It’s near impossible to get tickets to games, and every business on Main Street has a proud supporter of ­sunnybrook football poster in their front window. Last year, a record number of football players signed with D1&#160;colleges, and all anyone can talk about is where this year’s seniors will end up.

Some shrieking outside the classroom pulls my attention away from my homeroom teacher, who is trying to secure a stuffed parrot to the shoulder of his polo with a safety pin. The noise startles Mr.&#160;Fiorella into dropping his&#160;safety pin.

The shrieking is happy. I can’t see the source, but I picture a gaggle of dance team girls, holding each other by the forearms, jumping up and down. We made it!

Mr.&#160;Fiorella sets the parrot on his desk and makes his way to the door. He lets out an exasperated “Ladies, please, the bell is about to ring” before returning to his desk, crouching in search of the dropped safety pin.

While I wait for the bell, I occupy myself with my newspaper notebook. The first meeting of the year is this afternoon, and I’ve been compiling a list of articles to pitch. I slip my pen from the binding and absently scrawl pirates? while the desks in the room fill.

I don’t look up until I hear the thud of a backpack hitting the chair in front of me.

“Hey, Hadley.” Alix Maroney smiles at me. She’s wearing her Sunnybrook Dance Team sweatpants and a white tank top, the thickness of the straps carefully calibrated to avoid a dress code infraction. Her golden-­brown waves are held back by a red-­and-­black-­striped pirate’s bandana, and she’s wearing big hoop earrings.

It’s not fair to look that gorgeous at seven-­fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. Alix also has the nerve to be genuinely, unfaili…