Saturday, May 4

  Location: Football Field

  Operation: N/A

  Time: 12:45

  I braced for something theatrical—some villain-monologue delivered with thunder and neon—but Andre started… normal. No dramatic pause, no sinister grin, no verbal sledgehammer. Just a shrug and a curious look, like he’d found an unusual insect and wanted to know how it moved.

  “Yeah? What about it?” I asked, wary.

  “Just fascinated,” he said. “You were the talk of the school—and kind of still are. Not in the way you wished, obviously.”

  “If you know about the accusations against me, why are you talking to me?” I asked, layering my question with a disrespectful amount of posh, the kind that sounds imported and breakable.

  “I don’t think you’re a mole,” he said simply. “Feels more like the kind of conspiracy they invent about very popular people.”

  “I was not popular at all.”

  He snorted. “Doubt it. You are. You’ve been. Sheesh—you even managed to talk to September. Besides Malachi, who you’re also friends with.” His mouth twitched. “You’re a worthy opponent.”

  Opponent? The word skittered across my nerves like a thrown coin.

  “Opponent?” I echoed, my voice hitting the same note it had in my head.

  “You see,” he went on, “I never really understood your status here. But now I do. And to beat you—to be better than you—that’ll be a field day.”

  “Beat me in what?”

  “The very sport you joined,” he said, and only then did the sinister aroma drift in, as if his intention had slowly saturated the air. “I’ll be the MVP of every game, the one they pull for every press conference—”

  “Press conferences?” came a chorus from my right—Malachi among them, genuinely surprised.

  Andre turned, incredulous. “Have you guys never watched the games?” He looked from face to face. “Yes, there are press conferences—hosted all over the world for us spy mages to entertain ourselves with.”

  “It can’t be posted on any regular content platform,” Tisiah said, suddenly stepping into the conversation. “We’d be cooked.”

  “On the frickin’ YMPA page,” someone far to the left answered, tone dry and stern. “Where else?”

  Andre re-centered on me. “As I was saying—before everyone butted in—I want to make sure they see me as the better one. Not just that. I want them to see you beneath me.”

  “We’re on the same team,” I said, the words scraping out between gulps. “Hard to accomplish that.”

  “No it wouldn’t,” he replied, almost gently.

  “Then why tell me?” I asked.

  He blinked, caught off guard—as if he’d followed a script right up to that line and found it blank. I’m not sure he’d considered the fallout of saying the quiet part out loud.

  “I still like a little competition,” he said at last.

  I was so rattled by that answer that I realized I’d stopped doing push-ups—an error Coach Wallaby spotted before I did.

  “Hey, Mole Boy,” he called, voice a low, stern drumroll. “You think you’re done?”

  I didn’t answer. I dropped back to the turf and hammered out push-ups with a zeal that looked a lot like panic. If I could outpace humiliation, maybe it wouldn’t catch me. Spoiler: it did.

  “No, no, no—stop,” Coach barked. “In fact, everybody stop!”

  Grateful bodies lurched upright so fast they forgot about oxygen, balance, or dignity. Knees wobbled. Hands reached for the air as if it had railings. A few guys blinked like owls in daylight.

  “Give me push-ups—now. And don’t stop until I say so.” He was looking directly down at me, which doubled the embarrassment like a mirror facing another mirror.

  Mole Boy? Mole Boy?

  The nickname caught fire, invisible but hot enough to redden the whole afternoon. Like a dance floor opening around a single spotlight, the team formed a ring around me. I went down again—palms to turf, elbows burning, chest brushing grass. And here was the real problem: I couldn’t use my Perk. Not here. Not with a circle watching. Which meant I had to do it the old-fashioned way—on core I didn’t really have, with strength that didn’t look good under fluorescent scrutiny.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  I tried to swallow my grunts, but the tension in my body resonated through every limb. Each rep let out a trapped noise I didn’t authorize.

  Coach crouched, meeting my face at push-up altitude. His eyes were steady and unblinking, like he could bore into my skull and extract an attitude adjustment with tongs.

  “Listen,” he said evenly. “You need to respect your peers. That’s one of the most important things in football. You know why? When the quarterback doesn’t throw to you, or tells you to run to the sideline, you don’t argue. You don’t disobey. Because that breaks the team.”

  I slowed—drastically. Each push-up became a miniature negotiation: pain versus pride, breath versus gravity. By the time I hit the next rep, I was crawling speed, wincing between inches.

  “See these boys?” He flicked a glance around the circle. “Those are your teammates. But if you can’t respect your offensive coach, your defensive coach, your parents, your classmates—how exactly do you plan to respect your teammates?”

  Against my will, something solemn squirmed into place inside me. He actually had a point. He was just delivering it to the wrong defendant.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Get up.”

  I staggered to my feet, dizzy with heat and humiliation. Coach spun to the rest of the team, voice raised but level. “Don’t think he’s beneath any of you. You’re at the same level, same status, same everything. Treat him like he’s the best thing that happened to your team. Treat each other like they’re the best thing to happen to your team.”

  He walked toward the sideline, concluding, “Because forget about trophies if you can’t consider the next person. Football isn’t about getting ladies—because I’m sure that’s your goal, innit’? Football is about character. Start jogging.”

  He said “jogging” like a blessing, and one by one the men moved—first a shuffle, then a trot, then the long, synchronized drift of a team lapping the field. I looked for anchors in the motion: Tisiah, close enough to be a lifeline; Malachi, who drifted farther from me with each step as if we were magnets flipping polarity.

  Off to my right, Andre wore something that might have been a sneer—or maybe my vision hadn’t cleared, and the day’s edges were still jagged.

  This ranked high—painfully high—on my list of humiliations. I felt like the bullied kid who gets rescued by the teacher in front of everyone, only for the teacher to lecture the kid too. The savior and the executioner in one breath.

  Ugggghhhh…

  I jogged. The heartbeat of embarrassment pounded behind my sternum, insisting on an encore. Tisiah drifted up beside me like he’d taken pity on a drowning man. “You good, bro?”

  I nodded twice. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”

  Monday

  I was not good.

  The weekend replayed itself on loop, the way televised sports use those slow-motion lines and circles to diagram failure. My brain turned into a commentary booth and I was the clip package: the circle around me, the arrow tracking my bad decisions, the freeze-frames of Coach crouched at eye level while I impersonated a collapsing tent.

  It wasn’t just memory; it was full-body. My skin recalled the heat. My lungs remembered the panic. My spine played it back like it owed interest. Sleep didn’t stand a chance. Every time I closed my eyes, I folded into myself—cringing into the position of an unborn child, like I could rewind and restart without the part where “Mole Boy” landed.

  Tears came at some point—quiet and stubborn, not dramatic enough to clear anything out. And underneath all of it sat the heavier truth: the mole problem hadn’t disappeared just because my dignity had. If I didn’t solve it, I wasn’t just getting benched. I was getting erased.

  Is this adulthood? I wondered, pausing in a hallway that smelled like bleach and futures. People always say life is hard, but do they mean hard like this—public shame plus espionage midterms plus possibly losing the girl you can’t stop orbiting?

  I headed toward the cafeteria. Sensei Waine’s class was in fifteen minutes, but my stomach was an empty drum and my nerves wanted company. The doors opened onto a rush of noise that felt personal: I could swear people were staring at me. Maybe they were. Maybe paranoia brainstormed it and the crowd said “approved.”

  To my left, near the bathroom, stood September. The location was… suboptimal, but my judgment had been crowd-surfing all day and I needed something—anything—that felt like a step toward normal. Or kindness. Or not bleeding.

  “Hey, Septem—”

  “Nope.”

  It wasn’t a shout. It was a flat gate dropping. I exhaled, caught, then tried again. “But—but—”

  She didn’t even look up from her phone. “I’m not sure what makes you think you can just approach me while you may possibly be a mole,” she said, voice calm, precise. “It’s irresponsible.”

  “Okay, listen—listen—listen.” Words tripped over each other, scraping their knees. “I’m not the mole. That rumor came from that foul-headed beast Jamal. I’m trying to clear my name. I just need… a friend right now.”

  My heart was heavy. My eyes were heavy. My soul dragged like a wet coat. She offered no response—no tilt of the head, no mercy. She walked away, clean and controlled, and yet… it felt like she was carrying something. Not indifference—constraint. Like she wasn’t choosing not to care, but choosing not to show it.

  And who could blame her? My reputation was stained in a color that doesn’t wash out. “Possible TSA informant” doesn’t pair well with lunch.

  I went looking for Tisiah and Nikki—not with urgency, just with the numb practicality of someone who knows where the last chairs are in a crowded room. Greg was there too, and judging from their looks, they’d caught the September moment from a distance. Maybe the cafeteria’s audio had been too loud to deliver my plea, but the gist was visible enough.

  “We have to figure out who the mole is…” Tisiah said, sighing, propping his chin on his hands like he wanted to hide his whole head in them.

  Before we could triage the plan, Mari arrived at the table with a face brighter than usual. Her hands landed on the laminate with two crisp taps.

  “Guys,” she said, breath quick with contained news, “I think we were right from before.”

  “About what?” Nikki asked. Not stern—hopeful. Whatever static lay between her and Mari, this mattered more, and her voice knew it. The room dimmed around the edges. My focus tunneled to the center of the table, to Mari’s eyes, to the next sentence that might finally let me breathe like a human again.

  Because this—the mole, the accusation, the way my name felt like a crack—this meant everything to me.