Unsung

Chapter Fifty-Five

"So, what's your fumble, bro?" Ris countered, his eyebrow raised.

"Yo, we're gettin' off-point here," Ty said, his eyes trained on Ris. He was wearing the same flirty smirk he always had, but there was a hardness behind it now. Almost challenging.

"He's right," Garrick said, picking up the newspaper and shaking it open loudly, the crinkling of the pages drawing everyone's attention back to the matter at hand. "What about the dead kid?"

"Huh?" I asked, still watching Ty and Ris side-eye each other.

"The kid that died trying to save that homeless guy," Garrick continued, pointing to that part of the article.

"Right," I said, shaking my head and bending back over my sketchbook. "What was his name again?"

"Um," Garrick said, scanning the feature for the answer. "Phoenix Scott. Dude even had a cool superhero name."

"You know, this one we could actually disprove right now," Ris said, already tapping the keys of the laptop he'd procured from out of nowhere. "If a kid died trying to save someone, it'd been in the news. That sort of story is journalism gold."

We barely had to wait before Ris' lips slid into a smile and he turned the screen around to face the rest of us.

"Bingo," he said, proudly.

I frowned.

The headline read, "TEEN DIES HEROICALLY." Underneath was a picture of a rather disarmingly attractive kid in what must have been his senior picture. It was a static shot, taken in front of a generic blue screen, but even so, the guy made it look like he was at a go-see for an Abercrombie & Fitch campaign. With perfectly tousled dark brown hair and cheekbones for days, the Tribune's article hadn't been exaggerating when it had called Phoenix the perfect physical specimen. In fact, he could've been the poster child for the University.

It dawned on me that he might've been if he'd lived long enough.

"Me-ow," McKayla purred as she admired Phoenix's photo.

"Good job, big guy," Sophia murmured dreamily while glancing up toward the sky.

Everyone turned my way, expecting me to round out the oogling session, but I just quickly looked back down at my pad. Busying myself with sketching the former hero student, feature by beautiful feature, I hoped they wouldn't notice I was blushing.

"Seriously?" Ris sneered at the girls. "The kid's not that attractive."

"You're right," McKayla said, dryly. "He's hideous."

"Hideously perfect," Garrick said, nodding. "Come on, Ris. Even I'd do him."

The rest of us chuckled, and I glanced up at Garrick who winked at me.

"See, the article was right about that," Austin said. "A hero kid did die."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean it was Cain's fault," McKayla said, as she snagged Ris's computer and quickly scanned the rest of the article. "This story doesn't even mention the hero program. Just says he was a university student. How do we know what really happened that day? Maybe it was just an accident and Cliff jumped on the opportunity to make it into something it wasn't."

"You can't ignore the things his boy said, though," Ty pointed out. "He probably knew the kid and his motives better than anyone else at that time, since they were roomies. And from one athlete to another, I get his focus. When you're at our level, you train to your fullest. You do anything to be the best. You're not thinking about whether you're going to get injured. Risk is a part of the game. So, yeah, I buy the motivation. No doubt he was doing it for Team Hero."