Free I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga

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    “Howie told me what you guys did last night,” Connie said, shutting up Billy’s voice in his head. “Not cool.”
    “I knew I should have killed that kid when I had the chance,” Jazz said lightly, then immediately regretted it when he saw the expression on her face. “Not funny?” he asked.
    “Not when you say it. You don’t know how to joke like that.” She thought for a moment, her warm, dark eyes searching him for…what? He didn’t know. “You should probably never joke like that.”
    “Okay.” Connie gave good lessons in being human. “But it needed to be done. We had to go in there.”
    Connie patted Jazz’s shirtfront and frowned. “Nope. Not there. Let me see your wallet.”
    Mystified, he put his wallet into her outstretched hand. She flipped it open. “Well, now,” she said, looking at the picture of her that he kept there, “that is one fine-looking honey, but…No. I don’t see it here, either.”
    “See what?”
    “The badge Tanner gave you when he made you a deputy,” she said, shoving his wallet at his chest. “Don’t do stupid things, Jazz. And don’t make me go all ‘psycho girlfriend’ on you. I don’t want to, but I will.”
    The bell rang and Connie darted for her class. Jazz fumbled his wallet back into his pocket and hightailed it to biology.
      
    Jazz didn’t see Connie again until the end of the day, when they met at the auditorium for rehearsal. The new drama teacher, Ms. Davis (she actually insisted that her students call her Ginny), was bringing The Crucible to life on the Lobo’s Nod High stage, and Jazz had been “encouraged” by Connie to audition. Result: He was now stuck every afternoon rehearsing with a bunch of kids he really didn’t care about, all to act out a role—Reverend Hale—that he found sort of annoying and wishy-washy. Not to mention hopelessly naive. There is a moment early in the play where Hale—an “expert” on witchcraft—haughtily brandishes his books and asserts that “Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated.” As if it could be that easy.
    Connie was no longer annoyed with him by the time they connected after the last bell; they spent the fifteen minutes between the end of school and the beginning of rehearsal feverishly kissing and groping back in the wings, behind a leftover matte painting from an old production of Grease . Or maybe she’d never been annoyed with him at all, he thought. Sometimes he couldn’t get a read on Connie’s emotions. Maybe it was a guy/girl thing.
    He hoped that’s all it was. What if it was a predator/prey thing? A human thing? What if he was losing his connection to her? God, don’t let that be it. Connie was one of the few anchors that kept Jazz’s sanity firmly moored. Losing any one of them would be disastrous, but losing Connie in particular, he knew, would be catastrophic.
    “Are you all right?” she asked, her fingers lightly stroking his cheek.
    “Fine.”
    “’Cause it’s like you’re not even here. Your tongue just stopped.”
    “Sorry. I was thinking.” He kissed her again, and this time he forced himself not to think while he did it. This was how normal people kissed. Without thinking.
    “Everyone onstage!” Ginny shouted from the house. “Come on, now!”
    Jazz and Connie joined the rest of the cast onstage. Today they were running through the last scenes of the play, so Connie—who was playing Tituba—didn’t have to be there the whole time, but she always stayed through every rehearsal. Of the two of them, Connie was the drama geek, and would have watched rehearsals even if she didn’t have a part in the play. Now she sat in the front row with Ginny and watched Jazz in a scene close to the end of the play, as Reverend Hale argues and pleads with Judge Danforth to release the heroic John Proctor from jail and stay his execution. In the play, Hale starts out as one of the main proponents of the witch trials in Salem, but later comes