Free Chain Letter by Christopher Pike

she must have sensed his
     lack of interest for she settled down and started to talk like a real person who had not been preprogrammed by MTV and People magazine. She was so funny! Every bit as witty as Kipp and a hell of a lot better
     looking. They had talked about everything except football and the Caretaker, and after
     taking her back to school,he had found himself replaying in his head over and over again their time together.
     He’d read the literature—he had the classical symptoms of infatuation.
    He hadn’t spoken to Alison since. Neil might get upset. Joan might kill him.
    “Tony!” Joan said, kissing him on the lips before he could defend himself. “Have you
     been avoiding me?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Liar.” She poked him in the gut. “Tell me why and tell me straight.”
    “I’m in love with Kipp.”
    “So you’re gay?” She asked slyly, leaning close. “Can you prove that you’re not? Say,
     in about two hours? My parents . . . ”
    Lightning hasn’t struck yet.
    Something large and loud crashed.
    The explosion came from the direction of the steep exit his friends had just used.
    Tony forgot about Joan. He was running the sprint of his life. No tumbleweeds obstructed
     his path. The sun was out and he knew where he was going. No sharp edge of the road
     tried to catch him looking. Still, he was on that road again, feeling the same time-warping panic.
    At the crest of the hill that fell beneath his feet at a forty-five degree angle,
     he ground to a halt. The car had plowed into the fifteen-foot brick wall that theoretically
     shielded a neighboring residential area from the noisy antics of the student body.The front end was an accordion, and cracked bricks littered the ruined roof. The windshield
     was gone. Tony covered the rest of the way at a slow walk, afraid of what he would
     find.
    Neil was picking glass out of his hair. Kipp was changing the station on the silent
     radio. “Do you want a ride home, too?” he asked casually.
    Tony discovered he had been holding his breath and released the stagnant air. No,
     this was not that night. This was only a warning. “What happened?” he asked.
    “My brakes took a holiday on the hill,” Kipp said, demonstrating the mechanical failure
     by pushing the unresisting brake pedal to the floor.
    “Coincidence?”
    “I don’t think so,” Neil said, putting his hand to a bloody spot on his forehead.
    “Are you OK?” Tony asked.
    Neil nodded. “Just banged my head. I should have had my seat belt on. I’ll be all
     right.”
    Kipp and Neil carefully extricated themselves from the front seat and sat on the curb.
     Tony could see others approaching in the distance—Joan included—and wanted to make
     a quick inspection before he had an audience. Crouching to the ground, wary of the
     glass shards, he scooted under the back wheels. The front tires were totaled but he
     would be able to see if the rear brakes had been tampered with. At first he was confused—relieved,
     in a sense—to see that the screws that bledthe brakes had not been loosened. Then he noticed the dark red fluid smeared over
     the lines themselves. A closer inspection revealed that they had been minutely punctured.
     The saboteur had been clever. Had the screws simply been loosened, the fluid would
     have run out the first time Kipp had pumped his brakes and he would have become suspicious.
     As it was, with the tiny diameter of the holes, he had had to hit the brakes four
     or five times—about the same number of speed bumps between where Kipp always parked and the hill—before losing them altogether.
    “Were they fixed?” Kipp called.
    “Yeah.” Tony pulled himself back into daylight. From the expression on his face, Kipp
     could have just finished tea with his mother. Neil, on the other hand, looked like
     he was about to be sick. “The lines were punctured—a nail, maybe even a pin. Didn’t
     you notice them slipping?”
    “Nope. My favorite song was on