Free Butter by Erin Jade Lange

hells?
and
whatever, dudes
. Then the comments began to catch me off guard.
    Wicked, man. I’ll totally watch.
    Sweet! Where’s my popcorn?
    If you go through with it, I’m in.
    Excellent. Way to take control!
    It was hard to keep track of the emotions spinning inside me, to catch one and hold it down. One second, rage:
People really don’t care if I die? Why didn’t anyone tell someone?
The next, a thrill:
Hell yeah, they’re impressed! Who else has the balls to pull this off?
And finally, fear:
What if I
don’t
pull this off?
    It was too much to feel all at once; the emotional roller coaster made me sick to my stomach. I wanted to puke right there in the computer lab. Like I said, though, I couldn’t lock on to one way to feel about it, so I just kept reading … until I saw a name that would set my course once and for all.
    Jeremy Strong had added his two cents.
    If this douche actually goes through with this I’ll eat a stick of butter myself! I know him and he’s way too big of a pussy to kill himself. And by big I mean massively beast-monster huge. Guy’s a Sasquatch. Tunein December 31 st and watch Butter EMBARRASS himself to death—by not showing up. Besides, Butter, don’t you think people have better things to do on New Year’s Eve than watch you slobber all over a pile of food and chew with your mouth open? Get a life.
    That post alone was enough to set fire to my veins, but it was followed up by a few in kind, probably friends of Jeremy’s, also calling my bluff. Those challenges—especially the one from Jeremy—were the gut-check I needed. And the reminder of why I’d made the threat in the first place.
    I would get the last word on this. On New Year’s Eve,
I
would get the last word. They could call me Sasquatch and Fat Ass and Pillsbury and Butter, but nobody was calling me a fucking liar.

Chapter 10
    â€œDeath by food” will turn up some strange results on Internet search engines. I spent the last ten minutes of lab looking up all the ways a single meal can kill a person. It turns out, not too many. Most of the information I found involved drawn-out painful bouts of food poisoning. That sounded a) unpleasant and b) pretty anticlimactic, seeing as how the goal was to carry my death live on the Internet. I didn’t have any plans for a cliff-hanger ending or hospital-room sequels. This was going to be a one-time performance.
    â€œFind anything interesting?”
    The voice startled me back into the real world. I looked up to see an empty classroom and a teacher at my side.
    â€œClass is over,” he said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and peering over my shoulder.
    I moved my hands over the keyboard as fast as my chubby fingers could fly and deleted the search history.
    â€œSorry,” I mumbled. “I thought it would be okay to look something up on the Internet since—since class is over.” I was hedging. I really didn’t know how long the teacher had been watching me—or how long class had been over, for that matter.
    â€œYes, well, these computers are not for personal use at
any
time, understood?”
    â€œUnderstood.”
    Then I stuffed my lab notes in my backpack and hoofed it into the hallway before the teacher could write up a detention slip or question me further about my search.
    I was in such a rush to get to seventh period I didn’t even see the Professor until I ran smack into him.
    Ever get body-checked by a five-foot-ten, 423-pound teenager? It looks something like this: First, everything you’re holding goes flying. In the Professor’s case, that meant a stack of sheet music and two long flute cases. Then, you stumble backward a few steps in a kind of spin. The Professor looked more graceful doing this than most, because I think maybe he studied dance back at Juilliard too. Finally, you hit the floor. Or if you’re lucky, like the Prof, there