Ch. 3: Fair Play for Evader

Harvey awoke early to find her roommate asleep in his bed on the other side of the room. Daxx was laying shirtless and upside down, pillow over his head and blanket laying on the floor, exposing a doughy torso. Rather than take in the scene any longer, Harvey opted to jump out of bed and grab a tofu scramble from the Chiller, the school’s small grill and cafe.

Noshing on her vegan breakfast, Harvey took a look at Committee documents she had scanned to her phone to learn just a bit more about the murder suspect, James Leonard Twill.

Looking into it, Harvey learned that Twill was a transfer student—not from any of the seven other institutions in the Great Schools Association that spanned across New England, but from Spoon Union Military Academy in Spoon Union, Virginia. He had transferred in his second-to-last year of schooling.

As a new fourth-year student at Moorehaven, Twill was a decent student, with a GPA of 3.7. He took the regular course of classes, English, Math, etc. Suddenly, there was one class that caught Harvey’s eye: Mandarin. That wasn’t a language that the school offered, at least not that she was aware of. Although, there was one possible exception Harvey gathered from her transfer orientation program: the CMT.

Could it have been that Twill was a student volunteer with the Crisis Management Team? The CMT offered the rare exception to the normal course of studies. The justification was that CMT students were given a special set of skills in order to accelerate their training for presumed career pathways into military intelligence. Outside of the Ivy Leagues, the one other major track for Andover kids was the military.

Harvey looked up Twill’s name on social media. Multiple accounts came up. It was difficult to tell which belonged to the genuine Twill. Two were obvious fakes, ridiculing the would-be killer of Josh Kilpatrick. One more had very little information. It looked like an account that had been started but never used. Then, she found the page she thought to be associated with his authentic account.

Harvey clicked on a photo of Twill, gazed at the stern face of the suspected assassin situated beneath a mat of fluffy dark brown, almost black hair. His blue eyes were striking and serious, creating a sharp contrast between two comically oversized ears and an prodigious nose. His head, too, was a bit too large for his body, which, according to a police report included in the committee documents, stood at about 5’11. Her health class informed her that that was near the average height for an adult male, though Twill was only 18 when he was arrested.

His arrest was an odd one. The case was closed almost immediately after the incident. Twill was questioned by the head of homicide. There would typically have been a record of such questioning. In this case, not only was the suspect of a public shooting questioned for less than five hours, but there were no notes, nor any recording of the interrogation, and his lawyer was not present—a violation of his constitutional rights.

The face stared back at Harvey, communicating an endless series of layers. At the center was a gnawing void. If she peered long enough, she wondered if either the truth might reveal itself or she would be led into incomprehensible madness.

***

After class, Harvey decided she had time to check out one scene described in the Committee docs. It was Lisa Pease Hall, a house just off campus, where a few students roomed, selected mostly by chance, and where several school clubs held their regular meetings. It was there that Twill both resided and handed out “pro-Marxist” pamphlets, as the Wilson Report described them.

It had not yet begun to rain, yet the October air was dank and crisp. Harvey bundled up in her hat and hoodie and trekked across campus, a barely bright spot in red and grey haze.

Harvey walked up to the front door of the two-story, red brick building, where she encountered, on an adjacent wall, a bulletin board covered in a rainbow of flyers for various activities. Next to the entrance was a list of the students boarding there. Twill’s name was no longer on the list, but there was a name that Harvey had recently become familiar with: Donovan Lanning.

Still pinned to the bulletin board was one of Twill’s old posters, stamped with the house’s address. The poster was for recruitment purposes, with several of the phone number tags at the bottom of the paper torn off. It advertised a job handing out pamphlets for $10 an hour on a Sunday roughly nine months ago, which was about two months before Kilpatrick was killed.

Harvey looked at the entrance to Pease Hall and saw that a rubber wedge had been used to prop the door slightly open so that students could come and go easily without the tedious hassle of using a keycard. Door propping was one of those things that was against dorm rules but widely ignored nonetheless. Harvey unpinned the poster from the pin board and took it into the house.

Inside the darkened common room, two scrawny figures in plaid pajama pants and t-shirts sank deeply into a worn leather couch and ate bowls of cereal while watching stand-up comedy on the shared TV. The boys munched silently as Harvey stepped into the living area and sat on another worn couch perpendicular to theirs.

She waited for a commercial break and asked in a wavering voice, “Hey, you guys know anything about this?” Hands trembling, she held up the flyer.

One of them barely glanced over before scoffing in a faltering teen voice, “Twill’s commie garbage? Yeah. Thank god he’s fucking dead.”

“Now he won’t be handing that shit out in front of the house and scaring all the hoes,” the other chimed in.

“So, it looks like he paid kids to hand out his pamphlets?” Harvey asked.

“Just until the school paper arrived to cover the show. After they took a couple pictures, Twill would say the other kids could go.”

Unlike most school clubs, filled with members and always trying to pull more funds from the administration, Twill’s “Fair Play for Evader Academy” group seemed to have the opposite dynamic, a sole member with plenty of money to dole out.

“Hey,” Harvey said with a sudden thought, “did Donovan Lanning live here at the same time as Twill? I saw his name on the door.”

“Yeah, they were roommates.” That was a surprising detail conveniently left out of the Wilson Report.

“Did they get along?”

“Who the fuck knows,” one offered.

The other looked over at her and, possibly overcome with some small sense of pity, replied, “I mean, they did both spend a lot of time in their room at the same time and I never heard any fights. And I guess if you’re sharing a room with a loudmouthed commie, that’s a good sign.”

“He’s got a better roommate now, though,” the other one laughed grimly. “By the name of ‘nobody.’”

“Thanks, guys,” Harvey concluded. With neither student acknowledging her departure, she walked up the carpeted stairs leading from the common room to a row of dorms. The social interaction was over, but Harvey’s nerves remained as she continued down the hall, looking at the names on each door until she came to Lanning’s. Only his name appeared with a blank space beneath it, presumably the slot where Twill’s name would have appeared. Underneath that was a picture of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. Taping the Trump printout to the door was a sticker depicting a U.S. flag, all black and white save for one blue line meant to represent support for law enforcement.

Harvey explored the building a little further, walking down the carpeted hall until she arrived at a window, located at the top of a set of stairs heading down to an exit. Looking out the window, across the street and just on-campus, she saw the nondescript CMT building blending innocuously into the other structures. Next to it was the indifferent and grey, modernist Brussell building, which housed the Office of Discipline. The large cubic edifice that was Brussell stood slightly taller than the rest and maintained a panopticon of windows that encircled its top floor. Brussell sat in front of the Campus Safety facility, which shared a gothic site with the mail room, janitorial, maintenance and other departments that Harvey couldn’t remember. Further in the distance was the omnipresent Admissions ziggurat, anchoring the rest of the campus in its orbit.

She then descended the stairs and, through the back entrance of the building, exited into the red wet air, as the sky started to drizzle. Wandering toward campus and away from her previous social interactions, her pulse slowed, her palms dried, and the seas of her stomach returned to a state of calm.

She walked past the CMT building and saw the school bookstore, glass door shaded by a blue and white awning, where Twill was employed under student manager Tad Blithe and full-time shop supervisor Bill Thompson. Thompson was well-known on campus as a sixty-five-year-old curmudgeon willing to engage any student in a political debate, during which Thompson would always take a far-right-wing stance. He decried social welfare programs in particular and socialism more broadly. Without a post as a teacher, this may have been his best avenue of indoctrination, Harvey figured.

Across the paved walkway from the bookstore was the immaculate new track and field building, where, according to the Committee report, Twill would frequent, sometimes when he was meant to be working. The Wilson Report highlighted the fact that he would check out a rifle from the gun cage for skeet shooting.

For a student, let alone a Marxist, planning to kill the student assembly president, the center of the school’s Safety-Intelligence Complex would seem like a less than ideal location to spend one’s time practicing marksmanship. This, combined with the idea that a Marxist could board with a right-wing student like Lanning, was more than a little suspect.

***

Harvey found that her regular table on the second floor of the library was free. Now that she had some background to go on, Harvey decided to trace her original lead in this case: Donovan Lanning. To learn more about his activities, she messaged Hack Klein on social media. She was grateful for the protective cushion of internet that separated her from Hack, the interpersonal easing that online spaces provided. It allowed her to become much braver than she would have otherwise been.

While she waited for Klein to message back, Harvey did a cursory Internet search. Donovan Lanning, a fourth-year student, had penciled-on eyebrows, one that was sometimes drawn higher than the other, and wore a red lace-front wig. Lanning was a member of few organizations but was featured prominently on a social media page for the school’s car club, Moorehaven Motorsports. In the group’s online photos, he was pictured standing alongside his souped-up Kia Stinger GT with a caption describing the school-sanctioned races he’d won. A small purple heart tattoo on his left hand caught her eye.

“What’s up?” came a chipper voice from her periphery, startling Harvey from her reading. It was the other enby student she knew at Moorehaven, Kinzly Brown. It wasn’t until Harvey met them that she even learned what non-binary meant and realized that it probably applied to her, as well.

“Oh, hey, Kinzly,” Harvey said. Unlike Harvey, Kinzly wasn’t afraid to experiment with gender fluidity. One day, they might tape down their chest, hide their tightly curled hair under a hat and wear a flannel and jeans. The next, they’d wear a girly dress and makeup, highlighting their almond-shaped eyes with eyeliner. If Harvey spent more than a moment’s linger looking at them, she found herself lost in the supernovae that were Kinzly’s golden brown irises.

“Whatcha workin’ on?” they asked.

“Oh, just some shitty project for Journalism.”

“Find what you’re looking for?”

“Not yet,” Harvey replied. She still hadn’t told them about the real story she’d gotten stuck in. There were already so many conspiracy theories about Josh Kilpatrick’s death that if you talked about it, you sounded like a nut.

“Oh well. Good luck!”

“Thanks. How are you doing?” Harvey realized that, unlike most of her face-to-face interactions, those with Kinzly didn’t result in a maelstrom of reflux and anxiety but instead caused a temporary break in the storm in which birds, moths and other pollinators could commune before a brilliant pastoral sunset. Colloquially, this feeling was referred to as “butterflies in the tummy.”

“Good! I’m about to go to the music studio and do my voice lessons.”

“Cool!” Harvey said, excited to learn about Kinzly’s musical talents.

Before she could ask what sort of musical style they were involved in, Kinzly added, “K, G-T-G! I hope you can finish and get the fuck outta here soon. See ya in zoology tomorrow!”

“See ya,” Harvey said timidly, taking in the lingering feeling of her tummy’s butterflies and waiting for Kinzly to disappear before returning to whatever this was.

Next, Harvey found the video page for the school’s auto club. There were several videos showcasing Donovan Lanning’s ability to crisscross a track, swerving between brightly colored cones.

On one of the club’s social media pages, she discovered an event dating back about seven months or so. In fact, it took place on the date of the Kilpatrick assassination: March 15, 2024. The event details listed all of the Moorehaven drivers that would be participating in the race but lacked the name of one of its most highly decorated members: Donovan Lanning. Harvey wasn’t the first to notice it, as several commenters had written questions on the event page asking where Lanning was, given the importance of the race. The group administrator responded that Lanning couldn’t attend the event, as he was going to be in Plymouth ice skating that day.

Harvey pulled up another video of Lanning from his personal page, not racing, but assembling what he called an improvisatory explosive device that he suggested was for fishing. Connecting a fuse, Lanning laughed, “It’s like blowing up fish in a barrel.”

It was startling footage, but not completely unsurprising, given the proclivity for hunting and fishing among some of the school’s right-wing students, some of whom went on regular group trips into the New England wilderness with their fathers as a part of archaic bonding rituals.

The next video featured Lanning, cast in a bizarre green glow, speaking into a webcam about the “evils” of a student group at Moorehaven’s long-standing rival, Evader Academy. He was referencing what was nominally referred to as “the Evader Fiasco,” an incident that had occurred just a few weeks before Kilpatrick’s death.

Those weeks were tumultuous ones. Three years prior, Evader had seen an upheaval in relation to the politics of its student assembly. The school administration had actually eliminated the student assembly as a nuisance to daily educational affairs. There were no more student elections. School clubs were even pared down and the administration was weighing the possibility of mandating prescribed class schedules to students. In essence, the students were unable to make any decisions regarding their own educations.

For your typical public high school, this might not seem all that crucial, but all institutions within the Great Schools Association were meant to train their students to be autonomous young adults, capable of making important decisions by the time they graduated and headed on to the Ivy Leagues. Student governments were essential to this task. Within two to three years’ time, the student body formed a collective called the Evader Student Union (ESU), led by second-year student Filipa Castaneda.

The ESU began holding sit-ins, walk-outs and other forms of protest not only at the school but at the homes of teachers and administrators. The list of demands started to grow beyond academic autonomy to include curricula with a more diverse set of political views (meaning more left-leaning content). The students also urged Evader and all schools within the GSA to divest from their fossil fuel holdings. Castaneda likened the endowment’s investments in oil and gas as a commitment to filicide of their students and ecocide of the planet.

This was the atmosphere ahead of the fiasco. Then, three weeks before Kilpatrick was assassinated, an incident occurred at Evader. Details about what happened were difficult to apprehend from outside sources. At one point, there was a bomb threat called in and students had to be evacuated for the afternoon. At Moorehaven, the CMT described the ESU as a leftist eco-terror organization intent on committing violence against Evader students. The CMT even went so far as to suggest, via an alert published in The Haven Maven, that splinter cells of the ESU had formed at Moorehaven Academy and were intent on forming their own eco-terrorist student union.

To sever a possible connection between the ESU and Moorehaven students, the CMT dispatched a small group of Crisis Officers to Evader to have Filipa Castaneda expelled. The intervention nearly had Evader launch a lawsuit against Moorehaven, but the Great Schools Association stepped in and mitigated the matter between the two school administrations.

After the incident, Josh Kilpatrick hosted a student pride rally, in which he proclaimed to the student body, in his non-rhotic, almost transatlantic accent, his wish to see the CMT “splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds.” He even leveraged the financial and political will of his parents to have CMT Director Aaron Douglas, not a student but an actual adult school employee, fired by Moorehaven, blaming what Kilpatrick deemed “the Evader Fiasco” on Douglas for clearly exceeding the department’s charter and possibly violating state law.

As a veteran of the CMT, Douglas had served with the organization for over twenty years, dating back to his time at the CMT’s predecessor organization, the Office of Security Affairs. Douglas’s firing made state news and sent a shock through the Andover community, given Douglas’s ties with local businesses, from small Andover retailers to Raytheon and Pfizer.

Needless to say, Kilpatrick proved himself to be more than your average ineffectual student assembly president with his influence flowing into the school administration itself.

Lanning’s video was a response to Kilpatrick’s speech. He railed against what he described as a “soft, commie pinko” response to “socialism infecting every school in the Great Schools Association.”

Harvey looked for more videos that could provide insight into Lanning’s world. The rest was mostly stuff about his racing prowess, aside from one brief and grainy clip of Lanning in what looked like a monk’s robe among several other people performing an odd ritual or seance. The video was only about 20 seconds long and was hosted on a social media page with no clarifying description. It was only smoke, chanting, and the beginning of a high-pitched yelp when the clip cut off.

By the sixth or seventh time the clip had ended, Harvey was back at her dorm and the rain had begun to pick up. She held up her ID to open the door to the building. In her room, Harvey found Daxx sitting in front of the TV, playing Call of Duty: Opium Ops with a headset on and mashing buttons on the controller of his Xbox. Classic rock was blaring from his computer. He shouted over the Counting Crows, “Hey, Harvey, how’s it goin’, man?”

“I’m alright. Mind if I turn down the volume a little bit?” Harvey asked, to which her roommate responded with a sigh.

Harvey sat down at her desk and plugged in her laptop, which was on a near-permanent 0% battery life, requiring that she keep her charger plugged in at all times. A half-hour had passed, and Harvey still hadn’t received a response from Hack Klein, so she decided to venture into the storm, walk into town, and grab something to eat.

***

Jay’s Pizone had a heavy metal theme, nightmarish ghouls playing guitars before a lobotomized crowd of cult members. The elaborate mural was brought to life by the shop’s fluorescent black lights. The shop’s owner and staff, though barely present, were decked out in what looked like tattered leather and denim biker gear. The whole scene was off-putting to the extent that if the food wasn’t so good, Harvey probably wouldn’t keep coming back.

Harvey was well into her third large, greasy and floppy slice of plain cheese pizza when she received a social media notification on her phone. It was a message from Hack.

“Hiya,” Klein wrote.

Harvey asked him about the fight that brought him to the Wellness Center, explaining that she’d been there that day and that she was considering writing a story for the school paper.

“Why would I talk to you about anything? I don’t even know you,” Klein wrote.

“You responded to my message, didn’t you?”

“Well I didn’t know what it was about. Now that I know, I might as well just ignore you.”

“Alright,” Harvey said. She thought for a minute. She wasn’t normally this rude, but it seemed like the only way to get him to talk: “I’m going to be writing this article regardless of whether or not you want to talk to me. If you want to provide your take, then we can at least ensure that the article is accurate.”

There was a pause before Klein started typing again. “How ‘bout this? I’ll talk to you on — what do you call it? I’ll tell you but you can’t use it in the article unless I say it’s okay.”

“Off the record,” Harvey clarified.

“Yeah, off the record.”

“For background.”

“Sure, background. So, you don’t get anything wrong. And I want to see whatever you write before you publish so I don’t get in trouble.”

“Deal,” Harvey typed cheerfully.

“What do you want to know?” Klein asked.

“So, I was looking at your social media and it says that you and Donovan have been friends for 10 years,” Harvey typed.

“At least 10.”

“And in all of those years, did Donovan ever hit you?”

“Not once,” Klein replied.

“There’s my problem. Something just isn’t adding up. If he’d never hit you before, why would he do it then? And why so brutally?”

There was a delay. No bouncing ellipses to indicate that he was typing. Just nothing. As she waited for his response, she visited his profile page and went through his pictures. Though he often appeared pretty dour, nervous, even a bit pathetic, Klein had an honest look about him and it seemed like he’d received some honors in school and some sort of medal for his Crisis Management work. His cheeks hung loosely from his face. His eyes possessed a certain sincerity that you’d expect from a student who believed himself to have a properly calibrated moral compass.

The three dots began to jitter.

“It was an argument about phone bills,” Klein wrote.

“Just phone bills? That’s why he hit you?”

“Ok, well not just phone bills. It involved more than that,” he typed.

“How much more?”

“We’d both been drinking, and Donovan was especially drunk. So, when we got to his office, he starts bitchin’ about every little thing. I had borrowed his phone to record a class lecture and he complained about the data usage ‘cause I watched some TV after class. Then he said I went through his files; you know texts and emails and pictures.”

There was a slight pause before he continued typing.

“And, well, in all of our years as friends, I’d never once done something like that. Thinking he didn’t trust me like that pissed me off. So, I guess I sorta blew up at him.”

“What’d you do?” Harvey asked.

“That’s when I told him he’d better not talk to me like that. I started calling him out on stuff. I told him I’d seen all the people coming in and out of his office all last semester. That’s when he hit me.”

“Just because you remembered some people?”

“That’s all it took. He went ape shit on that one.”

“Who were these people you saw?”

“Oh, there were tons of them. It was like a circus in there. Mostly people I didn’t recognize. Couple kids I assumed were students. Some adults. Aaron Douglas came in once or twice before and after the Evader fiasco. Nutt McGillicuddy, his deputy, too. Just a lot of folks. Coming in and going out. Coming and going. They all looked the same to me.”

It seemed to Harvey that, when someone wanted to spill the beans, they spilled the beans. They were just waiting for the right person to come along and give them permission to do so.

“And there were all of these other characters. You know who practically lived there?”

And then he stopped. No more words. No more ellipses. Harvey decided to lend a hand.

“James Twill?”

There was a pause before Klein replied in the affirmative. “Yeah, he was there. Sometimes he’d be meeting with Lanning with the door closed.”

“What was Lanning doing with all of these people in his office?”

“Hell, he was running one hell of a circus.”

“And Crisis Management work?”

“There wasn’t much going on, but when there was, I’d take care of it. That’s why I was there.”

“Hack, what exactly was going on at Lanning’s office?” Harvey asked.

There was another long pause and then Klein did a complete 180 and replied with “gtg.”

“Gotta go? What’s the problem with going into what happened at Lanning’s office?”

“Nothin’ was happening. Listen, I already told you plenty.”

“You were fine telling me everything up until now. What’s the difference if you tell me a little more?”

“What’s the problem? What’s the problem? We’re calling the goddamn school administration onto our backs. Do I need to spell it out? I could get expelled—or worse. So could you.”

Then Hack Klein blocked Harvey, turning his profile page into a virtual wall in front of her eyes.

Next Chapter: The Network