After midnight, when Mom and Dad were asleep, I slipped out of my room and into the backyard. I sat on the edge of the porch, feet in the grass. It was early enough in the season for the weather to be pleasant this late, almost cool now that the sun was gone. In a few weeks it would be miserably humid every hour of the day.
France probably had better weather. It was a terrible reason to run off to fight scrabs, but I’d always hated the summer. I hadn’t even known that other places were cool at night, even in the summer, until I visited Mexico.
The door slid open behind me, and fear gripped my chest so intensely that I couldn’t breathe until I turned to see that it was just Laurence. I let the air out of my lungs slowly.
Laurence had something square tucked under his arm, and he used his elbow to keep it steady as he lit a match and held it to the cigarette in his mouth. He hadn’t noticed me yet, sitting at the far edge of the porch.
“Laurence,” I said.
He jerked like I’d startled him and almost dropped whatever he had under his arm. He adjusted it and tucked his lighter in his pocket.
“Hey,” he said, blowing out a breath of smoke. “What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing.”
He watched me for a moment, like he was debating saying something. Laurence’s words were never an accident.
He settled for silence and strode across the yard to where an old drum sat on top of two concrete blocks. He removed the lid.
“The neighbors hate it when you do that,” I called.
“Life’s full of disappointment.” He peered inside the barrel, then grabbed the matches from his pocket and lit one. He dropped it in and added leaves until smoke began to rise.
I stood, dead grass crunching under my feet as I walked to him. He took the square object out from underneath his arm and dropped it on the ground. It was the painting of Texas.
He slammed his foot down on it, cracking the wooden frame. He picked it up again, another crack echoing across the yard as he folded it in half. He dropped it in the barrel.
I stopped next to him, watching the black smoke curl up from the fire. “Didn’t like that painting?”
“You kept staring at it.”
He said the words to the barrel, not meeting my gaze even when I turned to him. The flames lit up his expressionless face in the darkness. I said nothing, because sometimes if you waited, Laurence would finally choose the right words.
“They should have to look at that hole,” he said after a silence so long the flames were almost gone, leaving nothing but smoke. He tossed his cigarette butt in with it. “He almost killed you. They should have to look at the evidence.”
Mom would just buy another one—that painting was ten dollars at Walmart—but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, because the words he almost killed you were vibrating through my brain. Laurence had never acknowledged the danger I was in out loud.
“I’m going to stay,” he said. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook it, and sighed dejectedly. He tossed the empty pack in the barrel.
“Why?” I asked, even though the answer seemed obvious. Obvious, but unexpected.
He met my gaze and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Unless you’re leaving too, I’m going to stay.”
“I didn’t ask you to protect me,” I said.
“I’m going to do it anyway,” he said.
You’ve done a terrible job so far, I didn’t say.
“Unless you’re leaving?” It was a question this time.
“What about the job?”
He shrugged. “There will be others. Dad can feel smug, at least.”
The wind shifted, blowing smoke in our faces, and we both stepped back, in opposite directions. I stared at him through the smoky haze; his eyes fixed on a point at the other side of the yard. When I looked, there was nothing.
I wondered if there would always be an excuse not to go. Maybe Dad had planned to leave when he was twenty. Maybe there were jobs in Oklahoma or road trips planned but never taken. A different life plotted but never lived.
I thought of the street kids at the church, the group home I could be placed at with one phone call, of Grayson St. John and beating a scrab with a plastic vacuum attachment. There were good reasons not to do all of them, to stick with the danger I knew. It would be so easy to get stuck forever.
“Can I borrow your phone?” I asked.
Laurence handed it over without question and then turned and walked back inside.
I went to the website. I pressed my finger to the phone number. I was actually doing this.
“What’s up? You got the Grayson St. John fight squad hotline.”
The man who answered the phone sounded like he was having the best day of his life. I scurried to the far corner of the yard, as far away from the house as I could get.
“Um, hi,” I said quietly. “I’m Clara. I’m interested in joining?”
“That’s awesome. I’m Victor.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Where are you?” Victor asked. “Did you look at the list of charter buses on our website?”
“Yeah. I’m in Dallas.”
“Perfect. You’ll go to Atlanta. So here’s how it’ll work. I’ll get some details from you—age, race, gender, current address, combat background, all that jazz, and you’ll be all set to try out when you get here. Do you have a passport?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. We’re asking that you bring that with you to Atlanta. If you pass, you won’t be returning home before going to Paris. Do you have any questions?”
“Um.” What are my chances of dying? Have I lost my mind? Are you people sure you know what you’re doing? “It’s not a problem that I’m only seventeen?”
“Nope. As long as your parents are cool with it, we’re cool with it.”
“How are you going to know if they’re cool with it?”
“I’ll email you a consent form. Just have a parent or guardian sign it and bring it with you or email it back. You’ll need to include their phone number too. We’ll call to follow up.”
There was no way that Mom or Dad would sign a consent form.
But there was also no way for anyone on the St. John teams to know if I forged the signature and put Laurence’s number down instead. He never answered his phone anyway. And his outgoing voicemail message just said “leave a message if you want, but I don’t check them.”
“Cool?” Victor said.
“Cool,” I said. “Where will we be going? If I make it, I mean.”
“I can’t answer that one. Certainly not the US, but other than that, it depends on where your team is assigned. You’ll all start in Paris, but we’ll have teams in the UK, certain parts of Europe, and China.”
“OK.”
“And be aware that the US government is extremely skeptical of what we’re doing, and they are monitoring our activities very closely. The NSA is probably listening to us right now.” He raised his voice a little. “What’s up, NSA? How’s the weather over there?”
I laughed, then quickly covered the phone so they couldn’t hear it. Maybe you shouldn’t laugh at the NSA.
“But most importantly, we need you to understand that this is a one-way ticket. We won’t pay for return tickets until you’ve been with us for at least a year. You’ll have to get back to the States on your own if you want to leave before that, and plane tickets to the US are outrageously expensive and hard to come by these days. Once you’re there, it will likely be very hard to get back.”
That might have been the most appealing reason to do this so far.
“Why don’t I get some information from you while you’re thinking about it. We’re gathering info on everyone who calls us. Voluntary, of course. And keep in mind that our buddy at the NSA is getting it all too.”
“Sure,” I said, suppressing another laugh.
“Full name? First, middle, last.”
“Clara Rivera Pratt.”
“Gender? This one’s optional, if you’d rather not answer.”
“Female.”
“Race?”
“Hispanic and white.”
“I don’t know if I can click more than one . . . Oh, I can! Perfect. Date of birth?”
He asked a few more questions and hummed as he inputted my info. I gripped the phone, wondering if I’d lost my mind.
“The Dallas bus leaves tomorrow at ten a.m.,” Victor said. “If you miss it, you can find your own way to Atlanta, but we can’t help.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Sorry, it’s after midnight, isn’t it? I mean today. Saturday.” Keys clicked on a keyboard. “So what do you think, Clara? Should I sign you up?”
I looked at the house. It was dark except for the small barred window of Laurence’s bedroom. It wasn’t a bad house. There were worse ones in the neighborhood.
Mom always liked to point out how things could be worse. We could be homeless, or run out of food at the end of every month, or we could have been born in the UK or Europe, where scrabs attacked constantly. We might get slapped around occasionally, but there was always someone who had it worse.
But this felt like the worst. The things that my mom had decided to accept were as bad as it could get for me. This house with the man who was allowed to terrorize us, over and over, was the worst thing I could imagine.
Victor had remained quiet, even though it had been at least thirty seconds since he’d asked his question.
“It can’t be worse than this, right?” I whispered.
I thought he’d laugh, or make a joke about how fighting scrabs was no picnic. Instead, he let out a breath of air that sounded like agreement. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean.”