“A WHOLE WEEK of sitting here and nothing,” Barry said.
This was the second Monday afternoon in a row that he and Clyde sat in his beat-up El Camino parked across from Booker Middle School along with the cars of parents. He had thought it would be a simple thing to spot those kids again, but the more days they sat there staring, the more all these kids started to look the same. There were so many that poured out of the doors of this school, and there were different exits on all sides of the building, too.
“This is never going to work,” Barry said.
“We’ll find them,” Clyde said.
Clyde dug his hands into his sweatshirt pocket, making Barry flinch. A shrieking chaotic mass of boys and girls ran down the sidewalk, jumped off the stairs, clustered in groups. Maybe if he could get them to line up and stand still for a minute, but they might as well be identical for as much as he could tell them apart.
“You’re a high-strung kind of guy, aren’t you?” Clyde said.
Barry bit at a cuticle. “Is this your idea of fun? ’Cause it’s sure not mine—”
“Purple backpack,” Clyde said and pointed.
Barry followed the direction of his finger without much enthusiasm. They’d seen purple backpacks before. And the longer they looked for these kids the more he wondered if maybe the backpack had been black or green.
The girl with the backpack was waiting for something, and that was when Barry spotted the boy crouched down, tying his shoe. That poky bit of hair standing up on his head—he’d watched that thing bob around when he’d been running behind it.
“What do you think?” Barry asked.
Clyde had the look of a cat narrowing in on his prey.
“Bingo,” he said.
“Bingo,” Barry agreed.