MAMA LOOKS DOWN at the handcuffs with shame all over her face. But with Mama, shame sometimes looks an awful lot like self-pity, and I’m tired of seeing it. I wave her off when she tries to explain.
She already made her excuses, and I haven’t decided yet if I believe her. If she’s lying, I can’t bear it, and if she’s telling the truth, then my temper tantrum looks foolish.
I remind her that visiting hours are short and my story is long. It’s difficult to get Mama to focus on anyone other than herself, but she makes an effort to stay still and listen. I appreciate it.
“I told you not to thank me yet,” I say. “For the violin.”
“You must have been in a lot of pain.”
She’s making excuses for me, as always, but she’s not wrong.
“I was in a lot of trouble,” I say. “I needed you, and when I heard you . . .”
“I know.”
My voice cracks. “I was so mad at you.”
“I know.”
The chain of the handcuffs scrapes the table as Mama stretches her hands toward me and I pull mine away.
“But I am sorry about the violin,” I say.
“Oh, Sam.”
Mama is crying now. Whimpering, really. It’s pathetic, and I feel sick to think that about my own mother, but even the other inmates and their families are looking away uncomfortably. The visitation room is very crowded today, and I wish she would keep it together. It’s not good to show weakness behind bars. She’s the one who told me that, after all.
“I just hate being here again.” Mama sniffles and looks around at all the gray. “This place . . .”
“You hate being here?”
“I know, honey, I know. I’m sorry.” She flaps her hands to settle me down, as if I’m the one making a scene here. “Of course you hate it, too. Of course you do.” She cries fresh tears.
I know in this moment that I’m stronger than Mama. And not because I don’t cry, but because after everything life has thrown at us—or, more accurately, after everything Mama has thrown at our lives—I’m not so breakable. Mama is glass that shatters too easily. I am stone that doesn’t crack easily enough.
We’re both screwed up that way, but sometimes—like right now—I’m glad to be me, if only because it reminds me that I’m not her.
The words kept repeating in my head. My fault, my fault, my fault.
I said it inwardly with every weary step. We’d been walking for an hour and had covered almost no ground, the soft soil working our calves until they screamed for relief, forcing us to move at a crawl.
After I’d destroyed my cell phone, Andi had held up her own and dealt the deathblow. “Battery’s dead.”
“How can it be dead?” Boston had cried.
“Because I never turned it off ! And because some idiot made me keep it on for the last hour, searching for a signal.”
“Only because some other idiot threw mine out a window!”
“Okay, so it’s settled,” York had said. “You’re both idiots.”
I had said nothing but My fault, my fault, my fault.
And so we walked.
The boys wanted to head to the place they called Pit Stop, but by the time we saw signs for Pitson the traffic on the freeway was heavy, and we all agreed our “friends” might be there waiting for us. There was a small argument about whether it was worth it to get inside a building with a phone and call 9-1-1, but then we would have to wait who-knows-how-long for sheriff’s deputies out here in the boonies. It was too risky, someone had argued, and whoever it was had won the fight.
I hardly paid attention. I was too busy thinking about Mama, wondering if she was in a bar right this minute—or, worse, in some drug dealer’s filthy living room, buying God-knows-what to kill her worries. Little did she know I was carrying all the drugs she could ever want on my back. I was Mama’s compass for sobriety, her true north, and when I hadn’t come home last night, she’d lost her way.
My fault.
“I need to stop,” Boston panted. He shrugged off his backpack and dropped to the ground next to it.
We all collapsed in response, lying down right in the dirt.
“How long is it going to take us to walk all the way home?” Andi asked.
“Years,” York said.
Boston sat up and rested his forearms on his knees. “Sixteen hours. Give or take.”
“Give or take what?” Andi asked.
“An hour. But that’s only if we keep up our pace.”
“Our snail’s pace,” York complained.
“How do you know it’s sixteen hours?” I said. My throat was dry, and it came out as a croak.
“Hey, look, it speaks!” Andi scooted over to me. “Thought maybe you were going the way of those monks or whatever, who take a vow of silence.”
“It can’t be sixteen hours,” I groaned.
Boston scratched his head. “Well, it’s an hour to the cabin in good traffic, at a driving speed of sixty-five miles per hour, so at a walking speed of—”
“Spare me your calculations,” I said. “I meant we can’t go sixteen hours. We’ll die of dehydration.”
Not to mention lack of sleep.
“Obviously,” Boston said, looking wounded. “We’ll find a phone or a bus stop before then.”
“A bus stop on the highway?” York said. “I know every inch of this road, and there’s no bus stop. There’s no nothing. We should have gone into Pitson, like I said.”
“There are houses,” Boston countered. “Farms and stuff. We’ll knock on a door, use the phone, and wait for the police.” He stood and kicked his backpack-load of heroin. “I’m sick of running, anyway.”
Me, too.
“Uh, guys?” York said.
“Forget running,” Andi said. “I’m sick of walking.”
“Guys?”
“I can’t walk one more step,” I agreed.
Boston stretched. “Well, if we want to stop running, we have to start walking.”
York was on his feet, shielding his eyes against the sun and looking up the highway from the direction we’d come. He dropped his hand to reveal pure panic on his face, then he turned to us and shouted a single word.
“RUN!”
I didn’t ask questions. The last time York told us to run it had saved our lives, for all I knew, so I stood and stumbled blindly after him. Andi and Boston were faster, and I panicked when I realized I was bringing up the rear. I had no idea what we were running from, but I didn’t slow down to look. Mama and I watched a lot of horror movies, and the person in back of the pack always bit it. Monster bait, Mama called them. And then she would tell me, If you’re ever in trouble, you only have to be faster than the slowest person. Parenting, by Melissa Cherie.
Just when I thought my legs were going to fall off from pumping so hard, York dove behind a low stack of round hay bales. I landed on my stomach, dry-heaving. Everyone was prone on the ground except York, who crawled up enough to peek over the top of the hay. Thank God for harvest season, or this field would have provided no cover.
But cover from what?
I crept up next to York and saw a pickup with huge wheels stopped on the side of the road, just yards from where we’d been resting.
“That looks like the truck that was at the cabin,” York said.
“Did they see us?” Boston whimpered in panic.
“Did they see us running and flailing around like idiots?” Andi huffed, still out of breath. “No, I’m sure they didn’t notice a thing.”
“Are we sure it’s them?” I asked.
Andi joined our peekaboo position and pulled her binocular glasses from her messenger bag. “Super Zooms say affirmative,” she said.
“This isn’t a joke!” Boston snapped.
“You’re the joke,” Andi said, passing him the Super Zooms. “But take a look. They’re leaving.”
Boston slid the funny glasses onto his face, but I didn’t need binoculars to see the truck begin to roll forward. I heard gravel under the wheels as the pickup pulled back onto the highway, then it pulled an abrupt U-turn and zoomed back up the road the way it had come.
“Where are they going?” I asked. “Why would they leave?”
“Maybe they don’t want to murder us in broad daylight,” Boston said.
“Or they decided we’re not worth the trouble,” Andi offered.
I watched the truck’s bumper disappear into the tunnel of trees where the woods swallowed the road. I hoped Andi was right.
York stood up the second the truck was out of sight. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Go where?” Boston stood too and threw his arms out.
“I don’t know,” York said. “But we can’t sit here with our heads in the hay like a bunch of dumb ostriches who think that if you can’t see your enemy, your enemy can’t see you.”
“That’s not why ostriches bury their heads,” Boston said. “They dig for pebbles to help with their digestion, and—”
“Wow, dude, we so don’t care right now,” Andi said.
“Let’s just start moving.” York nudged Boston. “You said there’d be a farm with a phone. Here’s the farm. Let’s find the phone.”
I got to my feet and spun in a circle. I saw nothing but black soil and butter-colored hay for miles in every direction. More than likely, we were sitting in the middle of a corporate farm, which meant hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of corn or soybeans, and zero farmhouses.
York snatched the Super Zooms from Boston’s face and put them on his own. “There are buildings back there.” He pointed deep into the fields, away from the road.
Anything away from the road sounded good to me. I started walking in the direction York had indicated, but a cry from Boston stopped me.
“My backpack!” he said, his hands scrabbling at his back. “I left it by the road!”
I reached for my own pack, still firmly in place. No wonder I had been running so slowly.
York still had his, too, and he hiked it higher on his shoulders. “It’s fine. Just go get it and come right—”
“No,” Andi said vehemently. “I told you guys to leave that shit alone from the beginning. Leave it now.”
Boston protested, “But it’s evidence—”
“It’s not worth it!” she shouted. “We have enough evidence right here.” She pointed at the bags York and I were carrying.
“She’s right,” I said. I knew we were mostly innocent, but it felt more true if we weren’t all hauling heroin on our backs. Less is more seemed to apply here. I looked at Boston. “They might be waiting for us just up the road. If they come after you, your dead body might be the evidence.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” York said. “They’re not going to kill us.”
“Not alongside a busy highway, anyway,” I muttered. “But I’d rather not take my chances, thanks.”
“But they didn’t even shoot at us back at the cabin,” York pointed out.
“Well, then they’re practically good Samaritans!” I cried.
“I just meant—”
“Look,” I cut him off. “Let’s go see what those buildings are back there—see if one has a phone. You can keep an eye on the bag with the mad-scientist glasses.”
“Super Zooms,” Andi corrected.
York peeked through the glasses to confirm that he could see the pack in the distance, then propped them on his head and reluctantly agreed. “One of those buildings had better be a house.”
No such luck.
It was a three-mile hike at least to the cluster of buildings, but the Super Zooms told us a mile in that there was no reason to keep walking.
“Tractor storage,” York said, passing the glasses around the group so we could see for ourselves. Long, low garages, wide-open on one side, housed lines of green-and-yellow John Deere machines. Next to them, a barn-sized warehouse was also open—and completely empty.
The only other building within view was a tall metal cylinder off to our left—a grain silo.
“Great,” Boston said. “Now—”
“Don’t say ‘now what,’” York warned. “The next person to ask that gets clocked in the face.”
“I’ll tell you now what,” Andi said deliberately. “Now, we rest.”
“Right here?” Boston asked.
“No.” Andi pointed at the silo. “In there.”
The inside of the metal tube was hot, the air choked with the dust of old hay. It took a few sneezes for my nose to adjust, but then I gratefully parked my butt on the dirt floor and leaned against the curved wall.
No more walking, no more looking. Let someone come find us instead. Hell, let the crooked cops come find us.
I was past caring.
My eyelids slipped closed, but popped open again when Andi snapped a finger in my face.
“Rest!” she ordered. “But don’t sleep.”
York dropped to the ground in defiance and rested his head in my lap. “Can I use you as a pillow?” he asked.
I was past caring about that, too.
“Whatever,” I said.
“Not whatever,” Andi said. “No sleep—sleep—sleeee—” Her words were choked off by her own deep yawn.
Boston was already curled into a ball on the other side of the silo, and Andi looked around at us, defeat on her face.
“Fine,” she said with another yawn. She stretched out on the floor. “But just for a few minutes.”
The sun had moved to the other side of the sky by the time we woke up.
I WAKE UP on a soft leather couch, comfy but confused. I’m used to the scratchy motel-room sofas and the busy buzz of the Cartoon Network on TV. It’s too quiet here. I rub my eyes and remember we have a house now—or, what did Grandma call it? An apartment.
I’m hungry, I realize, and pad off to the kitchen in my pink footie pajamas. Mama promised pancakes every day in this new place. Mama is not in the kitchen, but something is cooking on the stove. It does not smell like pancakes. It does not smell like anything good at all. I don’t want to eat that, whatever it is. I need to get rid of it so Mama doesn’t make me.
I stand on my tiptoes, but my fingertips only brush the handle of the pot—just like in my kindergarten class, where all the other boys and girls can reach the top toy shelf except for me. The smell from the pot is making my tummy hurt. I pull out the drawers next to the stove one by one to make a set of stairs, but on the second stair the drawer breaks, and I trip forward.
“Sam.”
I am falling toward the stove in slow motion. My face is going to hit the pot. No, no! I don’t want to smell it. I thrust my tiny arms in front of me to push the pot out of the way, and then it’s all flames, flames hot on my face.
“Sam!”
I grab at the air, but there is nothing to hang on to, nothing to save me from the fire. I turn my face just in time, and my ponytail turns to ash.
“SAM!”
Rough hands shook me awake—many rough hands. I came to with a jerk to discover that Andi and York each had me by an arm, and Boston was actually sitting on my feet.
“Get off me!”
I squirmed until they let go, and Andi sat back with a thump against the silo wall. “Jesus, that was some kind of nightmare.” She picked something up off the dirt floor, dusted it off, and held it out to me—the green knit hat.
My hands went instantly to my hair, where I felt a matted knot of curls.
“You took it off,” York said quietly. “You were pulling your own hair out. We had to . . .”
I snatched the hat from Andi’s outstretched hand and tugged it on, yanking it down as far as it would go. “Got it,” I said, and then, because it seemed like the not-weirdo thing to do, I added, “Thanks.”
“Thanks?” Boston scoffed, climbing off my legs. “That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” I snapped.
“But—but—what were you dreaming about?” he pressed.
York gave him a backhanded smack to the chest that practically knocked him over. “What do you think she was dreaming about, asshole?”
“Sam,” Andi said quietly. “What the hell happened to you?”
I wiggled my fingers up under the hat, feeling my scars. They seemed hot to the touch, but maybe that was just because the silo was now sweltering in the afternoon heat.
“You used to be blond,” Boston said, staring at the hand digging into my scalp. “In kindergarten, right? Blond, and then . . . then you went away.”
That’s one way to put it.
“And you didn’t come back until first grade, and then you . . .” He trailed off, but I saw the memory coming to him, saw how his eyes slid from questions to compassion. I’d rather be interrogated than pitied.
“And then I wore wigs,” I finished for him.
That was all I was going to say, but the three of them were watching me intently, sitting in a little semicircle around my legs. I stretched, then contracted my body, pulling my knees to my chest.
“I wore wigs to cover my scars,” I began. “But they were worse than scars back then. They were . . .” Still oozing, still red and raw like meat. “Still healing.”
“But what happened?” Boston asked. “Why did you go away?”
“I didn’t go away, exactly. I was in the hospital for a really long time. My—I lost my . . . There was an accident, and my hair caught fire.”
“What kind of accident?” York asked.
I rested my chin on my knees and stared at the floor. My next words came out in a rush. “The kind that happens when a drug addict attempts to cook her own meth and leaves a pot of poison sitting on an open flame with her curious six-year-old unattended in the next room.”
“Whoa,” Boston breathed.
“I don’t really remember it—not the bad bit, anyway. I just know I was falling, and there were flames, and that’s it. Then I was in the hospital.” And there were lollipops and ice chips and clean sheets and cartoons. “Honestly, I’m lucky I didn’t pull the pot off the stove and dump it all in my face. I’d probably be blind or something. My mom knows all about taking drugs, but she doesn’t know shit about making them.”
“What did they do to her?” Andi asked.
“Not as much as they could have.” My voice was rough, scraping the rust off words never used—a story never shared out loud. “She was wasted, but seeing your kid’s head on fire will wake you up pretty quick. She took me to the hospital herself and called my grandma on the way. Grandma got rid of everything—I mean everything—in our apartment. As far as the police were concerned, I’d set myself on fire trying to reach a pot of boiling water.”
“So she got away with it?” Boston said, his eyes bugging.
I looked up from the floor. “Oh no; she went to prison.”
“But, you said—”
“I told you, she’d already been busted once. After that, they don’t let you off easy for anything. They got her on neglect and probation violation. They probably suspected drugs were involved because she had a history, but they couldn’t prove it. So she only got nine months that time.” I twirled one of my orange curls around a finger. “And I got new hair forever and ever.”
“And scars,” Andi added.
“And scars,” I agreed.
“I think I laughed at your wigs,” Boston said. “I’m sorry.” He looked miserable about it, and I tossed him a forgiving smile.
“Hey, at least you didn’t try to pull my wig off.”
“Someone pulled your wig?” York said. He punched a fist into the silo wall, causing a metallic ring to reverberate all around us. “That’s messed up.”
I turned my smile to him. A punch thrown in my honor seemed more valiant than violent.
“Some girl,” I said. “Marla or Marlo or something. I can’t remember now. She moved away. But she pulled it off at recess, and everyone could see—” I circled a hand over my head.
Boston swallowed. “And that’s why we called you . . .”
“Worms. Yeah,” I said. “Because my scars are kind of shaped that way.”
Boston started to apologize again, but I held up a hand to let him know he didn’t have to. Then we fell quiet, which was sort of awful, because I knew the quiet meant they all felt sorry for me and didn’t know what to say. It’s funny how people feeling bad for you can make you feel more like an outcast than people being cruel to you.
Andi was the first to break the silence. She pulled one of her long dreadlocks forward and inspected it. “I should be called Worms, with this hair.” She waved the twisted lock at me, and I laughed gratefully. “My offer stands,” she said. “I could turn your curls into dreads. Cover up some scars—give people a new reason to call you names.”
“Don’t cover ’em up,” York said. He lifted a hand to my face and gently tugged up the front of the knit hat so the ends of my “worms” were exposed on my forehead. “Scars are cool.”
“Cool?” I asked.
“Yeah—mysterious. Kind of . . . sexy. Like your hats.” He smiled. “Hat Girl.”
I knew I was turning pink, and a pink face always made my scar tissue turn white, but I didn’t pull the hat back down.
On my other side, Andi snickered. “Way to take someone’s childhood trauma and use it to hit on them.”
“Too bad Andi wasn’t around back then,” York said to me. “You needed a friend like her to kick that wig puller’s ass.”
“Nah,” Andi said. She plucked a small rock off the ground and tossed it back and forth in her hands. “I would have been one of the girls pulling the wig. I was a real little bitch back then.”
“Uh, sorry,” York teased. “But if you were a bitch back then, what are you now?”
Andi chucked the rock at him and laughed. “Fair enough.”
“What changed?” I asked her. “You used to be . . . different.”
“You mean I used to be like Georgia?”
“You were never that bad,” I said. Not that I knew.
“I was worse,” Andi promised. “Much worse.”
“You guys were joined at the hip,” York said.
“And at the lips.” Andi’s voice was heavy with meaning.
“You guys made out?” Boston gaped.
“And then some.”
“So, not just a phase?” I asked.
“Not for me. I thought—I don’t know, that it was me and her against the world. Nobody liked us, so—”
“Um, excuse me,” Boston interrupted. “Since when does nobody like the popular girls?”
“Since you have to do some pretty unpopular shit to stay one of those girls,” Andi said. “Just because people want to be you doesn’t mean they like you. But Georgia and I . . . we liked each other. That was enough.”
“You like liked each other,” I said.
“Just me.” Andi traced patterns in the dirt with her fingers. “It really was a phase for Georgia. Or an experiment or something. She got freaked out. And then I got freaked out.”
“And then you . . .” I waved an arm wide around her, not sure how to put it.
“Got a new look?” she supplied.
“Yeah.”
“That was part of it, I guess. I just didn’t want to keep being what everyone expected me to be.”
“But you have a boyfriend now,” I said. “The nice guy on your phone, who left you all those charming text messages.”
Andi looked up, one eyebrow raised. “What, a girl can’t keep her options open?” She winked.
“Speaking of options,” Boston said, standing to stretch, “what are ours?”
I would rather have shared ten more disturbing childhood memories than discuss the answer to that question, but I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled out of the tin tower with the others. The air outside was cool and fresh compared to the sweat lodge that was the inner silo. I held out my arms to feel every bit of the light breeze blowing around my body.
Maybe we don’t have to go anywhere. Maybe we can just stay right here and start one of those communes like old hippies. Maybe we can have a new beginning.
“Maybe we should hike back to Pit Stop,” York said.
Or that.
Boston eagerly agreed, but Andi repeated her warning that the crooked cops might be waiting for us there. Always the voice of dissent.
My head said she was right, that trouble could be parked in Pitson, but my sandpaper throat and screaming calf muscles didn’t care. We needed water. We needed rest.
“I’m with the boys,” I said. “We’ll call the police from there and let them come to us.”
I didn’t add that I was secretly relieved I wouldn’t have to march into a police station all by myself.
“What do we tell them?” York said, tightening the straps on his backpack.
Boston shouldered the second pack. “Everything.”
“You all sure you don’t want to come up with a different story?” Andi asked. “I like the one where you just picked us up at the party and then let us out of the car. Whose idea was that again?”
“Yours,” Boston and York said simultaneously.
“Oh yeah.”
I tugged one of Andi’s dreadlocks. “All of us or none of us,” I said.
She sighed and threw her arms up in defeat. “Fine, whatever. Let’s go to back to Armpit.”
“Pit Stop,” York said. He started the long trek back toward the highway, retracing our earlier steps, and we all fell in line behind him. “And then we go home,” he promised.
I heard Mama’s slurred speech in my head and imagined her sprawled out, passed out, blacked out on her bed. Home was the last place I wanted to go.
“I’M THIRSTY,” BOSTON complained after only a few steps.
“I’m starving,” Andi added.
I was both, but I didn’t see the point in complaining about it.
Ahead of us, York stopped and turned, digging into the front pocket of his jeans.
“Here.” He pulled out a slighly smushed package of something colorful and tossed it to Andi.
She ripped into it with her teeth, then stopped to inspect the contents. “Gummy worms?” She raised an eyebrow, but stuffed three in her mouth at once and offered the bag to Boston.
“I only eat the red ones,” he said.
“I pocketed them back at the cabin.” York shrugged. “Better than nothin’.”
“Barely better.”
Boston agreed with Andi. “You couldn’t have grabbed some beef jerky or something?” he said through a mouthful of red gummies.
“And what did you bring?” I challenged Boston.
It seemed to me that he and Andi were being a little ungrateful. If it hadn’t been for York keeping his wits about him, we probably wouldn’t have even gotten out of the cabin, let alone with a little bit of food.
York elbowed me lightly as we started walking again. “Thanks.”
“No problem. But seriously, gummy worms?” I laughed. “I thought you didn’t eat foods that jiggle.”
“I don’t.” He slipped me a sideways smile. “But I like worms.”
My face burned so hot I thought my scalp might catch fire all over again, but I forced myself to return his smile. He stumbled when our eyes met, his feet tripping forward a few steps.
“Your eyes,” he said, recovering but still not watching where he was going. His gaze was focused on me instead of on the field ahead. “I noticed them before, but in the sunlight, they’re . . . wow.”
I bit my lip. “Good wow?”
“I’ve never seen—I don’t even know how to describe the color.”
“Alien green?” I suggested, thinking of the little boy Mama had said complimented me by way of insult back in third grade.
He laughed. “No, but they are kind of . . . radioactive.”
The cocky smile on his face said he thought this was high praise, so I decided to take it that way. But seriously? Boys don’t get much better at compliments past the third grade.
“Hey, Romeo,” Andi interrupted from behind us. “You got any cigarettes in those pockets?”
“You should quit that shit before it fries your face,” York called back. “You’ll end up looking like a little old raisin.”
“I don’t care how I look,” Andi said. “The world has enough Georgias.”
“That’s for sure,” I agreed. I smiled back at Andi. “For what it’s worth, you can do better than her.”
“And better than your douche boyfriend, too,” York said.
“Thanks?” Andi sounded unsure whether she was being flattered or insulted.
“I’m just saying I like you better now,” York said.
“I like me better now, too.” Andi said it softly, but her voice carried over the quiet field.
“Wish we could say the same for you,” Boston chirped at his brother’s back.
York clutched his chest with both hands and dropped to one knee. “Oh, I’m so wounded! Whatever will I do without your approval?”
I laughed and dragged him up by the elbow as Boston and Andi caught up to us.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Andi said. “You used to be a nice guy—kind of a meathead and always a little full of yourself, but, y’know, nicer.”
“Was that supposed to be a compliment?” York retorted, unfazed.
His muscles tensed under my fingers, and I realized my hand had been lingering on his arm since I’d helped him up. I pulled it back now, embarrassed.
“I think she means,” Boston interpreted, “better a jock than a jackass.”
If Andi wasn’t walking between the two of them, I was pretty sure York would have answered in the form of a fist, but instead he just muttered, “Who’s the jackass?”
“You’re always trying to impress those guys now,” Andi said. “Like it’s your job to entertain them or something. You stopped being their teammate and started being their mascot.”
Ouch. The Jefferson High mascot was an otter—not exactly a flattering comparison.
“I’m nobody’s mascot,” York bit back. “I make people laugh. Since when is that a bad thing?”
Since making some people laugh makes other people cry, I thought.
Except I didn’t just think it. I said it right out loud, the words tumbling out before I could stop them.
“See, even Sam agrees,” Andi said.
All three heads swiveled in my direction, and I turned away, staring stubbornly at the endless wash of brown field in front of us. The walk back to the road seemed a lot longer than the hike in.
“Do you?” York asked quietly, and the vulnerability in his voice made me melt a little.
“Well, I— It’s just—” Images flashed through my mind: York punching a locker, York crouched by the lake with tears in his eyes, York humiliating the boy in spandex, York touching my face as he pushed back my hat to admire my scars. It was like a mash-up of two wildly different songs, but somehow they found a common beat.
“I think maybe you’re nicer than you let people see,” I finally said. I looked down the line at my partners in crime. Their faces were all the same as they were less than twenty-four hours ago, but they were somehow changed, too. “But maybe we’re all something a little different than we let people see.”
There was a moment of awkward silence that made me want to throw myself in front of a tractor, but Boston rescued me.
“Deep, that is,” he squeaked in his best Yoda voice.
York followed up with a high-pitched yawning roar—a pathetic Chewbacca impression designed less to impress and more to crack us up. It worked. Boston called out another Star Wars character and York immediately obliged, saying some seriously filthy things in the voice of Darth Vader. It was obviously a game they played a lot, and by the end, York had mimicked everyone from R2-D2 to Princess Leia, each impression worse—and more hysterical—than the last.
When the laughter settled, the field wasn’t as silent as it had been before. I could hear the infrequent whoosh of a car speeding down the highway, even though I couldn’t see the road yet.
“It’s spooky out here,” I said to no one in particular. “It reminds me of Children of the Corn.”
“What’s that?” Andi asked.
“It’s a scary movie. An old one, with a bunch of demonic kids living in a cornfield.”
Boston shivered. “No, thanks.”
York stepped closer to me and fiddled with the straps of his backpack. “You like scary movies?”
“They’re okay.” I shrugged. “It’s just sort of a thing I do with my mom. . . .” But I didn’t want to think about that—about her—right now.
York noticed and quickly shifted gears. “What about, uh, mini-golf? You ever been to the mini-golf complex over in Williams? It’s got bumper cars and an arcade.”
I grinned. I hadn’t been to that complex since I was a kid, with Grandma and Aunt Ellen, before my cousins were born. It seemed like it might be fun to go again with someone my own age.
“You hate video games,” Boston piped up, looking at York as if he were an alien.
I wish he’d fall back a few paces.
“If you’re trying to ask her out, you’re doing it wrong,” Andi said.
Her, too.
“I was just asking what kind of stuff you like,” York said to me, ignoring the others. “Besides travel.”
His lips tipped up in a smile. He was proud of himself for remembering.
Cocky, I thought. And cute.
He almost made me forget the ache in my calves, the nagging pang of my empty stomach, and everything that had come before.
“I like music,” I said. “But I can’t play it or anything. Guess that skill skips a generation. And . . .” I thought of downtown River City—seedy but alive, thanks to the bar hoppers, the street vendors, the creep in the suit, and even the guy who owned the Chinese place who was always arguing with the woman in the upstairs apartment. “And I kind of like watching people.”
“You mean people-watching,” Boston said.
“Same thing.” I could see why York got annoyed with Boston’s constant corrections.
“No,” Boston said. “People-watching is normal. Watching people is creepy.”
“Trust him,” York said. “Boston knows all about being creepy.”
“You’re not creepy,” Andi assured me. “But you’re definitely not normal.”
Pot, kettle.
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, I mean—God, who wants to be normal? Bleh.” She turned to walk backward in front of us. “You’re crazy, but I like crazy. There’s a quote—I can’t remember who said it— ‘The only people for me are the mad ones.’”
“Kerouac,” Boston said, beating me to it.
Andi snapped her fingers. “Right. Jack Kerouac. I had to read him for lit last year. I agree with him. The only people for me are the mad ones.”
“From On the Road,” I said. I had read it for lit last year, too, and it had crawled under my skin with its wild desires—to see, to experience, to just go.
“On the Road,” Andi repeated with a smile. “Like us. We’re the mad ones.”
“He doesn’t mean it in the same way you do,” Boston said. “He doesn’t mean crazy.”
“How do you know?” Andi asked, falling back into line with us. “You ever met the guy?”
York rolled his eyes at his brother. “Well, what does he mean, then, smartass?”
“He means they’re free,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that answer would get me an A on an essay or anything, but it felt right. I felt it in the warm wind at our backs and in the open stretch of road waiting somewhere ahead of us. We were mad to be doing any of this, but at least in this small moment, we were also free.
“Kind of,” Boston said. “He was talking about the beatniks. He meant that they were passionate about life and art and, yeah, freedom, I guess. They made him feel—”
“Alive,” York finished.
Yes.
“I stand by what I said.” Andi gave my shoulder a light punch. “You’re still one of the mad ones. And that’s why I’m sticking with you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Because I make you feel alive?”
She grinned. “No, because you make me feel sane.”
“And because you don’t have any other option,” York pointed out.
A few steps later, we were even with the hay bales where we’d hidden earlier that morning, and in the distance the highway rose up like a great gray snake crossing our path.
There, waiting for us like a mirage in the hazy afternoon heat waves, was the other option.
THE BACK WINDOWS were smashed and streams of dried mud splattered the sides, but otherwise, the SUV looked just as it had when we’d stolen it from River City Park.
We confirmed all this through Andi’s Super Zooms, from the safety of the hay-bale wall.
“The backpack is gone,” York said, passing the glasses back to Andi. “Do you think they’re hiding inside the SUV?”
Boston crouched low behind the hay. “It’s a trap!”
“It’s not a trap,” Andi said. “It’s a gift. A way home!”
“Yeah, I’m sure they brought it here as a present,” I said with mock cheer. “It practically has a big red bow on it.”
“I’m going to check it out.” She stood up too fast for any of us to stop her and tiptoed around the hay bales.
“Hey, Andi,” York said. “Did you take candy from strangers when you were a kid?”
She answered him with her middle finger, but she didn’t take any more steps into the field. “They got what they wanted,” she said. “Now they’re letting us go.”
“Not everything they wanted.” I pointed to the packs on York’s and Boston’s backs.
“So it could be a trade,” Andi insisted. “We left them the bag, they left us a ride.”
I was skeptical. “And what exactly do we get for the other two bags?”
“Only one way to find out,” she said.
I stood up next to her. “Fine, but we go together.”
York was on his feet as fast as I was.
“I’ve got your back,” he promised.
“It’s not my back I’m worried about,” I said. “It’s all of our asses.”
“Or none of our asses,” Boston mumbled.
Andi laughed down at him. “Hey, genius, did you just make a joke?”
But Boston wasn’t laughing. The coward wasn’t standing, either. He remained in his crouched position behind the hay.
Or maybe he’s not a coward so much as just smarter than the rest of us.
“I’ll go alone,” Andi said, as if reading my mind. She held up a hand when I tried to protest. “I’m faster than you, shortie—no offense.”
I was secretly too relieved to be offended. I guess I was a coward, too.
“I’ll just zip up there to check it out,” she said. “If the car’s clear, I’ll wave you in.”
She tossed the Super Zooms to York, then lifted her messenger bag from her shoulder and handed it to me. It was heavy with the weight of her army jacket stuffed inside.
I took it reluctantly. “Are you sure—”
But she was already gone, racing off across the field.
York watched her through the glasses while my eyes flicked back and forth between the infinite ends of the highway. I didn’t breathe until she reached the road and dropped low behind the SUV.
“What’s happening?” I asked York, not taking my eyes off the Andi-shaped blur in the distance.
“She’s looking in the back window.”
“And?” Boston whimpered.
“And . . . she’s going around the side. Shit.”
“What is it?” I nearly snatched the lenses off York’s face.
“I can’t see her. She’s on the other side of the car. Wait—”
“What?” I said, my heart racing.
“Oh my God.”
“What?!”
“Oh holy shit!”
I leaned into the hay bales, willing my vision into something even better than 20/20 so I could see what York was seeing. Andi was back behind the SUV, and it looked like she was doing jumping jacks.
Finally, York pushed the Super Zooms back onto his head and turned to me and Boston with a whoop. “She’s got the keys!”
I took a peek through the glasses to see for myself, and sure enough, Andi’s jumping jacks were actually some kind of strange victory dance. She held the keys high in one hand and waved at us with the other.
“They left us the keys?” I said.
Maybe Andi was right. Maybe it was a trade after all.
We waved back and practically climbed over the hay bales in our hurry to join her. It was possible the crooked cops were trying to buy our silence with this peace offering, but at the moment I didn’t care. All I could see were four wheels and all the places they would take us—to food, to water, to comfortable beds, and, yes, even to the police station. Anywhere was better than this middle of nowhere. Luck was finally on our side.
Or so it seemed for thirty glorious seconds.
Because that’s all the time we had before the heavy roar of an engine drowned out our celebration. It came from the end of the highway that disappeared into the woods, and I barely had time to blink before a pickup truck shot into view, blasting down the road, heading straight for Andi.
The rest of us fell prostrate on the ground out of some sort of instinct, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene in front of me. I shoved the Super Zooms back onto my face, and then immediately wished I hadn’t. It meant that I could see the surprise, then the panic, then the sheer terror on Andi’s face, and for one insane moment, I knew we were both thinking the same thing: the truck was going to run her down.
But at the last second the pickup slammed on its brakes, and the sudden stop seemed to shock Andi out of the paralysis that had kept her frozen on the road, her arms still up in the air. She bolted for the field. Something pounded next to my ear, and feet raced into my vision. York had gotten up to help her.
Yes, help her!
I struggled to stand, too, but it was as if I were moving through water. Everything else was happening too fast. The doors of the pickup were open. A man—I couldn’t tell whether it was the cop with the familiar face or the other one—was right on top of Andi, and York was still yards away. It might as well have been miles.
The guy caught up to Andi in a second, his arms locking around her. She shouted something I couldn’t make out, then twisted out of his grasp long enough to get one arm free. That arm sailed toward the sky in an almost elegant gesture—a ballerina taking a bow. The crooked cop redoubled his efforts and trapped her arm once again, this time lifting her all the way off her feet with his bear hug.
Fight, Andi! I screamed it in my mind. Or maybe I screamed it out loud.
Boston cried out for his brother from somewhere on the ground behind me, and while I couldn’t blame him, I silently willed York to run faster. But it was too late. The man now had Andi’s dreadlocks in his fist and was forcing her face-first into the truck.
The pickup was peeling away before York was even halfway across the field.
I STARED AT the cloud of exhaust left by the pickup until every wisp of it flew away on the wind. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the spot where the truck had been, where Andi had been. I stood staring for an eternity stuffed inside a few short seconds.
Behind me, Boston was wailing “Oh my God, oh my God” over and over again. Up ahead, York was on his knees, screaming, “Help me!”
It was the latter cry that unstuck my stare and got my feet to move. I flew across the field toward York, my heart pounding. Why was he on the ground? Had he been hurt, and I hadn’t noticed? But when I caught up to him, winded and aching, I saw that he wasn’t on the ground in pain but in panic. He crawled through the rows of soybeans, using his hands to scatter soil and crushing plants as he went.
“The keys!” He panted without looking up. “She tossed the keys!”
The ballerina’s bow.
I dropped to the ground next to him, and a few seconds later Boston was there, too, the three of us sweating and searching, our nails and the creases of our skin caked with black dirt. We worked in speed and silence, each of us knowing the unsaid: the truck could be back at any moment.
“Got ’em!” Boston leaped to his feet, a set of silver keys jingling in his filthy hands.
We moved as fast as our weary bodies could toward the SUV, driven by pure adrenaline.
“Where do we go?” York panted.
“After the truck,” I answered without thinking, at the same time Boston said, “To the police.”
Yes, that makes more sense.
“The police already have her,” York said.
“That didn’t look like an arrest.” I clutched at a stitch in my side. “More like a kidnapping. I’m with Boston. We call the police.”
“Pitson, then?” York said. “For a phone?”
A phone.
The word brought me up short, then gave me new speed. I rushed forward, ignoring my groaning body and digging into Andi’s messenger bag as I ran.
“Andi’s phone!” I cried without looking back at the boys. My words came out choppy with exertion. “We can plug it in—power—the equipment—call the police!”
They said nothing, but I knew they had understood when two sets of feet pounded up behind me. We reached the road at the exact moment my hand closed around Andi’s phone inside her bag. Another second of searching, and my other hand found a cord. I yanked it out, praying, and . . . “Yes!” I cried. “Car charger!”
We could not be so lucky.
And, of course, we weren’t.
The SUV was gutted. I mean, it still had seats and a steering wheel and all, but the electronics were gone. All that was left of the old tricked-out console and dashboard were a few raw wires stabbing uselessly into the air, their connections severed.
I had leaped into the driver’s seat, phone and charger in hand, and now I slumped in it, deflated. For the first time in my life, I wished very hard to be in River City and nowhere else. Adventure, I was quickly learning, was much safer inside my head.
“Well, we can’t sit here,” York said, slamming the passenger door shut and strapping on a seat belt. At least they’d left us those.
Boston leaned forward from the back and shoved the keys into the ignition. “Drive!” he commanded.
My hand went to the ignition, but I hesitated. “I don’t know how to drive an SUV.”
“It goes forward and back like any other car,” Boston snapped. When I still didn’t move, he threw up his hands. “Fine, I’ll drive.”
“Oh, we so don’t have time for that,” York said, tapping the rearview mirror.
Under any other circumstances, I would have laughed. But right now, I just wished I could cry.
York closed his hand over mine on the keys, and when he spoke, I could tell he was fighting to keep his temper—his fear—under control. “Sam, please.”
I nodded and gripped the keys, ready to turn the ignition when a familiar crackle filled the car. I froze—not just my hand, but my whole body.
“Hello, friends.”
I experienced a sickening wave of déjà vu as York yanked down his visor, and the walkie-talkie tumbled out. He gripped the radio so tightly his fingers turned white. He pressed the button on the side of the walkie-talkie and barked, “We are not your friends!”
Boston gripped York’s arm. “Don’t talk to them!”
The boys struggled for a moment, Boston grabbing at the radio while York shook him off.
“We’re not your enemies either, champ,” the voice answered.
York pressed the button to respond, but he released it again when Boston shouted, “Wait!”
I had a sudden urge to throw the radio out the window the way Andi had done with Boston’s phone.
“Try another frequency,” Boston urged, breathless. “There has to be someone else we can reach—tell them to call police.”
“Yes!” I cried. “You really are a genius!”
“Ignore us again,” the voice warned, “and we’ll take it out on your friend.”
“Shit,” York breathed. He looked at me, waiting for I don’t know what. Maybe it was because I was in the driver’s seat; maybe he just didn’t want to be the one to make the call; but for whatever reason, the decision was apparently mine.
I nodded once.
York gave Boston an apologetic look, then held down the button. “We’re listening.”
“Good boy. This is simple. You have something we want, and now we have something you want. Even trade.”
“No way,” Boston said. “They’re lying. We call the police, and we call them now.”
“You go ahead and call the police,” the voice said. “Tell them we say hi.”
I sucked in a breath and smacked York’s hand. He hadn’t released the button in time.
“I suspect I know a little more about police work than you do.” The utter calm in the voice was infuriating—and frightening. Either he was sure his word as a cop would stand up to ours, or, worse—the whole damn department was crooked.
“Better be ready to explain why your fingerprints are all over that stash,” he said. “Why you’re driving the car that ran over a cop; why you skipped town. And . . .” He paused for effect. “Why your friend is missing a few fingers.”
I whipped the radio out of York’s hand and slammed down the button. “Don’t you touch her!”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” the voice cooed. “Nobody wants to hurt anybody. It’s not in our best interest. I’m merely trying to impress upon you the severity of our situation.”
Our situation, as if we were partners in this.
“A simple trade will be good for all parties involved,” he said. “We can even make that car disappear for you, too. No evidence, no crime. Everyone walks away with their hands clean.”
I stared down at the dirt crusted under my nails and smeared over my skin.
Too late for that.
We all got our hands dirty. What mattered now was how we cleaned up our mess.
York reached to take the radio back, but I held it out of his grasp. “You know where we are,” I said. “Bring her here.”
The sick bastard actually laughed. “No, no, no. No more risks. We’re not doing this on the side of the road where anyone can see.”
Damn. That was exactly why I wanted to do it here.
“Now pay attention!” the voice snapped. Then he rattled off some instructions about a dirt road and a fork and a field and a left turn at the something-or-other. He talked so fast, I couldn’t keep up. I struggled to yank Andi’s notebook out of her messenger bag, but by the time I found a pen, he was done.
“You have one hour. Every ten minutes you’re late, your friend pays for your tardiness. If I see a cop car—if I see any car other than that jacked-up SUV with your three pretty faces inside it—she’ll lose more than a finger. Time starts now.”
“Wait!” I wailed into the radio.
But the voice was gone.
THERE WERE TWO options for serving detention at Jefferson High: before school in the empty classroom next to the indoor pool, where the chemical smell was enough to knock you out—or get you high, if that was your thing—and after school in the east-wing gymnasium.
I always opted for the latter, since you could sit in the stadium seats and spread out rather than bumping elbows at cramped desks. Also, the odds of me making it to the morning session on time were slim, considering the only thing I ever got detention for in the first place was being late to school. It’s funny; I always woke up early on weekends, no matter how little sleep I got the night before, but dragging myself out of bed to come here every day was like torture.
I climbed the bleachers, choosing a spot high on the left, away from everyone else. A few students sat together in pairs, but Mr. Wayne quickly split them up and barked something about this not being social hour. I had Mr. Wayne for sophomore health first semester, and I remembered him being pretty laid-back, but now he looked as miserable about being here as the rest of us. I wondered what teachers had to do to get detention.
He was just about to close the gym doors—once those doors closed, you couldn’t get into detention and had to do double duty the next day—when one more body slipped through. From above, all I could see was a mess of long, ropy dreadlocks on top of a tall frame.
“You’re late, Dixon,” Mr. Wayne said before sealing the doors behind her.
Dixon?
Now I noticed her army jacket and the messenger bag she carried in place of a boring backpack like everyone else, but her signature—that luxurious mass of long hair—was gone. She was almost unrecognizable.
Almost.
Some things you just couldn’t change, like the confident way she breezed past Mr. Wayne and dismissed him with a flick of her hand, or the way her very presence commanded attention from everyone in the room as she stomped up the bleachers.
“That’s far enough,” Mr. Wayne called out, and Andi stopped two rows directly below me. Her eyes flicked upward as though she could feel my stare, and I immediately buried my face in my homework. She turned to sit, and the movement sent a wave of stale cigarette smoke spinning up in my direction.
The second her butt was on the bench, a boy to her left leaned sideways and hissed, “Nice hair.”
Andi ignored him and pulled a notebook from her bag. Over her shoulder, I could see several lines of equations, but she wasn’t doing math. Her hands worked quickly, filling up the margins of the page with sketches of flowers wrapped around daggers, a snake eating a rat, and a caricature of Mr. Wayne and his oversize jaw that was so good I almost laughed out loud.
When Mr. Wayne retreated to a desk in the far corner of the gym, the boy down the row from Andi tried again.
“Did your head get stuck in a washing machine?” he whispered.
Andi cricked her neck back and forth but still didn’t answer.
“Stick your finger in a light socket?”
“Quiet!” Mr. Wayne bellowed.
And the boy was quiet, bending over a binder and hastily scribbling a note. He folded the note neatly and slid it down the bench to Andi. She caught it with one hand and, without looking up, pulled a small yellow Bic lighter from her pocket. She flicked the wheel and held the flame to the still-folded note. It burned silently in a matter of seconds, and Andi shook the last little bit of paper to cool the embers, then swiped the black ashes from the bench, scattering the evidence.
The boy sneered. “Dyke.”
My gasp was covered up by the sound of Mr. Wayne slamming a hand down on his desk. It echoed around the gym, and all eyes turned toward it except mine. I was the only one who saw Andi’s shoulders finally sink, saw her curtain of dreadlocks fall forward as she ducked her head, saw the ink bleeding into the paper where her pen had stopped moving.
I wished I could share my invisibility with her in that moment, but some people will always be seen, whether they want to be or not.
“I GOT IT, I got it!” York said, to calm my panic.
I had desperately scribbled everything I could remember of the directions onto a page of Andi’s sketch pad, but I’d missed at least three turns.
York snatched the pen away to stop my frantic scratching. “I know the area he’s talking about. Just drive.”
I turned the key without hesitation now and threw the car into gear.
“Wait, wait!” Boston cried as I hit the gas. “Let’s talk about this for a second!”
“Can we get there in an hour?” I asked York.
He nodded. “Yes, if we don’t stop, but . . .”
“But what?”
“This is way beyond—it’s more than . . . maybe we should just call the police.”
“They are the police!” I shouted. “Didn’t you hear him? He was practically bragging about it.”
“So what?” Boston pulled himself into the space between York and me. “Not every cop is crooked.”
These guys were more than crooked. They were completely broken. Drugs did that to people. It didn’t matter whether you were a user or a seller; somehow, you got messed up either way. I knew one end of the spectrum was waiting for me back home, but that problem seemed hopeless. I couldn’t fix Mama, but I could do something about this.
“The police will believe us now,” Boston insisted. “This is too crazy to make up.”
“I know they will,” I admitted. I adjusted my mirrors without slowing down. “But that’s not the point anymore.”
“Sam,” York started, his tone urgent but gentle. “We could be driving into some damn serious danger.”
“Could be,” I echoed. “But Andi is definitely in danger.”
Both boys started to talk at once, but I cut them off. “All I know is this: if we go to the cops, and if they believe us, and if they go straight to check this place out, we’ll still have wasted time, and by then, Andi could be . . .”
I didn’t want to think about what Andi could be.
There was a hitch in my voice when I spoke again. “But if we just do this now—right now—there’s at least a chance to get her out of there. And then we go to the police,” I promised.
“Slow down,” York said.
“Just listen to me!”
“No, slow down! This is the turn!” He pointed up ahead at an unmarked road, and I hit the brakes, making the tires squeal.
We were thrown to the right as I skidded left onto new, uneven blacktop.
“York, what are you—” Boston started.
“Listen, B.” York turned to face his brother square. “If something happens to her, it’s my fault.”
“How is it—”
“I took the car. I hit that cop. Me.” He gave Boston a sad smile. “That’s what you said, right? That none of us would be here if it wasn’t for me.”
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“Sure you did. And it’s okay; you were right. But it’s on me, not you. So you don’t have to come.”
“What?” I jerked the wheel in surprise. “But they said all three of us—”
“I don’t care what they said,” York growled. “I screwed up, and I owe it to Andi to help, but I’m not risking my brother’s life for her or for anyone. If he wants out, we let him out.”
I slowed the car to a crawl. I didn’t like it, but the compromise seemed fair, and I would rather have at least York with me than no one.
Boston took an unsteady breath and rubbed a hand over his face. Then, to my eternal surprise, he looked York straight in the eye and shook his head.
“I stay with you,” he said. And he flopped back in his seat and didn’t speak again.
Turn by turn, York directed us to a spot about ten miles downriver from where this had all begun. The fastest way to get there would have been to drive straight into River City and follow the well-traveled highways that snaked along the riverbanks, but the directions seemed deliberately designed to keep us on back roads instead—a circuitous route meant to help us avoid police.
Help us? Or help them?
“We never figured out how much the drugs are worth,” York said during one long straightaway between turns. “It must be a lot, for them to . . .”
He didn’t say “to kidnap and possibly torture a girl,” because he didn’t have to.
I gripped the wheel tightly as I navigated around a pothole. “I think it’s—I mean, I’m not sure, but—it could be close to a million dollars.”
The boys shot up straight.
“Wow.”
“Seriously?”
I worried the high stakes would change their minds, but York only said, “We should ask them for a cut.”
“Yeah, right.” Boston rolled his eyes.
“No, really. Promise not to go to the police if they deal us in.”
His halfhearted smile said he was only kidding, just trying to lighten the mood to help us through this drive into hell, but I suspected there was something legitimate behind the joke.
I glanced over long enough to catch his eye. “You know money won’t keep you from being that guy on the toilet at the end of the world.”
He laughed. “Yeah, but maybe if I invest it right, the toilet will be made of gold.”
York twisted in his seat to look at Boston. “And you can go to Harvard.”
“Yale,” Boston answered.
“You decided?”
“Best law school in the country.” Boston’s voice was monotone. “So I can send guys like them to prison.”
York nodded. “I hear bad things happen to cops in prison.”
“I hope so,” Boston said.
I set my lips in a thin line. It was hard to wish that kind of thing on anyone, but the only people who had ever treated Mama worse than the cops were the lowlifes who sold her drugs, and the people waiting for us were both—the lawmen and the lawless.
“Bad things happen to just about everyone in prison,” I said. “Trust me.”
The boys were quiet for a moment, then York said, “That phone call. Your mom . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Was she . . . ?”
“Yeah.”
The SUV bumped along on the uneven blacktop as the wind rushed in through the windows, a few of them broken and the rest rolled down because the assholes had somehow taken our air-conditioning, too.
“I thought she was clean now,” York said. “When you talked about her last night, I thought—”
“She is.” I bit the inside of my cheek. “She was.”
“You think she fell off the wagon because she was worried about you?”
“If she was struggling, she should have gone to a meeting,” I said. I hoped the conviction in my voice hid the guilt.
Boston leaned forward. “Like an AA meeting?”
“NA.”
“What’s that?”
“Narcotics Anonymous.”
The boys waited for me to say more, but I just shrugged. “They take the same twelve steps.”
“Drag,” York said. “How long was she clean?”
“Four years today.”
It hit me then—just bam!—hit me so hard I had to slam on the brakes to keep from driving off the road. The SUV skidded to the side, and I heard a twin thunk-thunk as the boys slammed back into their seats.
I barely heard their shouts of “Whoa!” and “What the hell?!”
Zero days clean. Four years wiped out in one night.
I opened my car door and leaned out to retch.
“Gross,” Boston said behind me. His comment was followed by a yelp of pain and the sound of a car door opening and closing.
My eyes were still on the sick I’d left on the pavement, and York’s shoes suddenly appeared in my field of vision. He crouched down in front of me, careful not to step in my mess.
“You want me to drive?” he asked, pushing a curl out of my eye and tucking it up under my hat.
I nodded and shimmied over to the passenger side so York could climb into the driver’s seat.
“You’re probably dehydrated,” Boston said. “When’s the last time any of us had water?”
Dehydrated, devastated. Both good reasons for losing your lunch. Not that we’d had any lunch. And now it was well past dinnertime, too. The leftover sick taste in my mouth begged for food and water.
“We’re close now,” York promised as he pulled back onto the road.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I detassel corn every summer. I’ve worked these fields.”
The farmland soon fell away, replaced by unplanted stretches of land, wild with overgrown weeds and speckled with occasional trees. The forest loomed in front of us, and beyond that was the river, where an X marked the spot we were speeding toward.
THE LAST TEN minutes of the drive were almost unbearable.
York hummed “Unfortunate Addiction” as he drove, while Boston played with the buttons for the back windows—up up down, down down up, up up down, down down up. It was maddening, and I interrupted as often as possible to ask York when we would get to the next turn. Soon we were rolling through a narrow break in the woods, the SUV aimed directly at the river.
The first signs of life were draped over low-hanging tree branches. Damp shirts and shorts, towels, belts, and gun holsters hung like limp welcome signs as we pulled into a small clearing along the water.
“What’s with the laundry?” Boston said.
“Uh, what’s with the tents?” York pointed at the makeshift camp around us.
Small pup tents ringed a fire pit built up with rocks. Between the tents, broken-down cars in various stages of repair sat rusting, their hoods studded with beer cans. More cans and other trash littered the site, stretching from the fire all the way to the water’s edge, where a long speedboat had been dragged halfway onto the shore. More laundry was draped across its nose, drying in the last rays of sun as evening turned to night.
“What is this?” York said. He parked the car but kept the engine running, his hands tense on the wheel.
“They’re camping out, I guess,” Boston said.
I peered through the windshield at the mess in front of us. “For how long?”
“Longer than just since last night,” York observed.
“Where are they?” Boston whispered.
I opened the door to find out, but York grabbed my elbow. “Be careful.”
We left careful back in that broken-down taco shop lot outside River City Park. Every decision since then had been crazy. Mad.
I pulled out of York’s grasp, and he killed the engine and followed me out of the SUV with Boston close behind, each of them shouldering a pack with our half of the trade.
“This doesn’t feel right,” he said.
No shit.
From the center of the camp, with the fire pit at our feet, everything became a little clearer. The cars weren’t being repaired so much as stripped for parts. Various pieces of metal were divided by size and shape into individual piles, and a fold-out camping table held an array of electronics similar to the ones that used to fill the SUV.
“That’s a cop car,” Boston said, pointing to one of the rusty vehicles. “A real one. Not undercover.”
I had no idea what to make of that. Did they steal it from their own department? Or maybe it was a discontinued model? It was hard to think with my nose full of the sickly sweet smell of old beer warmed by the sun. This place was disgusting, and it had clearly been this way for a very long time.
York spoke, his voice low. “I’m starting to think these guys are more criminal than cop.”
“Where’s Andi?” I said, kicking a beer can in frustration. “Where’s anyone?”
“Maybe they didn’t expect us to get here so soon,” Boston said. His voice sounded small, and I noticed he was standing very close to his brother.
I jerked my chin toward the water. “You think that’s the boat they had at the dock?”
We walked as a group toward the speedboat, and as we drew closer, I realized with a start that the clothes drying on the bow were not your average duds. They were all black—pants and button-down shirts, the collars pierced through with small gold stars, thick patches stitched onto the short sleeves.
River City police patches.
“This is wrong,” I whispered.
I didn’t care where these guys did business—or their laundry, for that matter—but I doubted this was how any cop, crooked or not, took care of his uniform. The edges of the pants were frayed; some of the shirt seams were pulling loose; and the gold plating on the stars had worn thin in places to reveal plain, dull metal underneath.
Grandma always said things were clearer in the light of day. She was usually referring to Mama sleeping off a bender, but it seemed to apply here, too.
“Very wrong,” I said again. “We need to get out of—”
A car engine cut me off—or, more accurately, a truck engine.
We turned to see the pickup that had found us at the cabin and had sped away with Andi emerging from the trees. The driver maneuvered deliberately, parking the truck at an angle that blocked our road out of the campsite.
I felt the boys’ shoulders bump into mine as our group instinctively pulled together.
The truck doors opened and closed, and three men hopped out, all of them long and lean, with smirking, unshaved faces. But only one of those faces was familiar.
He stepped forward as the other two circled carefully to either side until we were surrounded. The familiar face motioned for us to come closer, and I saw he was beckoning not with a hand but with a gun.
“Welcome!” His voice was booming and almost buoyant, but no smile touched his lips. “Welcome to my office. Please, have a seat.”
He gestured around at the various tree stumps and broken lawn chairs that had been stationed by the fire. His words were inviting, but when none of us took him up on his offer, he pointed his gun and turned it into a command.
“Sit.”
Boston and York hustled to share a length of log, but I didn’t move.
“Where is she?” I asked, grateful that my voice was steady.
The smiling face turned quizzical.
“Do I know you?” he said.
I know you, I thought.
I was kicking myself for not probing deeper for the memory before. But seeing a familiar face in uniform, I just assumed . . .
He used the business end of his pistol to scratch his chin, and I found myself willing the gun to accidentally go off.
“I do,” he said. “I know you from somewhere. Did I sell you something?”
“I’m not one of your clients,” I said with venom. “And you’re no cop.”
THE FAMILIAR FACE laughed. “Who said I was a cop?”
I reached a hand back toward the boat, and he steadied his gun, aiming straight at my chest. “Careful now,” he said.
Slowly, I lifted my hand, and gripped in my fist was the shirt half of the officer’s uniform. “You were wearing this. In the park.”
Now the other two guys were laughing. I noticed that neither of them had guns—not in their hands, and nowhere else I could see on their bodies, which was pretty much everywhere, since they were both in jeans and dirty tank tops.
“We ain’t no pigs,” one of them said. “But those are kind of our uniforms.”
“You kids thought we were the real deal? This whole time?” The leader lowered his gun but kept a tight grip on it. “She didn’t tell you.”
She who?
“My mom?” I asked, at the same time York said, “Tell us what?”
“Whoa, whoa. I’ll be asking the questions here. What’s this about your mom?” He leveled the gun at me. “Did you go crying to your mommy about all this?”
“I don’t cry,” I said through gritted teeth. “And you already know my mom.”
“You know him?” York said, gaping at me. Next to him, Boston was whimpering.
“I recognized him. I thought he was a cop who arrested my mom.”
“Well, now I’m curious,” the creep said, stepping closer to me. “Who is your mom?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Melissa Cherie. And you were her dealer.”
“I doubt that,” he said. “I don’t deal anymore.” He spread his arms to indicate the campsite, smiling as he lorded over his kingdom. “I’m more of a behind-the-scenes guy now. Dealers answer to me.”
“Well, I don’t answer to you,” I said.
“Oh my God,” York groaned. “Just sit down.”
“Nah, let the lady speak,” the gunman drawled. “What’s on your mind, little girl? You mad at your mom and taking it out on me? Sorry, but I’m not your guy.”
“It was years ago,” I said. “She’s clean now.”
It was a lie, but just a day ago it would have been the truth. I wanted him to know he had lost one to sobriety.
“Melissa Cherie, you said?”
I nodded.
“She used to be a country singer or something?”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I knew I was right—knew it the moment I heard his slimy voice in person and finally saw his scum face lit up with the last gasps of daylight—but having him confirm it made me physically ill.
“Yeah, I remember her now.” He chuckled. “No way is that bitch clean.”
I wanted to scream at him not to call her a bitch, but a logical part of me remembered he had a finger on a trigger, and a deeper part of me felt ripped open by the truth. He was right. As of this moment, she wasn’t clean.
My fault.
No.
His fault.
“Careful with that,” he said, aiming his gun at my hand.
I looked down and saw that I was crumpling the police shirt in my fist.
“Did you really think these would fool real cops?” I asked.
One of the sideline guys called out, “How ’bout you just shut your mouth and sit down like the man said?”
“Sam,” Boston’s voice was pleading and racked with tears. “Just sit!”
I ignored everyone except Mama’s dealer.
“Those uniforms aren’t for the cops’ benefit, sweetheart,” he said. “They’re to keep the other riffraff away while we’re doing business.”
He turned his head to the side to spit, and a thick brown glob hit the ground. The sight of it twisted my stomach. “Most folks in River City Park at night don’t want to be anywhere near police,” he said. “All hookers and dope-heads and trash.” He spit again. “Like your mom.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
The logical part of my brain had apparently just gone on vacation.
His smug look turned vicious now, and he aimed his weapon right at my face. “You may not answer to me, honey, but you will answer to my gun.”
York stood up then, and the dealer turned his gun on the boys. York instantly put his hands up, and, not taking his eyes off the weapon, he said to me, “Sam, come on. Please.”
The fear in his voice shook me awake. That’s what I was supposed to be feeling—fear. The rage had chased it all away, but it was seeping back in now. I shuffled over toward the fire, and by the time I had dropped onto a low stump, my whole body was trembling.
“Finally!” The dealer lowered his gun and rotated his shoulder. “My arm was getting tired. Now, get the other one out here.”
The sideline thugs—who looked more like meth-heads than bodyguards, with their skinny frames and gray teeth—backtracked to the truck and returned with Andi between them.
My heart pounded. She had a dirty gray cloth stuffed in her mouth and bruises on her tattooed arms, but I counted ten fingers and exhaled with relief. The goons threw her into a lawn chair and then took up posts on either side of the campfire. They twitched with nervous energy, reminding me too much of Mama at her unpredictable worst. The man in charge dropped into a chair next to Andi and pulled the cloth from her mouth. She gagged as it came out.
“She’s a screamer, this one.” He winked at us, then nudged Andi’s knee. “Don’t be mad. It was just a precaution. Sit back and relax now. You done good.”
What was that?
I cocked my head, zeroing in on the two of them across the fire. Twilight was darkening the sky around us, but I could still clearly see Andi’s face—and the shame that now filled it.
The scum sitting next to her smiled around at the rest of us. “Andi here almost blew it, though, huh? Thought I was going to have to cut this bitch when shit went bad, but she pulled it together.”
No.
“What is he talking about?” York spoke low and even, but there was a growl at the back of his throat.
“You’re the ‘she,’” I whispered.
“I wanted to—I thought that—”Andi stammered.
She moved to stand, but the dealer used his gun arm to force her back down. “Andi here’s our little lookout. Kind of fucked it up, though, didn’t she?”
He reared his gun up and moved as if to backhand Andi, but he stopped just short of her face and laughed. To Andi’s credit, she didn’t flinch.
“You work for them?” I said.
The dealer answered for her. “Oh yeah,” he drawled. “Andi and I go way back. Caught her trying to lift a wallet out of some girl’s purse while she was getting her ankle inked up at my friend Frankie’s tattoo shop. Told her there was a much easier way to get cash. She’s been running little errands for us ever since.”
I heard every word he said, but I never took my eyes off Andi. Her face crumpled as he told the story, and I saw her deflate the same way she had in detention last year. She didn’t need his cash. What she needed was an outlet for her rage—at Georgia, at her dad—and she’d gone looking for it in all the wrong places.
“I can explain,” she said.
“Explain?” Boston said. “Explain?!” He leaped to his feet and stayed there, despite the thugs stepping closer and the gun now pointed at him. “You knew—you’ve known all along—”
“The paper,” I interrupted. “With the time and place—”
“It fell out of my bag,” Andi said miserably.
“You tried to pin that paper on us!” York cried.
The dealer reached into a cooler with his free hand and cracked open a beer. “Well, this is downright entertaining.”
York spluttered at Andi. “You could have—you didn’t—and then—”
“I tried to stop you!” Andi burst out. “I told you not to go to the docks! I said we should go back to the party!”
She did. She did try. But not hard enough.
“Didn’t try to stop us from stealing their car, though, did you?” Boston raged.
York tried to pull him back down, but he wouldn’t budge.
“Yeah, I’m a little pissed about that,” the dealer said, sucking the foam off his beer can. “I think you owe me a new ride.”
“I think you’ve already got everything you need,” Andi said. She was trying to sound tough, but I heard a quiver in her voice.
“Just about,” he agreed. He nodded over at Boston and York. “How ’bout you boys shove off those backpacks?”
They did as they were told, tossing the bags by the fire, where the thugs picked them up.
“You tried to get us to leave it all behind,” I said to Andi.
She grasped at the lifeline. “I did! I did try! I knew the crooked-cop story wasn’t going to fly with police, but I couldn’t tell you why.”
“You could have,” I said, sympathy competing with deep disappointment. “You could have told us.”
“You would have turned me in.”
“Yeah, we would’ve!” Boston agreed.
Andi’s eyes probed mine. “Sam, I swear. I thought if we just left them their stuff—and after they got it I was going to tell you, before we got back to—”
“The text messages,” I said, realization dawning. Call me or I will end you. “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”
Andi shook her head miserably.
“Andi here doesn’t like boys.” The dealer laughed. “Damn shame.”
“She told us to leave the junk for you,” I said to him. I should have been pissed at Andi, but all I felt was pity. I had seen Mama sucked into situations like this, seen how quickly they could spiral out of control—how the least guilty could take the hardest fall. “She kept trying to ditch the car, the drugs—she was just outnumbered.”
The dealer was sipping his beer, listening.
“She didn’t tell us anything, and she won’t tell the cops. You can let her go.”
He sneered at me. “You talk too much. And you—” He pointed at Andi. “All you had to do was keep your little party pals out of the way. Don’t think you’re still getting that hundred bucks.”
“A hundred bucks?” York’s hands clenched into fists on his knees, and his eyes drilled into Andi’s. “You did all this for a hundred fucking dollars?”
No, I thought. She did it for the thrill. But her thrill ride had turned into a shit show for all of us.
“You don’t even need money,” Boston cried. “You have your own.”
“No; I have hers.” Andi took a sharp, sudden breath, almost like a hiccup, and looked away. “It’s all I have of her.”
I would have spent all the money in the world to buy back Mama’s missing pieces, but for Andi, all the money in the world was the only piece she had left. She steals because she refuses to spend.
“I was just supposed to keep kids from the party away from the docks,” Andi said. “It wasn’t my fault. It was the police. They busted up the party, and they all ran.” She waved an arm at us. “I couldn’t stop them.”
“You’re garbage.” York seethed.
A tear slipped down Andi’s cheek, and she didn’t bother to wipe it away. I wasn’t sure she even knew it was there.
“The cabin,” Boston said, his voice strained. “You told them where we were.”
Andi shook her head, and the look she gave Boston was a warning, but he plowed on, catching up to what I’d already figured out.
“Those text messages! They were from him.” He pointed at the dealer, who in turn cocked his head at Andi.
“So you did get my messages.” He looked back at Boston. “If she had told me where you were, she’d be in a lot better favor right now. As it is, we used the GPS tracker in the wheel well. Took a while. Thanks for not finding it before we found you.”
“They saw you,” Andi said to the dealer, dragging his attention away from the boys and back to her. “They saw you by the docks, and the cops were right behind us. They could’ve identified you. When they took the car, I didn’t know the stuff was still in it. I went with them to keep them from talking. I did it to protect you.” As she said this last line, her eyes slipped, ever so slightly, over to me.
I gave her the tiniest nod in return. I believe you.
But apparently I was the only one.
The dealer waved the gun at his thugs. “Andi first,” he said. “Then the rest.”
I didn’t have time to decipher what that might mean, because so much happened then at once. The twitchy meth-heads moved toward Andi just as Boston and York unleashed a flurry of curse words and accusations at her. Words like “traitor” and “scum” pierced the air in Boston’s high-pitched scream, while York kept repeating “garbage” over and over again. The outburst startled the goons, and they paused halfway to Andi and turned to grab the boys instead.
York pushed one in the chest, then immediately held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Sorry. We’re cool.”
But Boston was not cool. He struggled against the guy trying to grip his arms and shrieked hysterically at Andi, “You did this! To all of us!” He flailed in the thug’s arms. “Disgusting, lying piece of shit, nobody—”
A gunshot ripped through the air, and I curled instinctively into a ball on the ground, my hands over my ears. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
The dealer was on his feet, his gun aimed and freshly fired. I barely had time to register the thugs backing away, Boston still standing—shell-shocked and silent now, but unhurt—and York jumping blindly in front of his brother before the second bullet exploded from the gun.
The first shot had missed. This one found a target.
I’VE HEARD THAT the world moves in slow motion during traumatic moments like this—that pure terror can drag an instant out into an hour.
It wasn’t like that for me.
It all happened very fast—blink-and-you-miss-it fast. For a second, all I knew was blood. Blood splattering over the campfire and onto my shoes; blood blooming on York’s shirtsleeve; blood on Boston’s hands as he gripped York’s shoulder, trying to slow his brother’s fall to the ground.
Then I was on my feet—How did I get to my feet?—and a bony shoulder was slamming into me, knocking me back to the ground. One of the thugs had run into me on his way out of the line of fire. He stumbled over my body and fell into the dirt, puking.
I guess blood and meth will make a guy a little queasy.
I rolled onto my back in time to see the dealer giving Andi a piggyback ride.
Wait, what? Did I hit my head when I fell?
But I wasn’t hallucinating. Andi was on the guy’s back, but it was no ride. Her black fingernails clawed at his face, and she wrapped her legs tight around his waist, one foot kicking repeatedly at his groin.
To my left, Boston pressed his hands against York’s shoulder, crying, “What do I do? What do I do?”
My vision swam at the sight of the blood and the sound of the meth-head puking behind me. Only seconds had passed.
Andi screamed a guttural war cry, and I turned my head just in time to see her fingernails draw blood on the dealer’s cheek. In the falling night, it looked like his face was bleeding black. Blood from every angle. There was nowhere to look that didn’t make me sick.
From across the fire pit, the second thug leaped into the fight. He was trying to peel Andi’s hands away from his boss’s face, but the dealer was blind, and he lashed out at what he must have thought was a new enemy. He pressed the barrel of his gun into his own minion’s chest and fired.
The thug fell still, then slumped forward, causing the totem pole of Andi and the dealer to collapse backward.
The gun thudded to the dirt in front of me, its open end gaping right at my eyeball. I didn’t stop to think; I swallowed the bile that had crept into the back of my throat, took the gun in my hand, and stumbled to my feet.
Two shots into the air, and the chaos finally, mercifully, came to a standstill.
I was the last man left standing—literally. Bodies were sprawled all around my feet. York, flat on the ground and gasping, with Boston kneeling at his side; Andi and the dealer in a tangle of arms and legs on the ground, both crawling out from under the dead body—Holy shit, a dead body—of one of the meth-heads; and the other druggie cowering behind me.
The coward druggie was the first to move. He skittered backward like a crab away from me.
I aimed the gun in his direction, shocked to find my arm steady, unwavering. I guess I was doing all of my shaking on the inside. He froze in midcrawl and began to cry. For a moment the near-dark played tricks on my eyes, and I imagined Mama trapped like a turtle on her back, Mama’s eyes swirling wildly in their sockets, Mama’s tears spilling down those cheeks.
“Go,” I whispered fiercely.
He didn’t need to be told twice. He scrambled to his feet and pulled a set of keys from his pocket, but to my surprise, he didn’t turn to the truck. He spun around and ran straight for the speedboat. Pushing it with all his drug-induced adrenaline, he got it into the water and then hopped behind the wheel. Seconds later, the sound of the motor was fading down the Mississippi, and the only noise was the soft slap of water hitting the shore in the boat’s wake.
I swung the gun back toward the campfire, careful to keep my gaze above the body on the ground. That could have been Mama, too. Dead, for running with the wrong people. Dead, for being too weak to fight a disease. Dead, just for trying to scratch an uncontrollable itch.
I pitied the dead.
I turned the gun on him, still on his ass in the dirt.
“Stand up.”
At the command in my voice, they all stood up.
York leaned weakly on Boston. “You saved me,” he said, but he wasn’t talking to his brother. His unfocused gaze was aimed across the fire pit at Andi.
“I tried,” she rasped through tears.
Once upon a time I would have envied those tears, the release they must have provided. But now I was thankful for my dry eyes. I didn’t want a release. Everything that was pent up inside me was now keeping my gun arm taut.
Boston nodded once at Andi. “If you hadn’t jumped on him . . .”
“Quiet!” I said. I didn’t want to think about what would have happened to York if Andi hadn’t altered the dealer’s aim. Right now I needed to focus on the guy who wasn’t talking.
He wasn’t paying much attention, either. The dealer’s eyes were combing the ground, probably looking for another weapon. He glanced at the gun a few times to confirm it was still pointed in his direction, but he ignored the girl holding it.
As if the gun were just floating in midair.
As if I were invisible.
“Look at me,” I ordered him.
His eyes only searched the ground faster.
“LOOK AT ME!” I screamed.
And everyone did.
Everyone except York, whose eyes slipped closed as his knees gave out. Boston slumped under the weight of his brother’s limp body, a sight that filled me with a quiet fury.
He won’t be sitting on a golden toilet at the end of the world, because his world might end right here.
My eyes slid to the blood clotting at York’s shoulder and the hands pressed tight against it. Boston had been more afraid than any of us to get his hands dirty, and look at them now. My anger stretched, running the length of my arm to the gun in my hand. I tightened my grip, and both Andi and the dealer, standing just feet apart, put their hands up.
It wasn’t Andi holding her arms in the air as if I would shoot her that unnerved me so much as the look on her face that showed she believed she deserved it. Yes, I would probably be angry with her when the dust settled and my emotions caught up to me, but that anger wasn’t part of this fury that filled me now. It burned in every cell of my body, leaving no room for fear or doubt or anything other than blind rage.
I now aimed that rage at the dealer. Blood dripped from his cheek to the corner of his mouth, and he tasted it with his tongue, licking his lips and smiling at me with teeth stained red.
“You gonna waste more of my ammo, or you gonna put the next bullet somewhere that counts?” he taunted.
I hated that he didn’t feel the same fear my friends had at the end of his gun—hated the reckless disregard he’d shown for the life of the only boy to ever hold my hand. I hated that he’d lured my friend Andi into what seemed like a harmless crime for easy money; hated that he’d wasted his partner to save his own skin. But mostly I hated that smug smile on his bloody lips.
He wasn’t just a dealer. And he sure as hell wasn’t some cop who stole my mama away for a couple of nights in jail.
He was the devil who stole my entire childhood.
“Andi,” I said, my voice cool. “Put your hands down.”
She obeyed.
“Check his pockets for keys to the truck.”
He twisted away as she came near him, but I held the gun straighter and stepped forward. He stood still then, the smile falling off his face.
Good.
Andi found the keys in his front pocket and held them up.
“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Boston said, struggling to support York’s slumping form.
“Take the truck and go straight to the police,” I said to Andi. My voice was ever steady, my rage focusing into something calm and absolute. “Tell them to send an ambulance here immediately. Tell them someone’s been shot.”
“No! We’re going with her,” Boston protested. “I’m taking my brother to the hospital!”
“Yes, you are,” I said. I looked at Boston and Andi in turn, then at the pale, half-passed-out face of York. “That’s not the gunshot victim I meant.”
I took a deep breath and leveled the gun at the man—the devil—in front of me.
“Go,” I told my friends. “Now.”
MAMA HAS FINALLY stopped crying, and I’m relieved, because I wouldn’t want to mistake her tears as sympathy for that scum.
“Stop talking,” she orders me. “Stop right there. They can monitor this conversation.”
She twists around anxiously in her seat, checking to make sure the guard is still tucked away in the far corner of the visitation room.
I almost laugh. “Mama, I know how it works. I’ve been here before, remember?”
“Not on that side of the table,” she says.
I clasp my hands together, the metal cuffs digging into my skin. “I already told all of this to the lawyer,” I say.
For once I had told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I plan to do the same on the stand, if it comes to that. And my attorney is pretty sure it will come to that. He’s planning to claim temporary insanity—except he calls it the “duress defense,” something about me being under extreme pressure and traumatized by fear. Whatever. Sounds like temporary insanity to me.
He says I’m lucky the guy isn’t dead.
I’m not so sure.
I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is for attorneys to knock down drug charges to lesser offenses, and according to the news reports, they might let him off for the murder, since he shot his minion while under attack. He’ll probably be in the hospital longer than he’s in prison, and then he’ll be back on the streets, selling his poison to someone else’s mom.
A part of me wishes I had better aim.
And a stronger stomach. I’d passed out after the first shot and the sight of the blood—so much more than had poured from York’s wound, and a lot messier. I’d woken up in the back of an ambulance, but I hadn’t been able to see my friends at the hospital—not with the police officer stationed outside my room.
“Any word on the others?” I ask Mama.
She shakes her head. “You need to worry about you right now.”
“Please.”
Mama sighs. “The boy who was shot—”
“York.”
“Right. He’s out of the hospital. They said his wound was minor; the bullet just skimmed his shoulder.”
Something tight in my gut releases all at once.
“Charges are pending,” Mama says. “Leaving the scene of an accident.”
Okay, that’s not bad.
“He’s lucky it’s not aggravated assault on a police officer.”
“Mama, it was truly an accident.”
“Well, fortunately, the county attorney agrees. And the other one isn’t going to be charged with anything. The little one.”
“Boston.” I smile. “He hates being called ‘the little one.’”
“But that girl—Andi . . .” Mama points at my bench. “She’s the one who should be sitting there.”
It’s hard to argue with Mama about Andi. I guess trouble knows trouble when it sees it.
“They’re practically calling her a hero,” Mama goes on. “She gave the police all kinds of information—rolling right over on her whole crew.”
“They’re not her crew. They’re just some guys she got mixed up with.”
We’re her crew.
“I don’t like her,” Mama says. “I’ve been listening to your story, and she—”
“If you’ve been listening,” I interrupt, “then you know things aren’t always what they seem.”
Mama falls quiet. She knows I’m handing her a free pass right now.
She already told me all about how the pills she took the night I went missing were nonaddictive and preapproved by her doctor for anxiety. And she made a big point of reminding me the reason for the anxiety was waking up at 1:00 a.m. to discover that I hadn’t come home from work. But she failed to say how many of these preapproved, nonaddictive pills she’d taken or what she’d washed them down with.
She knows I don’t believe her. I want to—desperately, I want to. She has four years of sobriety backing up her story, after all, but Mama’s lies don’t work on me. She slipped that night; I’m not sure how far, but I know it happened, and she knows I know. And so she blames herself for all of this.
But in this moment, I’m telling her I trust her. Mama holds my hand. She thinks I’m giving her a gift, but the gift is for me. I will always worry about Mama, but I can’t be her keeper anymore. If she slips, it won’t be my fault, my fault, my fault. It will be her fault. I squeeze her hand.
“I love you, Mama.”
She sniffles.
“Oh, don’t start that again,” I warn, and we both laugh.
“I’m working on your bond,” she says, serious again. “But if we can’t post it, at the very least we can get you moved to juvie. You shouldn’t be in here with the adults.”
“They said the juvenile facility was overcrowded.”
“They can make room for one more. I’ll talk to someone—”
“Mama, I’m fine here.” I give her a half smile. “Thanks to you, I already know most of the guards.”
She flinches. “That’s nothing to be proud of.”
“Cherie?” A man’s booming voice interrupts from the other side of the room, but he bellows it as “Cherry.”
Mama and I give an identical eye roll and answer simultaneously, “Sherry.”
“Sorry,” the guard says as he approaches. His hand is outstretched, and in his fingers I see a tiny key. He reaches down to fit the key into a tiny hole on one of my cuffs.
“Switching to zip ties?” Mama asks.
I rub my emancipated wrists in relief.
“Nope—no ties, no cuffs,” the guard says, and smiles at me. “You made bail.”
I tilt my head back, startled. “I what?”
“But . . .” Mama shakes her head. “I didn’t post it yet. We’re short.”
The guard shrugs. “Guess you’ve got a fairy godmother, then.”
Mama promises to meet me out front, and I follow the guard in a daze to a small room, where I’m handed an unfamiliar set of clothes.
“These aren’t mine,” I say.
“Yours must be in evidence,” he says, and shuts the door.
I hurry into a too-large pair of jeans and a too-small white T-shirt, and then I’m shuffled into a room marked “Discharge,” where I blindly sign some papers and take a large envelope stuffed with my purse and the green knit hat.
Huh. Must not be any “evidence” on this.
I pull the hat over my curls and follow signs with arrows to the lobby. I’m walking around in a fog, trying to figure out who might have bailed me out. Not Aunt Ellen, or Mama would have known about it. But who else did I know with the money to . . .
A light, like a tiny ray of sunshine, pierces through the walls of this awful gray place as realization dawns. I do happen to know a girl with a lot of money.
And she still owes me two hundred bucks and one violin, I think with a grin.
My guess is confirmed when I push open the door to the lobby and see the grim look on Mama’s face. She’s staring through the glass walls toward the jail parking lot, her arms crossed.
“This really doesn’t help your case,” she says to me without taking her eyes off the lot.
When I step up next to her, I see what she sees.
And they see me, too.
All three of them, jumping up and down and waving like maniacs. I can tell they’re cheering, even though I can’t hear them through the thick glass.
Boston and York are holding signs and pumping them in the air like strikers on a picket line.
FREE SAM!
An intercom crackles to life in the lobby, and I hear a distorted voice say, “Disturbance in the east lot.”
I move toward the door to warn them, but Mama grabs my arm, holding me back. I use my free hand to shoo them away, but either they can’t see it or they don’t care. Andi steps forward and tugs at her shirt, holding the front flat for me to see the words written there.
ALL OF US.
She turns around and stretches so I can read the words on the back.
OR NONE OF US.
I know things are bad right now. I know I’ve got some mistakes to pay for, some wrongs to right. And normally that would make me wish myself away to some far-off place—but seeing them all waiting for me outside, for once—for once—I don’t want to be anywhere but right where I am.
Two officers cross through the lobby, brushing past me and Mama and heading straight for the door.
“Run!” I cry with glee as the sliding glass doors open.
The boys drop their signs and turn in the same direction, knocking heads. I’m laughing out loud now. I don’t care what Mama thinks. Andi jumps in surprise at the sight of the officers coming their way. She gives me one last big wave, then takes off running after the boys, who are already halfway to the street.
The three of them zigzag across the lot as if dodging pursuers, but the officers outside are still by the doors, just shaking their heads at these crazy teenagers. Grandma would have called them fools. I call them friends. And as I watch my friends racing out of the lot like escaping inmates, I laugh.
I laugh until I cry.