The scariest thing about my plan is that Mom actually agrees to it.
She and I talk through a million possibilities, and each time we think of another problem I decide, Well, that’s it. This isn’t going to work. I don’t even have to try. And I’m not sure whether to be relieved beyond words or upset all over again when we work through the complications and go back to the original idea again and again.
I skip school the next day because we stay up so late talking—and, anyhow, would it be safe to go back to school? We spend the next night in the cheapest hotel we can find near Deskins, and that pretty much blows any budget we have for hiding on our own, without Mr. Trumbull’s help.
He has to help us.
And then suddenly it’s Thursday morning, barely thirty-six hours later, and Mom and I are on the long, winding driveway up to Stuart’s house. Ahead of us, I can see Rosa moving a sleeping bag from her beat-up old car to a gleaming black SUV that belongs to Stuart’s mom.
This is really happening. I’m really going back to Atlanta.
Oscar appears around the side of the SUV and drops a sleeping bag onto the blacktop. He makes a lazy wave of his arm, obviously telling Rosa, No hurry. I’ll put my stuff in after you.
Rosa and Oscar think I avoided them Tuesday afternoon—and then skipped school Wednesday—just because I was upset about the Court scholarship. They know my interview went badly, but they don’t know why. When I called Rosa to “explain,” I said I didn’t want to talk about it; I just wanted to focus on the college visits.
Rosa thinks this trip is compensation, something I’m seizing for myself because I won’t get the Court scholarship. I feel like I lied to her just because I didn’t tell everything.
And now I’m going to sit in a car with her—and Oscar and Stuart—for the next nine hours?
Mom parks next to Rosa’s car.
“Got to keep the trashy vehicles together,” she mutters under her breath. “It’s surprising they don’t have a moat around the whole neighborhood to keep out riffraff like us.”
I give her a startled glance, and she sighs.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know Stuart’s your friend. I know you were used to being well-off the whole time we lived in Atlanta. But honestly, I felt like I was pretending as much back then as now. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see that your father was faking everything, because I always felt like an impostor anyhow.”
And once again, Mom has flipped around my whole outlook. Her new I’m-going-to-treat-you-like-a-grown-up attitude is really disorienting.
But I can see it. I can see how Mom’s speech about being “poor but honest,” the way she’d grown up, was almost meant as a declaration of independence on the way to Ohio three years ago. I can see now how her Ann Taylor clothes and perfectly coiffed hair in Atlanta seemed like a costume to her, when it seemed like her true self to me.
“Mom,” I say. “Class warfare? Not what I need to think about right now.”
“Oh, right,” she says. She slides over and gives me a huge hug. “Be careful. If anything happens, if you start feeling unsafe, then . . .”
“Then what?” I ask. “Pray? Go to the police, who wouldn’t believe me?”
Mom pulls back a little to study my face.
“Praying’s good,” she says. “Depending on the problem, maybe the police would be good too. But what I was going to say was, come home. Don’t do anything desperate. Just come home, and we’ll figure out something else to try.”
Something we haven’t been able to figure out despite thinking about it constantly the past day and a half? I think but don’t say. Something we probably wouldn’t be able to afford, anyway?
Maybe the skepticism shows on my face, because Mom tightens her arms around me again, pulling me into a second hug.
“The thing is, even if this were just an innocent trip to look at a faraway college, I’d be scared and worried and nostalgic and sad,” she mutters. “It’s like I don’t even get the chance to feel normal emotions. . . .”
She breaks off because someone is opening the door beside me.
I squint in the near darkness—it’s Jala.
“You came to see us off?” I ask.
“No, I’m going, too!” she says. “I decided maybe I’d want to transfer—it’s not like I even looked around at which college I wanted to go to. I just went to Ohio State because my parents told me to go to Ohio State.”
She’s practically dancing with excitement.
“That’s great!” I say. I pull away from my mom to climb out and hug Jala, too. Jala is five foot one and probably barely weighs a hundred pounds, so it’s not like she would be much use as a bodyguard. But I’m so happy she’s going to be along for this trip.
Though, when I break away to go see Mr. Trumbull, I’ll be totally alone. . . .
I push that thought aside and concentrate on moving my sleeping bag and backpack into the SUV. Mom introduces herself to the two grown-ups standing beside the SUV—Stuart’s parents, I guess.
You don’t think we could talk them out of it, do you?” Mrs. Collins says plaintively to Mom. “Convince them to only look at schools close to home?”
“Mom, stop it,” Stuart commands. “You promised we could do this!”
I look closely at Mrs. Collins. Even though it’s barely six a.m., she’s already wearing makeup and her dark hair is shaped into the same kind of perfect hair-helmet so many of my friends’ mothers had back in Atlanta. Because of what Mom said in the car, I wonder, Does this come naturally to Mrs. Collins? Or is she faking too, pretending to be someone she really isn’t?
Mrs. Collins flinches at Stuart’s words. Naturally rich and perfect or not, she still has feelings.
“Eventually I guess we have to let them grow up,” Mom says softly.
And then my friends and I are saying final good-byes and scrambling into the SUV. Stuart starts to put it in gear, but before he can start driving, his mom raps on the window.
“You all have your cell phones, right?” she asks. “To stay in touch in Atlanta and Nashville?”
Everybody else dutifully nods yes. I shrug and give my head the most minimal shake no. I’m hoping Mrs. Collins won’t notice, but she zeros in on me.
“It’s not going to matter,” I say. “I can borrow somebody else’s to call home, and if we break up into different groups, we’ll have meeting places planned ahead of time or—”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Collins says. “That won’t work. Take mine for the next three days.”
She rushes into the house and comes back with a phone in a turquoise case, which she hands in through the window. She’s thought of everything: She gives me a charger, too.
I do a double take.
“Mrs. Collins, this looks like a brand-new iPhone,” I say.
“It’s my personal cell,” she says. “I’ll just use my work cell until you’re back, so forward any text messages; Stuart can tell you the number. I already changed the voice-mail message, so ignore any calls that aren’t for you. And, Stuart, you will call my work cell twice a day, but never while you’re driving—”
“Sure, Mom,” Stuart groans. “Now, can we go already, so we don’t get stuck in traffic?”
Stuart rolls up the window and hits the accelerator. He keeps his eyes on the rearview mirror.
“I don’t believe it,” he says. “They’re letting us go. For real. They’re not chasing after us.”
Mom and the two Collinses are standing at the top of the driveway, looking forlorn and cast-off and left behind. I glance around and see that Oscar, Rosa, and Jala all seem to be holding their breath, as if they’re incredulous too. I go back to staring down at the iPhone.
“Why would your mom trust me with her brand-new iPhone?” I ask.
“Oh, my parents think you walk on water,” Stuart says. He rolls his eyes. “You coming on this trip was the only reason they agreed to let me go without some adult present. You know, since the original plan was for Mom to drive us, before she had that emergency at work.”
“You totally saved this trip!” Rosa raves.
Stuart’s mom had called mine back right away Tuesday night, double-checking to make sure Mom understood that a last-minute change in plans meant we wouldn’t be “chaperoned.” But I hadn’t realized that anyone else’s plans depended on me.
So . . . was that why Stuart nagged me to go? I wonder. Why would it matter?
It bothers me that I evidently missed some undercurrents connected to this trip. And that I still don’t understand them.
What if Mom and I also missed something big in our plans for dealing with Mr. Trumbull?
I’m glad Stuart’s not looking toward me in the rearview mirror anymore. He’s focused on making the turn out of his neighborhood.
“Stuart’s parents probably thought Becca wouldn’t really go,” Oscar says, spinning around jubilantly in his seat. “And my parents thought they were safe saying I could go if his parents said yes—because there was no way his parents would say yes!”
“Helicopter parents,” Stuart mutters under his breath. He makes it sound like a curse.
“At least I don’t have that problem,” Rosa announces. “Lily got into so much trouble her senior year, my parents gave up. But Jala”—she turns sideways, to look at Jala sitting between us—“I thought your parents were crazy-overprotective. How did you convince them?”
Jala looks down at her hands.
“They don’t know I’m here,” she says quietly. “They think I’m on a three-day biology class field trip for OSU.”
We all stare at her, even Stuart, who should be keeping his eyes on the road.
“What?” Jala says defensively. “Stuart knows what it’s like. Sometimes you just need to tell your parents, ‘This is my life. I need to decide some things for myself.’ ”
“But you didn’t tell them that,” Rosa points out. “Not if they don’t know you’re here.”
“Sometimes you need some space away, so you can figure out what you want to tell them,” Jala explains. “What if I don’t want to be a doctor, after all? What if I don’t want to speed through college and med school as fast as I can? What if I actually want to have some fun with my friends before I’m suddenly thirty-five and married with three or four little kids and working seventy hours a week in the ER?”
It’s unsettling to hear normally sweet, easygoing Jala sound so fierce.
“Didn’t you get the memo that ‘fun’ is supposed to be spring break in Florida?” Oscar asks. “Or wild parties or . . . really, anything but driving twenty hours round trip to go to two stuck-up colleges where they tell you, ‘You should have studied harder in high school, and, oh, yeah, already invented the next Facebook, if you want in to our school.’ ”
“If I’m trying to figure out who I am, can’t I rebel in my own way?” Jala asks him, just as fiercely as before.
“Okay by me,” Stuart says, steering the car onto I-270, our first freeway of the trip.
Rosa and Oscar nod agreement. Oscar even dredges up some outdated “Power to the people!” fist pump. But I’m jolted that even Jala—Jala!—has ulterior motives for this trip. I thought having her along would make me feel safe and secure—I never thought she might have serious issues of her own.
Not to mention, her confession makes me feel like I should confess too.
But I can’t tell my friends why I’m really going to Atlanta, I remind myself. And it’s not like it’s going to affect them. I’m not endangering them or anything.
I hope.
Jala is turning toward me, like she’s about to ask how my supposedly most-overprotective-of-all mom would let me go in an SUV full of teenagers all the way to Atlanta. It’s time to dodge. And I’m still curious about something, anyway.
“Hold on, let’s back up,” I say. I lean forward, so I’m sure Stuart can hear me. “Your mom giving me the iPhone, your parents saying you could go on this trip if I go along—why? Your parents don’t even know me!”
“They know you kept him on the straight and narrow,” Oscar answers for Stuart.
I squint at them both in confusion.
“The cheating scandal in calc?” Oscar says.
I can feel my expression becoming blanker.
“What cheating scandal?” I ask.
“Have you been living under a rock?” Rosa asks.
“Um, yeah, pretty much,” I say. “Studying calc myself, you know?”
Rosa rolls her eyes.
“Didn’t you hear that Caden, Riley, Sam Chase, and Dillon Arterfuss all got suspended for cheating on the last exam?” she asks.
“Didn’t gossip queen Rosa tell you?” Stuart asks sarcastically.
Rosa glares at him.
“Even I heard about it,” Jala chimes in.
Had Rosa said something to me about kids cheating? I’m not sure. And it’s not like I can explain why I’ve been so distracted lately.
“Okay, so four kids got suspended,” I say. “What’s that got to do with Stuart’s parents?”
“All four of those kids are in marching band with Stuart,” Oscar tells me. “They had what they thought was the answer key—”
“Only it wasn’t,” Rosa says. “It was, like, a decoy test Mr. Hattimer set up because he was suspicious—”
“And Stuart’s friends offered him the answer key too, but he refused to use it,” Jala finishes the story.
I can picture Mr. Hattimer setting up a trap. What I can’t picture is Stuart refusing to cheat. From where I’m sitting in the backseat, I can see Stuart is clutching the steering wheel way too tightly.
“Tell her,” Oscar commands Stuart.
Stuart keeps his eyes trained on the windshield.
“Everybody knows I’m friends with you, Becca,” he says. “So when Dillon offered me that answer key, he wanted me to check the answers with you, just to be sure they were right. Since you’d had the highest score on the first test and all. He thought you’d do it, so you could get a good grade too. But I knew you wouldn’t cheat. And then all I could hear in my head was what you said at lunch that one day: ‘Cheaters get caught. They lose.’ ”
He makes me sound like some Old Testament prophet or something, speaking with the voice of God. Hadn’t he noticed that day how close I was to crying?
“So . . .” I’m still trying to piece everything together. “Your parents think I’m the reason you didn’t cheat?”
“You were,” Stuart says quietly. “I almost did it. I almost threw away everything.”
Everyone falls silent. We all know how badly Stuart wants to go to some impressive school next year. We all know that being caught cheating senior year would have ruined that.
“But why did you even tell your parents Dillon offered you the answers?” I ask.
Stuart’s gaze could drill holes in the bumper of the car in front of him.
“They forced it out of me,” he says. “They heard about the other kids getting suspended and . . . they thought I cheated too. They were afraid I’d get caught the next time.”
Ouch, I think. Even Stuart’s own parents think of him as a cheater?
“Maybe this whole story should be your college essay, Becca,” Rosa says mockingly. “ ‘How I made the world a better place by making sure Stuart Collins can get in to an Ivy League school.’ ”
“Hey, Stuart made his own decision,” I say, trying to match her light tone. “So it’s his essay topic, not mine.”
But I’m thinking, Stuart actually paid attention to me? Even when I was really talking about my dad, not him?
“I did try writing about this,” Stuart says. “For the Chicago essay, ‘Describe a time you went against the crowd.’ But I just sounded terrible for considering cheating. Or like a freak, for not doing it.”
“Doing the right thing is freakish?” Jala asks.
“Didn’t you see what most people were doing during your time at DHS?” Oscar asks her.
“Not really,” Jala admits. “I always had to study or babysit.”
“DHS is a hotbed of drug users, the morally bereft, and kids who won’t have a future because they won’t work at their education now,” Oscar says in a pompous tone. He’s clearly quoting somebody—his parents, maybe? “Once we’re in college, we will look back and see what a waste of time high school really was.”
Jala giggles. She looks sympathetically toward me.
“Are you having trouble writing your college essays?” she asks.
I shrug, because I can’t say, “I haven’t even started, because I’m more worried right now about one of the largest corporations in America directing all its resources to finding and destroying my mother and me. I don’t know—do you think I have my priorities messed up? Isn’t it more important to make sure I survive until graduation than to focus on what I’ll do next?”
“I know what would really make you look good,” Jala tells me. “Tell what happened with that sub, Mr. Vickers.”
“You mean, when he got fired?” Stuart asks. “I thought that was because of you, Jala.”
“What? You don’t know the whole story?” Jala asks.
She launches into it, and I only half listen, because I’m remembering it from my perspective.
It was early freshman year, when I was still lost in the morass of missing and hating Daddy, and being terrified of being discovered, and facing the nuclear winter of Mom and me both being miserable. I was sitting in social studies class, barely paying attention because we had a sub and he’d already made it clear we weren’t going to do anything important. Also, Mr. Vickers seemed to think he’d missed his calling as a stand-up comedian, because he kept cracking stupid jokes. None of them sounded funny to me, but I wasn’t the best judge of humor that year. The guys sprawling at the back of the room kept laughing. But maybe that was just to keep Mr. Vickers from talking about social studies.
Somebody knocked at the classroom door, and Mr. Vickers joked, “Who could that be? Think it’s a terrorist? Think we should all hide?”
Mr. Vickers opened the door, and there was Jala in her hijab, holding a late pass from orchestra.
“It is a terrorist!” Mr. Vickers proclaimed, beaming like it was his best punch line ever.
A few guys at the back of the room laughed, as usual. But everyone else seemed to go into a shocked, frozen silence. Jala looked frozen too, for an instant, and then she muttered something like, “Sorry. Wrong class,” even though it wasn’t. She belonged in that class as much as I did. But she turned and walked away.
And, somehow, that was too much for me. The triumphant cruelty on Mr. Vickers’s face balanced against the stunned horror on Jala’s—it was the last straw for me, the tipping point. At that exact moment I had suddenly had enough of cruelty and horror and people hurting other people. I couldn’t stand another second of the world being so filled with pain; I couldn’t just sit there, shocked and frozen and silent like almost everyone else. I had to do something.
I raised my hand.
“Mr. Vickers, I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
I didn’t wait for permission. I just fled the room, scurrying after Jala. I caught up with her easily. She barely glanced at me from under her hijab.
“If you think we’re such good friends that you’re going to come cry with me in the bathroom, don’t bother,” she said flatly.
Her hijab blocked so much of her face that I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not.
“No,” I said. “No. That’s not what we’re going to do. We’re going to go down to the office and we’re going to tell the principal or the vice principal—or somebody!—exactly what Mr. Vickers said. And we’ll say he has to be fired. People like him shouldn’t be teachers.”
Jala turned so I could finally see her whole face.
“Okay,” she said. “That sounds like a better plan.”
And then it was like Jala turned into Rosa Parks, because when we got down to the office, she did the talking. She even said, quite calmly, that she was sure DHS didn’t want a reputation as a bigoted school, and it’d be better if the administration could handle this quietly, without any sort of lawsuit or national media coming in. . . .
I almost choked over that, but it didn’t matter. Mr. Vickers was out of the building before the end of the day. And he’s never been back.
“I wouldn’t have had the nerve to tell, if it hadn’t been for Becca,” Jala says now, finishing up her version of the story. “I wouldn’t have even told my parents. But after that—well, that’s when Becca and I really became friends.”
It’s strange she remembers it that way. Because the whole way down to the office that day, I’d been thinking, It’s not like Jala and I can ever be friends, because I can’t tell her about my daddy. But at least I can help her with this.
“Whoa, Becca, you are a saint,” Oscar says, and it’s humiliating how much admiration glows in his eyes.
“Stop,” I protest. “I was just doing what anybody would do.”
“But you were the only one who did it,” Jala says quietly.
And it’s awful that I can’t tell them why I’d followed Jala, or why I’d been so anticheating with Stuart. I want so badly to say, “I’m not a saint. Kind of the opposite—I’ve lied to all of you for the past three years. And it’s not like I’m innately good or anything. It’s that my daddy got caught and sent to prison and that changed everything.”
Is it possible that I’m actually a better person because of what Daddy did?
I sort of want to tell my friends everything and ask them this question. But of course I can’t.
How is it that I can care so much about these people and their opinions when they don’t know me at all?