HE WATCHED THEM from the street. Cas and Tad looking up at the school. The two of them walking off to meet Rashid at the spot everyone called the Park. Browning grass and a couple of trees wasn’t exactly his idea of a park. But people liked labels to tell them what to think.
Hell, they had labeled him a hero. All the talk shows wanted him to speak about Diana and surviving the bombing. Someone even offered to represent him if he wanted to write a book. His father said he should think about it—after all, Frankie had saved Cas’s life and he’d dated Diana, so he had insight into what people on TV were calling her complicated mind. But all Frankie wanted to do was pretend none of it had ever happened. That nothing that occurred this summer had ever happened.
It was over. He was at a different school now, with different friends. No one knew about why Tad had been in the school when Diana had tried to blow them up. All people knew was that she’d done something crazy to help her father and that she was dead. Kaitlin was too.
Frankie could still see Kaitlin’s pale face and hear the way she told Z it was all going to be okay, even though her legs were crushed. She had to know she was going to die. Yet no one was calling her a hero. That just showed how stupid the world was. Everyone saw what they wanted to see. Kaitlin was a victim. She was dead, and heroes didn’t die. Heroes saved the girl when they saved the day.
Technically, Z should have been a hero as well, but no one knew where to find him. One day he was in the hospital and talking to all the cops and FBI agents like the rest of them; the next he was gone. Frankie had heard Z wasn’t attending classes at the community college and no one at the other schools where students had enrolled had run into him. Rashid claimed Z had headed for California, but no one else had heard from Z. No one knew what to believe. It had almost become a game online to speculate where Z had gone and what he had been doing in the school in the first place. Yet, despite varsity practice being canceled, no one ever questioned why Frankie had been there.
He looked back at the building and wondered if any of his handiwork had survived the fires. The one in the field house had been his best effort, and it was the part of the school with the least damage. He was pretty sure someone must have seen the tag line Frankie had added under the HOME OF THE TROJANS sign.
Because a good offense starts with a great defense.
Of course, if anyone had noticed, no one cared about who might be responsible. The high school got blown up. More than a dozen people died. And his parents’ first priority after all that had happened was to get him into a new school so he could make the most of his senior year. They still needed him to get over the bar and win. To still be the guy that everyone looked up to. And winners didn’t go off track. They didn’t think about the things that could upset everything. They looked for the next challenge and didn’t look back. Not even when they wished they could. Maybe someday, he thought. But not yet. Not now.
Frankie spotted Rashid walking down the sidewalk toward the Park, where Cas and Tad were waiting—one who thought he was a hero, and the other who knew he wasn’t.
Rashid disappeared behind a tree, and Frankie put the car in gear and drove away.
No looking back. Because that’s who he was.