Latitude Zero (6 page)

10

BACK AT
our house, my mom helped me into loose-fitting shorts and a tank top, easing them over my wound dressings. Her touch was soft. Her words were harsh. She launched into a lecture, which might have been titled “How Could You Lie to Us—We Raised You with Values!” At least it was better than the stony silence I’d endured on the half-hour car ride from Cabot to Cambridge.

“Tessa? Are you even listening?”

“I’m listening.” I glanced at her, then looked away, unable to face her angry expression. Not to mention the glittery alien antennas she wore. My mom had left her portrait studio so fast to come get me she hadn’t removed the prop she wore to get little kids to smile.

The antennas reminded me of the fun things Chain Reaction riders mounted on their helmets. “You might want to lose the antennas,” I mumbled.

“What?” She felt the top of her head. “Oh.” She snatched them off and flung them aside. Then she pointed at my chest, almost accusingly. “Speaking of odd accessories, what’s that?”

I looked down. Juan Carlos’s necklace was now exposed, as I wore a scoop-neck tank top. My hand flew to my chest and covered the cross. “Nothing.” The necklace. Fresh worries. How was I going to give this back to him? Could I get to the hospital? He probably needed this necklace now more than ever.

“It’s not nothing. Let me see that.” She moved my hand away and looked more closely at it, tracing the body on the cross with one finger. “Why are you wearing a crucifix?”

“Why not? Is it a crime or something?”

“Of course not. It’s just not like you.”

“Mom,
chill
. It’s just a friend’s necklace, okay? I borrowed it. I thought it looked cool.”

My mom pressed her lips together.

After she delivered Lecture #2 (“You Will Use Your Own Money to Donate to This Charity, Young Lady, Oh Yes You Will”), I limped over to the screened-in porch, like a dog slinking off to lick its own wounds. A sprinkler hissed in the neighbor’s yard. Kids played ball in the driveway. An ice-cream truck cruised down the street, its music unusually shrill. Everything seemed false and wrong while Juan Carlos was in the hospital, his life in the balance.

News. I needed news.

I sat in the wicker love seat, wincing from pain. I propped my hurt leg on the coffee table and turned on my laptop. While it booted up, I tore open an EcuaBar that I’d grabbed from the stash in my room. Mocha-Cinnamon Fiesta. It melted in my mouth.

I went to the GBCN site and learned Chain Reaction had not been canceled. There were still hundreds of riders out on the course. Team Firestone-Panera had won the competitive portion of the event, with Team Trident-Crisco taking second and Bose Pro-Cycling in third. Cadence-EcuaBar, thrown off by Juan Carlos’s ride, had not even placed on the podium.

I clicked on a link to eyewitness accounts of the crash and forced myself to watch.

“I was ten feet or so behind the guy,” one out-of-breath man said, as he was interviewed at the mile fifty water stop. “He’d slowed down, but then he started going faster, maybe twenty-five miles per hour on a downhill curve. A bunch of us tried to give him room to do what he needed to do, especially since the road was wet. We figured he was trying to catch his team.”

“I heard this horrible sound up ahead,” said a woman. “I was cresting the hill, and I didn’t even realize what I was seeing at first. People falling off their bikes. Arms and legs . . . flailing.”

An older cyclist said, “I saw el Cóndor go down, right in front of me. It was like his bike blew apart. He must have been going even faster than I thought.”

“Did an endo. End over end, right over the handlebars,” said a teen cyclist.

I could hardly breathe. Juan Carlos had never passed me. His crash had to have been a result of my own.

My hand shaking, I clicked on “Team Cadence-EcuaBar Reacts.” Juan Carlos’s equally stunned teammates could barely stammer out sentences.

“El Cóndor always rode on the edge, man. But he always stayed in control. I don’t know what went wrong for him today.”

“He seemed okay in the morning. He was amped for the race.”

Coach Mancuso, his face lined with worry, added, “But he never showed up for the team photo. Or to the starting line. We had to make the tough call to start the race without him.”

I gasped and replayed that statement to make sure I’d heard him correctly. He’d never made it to the team photo? He’d started the race late?

So where had he gone after talking to me by the woods on Great Marsh Road?

The next clip was an interview with Dylan Holcomb, the heavily tattooed and pierced team mechanic. He spoke from the team trailer. He looked shell-shocked. “He came running up here after the race had already begun,” he explained to the reporter when she asked about the last time he’d seen Juan Carlos. “There wasn’t time to talk, so I don’t know what made him late. After he rode off, I saw he’d dropped his radio earpiece.” The camera zoomed in on the device in Dylan’s palm. “I guess that’s why he couldn’t reach anyone once he was on the course.”

Dylan didn’t say where he thought Juan Carlos had come from. Nor did he mention a missing spare bike. Maybe Dylan didn’t even know yet that Juan Carlos’s spare bike was missing.
He’s the person I should tell about what I saw in the woods. I should find a way to get in touch with this guy.

But I couldn’t resist watching another video clip. An interview with Preston Lane.

The dazed and bleary-eyed EcuaBar entrepreneur faced the camera in front of Mass General Hospital.

“I heard you were signed up to do the recreational ride. Where were you on the route when you heard the team leader was down?” the reporter asked Preston.

He glanced away, his eyes watering. “I never made it out there. Some of the junior riders and I were looking for him, right up until race time. Then the race started without him. I couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t with the team in time.” Lines appeared in Preston’s forehead. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. The Chain Reaction event was important to Juan Carlos. You see, he lost his own mother to cancer.”

He did? Juan Carlos had mentioned his mom’s cooking to me once, something about her perfect
empanadas
. He’d told me he had two younger sisters and a dad who worked in a factory that manufactured windows. He’d mentioned a best friend nicknamed el Ratón, or the Mouse, whom he’d raced with in Ecuador. He’d never said a word about his mother having cancer. Yet he’d probably been through everything Kylie was going through now. The waiting and worrying. I felt an ache of sympathy for him.

“He was airlifted from Emerson to Mass General, because of the severity of his head injury,” Preston went on. “So I immediately left the race site and followed him here.”

The reporter murmured something vaguely sympathetic. “And how long do you plan on keeping vigil here at the hospital?”

Preston ran his hands through his hair. “As long as I need to. We’re trying to reach his family in Ecuador. I doubt they’ll be able to fly out here. It’s the least I can do.”

The last link I clicked on was to an interview between my idol, Bianca Slade, and Chris Fitch. I sat up straighter, ignoring the throbbing pain in my limbs. Bianca’s interview was sure to be different.
Avoid the obvious. Look for the unusual angle. Dig
deep,
and you’ll hit the truth eventually
, she’d advised in her blog post about investigative reporting.

“Mr. Fitch, we understand there have been complaints about Cadence bikes,” said Bianca. “Two product liability lawsuits, for which settlements were reached, and a recall on the Cadence Navigator two years ago. Could el Cóndor’s bike have played a role in this crash?” Bianca demanded.

“Absolutely not,” said Chris, practically glaring at her. “First of all, those were consumer bikes, not racing bikes, and they came out of a factory we no longer use in Hong Kong. Team Cadence-EcuaBar bikes are custom-made in our factory right here in Massachusetts. They are rigorously tested for quality control. And Cadence has a strong record of proactively addressing potential safety issues. We have the highest standards for quality and integrity.” He looked directly at the camera. “Cadence owners should have no cause for alarm. Whatever caused this incident had nothing to do with the integrity of the bike frame.”

Bianca pursed her lips. “This accident must bring up a lot of emotions,” she said. “Your brother, of course, the founder of the company you took over, died tragically on a bike. It must be unsettling, to be so close to two bicycle crashes involving head injuries. One of them fatal.”

“Yes, this crash hits uncomfortably close to home,” Chris said, robotically, as if he’d said these words a hundred times before. “But my brother was hit by a car, so at least we knew the cause. My heart goes out to this young cyclist’s family in Ecuador. We all want to figure out what caused Juan Carlos to go down in the way that he did. And our prayers are with him for a speedy recovery.”

I should just come forward. That was the right thing to do. But what if someone accused me of negligence? Was Jake right that I could incriminate myself and get into worse trouble? When Bianca advised reporters to “
dig deep,
” she probably didn’t mean “
dig one
’
s own grave
.”

Normally information calmed me. News comforted me. I’d been falling asleep to the murmur of news on a tiny radio on my nightstand since I was eleven years old. Knowing was better than not knowing, I always told myself. Even when news was horrific—bombings, tornadoes, airplane crashes—there was something about journalists trying to find the human stories in the chaos that always made me feel better. But now these testimonies from people in Juan Carlos’s inner circle just fueled my guilt. I massaged my stomach to calm my nerves.

My emotions must have shown. When my mom came in to check on me, she promptly closed my laptop. “Media break,” she announced. “Sorry, hon. Obsessing about this crash isn’t healthy. You’ve just been through a shock. Your body needs rest. So does your mind.”

“But I want to know what’s going on with Juan Carlos.”

“You mean that guy Jake raced with? From El Salvador?”

“Ecuador. And yeah. He crashed. He’s still in critical condition at Mass General. Unconscious, with a head injury.”

“Oh, my. Well, I’m sure he’ll pull through,” she said, sitting opposite me on the wicker ottoman. “Cyclists are tough. Though it does seem strange how one of the most skilled cyclists out on that course got hurt the worst.”

“I know.”

“I wonder if something went wrong with his bike,” my mom suggested.

I remembered Juan Carlos looking down with a grimace, as if the bike were handling funny. Jake had taught me about how picky cyclists could be about seat and handlebar adjustments, down to the millimeter. The slightest difference could throw off their game.

But he was riding his main bike, with the green handlebars. That bike should have been fine-tuned and ready to ride.

“Or he could have been sick,” my mom went on, reaching for a Mexican blanket on the floor and folding it neatly. She was weirdly obsessive about that blanket, a threadbare souvenir she’d bought on a trip to Mexico approximately one hundred years ago.

“But when he beat Jake in Colorado at the junior nationals last summer, he had strep throat
and
a sprained wrist,” I pointed out. “If something were wrong, it would be serious.”

“Well, maybe it was. Like a bad reaction to something.” She paused. “Like drugs.”

“God, Mom. Can you give it a rest? You and Dad are always assuming drugs and bike racing go hand in hand. They don’t. El Cóndor rides clean. Everyone on Team EcuaBar does.” Team EcuaBar was actually created to counteract the doping stigma. Several years ago, Preston Lane had bailed out a struggling, upstart cycling team, then added the junior development team. Combined, they’d be “the pure team”—a new generation of untainted cyclists.

“I know. ‘Pure energy, no additives.’ Just like the energy bars. It all sounds good. Still”—my mom shrugged and set the Mexican blanket on the arm of the love seat—“the scrutiny of crowds, his sponsors, the media, his team—it seems like so much pressure.”

I wanted to buy my mom’s theory. If he had reacted badly to some drug, then I was less responsible. But I just couldn’t believe Juan Carlos was doping! He visited schools. He was deeply religious. His faith, his training, and his natural talent all combined to make him win.

If he had doped, only drug tests could confirm that. Or an autopsy report if he died.

If he died . . .

I curled up into a ball on the love seat, drew my mom’s wool Mexican blanket over my head, and tried to shut out the world.

If he’d crashed because of the domino effect of my swerve, I was, in some way, responsible for his hospitalization now. An invisible fault line connected our crashes.

And if he died? I would be responsible, too.

11

A RHYTHMIC
scratching and snapping sound startled me awake—I must have drifted to sleep on the love seat.

The scratching was on the porch screen. I didn’t know what the snapping was.

I remained frozen under the Mexican blanket, suddenly thinking of that guy in the woods, and the snaps of the underbrush as he had chased me.

“Tessa!” a girl’s voice called out. “Are you awake? Didn’t you hear the doorbell?”

I emerged from under the blanket and sat up to find Kylie and Sarita outside the porch. Kylie was scratching the screen with a twig to wake me up, and Sarita was loudly snapping an enormous piece of gum. Behind them, parked at the curb, was the Fingernail: Kylie’s ten-year-old maroon Ford Taurus. The car had earned its nickname due to its uncanny resemblance to a press-on nail. It was our portable home away from home, where we’d had heart-to-heart conversations, taken crazy road trips in search of New England’s best ice cream, and collectively consumed about a billion lattes.

All that stuff suddenly seemed a lifetime ago. Even my friends standing there didn’t seem real. Sarita’s black curls were damp against her brown skin. I could see the tie of a bathing suit halter around Kylie’s sunburned neck, and her auburn, pixie-cut hair looked recently towel-dried. They smelled of chlorine and coconut sunscreen. They’d been having a normal summer day. I wished I’d been on their ride.

“Oh my God! What happened to you?” Kylie pointed to my arm and leg bandages.

“Long story.” I limped to the front door and let in my friends. They joined me on the porch, where we took up our usual perches: Sarita sprawled on the chaise longue, Kylie cross-legged on the ottoman, and me, curled up on the love seat.

“Nice necklace,” said Sarita. “I’ve never seen you wear crosses or anything like that. You’re not becoming Catholic, are you?”

Kylie reached out and touched it. “Is that real gold?”

“I think it is. It’s heavy.”

“I’m not sure. Kind of seems like metal.”

“Well anyway, it’s not mine. It’s a loaner.” For some reason I felt funny telling them who’d given it to me. I slid the crucifix on the chain so that it hung over my back instead, and so they’d stop staring at it. “It’s jewelry, guys. It’s not that weird.”

“Not judging. Just noticing,” said Kylie, not taking her eyes off the necklace.

We were together now, yet separated by an invisible screen. Something had shifted in me at Chain Reaction. I was now a person capable of doing devious and harmful things.

“You look like hell. What happened?” asked Sarita.

I sighed. “Did you hear about the big bike crash on the cancer ride in Cabot?”

“I did.” Sarita’s eyes widened. “I saw the news on my phone when Kylie was driving here. I thought of you right away. I heard el Cóndor got hurt. Didn’t we meet him, when you dragged us to one of Jake’s races?”

“You did meet him. And yeah. He got hurt. Bad.” I took a deep breath and plunged in to the whole story, since my mom was in her photography studio out back and couldn’t hear the details. As I talked about bandit riding on the cancer ride, I couldn’t meet Kylie’s eyes. I would have understood if she walked out.

But she didn’t. Neither did Sarita. They both hugged me. They expressed alarm about the man in the woods, and agreed with my theory about him: he was a fence, a middleman between a bike thief and a black-market sports memorabilia collector who wanted the young cycling protégée’s bike.

“So what happened to Jake?” asked Kylie.

“I didn’t see him again after he took off. My phone battery died, so we didn’t talk.”

“Asshole.” Kylie glowered.

“May I?” Sarita pointed to my phone, charging in the wall.

“Go for it.”

Sarita scrolled, wide-eyed. “Fifteen messages! All from Jake. Stalker.”

I took the phone from her hand, and Sarita and Kylie read over my shoulders.

The first text from Jake had come in at 10:05. I’d have been leaving the medical tent with my mom around then.

Hey. Where RU? Hit mile 20 and realized u weren’t there.

“It took him
twenty miles
to realize you weren’t behind him?” said Kylie.

That did kind of hurt. I had to force myself to read the next messages.

What happened 2U? Heard there was big crash. Tessa? U OK? Call or txt me.

OK I stopped by med tent. They said girl w ur descript went home w mom. Wouldn’t give name but sounds like u. Hope its u. Call me OK??

RU home now? Almost called house. Trying to respect parental situation. CALL ME.

Tessa. I’m so sorry. PLEASE get in touch. Let’s fix this.

Call me as soon as you get this, K???

“Please tell me you’re not going to call him,” said Kylie.

“I’m not. He can wait for me now and see how it feels being dropped.”

“Good,” said Sarita. “Put us out of our misery. I know he’s got this romantic side with those moonlight picnics, and he’s adventurous, and smart. But I hate the other side of him. The side that makes you feel so bad about yourself. It’s not right.”

A new text buzzed in.

Sarita lunged for my phone. “I’ll get rid of him for you.” She frowned. “Who’s this?”

I looked at the screen. The message came from a number I didn’t recognize. It had a whole bunch of zeros in it, and no name.

YOU LITTLE LIAR.

Then a second buzzed in:

YOU DECEIVED ME. YOU WILL PAY.

I chilled. I’d never gotten any kind of message like that before.

“Oh my God. Who sent you this?” exclaimed Kylie, leaning in to see.

“I don’t recognize that number. It’s not in my contacts list. It doesn’t even look like a real phone number.” Maybe the message was a wrong number.

The phone vibrated again.

YOU MADE A BAD, BAD MOVE.

AND I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

So much for the wrong number theory. I reached for the Mexican blanket and hugged it.

“You’re sure it’s not Jake texting from someone else’s phone?” said Kylie.

“I’m sure. This doesn’t sound like stuff he’d say.” My throat tightened. Who would have gotten my number and sent me something so creepy? Who hated me that much? Not Gage or Mari. I hadn’t left my phone number in the medical tent.

You made a bad, bad move.
Someone might have known about my stupid swerve.
You will pay
. I was already paying, wasn’t I? I felt terrible, worrying about Juan Carlos. But
you deceived me
—that made no sense. Unless—a new idea flew into my head. I sat up straight. “You guys! What if it’s from that guy who chased me in the woods? The guy who was looking for Juan Carlos’s spare bike?”

“The fence? How would he have gotten your phone number?” asked Kylie.

I thought for a moment. “He held my phone. He deleted the video I took. Maybe he saw my number and memorized it.”

“That’s possible. But why would he call you a liar? You didn’t lie,” Sarita pointed out. “You showed him where you’d seen the bike. He told you not to report him. And you didn’t.”

“I think this is a spambot,” said Kylie. “Remember that scary text that was going around last year, where you had to forward it to ten people or you’d die? It’s like that.
You will pay
. They’ll probably ask you for money if you respond.”

“Kylie’s right. Delete it,” said Sarita.

I hit the
DELETE
button. Maybe it
was
random spam. I desperately wanted to believe that.

“You seem like you have a lot on your mind,” said Kylie. “We should go. I’ll take a rain check on the mock interview.”

“What mock interview?”

Kylie took a file folder out of her tote bag, its edges damp and curled from her day at the pool. “You were going to coach me this afternoon for my Lane Scholarship interview.” She stared at me with a hurt expression. “You didn’t forget about that, did you? You already rescheduled our practice once to go bike riding with Jake.”

“No. Of course I remember.” An elevator dropped in my stomach. How could I have forgotten about this? The Lane Scholarship was a huge opportunity for Kylie. Preston Lane would pay an entire year of Shady Pines tuition for a student who demonstrated commitment to social issues combined with an entrepreneurial spirit. Sarita, who was captain of our school’s nationally recognized debate team, was supposed to help her come up with talking points. And I’d agreed, weeks ago, to coach her on interviewing techniques—eye contact, voice modulation, stuff I knew from
KidVision
—since Kylie was on the shy side and often froze under pressure.

Kylie really needed this money. Her mom’s cancer treatments had eaten through their savings. There was a chance, if she didn’t get the scholarship, that she’d have to transfer to another school for her senior year.

Kylie stuffed the file back into her tote bag. “Never mind. I know you forgot all about it.”

“I didn’t—”

“No, you did. If you hadn’t crashed, you’d still be out there on that ride.”

“Kylie, I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying so hard to patch things up with Jake, and when he suggested we do this ride together, and try to reconnect, I jumped at it. And forgot everything else. I completely suck.”

Kylie shrugged. “We’ll find time.” She managed a small smile. “The important thing is you’re not hurt worse. Let’s do this when you’re not in mortal pain or thinking of a million other things.”

“What’s there to think of?” Sarita asked.

I sighed. “The other people I hurt. I’m responsible for a bunch of people’s injuries. Including Juan Carlos’s.”

Sarita raised an eyebrow. “Now how could that even be possible?”

I explained how people stopped to avoid the pileup, and what witnesses had said. “He wasn’t that far behind me,” I concluded. “My crash caused his crash.”

Kylie leaned forward and scrutinized the gold chain more closely. “Wait. Is that
his
?”

“I ran into him before the ride and he told me to take care of it for him. He couldn’t ride with it for some reason. Anyway, he said he wanted to talk to me about something after the award ceremony. Obviously we didn’t get to that.”

“Wow. Most guys go out with you at least a few times before they hand over the bling,” said Sarita, a sly grin spreading across her face. “How long was it before Jake gave you jewelry?”

“Jake wasn’t into jewelry. He said it was too materialistic.”

“Right.” Sarita gave me a knowing look.

“Don’t go there, Sarita. This is totally different.”

“Still. Now I see why you’re taking that crash so hard,” said Sarita. “That’s intense.”

“But accidents happen,” said Kylie. “Especially on wet, crowded roads. People crash and die on the Tour de France, don’t they? His crash is not your fault. You can’t sit here dwelling on it. Life’s for living. Not worrying. My mom tells me that all the time now.”

“And I’m sure he’ll pull through.” Sarita patted my good knee.

“Okay,” I said, but the word sounded hollow. “How’s your mom, by the way?” I asked Kylie. “I’m sorry I haven’t been over more lately.”

Kylie shrugged and looked down. “She has her good days and her bad. She’s tired a lot. But her spirit’s strong.”

“Talk about an inspiration,” said Sarita. “Beth Sullivan. She’s my hero.”

“Hey, can you two come over for dinner on Tuesday?” asked Kylie, brightening a little. “It’s actually her birthday. We were going to keep it simple, just family—but you guys, you’re like family, too.” Her eyes watered. “My dad said he’d come and help out, but I don’t know. My bro and I—we’re kind of on our own with this. I guess I could use some moral support. People to take pictures, sing—make it seem more like a party, you know?”

“Oh, Kylie, I can’t.” Sarita looked crestfallen. “I wish I could. I have to present my service project idea at a Rotary club meeting. It’s too late to reschedule.”

“Tessa?” Kylie looked at me. “My mom was just asking about you this morning. She’d love to see you.”

Beth Sullivan had asked about me that morning. While I’d been busy crashing a cancer ride, in more ways than one. “Sounds fun,” I managed to say. “I will be there.”

“Really? You’ll really come?” Kylie’s face lit up.

I managed a smile, too, even though Beth Sullivan’s illness scared me. From now on I would do only good things. “I will absolutely be there,” I said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”