Divided We Fall (22 page)

“Danny, I think I would have noticed if you hit your face.” She stepped back and folded her hands over her arms. “Trust me, nobody is watching your bull rides as closely as me.”

Why couldn’t she ever leave anything alone? If I told her what really happened she would make a big deal out of it. Maybe try to find the police to arrest those three idiots. Who knows? The thing about guys is that most of the time a good fight settled everything. Whatever issue had caused the fight was over when the fight ended. JoBell had always said that that system was barbaric, but it sure seemed to beat the way girls would drag every conflict out through a long battle of words and gossip for months and months.

“Well?” she said.

“We got in a fight,” Becca said. “These three cowboys —”

“Total jackwads,” I said.

“— were mad about the Boise thing. They tried to jump us out here when Danny was brushing down Lightning.”

“Whoa, you and Becca took on three guys?” Sweeney asked.

“Aw, man, awesome,” Cal said.

I couldn’t hold back my smile. “Yeah, Becca swung Lightning’s bit and nailed one of them right in the nuts!” The guys laughed, and even Becca and her father looked amused. JoBell did not. “What?” I said to her. “What were we supposed to do? They attacked us.”

“It’s not that. I wish you would have told me.”

“I was going to —”

“When?”

“I don’t know.” I threw my hands up. “Sometime when you wouldn’t get all mad about it.”

“I’m not mad about the fight. I only —”

“You sure seemed pissed to me.”

Sweeney took a step forward. “Hey, you two, can you —”

“I’m tired of being kept in the dark about everything, Danny!” JoBell shouted. “You just tried to lie to me again about how you hurt your face, and I’m tired of being the last to know what’s really going on. How long did you wait before you told me about Boise? Who else knew before I did? Now this? I mean, what other secrets are you hiding?”

“Nothing! I didn’t want to tell you about it because I knew you’d act like this!” I yelled.

Becca put her hand on my forearm. “Danny, it’s okay. There’s no need for everybody to get so upset.”

I shook my arm out of her grip and took a step closer to JoBell. “I’m tired of you being mad at me about this Boise shit!”

JoBell opened her mouth like she was going to say something else, but she stopped and pressed her lips together, blowing out through her nose. “That’s
so
not the point. I’m done with this right now.” She started for Becca’s dad’s truck.

“JoBell, come on,” Cal tried.

“I …” She waved her hand behind herself as she walked away. “Not now.”

I’m not gonna lie. Me and JoBell had had fights before. Show me a good couple who hasn’t. That’s what love is, still loving each other even when we both were mad. I wouldn’t have cared if JoBell was angry enough to hit me in the head with a ball-peen hammer. I would’ve still loved her. By Sunday, I was already missing her, but when I tried to call or text her, Digi-Eleanor wouldn’t let my messages through.

Weirdly enough, missing JoBell made me think about how she was constantly tracking news updates, and that made me check to see what was going on. The coverage, if not the mob of reporters outside the house and all over town, actually backed off the Idaho Crisis for a while on Saturday night, after the Iranian military hit US troops with a surprise attack in some place called Birjand. Maybe the attack reminded everyone that we were supposed to be fighting Iran, not each other, or maybe the seven Idaho soldiers among the forty-six killed made the “hate Idaho” crowd remember that we were all still Americans. I was just relieved that none of the casualties were from my unit. I guessed the deployed guys from the 476th Engineer Company were stationed closer to Tehran.

The governor seemed to be doing his best to make sure that Specialist Stein was the last Idaho Guardsman that the Fed could get its hands on. The Freedom Lake cops and the state police drove by the house a lot to make sure everything was okay. Good old Nathan Crow was living up to the promise he’d made. My father would have been proud. Crow became truly aggressive, arresting any reporters who trespassed on private property. Then he convinced some of his friends on the city council that the public sidewalk in front of my house was unsafe and needed to be torn up and replaced. While it was torn up, reporters weren’t allowed to use that sidewalk space to film their stories. Even better, he made sure there were always plenty of cars and trucks parked on my street so that news vans couldn’t get near my house. He had even arranged to have my mother moved out to her nursing conference undercover, driving her in his own car to Spokane. Despite all his efforts, though, the media still swarmed all over Freedom Lake.

On Sunday night, Schmidty finished the upgrades to the Beast. He’d worked overtime all weekend to weld two-inch steel pipes inside the doors and fenders and under the hood. The normal windows had been replaced by glass that was rated to withstand 7.62 rounds. Where he found that, I’ll never know. A heavy steel-pipe push bumper had been welded to the truck’s frame and wrapped the grill in a cool sort of cage. He’d even put a false bottom in the back behind the seats, raising the carpeted floor and toolbox to make a small hiding place back there. All of this made the truck even heavier and cut down further on gas mileage, but it would be safer if I ran into another crazy shooter like the one after that football game. It felt great to be up in the driver’s seat of the Beast again.

On Monday morning, I was relieved to see the school had hired private security to keep the parking lot clear of the media mob. After ignoring the reporters shouting questions from the street in front of the school, I moved quickly and quietly, hoping to avoid detection. I had a very serious mission, though it made me grin like a dork. When I reached my destination, I was in with a few quick spins of the combination lock, and I let out a little breath of relief. I would pull this off without being caught.

“Hold it right there,” said a voice from behind me.

I froze in place. I’d been so close, only to be stopped now.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I turned around to face JoBell and held out the bunch of roses I bought for her the night before. “I was trying to sneak this into your locker as a surprise. I thought you had a student council meeting this morning.”

“We wrapped up early.” She smiled and took the flowers. “They’re beautiful. Thank you.” I had hoped for a warmer reaction than that after our fight, but that would have to do. She held the flowers up to smell them. “What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion.” That was only partly true. “Just … Well. I’m sorry. I should have told you about the fight at the rodeo right away. I thought it would be better not to worry you about it, but I was wrong.” I’d been practicing that speech over and over all the way to school. “And with everything that’s been happening lately, I was thinking about how much I …”

It felt weird saying it, right out in the open hallway. Dylan was messing with something in his locker a few doors down. He’d have some jackwad comment at practice if he heard me getting all mushy.

JoBell looked down at the bouquet. “How much you what?” she said quietly.

I wanted to touch her, to hold her, but she stood a few steps away, and oddly enough, the roses were between us. “I’m a lucky guy,” I said. “To be with you, I mean.”

Her expression brightened a little, and that gave me some encouragement. “Thank you,” she said. “For being man enough to apologize. And I’m lucky too.” She smelled the flowers again. “I’m going to go put these in the office so they’ll get some water and won’t get all crushed in my locker. Thanks so much for this.” She spun so that her hair whipped out behind her and headed off down the hall.

“Smooth move with the roses, Wright,” Dylan said as he closed his locker. “That’s a slick trick. You’re a master.”

What guys like Dylan Burns would never understand was that it wasn’t a trick at all. I loved JoBell and liked to see her happy. She liked flowers and nice surprises. I only wished that this particular surprise had made her happier. It hadn’t gone as well as I hoped it would, but at least we were talking again. Sort of.

The halls were beginning to get crowded. Samantha Monohan and a group of cheerleaders taped up signs on lockers for the JV football game this Wednesday. A freshman girl hurried by with an instrument case. A group of kids copied a worksheet that was probably due first hour. They wrote down the answers in a big hurry.

I sighed. All of these different parts of high school life used to seem so important. I remembered scrambling to get some sort of assignment ready for my teachers and liking the way the locker posters signaled I was part of the team. Now half the country wanted me in jail or worse, and the other half seemed to talk about me like I was some kind of hero. I had never liked school that much — hated the assignments and couldn’t stand a lot of the teachers — but I had belonged here. Now this place was like the rodeo. I felt my old life slipping away.

Becca found me in the hall on the way to government. “Hey, cowboy, you still sore from the weekend?” She grinned and elbowed me.

“I’d be a lot worse off if not for you helping me with those three idiots,” I said. “I bet that dumb bastard’s balls are still in a sling. Without your help, they’d probably have put me in the hospital or something.” I shrugged. “I’d have gotten more behind on my schoolwork. Flunked all my classes. Failed to graduate.”

“Golly, I’m glad I saved you then.”

“I wouldn’t say you saved me, but you definitely —”

“I
saved
you! And good thing, because your grades are bad enough.”

“Ouch!” I said. “Keep talking, Wells. Just remember our bet.”

Becca stopped walking, her eyes wide. “What bet?”

“You remember when we were in, like, third grade, at your brother’s graduation, and you had to explain to me what the valedictorian was?”

“I do remember that. You kept pronouncing it valley doctorian.” She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together. “Hmm. And I
think
I was your ‘girlfriend’” — she flashed air quotes with her fingers — “for that whole weekend.”

“Oh yeah!” I said, remembering. “You dumped me the following Monday.” I grabbed Becca’s arm. “But don’t try to get off topic. At that graduation, you said you were going to be our valedictorian, and I bet you a hundred dollars that you wouldn’t be.”

“Hey, cut me some slack.” She gave me a little push, and we went on toward class again. “I was in third grade!”

“A bet’s a bet. What are you ranked, sixth in the class?”

She gazed at the floor for a moment. “Eighth.” Then she fixed me with that look that said she had an idea. “I seem to remember you were a pretty fast runner back then.”

“I’m still a fast runner!”

She shrugged. “You said if I was ever a faster runner than you, you’d kiss me.”

I laughed, though my cheeks felt a little hot. I knew where she was going with this. “You cut
me
some slack. I was in third grade!”

“I seem to remember beating your time in the open eight hundred in track last year, so, um …” She stepped close to me. “A bet’s a bet.”

I didn’t know what to do. I looked at Becca, with her green eyes and the sprinkling of a few freckles on her nose, her red-brown hair and the purple butterfly hair clip she always wore. A tingle shivered up my spine.

Her lips passed less than an inch from mine as she leaned forward to whisper in my ear.
“You owe me.”

Then she hurried into Mr. Shiratori’s room. I followed her into class, trying to fight back the disappointment at being faked out like that, trying to fight back the guilt over that spark of disappointment.

*  *  *

Mr. Shiratori paced the room and tapped his stick on the floor. Step, step, tap. Step, step, tap. “We’ve finished our study of Article One of the Constitution. Your test on this material will be on Wednesday.” He stopped for a moment and finally looked up at us. “In case any of you were interested.”

He went back to tap-walking. Sweeney looked at me like,
What’s he doing?
I shrugged.

Mr. Shiratori drew in a long breath. “Your homework for the weekend probably didn’t require much writing. Four or five short paragraphs at the most. But it did require a lot of thinking. What was your assignment for the weekend?”

Oh crap. The assignment. I’d forgotten all about it. I slid down in my seat a little.

JoBell raised her hand, as usual.

“Someone besides Ms. Linder for a change,” Mr. Shiratori said. “How about Ms. Monohan?”

Samantha sat up straight in her chair the way she did whenever she answered a question. “We were supposed to write a paragraph for each section of Article One that had significant … relevance … to … circumstances … being reported in the news.”

“Thank you, Ms. Monohan, for that well-memorized verbatim reply,” said Mr. Shiratori. “I’ve been thinking …” He loved dramatic pauses. “… about what is fair.” He looked right at me, and I knew I was doomed. “I think after the events of this last Friday night, some of you might have been a little shaken, and you might need more time to write and revise your essays. Also, in your papers, I want you to imagine how some of the things happening today might develop in the future, and how those events could become relevant to issues regarding Article One. So I expect this assignment in my inbox before we take the test Wednesday, whether or not you are in school that day. No late work when you can easily wire it in on your comm.”

I sighed with relief and sat up a little. One more chance. That was good, since my grade in this class was already not so hot.

“ATTENTION. PRIORITY MESSAGE.”
A deep robotic voice blasted out of my comm.
“ATTENTION. PRIORITY MESSAGE …”

I jumped up in my seat, scrambling for the mute switch. I swear I had switched off the sound when I got to school. I checked it. It was shut off. How was it still making noise?

Mr. Shiratori pointed the Stick of Power at me. “Mr. Wright. You just bought yourself a detention.”

“It’s not even Hank! I turned the sound off! It’s off right now!” I said. Normally I wouldn’t dream of giving Mr. Shiratori back talk, but this wasn’t fair. The screen read:

“ATTENTION. PRIORITY MESSAGE. ATTENTION. PRIORITY MESSAGE …”

“You’re testing my patience, Mr. Wright.”

“Mr. Shiratori. It’s the … Army calling. I think I need to take this one.”

I kept my eyes locked on him and tried to ignore the stares from everyone else. The hardness went out of Mr. Shiratori’s face. “Oh. Well, then. Go ahead. Why don’t you step out into the hallway, Mr. Wright?”

When I was alone, I tapped to accept the call.

“Hello, sir. This is PFC Wright.”