Full Ride (30 page)

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?

We change drivers every hour or two, sticking to some schedule Stuart's parents came up with to make sure we do this as safely as possible. I get the second leg of the trip, from Cincinnati to just south of Lexington. I'm glad Cincinnati traffic is so bad that I have to concentrate on driving, rather than obsessing,
This is where the Courts live now. What if I turn my head and look out the window and see one of them driving beside me?

Lexington traffic is not so extreme, so I have time to wonder,
Do I really have cousins here, going to UK? Will Mom ever get to see her family again?
I also start thinking about how Mom said it's safe for me to have a driver's license only because Excellerand has no contracts with Ohio. If I were to get stopped in Kentucky for, say, speeding, would that kick my name into some database Excellerand could see? I drive very carefully, and try not to worry. Fortunately, everyone else in the car is talking a lot, so I can mostly tune out my own thoughts and listen instead. My friends argue over whether it's better to listen to satellite radio or to hook up somebody's iPod. They make up ridiculous college-essay spoofs for various people
from our senior class: Shannon Daily's as a Miss America–style “I just want world peace” discussion; the football captain's as a diatribe about how elections should be decided by sporting events. They debate endlessly about the best place to stop for lunch—until I'm so disgusted that I pull into a McDonald's.

“Fine, because you can't make up your mind, you get the most ubiquitous food in America,” I tell them.

But once we get out of the car, we somehow are suddenly in exact agreement: We'll leave the car right where it is but walk over to the Burger King next door.

Oh, yeah. We are such a band of rebels.

After lunch it's Rosa's turn to drive, and Stuart and Oscar fall asleep: Stuart with the front passenger seat leaned back against Jala's knees, Oscar hunched over awkwardly in the middle backseat between me and Jala.

“You know they're faking,” Rosa says. “Thinking we'll start talking about them and they can eavesdrop.”

“Rosa,” Jala says, “you
are
talking about them.”

“Only because I'm hoping guys in college will be more mature,” Rosa says. She reaches over and flicks Stuart's arm. He doesn't even flinch. “I do
not
know how my sister could have wanted anything to do with high school guys.”

“Maybe because they're kind of cute to look at?” I say, glancing toward Oscar. In his sleep—or, I guess, pretend sleep—he eases into a soft grin. I know he expects me to bust him for it, to call out, “You are such a faker!” or hit him, like Rosa just did with Stuart. But I don't. I just keep watching his face.

“Yeah, but underneath the pretty packaging, they're like five-year-olds,” Rosa snorts. “Psychologically, emotionally,
mentally . . .
”

Jala yawns.

“They do have the right idea about taking a nap,” she says. “I
think I'm going to need one before it's my turn to drive. Rosa, are you okay if all the rest of us go to sleep?”

“Why do you think I got the jumbo Diet Coke?” Rosa says with a laugh.

Jala huddles against the door and seems to be out in about three seconds.

“I guess her conscience isn't bothering her about lying to her parents,” I whisper to Rosa.

“I think that's a very forgivable lie,” Rosa whispers back.

So many lies,
I think.

On impulse, I lean forward so I can talk practically right in Rosa's ear. There is one thing I might be able to make right with her.

“Did the Courts tell you what really happened to Whitney after high school?” I ask.

Rosa shoots me a startled look, as if to say,
Oh, so now you're willing to talk?

“Yes,” she says. “Because they said somebody else's essay made them realize not all DHS students knew the whole story. It was yours, wasn't it? I would have warned you before you went in, if I could have, but—”

“There wasn't time,” I say, shrugging. “I just wanted to make sure you didn't think I knew all along that Whitney was mentally ill, and I kept it secret to mess you up.”

“I wouldn't think that!” Rosa says hotly. “But is that what messed you up?”

“I messed myself up,” I say. For a moment I feel like someone from Old Deskins—I don't want to tell Rosa about Whitney's strange behavior. Or am I just protecting myself? Am I scared that if I start describing my interview, I'll end up telling Rosa all my secrets?

“None of that matters now, anyhow,” I say.

It hits me that this is entirely true. Even if I won the Court scholarship, I'd never be able to claim it. Not if I get what I'm asking for in Atlanta.

And then I can't keep talking to Rosa one-on-one anymore. She's smart. She'll figure out that something is really, really wrong. She'll
make
me tell her.

I mutter something about being afraid of waking the others, and I settle back in my seat. But I'm too jittery to sleep myself. I think about making another attempt at college essays, but it's impossible to write an essay when I don't know who or where I'll be when I send it in.

I pull out Mrs. Collins's iPhone instead. I dropped out of the whole cell-phone scene before everyone started getting smartphones, so it's amazing to me that I have the entire Internet at my fingertips while I'm sitting in an SUV speeding across southeastern Kentucky.

And I can look up anything without having it traced back to me, because this isn't my phone. . . .

I type the name, “Robert Catri” and “Tennessee” into a search engine. I couldn't do this at home, not if there was any chance Mom would see what I was looking for. I'm a little sloppy on the unfamiliar keyboard—I forget to put quotation marks around the name. So I pull up information about all sorts of Catris and unrelated Roberts, all across Tennessee. I'm about to go back and start over when I see “fourth conviction for breaking and entering.” I slow down and scan the articles I pulled up.

It looks like, in the corner of Tennessee where Daddy grew up, the Catris are some big crime family. They're not necessarily talented; they don't seem to have ever made off with more than a couple hundred dollars from any of their crimes. But they are amazing in their persistence and their dedication to breaking the law.