Narc (25 page)

“Not true. The cops are looking for us right now. Maybe they sent out a search unit.” I was holding back tears, trying to keep it together. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“When I saw you at school, I knew there was something weird about you,” she said. “I just didn’t know what it was. You didn’t have a clique, so I thought, maybe you just hung out with whoever you wanted. And I was like, ‘That’s cool. He’s doing his own thing.’ Now I look back and see how fake you were. You’re not really friends with anyone.”

Her words stung. Did I really come across like that?

Skully said, “I let you stay at my place. I thought you were in trouble.”

Only Sebastian stuck up for me. “He’s been through everything and he hasn’t ratted us out, right?”

I didn’t know what to say. Because technically I had.

“Right?” he asked again.

The sound of splashing water caught my attention. I turned and saw a shadow drifting towards us. An airboat. Did Finch come back? Or did the narcotics team bust their way through the swamp?

“It’s the cops,” Sebastian said.

I watched the boat zigzag until I saw a group of men crouched on the prow, shining their flashlights. They wore loose-fitting jeans and patchwork shirts. The oldest guy had knotted his silvery hair into a ponytail that flopped over his shoulder like a sash.

“What do we have here?” he said, peering down at the girls.

The man behind him, the one with gold hoops glinting in both ears, said, “Looks like a bunch of swamp rats.”

“Are you going to arrest us?” Haylie asked.

The men laughed.

“What for?” the older guy asked. “Something you wanna confess?”

“The fire,” I told them. “I think it’s our fault.”

The older guy laughed harder. “That what you think? Who started it in the first place?”

I chewed my lip. “You?”

“That’s right. It’s our land, not the park’s. Always has been our land. This here is a controlled burn.”

“Controlled burn?” I echoed. Talk about a contradiction.

“Cleans out the non-native plants, the invasive species.”

Invasive.

“Burns all the hammock scrub that doesn’t belong here, you know? So they don’t suffocate the pines. When we saw your little campfire, we thought the burn had spread.”

The man held out his meaty fingers. I reached for them, and he helped me scramble onto the boat. They had a dog on board, a slobbering mutt. The beast leaped at me, slamming its paws on my chest and nearly knocking me overboard.

“Don’t worry. She don’t bite … hard,” the older guy said.

We helped weak Sebastian up next, then together we pulled the girls onto the boat, one at a time.

“Do you have any candy on you?” Skully asked.

The older guy blinked. “That’s a strange question. Actually, I’ve got a chocolate bar in the cooler. Will that do?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling at her brother. “It will do just fine.”

“Any more of you swamp rats?” asked the guy with the gold hoops.

I nodded. “Our friend is still on the island.”

“Then you better hang tight,” said the older guy. “We heard noises, smelled smoke. Were you shooting guns out here or just fireworks?”

Nobody said anything.

We sped back where we started. It didn’t take long to find Brent, standing waist-deep in the water, a few feet away from the shore. When he saw the airboat, he just stood there, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Haylie seemed to have sobered up and looked really tired now. Whatever Finch had laced into the joint he gave me had worn off as well. The girls huddled under blankets, and Sebastian was clinging to the dog, his arms cradled around its neck. So I slid into the water and waded toward Brent.

“It’s over,” I told him.

Brent looked at me and started to sob.

I held out my hand, but he didn’t take it. Just moved past me, as if I didn’t exist.

I was gone now. Disappeared. Erased.

The smoke rose higher, seeping into my clothes, my hair, my throat.

It would never wash out.

27 :
Eden

The men were from a tribe of Miccosukee who made their homes near the Everglades. They didn’t live on the reservation, and they didn’t live in grass-covered chickee huts, the way I imagined. Their house looked like any other suburban fortress in Miami, complete with a flat-screen TV and a stereo the size of a station wagon.

Jim, the man with the silver ponytail, represented the Tiger clan. He and his sons were supervising a controlled burn on one of their islands. That’s when they discovered the bonfire.

“You kids are damn lucky we came along. Damn lucky. Especially you,” he said, jerking his head at Haylie. “Could get an infection real easy out there.” Jim bandaged her up. Turns out the bullet just grazed her skin. It may hurt like hell, but those types of scrapes always look messier than an actual puncture wound.

A tapestry stretched across the wall behind Jim’s head. Beneath it, a big-boned woman in an Elvis T-shirt sat at the table, stringing plastic beads.

“For the tourists,” she explained. “I tell ’em these necklaces are a hundred years old.”

“My wife, Sarah, thinks she’s funny,” Jim said.

“
They’re
funny because they believe me.”

We settled on the floor, picnic-style, and gobbled leftover Chinese out of little paper cartons. Sebastian and the girls chowed down like they hadn’t eaten in days. Alone in the corner, Brent stood back, stirring his tea with a chopstick.

“Pretty good death rate,” Sebastian said. “Only a few egg rolls made it out alive.”

“I need some Oompa Loompas to roll me out,” Haylie said.

It felt like my bones had been chewed up and spit out. Every part of me hurt, especially on the inside.

“Are you hanging in there?” I asked my sister.

“Kinda sorta,” she said, wincing. “As long as I don’t breathe too hard. Oh, wait a sec.” She pulled a cell phone out of her bag. “I think this is yours. I found it in the bushes before I saw you and …”

She looked away and handed it to me. The room spun.

“Is it on?” I managed to choke.

“I just checked to see if it still worked.”

My fingers trembled as I punched the button to wake up the screen and saw the three bars. There was nothing I could do.

Jim and the rest of the family headed for the kitchen and cleaned up. When I offered to help, they just waved me away.

Morgan nibbled a fortune cookie. “Happy birthday to me,” she sang under her breath.

“What’s your fortune say?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I never look at them.” She unfolded it slowly. “It says, Soft Drink.”

“What?” Skully giggled.

“I’m just reading what it says. The Chinese word for ‘soft drink’ is
ke le
.”

I shoved another egg roll in my mouth. “That’s supposed to be your fortune?”

“What’s yours say?”

I read, “Every person is the architect of their own future.”

The girls laughed. Hard to believe, only hours ago, we were trapped in the burning swamp.

Morgan flipped the paper over. “Oh. Cool. It says my team will be very prosperous.”

Brent threw his chopstick across the room. “You guys are a bunch of fools, sitting around, laughing with this freak.”

Would this kid ever let up? Rage boiled up in me suddenly. “You’re the freak. Who aims a gun at someone?”

He pointed at me. “Don’t you get it?” he shouted at the girls. “As soon as this is over, he’s going to narc us out.”

Morgan squeezed my hand. “I trust him.”

“Me too,” Skully said.

The room went silent.

Brent turned to Sebastian and clapped him on the shoulder. “What about you, big guy?”

Sebastian frowned. “Aaron’s always been cool with me. I mean, if he was going to do something bad, it would’ve happened already. Right?”

“Oh, my god. You people are idiots.” Brent stormed out of the room.

Jim came back and asked, “What’s his problem?”

“He’s pissed at me,” I said.

“Anger is a wasteful emotion,” Jim said. “Why get angry at the past?”

“Easier said than done.”

Jim sighed. “Who said life was easy?”

We camped on the living room rug. Jim was cool enough to let us use his land line to call our parents. As we waited to be picked up, the others conked out on the floor, but I stayed awake, listening to ice rattle in the freezer. I got up and went to the window. No pigeons stirring on the ledge. Just a broken flowerpot.

I stared out into the dark. I couldn’t see anything without my glasses, not even trees. Just blurry nothingness. At that moment, my life felt just as empty.

My scraped-up arm was stinging, but not as badly as when Jim dumped a bottle of peroxide on it. I’d groaned as it fizzed and bubbled, and he called me a baby. I’d been called worse. On top of that, I’d lost the rubber band. I couldn’t even remember how or when it happened. It was just gone.

I grabbed my cell phone and tried calling the lead officer. No response. I sent him a text message:

It’s over.

Minutes passed.

Still no response.

This was really weird. He always had his phone. I went back to my blanket on the floor. Morgan had stretched out in one of those oversized cartoon T-shirts, which she’d borrowed from Jim’s wife. It was Spiderman. I brushed the bangs out of her face and traced my finger along her body, following the slope of her back.

What was going to happen to us? Would she freak if I told her, “Look. I messed up big time. I can’t stick around here anymore.” Maybe I could apply for college next year. It was time I started living my own life. Doing what I wanted to do. Not that I had it figured out yet. I was just so tired of trying to please everybody else.

Carpe diem
.

I got under the covers, but I still couldn’t fall asleep. My Spidey senses were tingling. For a while, I tossed and turned. Just as the room started to brighten, I heard multiple footsteps scuffling outside the front door, and the dog began to bark.

The cops found us.

One text message. That’s all they needed.

They thought this was the “take down” signal.

Shit.

I tried to shake Morgan awake, but she just mumbled something and rolled over.

“Let’s go,” I hissed.

She opened her eyes. “Aaron?”

The room shimmered. I wiped my eyes and tried to stay calm. “Get up. Please, just move. Goddamn it. You want to rot in jail?”

She still didn’t get it. “Aaron, why are we going to jail?”

The door banged open and slammed against the wall. Somebody hollered a command. The room exploded with noise. The guy at the head of the line busted into the place and tossed in a “flash-bang,” a harmless grenade meant to create confusion. And it did.

Morgan screamed as the foot soldiers dropped down, huddling in each corner of the room. They were dressed in riot gear: vests and shin pads, faces hidden under wasplike helmets.

Haylie knelt on the floor, clutching her head, as if fending off a nuclear bomb. The men kept telling her to stand with her arms in the air.

“Leave her alone. She’s just a kid,” I shouted, the words like an echo from the traffic stop months ago. But nobody listened. The dog wouldn’t stop barking. Then Jim and Sarah were in the room and their mouths moved, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I just saw their panic-stricken faces. Only Brent stood with no expression as the foot soldiers clamped the handcuffs over his wrists and herded him outside.

The girls crouched in their borrowed pajamas. I watched, in horror, as a foot soldier pointed his gun at Morgan and told her to “move, move, move.”

I shoved my way between them.

“Get away from her,” I yelled.

The foot soldier pushed me aside. Another one wrestled me against the wall and yanked back my arms. I could feel things tearing inside my muscles as the handcuffs tightened. The cold metal burned.

As he squeezed the cuffs tighter, I glanced at the faces of my friends, then slumped to the floor.

28 :
Sincerely/You

Status: SENT

To: LadyM

From: Metroid

Subject: Angel And The Jerk

You will probably hate me forever, but I wanted to write things down from my own perspective. I spent a lot of time, trying to explain what really happened.

I got the feeling nobody wanted to hear it.

Finch belongs in jail. So does Brent. Once the cops got hold of that video, those guys didn’t have a chance. The judge could’ve thrown the book at you, but I stood up for everybody in court.