Rebel, Bully, Geek, Pariah (22 page)

I wondered if the ATVs could carry us all the way back to town. I no longer feared the idea of walking into a police station. At this point, I would bang on the door and demand to be let in.

Hurry
, I urged the engine underneath us.
Take us home
.

The ATV answered my plea, but it wasn't the answer I wanted to hear.

It slowed, sputtered, and then died.

York swore and banged the handlebars with his fists. “Out of gas,” he said as Boston and Andi chugged up. I kept my hands locked around York, my face buried in his back, and tried very hard to cry.

 

28

“SCREW THIS!” BOSTON said, killing his engine and climbing off the ATV. “I'm done playing cops and robbers!”

Andi swung a leg around and sat sidesaddle on the ATV. “You realize they're the cops and we're the robbers in that scenario, right?” The words had all her usual sarcasm, but her voice was flat.

“I'm calling the police,” Boston barreled on. “The
good
police. Someone give me a phone.”

York and I both reached for our cell phones simultaneously. I got to mine first and handed it to Boston. Forget best-laid plans—we should have done this from the very beginning.

Boston clicked the power button with one hand while he looked at the palm of the other. “Shit!”

“What?” York hopped off the ATV and held out a hand to help me down.

Boston raised his palm to show us a smear of black ink. “I sweated off the number, and the website won't load. The
Internet's not working! Your phone sucks.” He tossed my cell back to me.

“Forget the Internet,” York said, powering up his own phone. “Let's just call nine-one-one.”

He dialed and held the phone to his ear, but after a second he made a face. “Nothing's happening.”

“What do you mean nothing's happening?” Boston grabbed the phone from York and dialed again himself. “There's no signal!”

I checked my own phone. No bars. I tried 9-1-1 anyway. Silence.

“I thought nine-one-one was supposed to work no matter what,” I said.

Andi shook her head. “It's supposed to work even if you don't pay for cell service. But if there's no tower
 
. . .” She gestured at the woods around us. “No tower, no signal, no nine-one-one.”

We were truly alone out here. I knew a little something about being alone, but this was different. I clutched a hand to my chest and knotted it in my shirt. If I squeezed tightly enough, maybe I could get my heart to slow down and beat normally.

Boston stomped this way and that into the trees, holding up York's phone like an antenna. “Nothing!”

“Calm down,” York said, though he sounded tense himself.

“Calm down?” Boston said through gritted teeth. “CALM DOWN?!”

He hurled York's phone into the trees, and there was a very final-sounding crunch of metal and glass on bark.

Two phones down, two to go.

“You scum!” York yelled.

“You're the scum!” Boston pointed a finger at York. “If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be here.
None
of us would be here.”

That's not fair.

“Drunk driving—you.” Boston held up a second finger, then a third and a fourth. “Stolen car—you. Running from the cops—you. Nearly killing a police officer—
you
!”

Huh. Maybe he has a point.

“You're right!” York exploded. “I'm the reason you're here, because if it wasn't for me, you'd never go anywhere. You'd sit in your room hugging your college brochures and jerking off to the slutty animated bimbos in your computer games. I'm the reason you're here, because if it wasn't for me, you'd still be back in that cabin pissing yourself behind the couch while those guys busted down the door. I'm the reason you're here, because despite the fact that you're an ungrateful prick, I never leave you behind.”

Boston opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“And I won't leave them behind, either,” York said, pointing at Andi and me but keeping his eyes unwaveringly on his brother. “But you—you would bail in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?”

Boston's silence unnerved me.

Would he?

York found his answer in the quiet. “Yeah, exactly. You and me got nothing in common.”

“You and I,” Boston said finally.

York shook his head. “You're an asshole.”

Our little group walked in tense silence down the path, the boys talking only enough to assure us that the trail dumped out in a field alongside the main road. Andi and I each held our cell phones out in front of us, keeping a keen eye on our bars in case one of us got service.

I hated the quiet. It gave me too much space to think, and I was thinking I'd been a fool. That's what Grandma would have called me, and she always called 'em like she saw 'em. Boston's own brother thought he was a traitor, so maybe I was a fool to agree to his plan. I had most certainly been a fool to believe we were safe at the cabin. I tried to ask the others how the cops could possibly have found us, but Andi only shrugged, like she didn't care, and York muttered something noncommittal about “parents” and “narcs” and “I told you so.” His face seemed folded into a permanent frown.

As the trees grew thinner, we spread out along the path, each walking as far from the others as possible while still keeping everyone in sight. The gaps between us made me uncomfortable, and I closed the distance to York.

“You okay?” I asked him.

Lame. Of course he's not okay. None of us are.

York shrugged. “You know how it is with little brothers.”

“I don't, actually.”

“He's a punk most of the time, but he was really there for me after
 
. . .”

“Yeah,” I said, so he wouldn't have to finish the sentence.

“He was the only one I could talk to. I blew off a lot of my friends for a while. Most of them were on the team, and I just—I couldn't face them.”

“That's why you used your brother's locker,” I said.

York cocked his head at me. “What?”

It was strange. Boston's locker had been across from mine all of freshman year, but the only person I'd ever really noticed using it was York. I guess I wasn't the only invisible person at Jefferson.

“I saw you in the freshman wing. It must have been right after it happened.” I looked down at my feet and added quietly, “You didn't see me, I guess.”

York tipped my chin back up with one finger.

“I see you now.” His eyes met mine, unblinking, for the length of a breath, then he shrugged. “Anyway, that whole year was a downward spiral. I didn't know who I was to my friends without football, so I had to, I don't know—find another part to play.”

Is that what everyone else was doing in school? Playing their parts? Some got starring roles, while the rest of us were just extras.

“What part are you playing tonight?” I asked.

His smile returned. “The dashing hero.”

I thought about how he'd hustled us out of the cabin. The ATV wasn't exactly a white horse, and York's armor was more smudged than shiny, but yeah, he was kind of a hero.

 

29

THE WOODS FINALLY parted, and we stepped into a brown field, awash in the first glow of a new day. The sky had turned from black to deep blue while we'd trekked through the woods, and the dark was slowly lifting from the world.

We passed through low rows of soybean plants, keeping the road back to River City on our left but staying a safe-enough distance away that we could duck out of sight at the sound of a car. Not that the beans would provide much cover. A cornfield would have been better.

“Anything yet?” Boston asked from a few paces behind me.

I checked my phone, but I already knew if I'd had service, I'd have heard it ring. Mama had probably broken her finger hitting redial all night. I felt a little bit of shame that I'd doubted her concern, and a whole lot of guilt for making her worry. I vowed to answer the next call that reached me.

“Nothing,” I said.

Andi didn't even look at hers. I wondered if she was less eager than I was to start getting calls again. Her boyfriend sounded like
a real prick. For all I knew, that's what she was really running away from last night.

Maybe we were all running away from something more than the cops.

Rays of sunlight started to break over the horizon, turning the brown field to glowing amber around us. Illinois was having an extra-early harvest season, thanks to the long, hot summer, and all we could see for miles in every direction were flat expanses of gold backed by deep-green tree lines. It was the kind of scene I liked to see captured on a postcard, so I could pin it up on my bulletin board and imagine myself there. Who knew there was this kind of beauty so close to home?

Our phones woke up at the same time as the fields.

Mine beeped, Andi's buzzed, and we all froze in our tracks.

“I've got a bar!” I said.

“Shit, I just lost mine.” Andi spun in circles with her phone held to the sky, trying to reconnect, while the boys ran to my side.

“Call nine-one-one,” Boston said immediately.

Forget 9-1-1.
“I'm calling my mom.”

Mama always told me she'd gotten
out
of a lot more trouble than she'd been
in
. Maybe she would have a way out of this as well. It rang three times before her phone finally picked up, and then all I heard was dead air.

“Mama?” I cried into the phone.

Still no answer. I checked my screen. We were connected, but maybe the signal was weak. I was afraid to move in any direction in case the call dropped altogether.

“Mama, can you hear me?”

“Sammy?” It came out slow and groggy.

“It's me!”

“Where are you? I was so worried about you.” But it sounded more like
Wherer you? Izo word bow you.

I felt a chill slip down my spine despite the warm morning sun.

“Did I wake you up?” I said hesitantly—hopefully.

Not that it was okay to sleep while your child was missing, but it was better than the alternative.

“Whashoo been doin'?” she slurred.

No.

Boston started to snap at me to just call the police, but I held up a warning hand, and York dragged him away with a concerned nod in my direction. Andi filled their space, parking in front of me with her hands on her hips, listening.

“What have
you
been doing?” I said into the phone.

“Mussa fell 'sleep.” There was a bang and a scuffle on Mama's end, then: “Whoops. Dropped a phone.” She giggled.

Damn it. Goddamn it!

Then I spoke God's name in earnest, begging him silently,
Please. Please, not this. Not now.

“Wha' time'sit?” Mama mumbled.

My voice sounded hollow to my own ears. “It's early on Saturday.”

“'S my unnversary,” she said brightly.

Well, it would have been.

The handle of Mama's anniversary gift glimmered in the sunlight where it poked out from the corner of Andi's messenger bag. I reached for it, and Andi handed it over with a quizzical
look on her face. I held the violin by the neck, letting it rest on my forearm, cradled in the crook of my elbow. The hand holding my phone shook.

“Mama, I have to go.”

But Mama was starting to wake up. Her words still slurred together, but there was urgency in her voice now. She said something mostly incoherent about curfew and scared to death and, again,
Where are you? 
. . .
 
and then she started to cry. I wished I could, too. “Good-bye, Mama,” I whispered into the phone, and then I turned it off—all the way off—and let it drop to the ground at my feet.

I swayed for a second, rocking in the sun, the only moving thing in this whole sleepy field. Andi reached for me, but I stepped out of her grasp.

“No,” I said.

She reached instead for my phone.

“No!”

“O-kaaay.” Andi backed away slowly with her palms out. “Sam, what just happ—”

“No.” I said it over and over, stomping a foot on my cell phone every time. But the soil was too soft, and I was only burying the phone, not breaking it. I began to sweat with the effort, and the violin slid in my grip.

Yes.

I twisted the violin so the body was aimed away from me and wrapped both hands around the neck as if it were a baseball bat. I swung it high over my head, and then brought it down hard. It made direct contact with the phone on the first try. The glass
screen cracked, and a seam on the violin opened with a pop. Another direct hit, and the phone's screen turned into a black puddle, as if leaking ink; the violin's lower trim splintered away. I aimed again.

For making me afraid.

And again.

For making it always all about you.

And again.

And again.

For leaving me alone.

For my HAIR!

My hands lifted the violin and slammed it down with increasing force each time. The phone was long past destroyed when the violin's strings snapped with a satisfying
Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping!
Still I pounded. Until my arms ached, I pounded.

The body of the violin finally separated from the neck, skittering away from me. I chased it through the field, using the neck as a club to bash away at it until there was nothing left but slivers.

I stood up, chest heaving, and surveyed the damage. Bits of blond wood were scattered all around me, and with the sun lighting them up, they blended in almost perfectly with the rest of the field. I twirled the neck in my hand, ready to aim at something new, but there was nothing left to destroy. Instead I chucked the final piece of the fiddle as far as I could into the soybeans and out of sight.