Rebel, Bully, Geek, Pariah (7 page)

“Look,” York said. “Whatever happened back there, for all intensive purposes, every one of us was a part of it.”

Boston shook his head. “You mean ‘intents and purposes.'”

“That's what I said.”

“You're an idiot.” Boston tossed the walkie-talkie back into the bowels of the glove compartment and kicked the door shut with his foot.

The radio in the center console spoke again, the dispatcher directing cars and calling for more units.

The shock started to wear off then, and in its place the gnarled claw of reality crept in, twisting my guts. This whole night had felt sort of like a dream—the kind where you follow yourself around, observing but not actually controlling any of your actions. But those were real police responding to a real
emergency—a real officer possibly real
dead
in the woods—and the dream was quickly becoming a nightmare.

I opened the door and tumbled out of the car.
Air. I need air.
It was a good thing I hadn't eaten dinner, or it would have all come back up in that moment. Instead, I bent over and faced the pavement, convulsing with dry heaves. Not much of a replacement for tears, but I felt a release all the same.

I am on a beach. I am on a beach in the Caribbean, all sunshine and white sand, with steel drums and the crash of ocean waves mixing to make a new kind of music.

I heard the sound of car doors opening behind me, accompanied by the constant static of that awful reality radio.

I turned up the steel drums in my mind.
My feet are sinking in the soft sand. There's a tropical drink in my hand, and a cool breeze blowing my hair, for once not held down by a hat.

“Is she puking?”

“Gross.”

I straightened up and looked around.
I am in a dark parking lot in shitty River City, streaming with sweat. Damn it.

I pulled my phone out of my purse to check the time. Only 10:00 p.m. I should have been getting off work now. I couldn't believe just hours ago I'd been wondering how to tell Mama I got fired. I guess telling her about all of this would really soften the blow of my lost job. It would have been funny if it wasn't so damn tragic.

“Grab her phone!” The voice was Andi's, but the rough hand that snatched my cell away was York's.

“Hey!” I lunged after him, but he held the phone out of reach.

“You were trying to call nine-one-one,” Andi accused me.

I should have.

“No,” I swore. “I was checking the time. I thought my ma— my mom might be worried.”

“She's lying,” Andi said.

“You don't trust your own friend?” York tucked my cell phone into his back pocket.

“We're not friends,” Andi and I said in unison.

York squinted at me. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Sam.”

Boston tipped his head to the side. “Yeah, but they call you Worms, right?”

Who is this “they”?

“No,” I said sharply. “They don't.”

“Well, Sam,” York said, “you need to get back in the car and—”

“We need to ditch the car,” Andi interrupted.

Boston scoffed. “Yeah, with my brother's fingerprints all over it.”

“Not my problem.”

“Then what do we do?” I asked. But the answer was obvious. We had to call the police, of course. We had to explain what happened and throw ourselves on their mercy. I just didn't want to be the one to say it out loud.

Boston said it for me.

“We'll tell them it was an accident,” he said.

Yes, perfectly reasonable.

“A drunk-driving accident,” York said quietly.

Well, okay, that sucks for him, but like Andi said, not our problem.

“We need to start walking,” Andi said. “Now. They're going to come after us.”

As if in response, from inside the SUV, a radio voice—it sounded like a different dispatcher this time—called for a perimeter around the park.

“Fine,” York said. “We get out of here. But we take the car until we figure out what to do.”

“No, we
leave
the car,” Andi protested. “If it's a cop car, they'll be looking for it.”

York came at her so fast, I thought he was going to shove her to the ground. Instead, he leaned in close and seethed. “We're taking the car. In case you hadn't noticed, nobody follows you around anymore.”

Andi looked like she'd been slapped.

“I'm driving,” Boston told York.

“My ass.”

“I can do it.”

“You're only fifteen.”

I hardly thought that mattered. When I was eleven, I drove Mama's station wagon all the way to the River City Hospital emergency room. She was on parole, and Aunt Ellen had let me stay the night with Mama. We'd fallen asleep on the couch while watching a marathon session of the
Scream
movies—our favorites—but when I woke up, I was alone. I'd finally found Mama in the parking lot, passed out behind the wheel with the car still running. I smacked her a few times, hard, but she didn't wake up.

Aunt Ellen had given me a cell phone to call her in exactly this kind of emergency, but I was more afraid of getting Mama in trouble with Aunt Ellen than with the police, so I left the phone off and shoved her into the passenger seat. It wasn't hard. She was so skinny back then—she weighed barely more than I did—and her frail body tipped easily onto the car's front bench. I remember her head hitting the inside of the passenger-door window with a little
thunk
, and the thin line of white foam that dribbled out of the corner of her mouth.

My small eleven-year-old hands shook as I stretched the seat belt across my lap and adjusted my mirrors, like Mama had taught me just weeks before. The emergency room was only a few blocks from the apartment. I cried the whole way.

I hadn't cried since.

“I'd rather ride with the fifteen-year-old than the drunk,” Andi said.

“So you're coming?” York asked.

“Yeah, we're coming.”

It took me a second to realize she meant both of us.

“Not me,” I said.

“Come on.” She stuck an arm out like an impatient mother ordering a child to take her hand.

Something about that motherly gesture caused anger to boil up inside my chest. It bubbled and bubbled until I thought I might explode, so when I opened my mouth, I made an effort to keep my tone even.

“No. Thank you.”

There. That was even polite. Good for me.

York tossed my cell phone at me before climbing into the passenger seat.

“Don't give her that! She'll call the cops.” Andi looked like she was about to boil over herself.

“We can't leave her downtown with no phone,” York said. He leaned out the window and called to me. “You okay out here, Hat Girl?”

I nodded.

Then he looked me over in a way that made me feel naked. “She doesn't look like a narc to me.”

I'm not! I'm not a narc!

I don't know why I cared what the hell they all thought. I'd learned a long time ago not to care what
anyone
thought, and I'd been called a lot worse than a narc.

“You can't leave,” Andi said, pleading now. “We're all in this together.”

“I'm not
in this
at all,” I said. “I don't even know how I got here. All I wanted was what you stole!”

“This?” Andi whipped the violin out of her oversize messenger bag and swung it back over her head like she was winding up a pitch. But she didn't throw it. She seemed to think for just a moment, anger flashing in her eyes, and then she shoved the violin into my chest.

“If this is really all you care about after a man's been run over and probably killed and we've been shot at, then you have some serious problems.”

My cheeks burned. Of course it wasn't all I cared about. But the violin was part of Mama, and I normally didn't have room to worry about much more than that.

“There you go,” she said, releasing the violin into my clutching hands. “You've got it. Now go.” She pointed out toward the road.

Inside the SUV, the boys had turned down that awful radio and were listening closely. Boston looked anxious to get on the road. I felt like a coward for abandoning them.

“And my money,” I said.

“Consider it payment for your stupid violin. Now, please. Get. Out. Of. Here.”

Why did it sound like she was begging me?

“GO!”

But I didn't want to go.

The feeling hit me like a wrecking ball.

I had Mama's violin. I had my phone and permission to leave. Maybe I didn't have my cash, but who cared? I was going to spend it on the violin anyway. This was my moment to escape this whole crazy night.

And yet my feet didn't move.

Move, feet!

But I was sure if I took a step, it would be in the wrong direction. My brain's compass told me to hit the road, but my gut was pulling me back toward the SUV.

For a few crazy hours tonight, I had been part of something—something silly and then stupid and then downright awful—but something other than Mama and endless daydreams. And now here I was, standing apart again, watching others from the outside, and it gutted me. It wasn't that I wanted to get in the car so much as I didn't want to be left out.

“We have to go!” York called.

A siren wailed off in the distance, somewhere inside the woods, punctuating his words.

I probably stood there weighing my options for only a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. Andi must have seen something in my face—some change—because her angry shout dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.

“Come on, Sam. You're with us.”

I yanked off my hat and let my fingers wander over the scars on my scalp, tracing the wide raised lines, smooth in spots where the hair had never grown back. I ruffled up my curls to make sure those spots were covered, which was pointless, because I just hid them back under the hat a second later anyway.

The siren grew louder, more urgent, and Boston punched the car horn in frustration. But it wasn't the horn that propelled me back into the SUV with three strangers and a world of trouble. It wasn't the ominous wail of the police sirens, either. I climbed into the backseat and slammed the door shut behind me because, for once, I was invited.

 

BEFORE

LOOK AT ME.

I stretched the thought across the wide hallway to the lockers on the other side. Or, more specifically, to the boy standing in front of those lockers. He was cursing as he spun a lock dial back and forth, every so often tugging on the latch and then throwing his head back when it refused to budge. I liked the way his muscles moved under his shirt when he tensed up to try again.

“Thirty-two, thirteen . . . no, thirteen, thirty-two . . . Shit!”

He banged his head on the locker in frustration, then turned to lean against it, blowing a thick lock of hair out of his eye.

Look at me. Look at me.

Not that I had any idea what I would do if he
did
look at me, but I wasn't exactly practicing my invisibility. I had pushed my gray ski cap back off my face—not far enough to tease out any curls, but far enough that if he looked my way, he might
see my eyes. Some people seemed to like my eyes, when I let them look.

But he didn't. Look, that is.

His gaze was focused on one end of the hall instead, his eyes narrowed in a laser-like search. I wondered who he was watching for and hoped, beyond reason, that it wasn't a girl. He looked too old to have a locker in the freshman wing, and it occurred to me he might be trying to break into someone else's. Maybe he was on the lookout for teachers so he wouldn't get busted.

It was unlikely. Most teachers retreated to their lounge during lunch hours, to get a little peace or hoover up some coffee or take a Xanax—who knows?—but I doubted they'd come marching down the halls of F-wing. The only action this hallway ever saw at this time of day was a few kids running back and forth between the cafeteria and the good bathrooms . . . and me, eating my lunch on the floor in front of my locker.

“York!”

The shriek came from the cafeteria end of the hallway, and a whirlwind of skinny arms and legs propelled itself forward—too fast; the kid was going to fall! As though my thought had triggered it, just then the boy pitched forward, tripping from his own momentum. His bony arms, all elbows and freckled skin, stuck straight out in front of him, Superman-style, and for half a second it looked like he might actually fly right past the boy with the lean muscles and floppy hair.

But instead, the boy called York threw out an arm and hooked it under not-so-Superman's chest, catching him before
he face-planted on the floor. A smile touched my lips. Now who should be wearing the hero's cape?

The scrawny kid—I searched my brain for his name but came up blank—straightened himself up and glanced in my direction. I ducked my face into my tuna sandwich so fast I nearly inhaled mayonnaise up my nose. I didn't want the poor guy to think I'd watched his almost-fall. When I dared to look up again, his back was to me.

“I got your text,” he said breathlessly to York.

York.
Three months into the school year, I hadn't learned many names outside of the freshman class, but this one sounded familiar for some reason. By the looks of him, there was every chance his name was written on bathroom walls and whispered between giggles around school.

I felt a pleasant little rush of relief that York had apparently been waiting for this awkward kid and not one of the Barbies. That's what everyone called Andi and Georgia and their clique—the Freshman Barbies. Although, come to think of it, I hadn't seen Andi with the other Barbies for a few weeks.

“The combination's not working,” York grunted, pounding the locker once with his fist.