“No way,” I exclaimed as Prianka stood at the front of the bus after sending me to the back to find her surprise. “When did you do all this?”
“I just grabbed what I could, along with some icepacks, before we left Walmart,” she said. “I thought the cold stuff was going to end up as lunch. But when we found Dorcas and the bus, I also found the briquettes, the hibachi, and the cooler in the back and thought the meat and the icepacks would at least keep until dinner.”
“Have I told you how amazing you are?” I said as my stomach growled with the prospect of scarfing down a real live hotdog in a real live bun.
“You can say it as many times as you want if it will make you feel better.” She smiled. “Oh, and look under the seat.”
I reached down and grabbed hold of a plastic Walmart bag. As I felt around inside, I silently prayed that Prianka and I were totally on the same page, and I was right. She had packed marshmallows, graham crackers and pile of chocolate candy bars.
“S’mores?” I gasped. “We’re going to have s’mores?”
“What’s a cookout without s’mores?” She grinned as I rushed to the front of the bus and gave her a big hug which turned into another makeout session that would probably have made Trina blush.
Come to think of it, I don’t think much could have made my sister blush, but I certainly gave her a run for her money.
By six, we had the little grill back up by the Peace Pagoda, hot with coals but not flaming enough to cause any attention. We didn’t have any grilling utensils, so we made due with sticks from the woods, but that was okay. Newfie and Whitby sat quietly between Sanjay and Bullseye as they watched the little tubes of meat slowly sizzle on the grill.
Whitby looked like she was ready to pounce the moment we offered one. I didn’t blame her. As for Newfie, he was going to have to be content with the dog food we had on hand. Otherwise he’d chow down the entire contents of our meal and think it was just an appetizer.
“I still can’t believe we have garden burgers, too,” laughed Jimmy. “It’s a vegetarian’s dream.”
“It’s a guinea pig’s dream,” I said as I rolled the hotdogs over one last time with a stick. “But hey, to each his own.”
As the clouds above us slowly floated away to reveal an orange sky, a tiny dark thought began to creep around the edges of my mind. No matter how nice it was to take a little bit of a breather at a place called the Peace Pagoda, the numbing reality that we were about to do something incredibly un-peaceful started getting more insistent and more real with each passing moment.
Thankfully, it wasn’t me who finally said something. It was Trina.
“I think fun time is over,” she said as she sat on one of the wide steps of the Peace Pagoda, leaning back against Jimmy.
“Yeah,” I said. “So how are we going to play this one out?”
Prianka swallowed the last of a hotdog and shrugged her shoulders. “The way I see it, you and Trina have to stay out of sight. If anyone sees you, there isn’t going to be any sort of capture and release. They’re just going to take you, no matter what you say.”
I knew she was probably right. I didn’t want to put any of my friends in danger, but my guess was as soon as we lit our ‘Diana’ fire, it was going to act like Batman’s beacon in the sky and the helicopter people would come running. Trina and I couldn’t be anywhere around when they got here. We had to be safely hidden, probably behind all the gods and goddesses with their guns.
One of the others had to talk for us.
Sanjay, who sat quietly munching on a hotdog, swallowed what was shoved into his mouth and raised his hand.
“Sanjay?” said Prianka like she was a teacher and he was her dutiful student.
“I’ll cast some magic wards like back at Walmart,” he said. “They’ll help protect us.”
“That’s a good idea,” Bullseye told him.
Like our little sharpshooter, if it weren’t for Sanjay soaking up Aunt Ella’s magic books like a quicker-picker-upper double-ply paper towel, we may never have gotten the answers we needed from Luke and Cal back at the farm. We’d still be looking for my parents.
“I second that,” I said approvingly. “Just like you used protection on the doors back at Walmart, right?”
“You got it, Buddy,” said Sanjay.
I found myself wanting to hug him because he was so smart and so good and he didn’t deserve any of this. “We’ll make a s’more for you,” I told him. “Why don’t you go do what you need to do.”
Sanjay nodded and stood.
“I’m going with him,” said Bullseye like an overprotective older brother. Prianka smiled at him and watched as the two boys and both dogs walked down the stairs, crossed over to the bridge and the lily pond, and to the ring of golden statues with our ready-to-be burned message beyond. A moment later, a dark shape swooped down from the trees and landed on Newfie’s back.
What good is magic anyway without a crow?
We all watched as Sanjay started walking around the circle, making elaborate hand gestures, all the while talking, like he was teaching Bullseye how to do what he was doing.
“I want to live in that little dude’s world,” said Jimmy as he reached down and hugged my sister.
“I think that world is our world,” I said. “We now live in a place where crows talk and dead men walk.”
“Crows have always talked in my world,” mused Jimmy with a wistful look on his face. “It’s just that the word ‘poxer’ was never part of crow vocabulary.”
Prianka busied herself with stacking marshmallows and squares of chocolate on graham crackers while we sat quietly. After a moment she said, “I’ll meet the helicopter.”
Words shot out of my mouth lightning fast. “The hell you will,” I snarled at her.
“I’m Indian,” she said. “I don’t think Diana is looking to collect anyone Indian.”
“You don’t know that, Pri,” said Trina. “All we know is she doesn’t want anyone over sixty. Besides, you’re like a black belt. Healthy as a horse. She’d take you in a heartbeat.”
“Yeah,” I said and snapped my fingers in her face. She looked as though she was going to break my digits right then and there.
“That’s why I’ll be meeting the helicopter,” said Jimmy without a hint of sadness or resentment behind his words.
“No way,” I said, but he cut me off then cut me in two with his next statement. He was so right, but so wrong at the same time.
“No one wants a guy in a wheelchair,” he said. “People like me aren’t part of Diana’s new world order.”
27
WE SAW LIGHTS in the sky just after 9:00. Most of the black clouds had drifted away and the air began to smell cool and crisp instead of damp. Way off in the distance, near the University, flashing lights rose above the buildings and kept rising into the night.
“They’re nothing if not predictable,” Jimmy said as we all stood in the shadow of the trees with the golden statues and their guns. Sanjay, Bullseye, and the dogs hung by a plump, golden deity that had a heavy-duty rifle pointed right in the center of the clearing. Andrew was now on Sanjay’s shoulder as Sanjay sat with his legs crossed, his eyes closed and his fingers shaped into a diamond. Bullseye sat with his legs crossed, too, and his head in his hands. He looked as though he was brooding about something, but damned if I knew what it was.
We watched the sky for fifteen minutes. Another flashing set of lights joined the first one, crossing our field of vision and heading off to where I guess Hollowton and Swifty’s was.
“Are you really sure about this?” I asked Jimmy. He was taking his life in his hands by volunteering to meet whoever bothered to come looking for us once we lit our blazing Diana fire.
“I’ll be fine. No one cares about someone like me,” he said in a wa
y that made me feel like he was starting to believe his own words. The thing is, Jimmy wasn’t that kind of guy at all. Having a defeatist mentality just wasn’t part of his game plan.
“We care,” I said to him. Then I repeated the words to make sure they really sunk in. “We care.”
“You’re a good guy, Tripp,” Jimmy said.
“He’s learning.” Prianka smiled as she came up behind me and rested one hand on my shoulder.
“I guess we’ll keep him for now,” said Trina, as she leaned down and kissed Jimmy on the cheek, then trotted off to the middle of the clearing. She had two bottles of lighter fluid with her. Lighter fluid was something we made sure to bring with us from Walmart.
In a poxer-filled world, lighter fluid was liquid gold.
As I watched her go, my thoughts started going toward that dark place that had been lingering just out of reach. All day long, since we left Walmart this morning, I had been second guessing our plan to find Diana. Now that we were about to do just that, something started nagging at my insides. I didn’t know what that ‘something’ was, but it was there, right on the tip of my tongue.
I tried to spit it out. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on willing whatever it was into being, but no matter what I did, all that would crawl to the surface was a vague feeling of foreboding. I knew what we were about to do was dangerous, but despite the risk, we needed to end this part of our lives.
We needed to get a wizened, preppy monkey named Diana off our backs once and for all.
While my brain contended with an unformed idea that refused to gel, Trina stood in the middle of the clearing and let the liquid pour out of the bottles in a stream and onto the big letters. She walked back and forth, soaking the ‘D’ then the ‘I’ all the way to the end. As she stood over the ‘A’, she emptied the last of the lighter fluid into the trench, making sure every bit of the flammable liquid would make the letters burn.
Then she pulled out a lighter.
She was maybe twenty or thirty feet away from us in the middle of the clearing. “Are we ready for this?” she called out.
“As we’ll ever be,” I shouted back. She pulled out some paper from her pocket, lit it and dropped it into one of the trenches. The pile of wood burst into life. Then she went to the rest of the letters and lit them up. When she was done, she backed away from the fire, eventually coming back to us in the woods and right into Jimmy’s arms.
The clearing glowed in the shadow of the flames as we watched the trenches burn, hoping against hope that the fire would be seen by one of the helicopters off in the distance, and come our way to investigate.
We didn’t have to wait long.
“It’s working,” said Prianka as a set of lights turned and headed in our direction. I suppose in a field of black where there’s no more electricity to light up the world, a fire on a mountain was a beacon that definitely couldn’t be ignored.
Bullseye stood up. So did the dogs. “They killed my family,” he said, almost to himself, but his words didn’t fall on deaf ears.
Prianka went over to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “What happened before already happened. We can’t change it,” she whispered to him. “We’re the authors of what happens from now on.”
You know, what she said was kind of beautiful. It was also pretty much the truth. Just because we were a bunch of kids didn’t mean we had to sit back and wait for someone else to decide our futures for us. This was our fight. No one else was going to step forward and fight it for us.
The thing inside my head flip-flopped again. Then the glimmer of a thought or even the shadow of a glimmer of a thought appeared for a fraction of a second before dissolving. What was it? I didn’t know, but I felt like it was something really important.
Meanwhile, the helicopter lights coming up from the University grew larger and larger. I didn’t have any illusions that Diana was inside that helicopter, searching for us in the darkness. No. She was sitting someplace else, probably in a book-lined study that looked an awful lot like the library at the McDuffy Estate.
Right about now, she was most likely resting warm and cozy in a big wingback chair, sipping tea, and tickled pink with the knowledge that as soon as my sister and I were found, she was going to get the chance to find out just what made us so special.
As for me, I’m sure it was going to feel really good to tell whoever was on that helicopter that their fearless leader didn’t need us anymore. Frankly, bursting Diana’s little bubble was going to feel awesome.
My brain did another flip-flop and a story flashed behind my eyes. It was a different story than the one that we had been telling ourselves since last night, but I only caught a glimpse of it. I felt like I was taking a really hard test at school where I knew the answer but just couldn’t get it from my head to my hand and onto paper.
It was there though.
It was coming.
I could feel it.
28
WHAT HAPPENED next was crazy. It will always be crazy. No matter how long I live in this messed-up world, I’ll always count our night at the Peace Pagoda as one of the craziest nights of my life.
As the helicopter came closer, Jimmy put his arms around Trina, whispered something in her ear that wasn’t a whisper at all. He said those dreaded three words that most people throw around like they don’t really mean anything. The truth is, they mean a lot.
“I love you,” he whispered to her, and my cheeks burned. I wasn’t embarrassed or anything. I think the burning was just one of those twin things where I was somehow feeling a little bit of what Trina was feeling.
The most she could muster back was, “Me, too,” but getting someone as rock solid as Trina to admit anything like that was like getting a poxer to actually eat veggies instead of meat.
Good for her, I thought.
Then Jimmy wheeled himself out beyond the cover of the trees, totally exposed, and rolled over to the blazing fire. He parked himself in front of it.
My gaze followed him as my head pounded with that same idea that wouldn’t take shape. I held onto Prianka’s hand, gently squeezing it, as I watched the helicopter grow large in the sky with its blades whirring like a huge garbage disposal. Bullseye stood with his hands at his sides and his fists rolled into balls. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that he was angry—I mean really angry—just like when we were back at Swifty’s, and he hauled off and punched me on the back deck after he spent the evening scrubbing Asian poxer goo off of the wooden planks.
Sanjay was next to him and Andrew was perched in a tree just a few feet above their heads. Sanjay had his eyes closed and he was waving his arms around again like the magic in Aunt Ella’s books was actually real. It had been real enough to fool Luke and Cal, but I didn’t think it was going to be real enough to stop the helicopter or the people inside.
The dogs flanked Bullseye and Sanjay. The two of them, Newfie and Whitby, belonged with them. They were good dogs and they were smart. They would protect the boys if they could. I was sure of it.
Trina had her hand in her mouth again as she watched Jimmy from the safety of the trees. I could practically feel her teeth scraping against my own nails. She was going to have to stop biting them someday—or not. We all have our little vices. In either case, all I wanted to do was go over and tell her that everything was going to be okay because Jimmy was a college dude and knew what he was doing.
But I didn’t move.
Yeah, it probably wasn’t a good idea, anyway. She was too tense for me to stray that close. I already had an on-again off-again icicle named Prianka Patel holding my hand. I didn’t need to go poke at a powder keg like my sister, good intentions or no.
The blades of the helicopter began to chop through the air as it grew larger and larger until it was hanging over the burning Diana sign and Jimmy. He sat t
here in his chair, staring up at the flying machine with his hand over his brow. The flames from the letters blew sideways as a rolled-up ladder unfurled from the side door of the helicopter and dropped to the ground. Memories of Trudy Aiken back on the road with her foot in the lowest rung of that ladder, begging to be taken away with them, filled my mind.
Why did they leave her anyway? Because she was fat? That was no excuse. Why didn’t they want her? Were fat people not part of Diana’s new world order? What about Santa Claus? Was he banned, too?
That thing in my head fell one more notch into place, but not quite all the way. Meanwhile, I heard Jimmy’s voice in my mind.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he had said. ‘No one cares about someone like me.’
‘ . . . someone like me.’
‘ . . . like me.’
And there it was—that idea.
It exploded in my skull like it had always been there, and I had known it was there but I didn’t want to admit it.
“Oh, my God.” I almost shouted as I saw a figure emerge from the helicopter and begin climbing down the ladder. “What are we doing?”
Prianka squeezed my hand so hard she almost broke my fingers. “Shut up,” she hissed at me. “Do you want to be caught?”
I wrenched my hand free of hers, whirled around and grabbed her by both shoulders. “WE HAVE TO STOP JIMMY,” I spat out, spraying her in the face with a fine mist.
Prianka got this really weird look, as though the ice on her face was going to turn into permafrost. I thought she was going to knee me in the nuts again like she did back at Stella Rathbone’s bookstore.
Instead, Prianka clamped her hand over my mouth.
“Make him shut up,” growled Trina as she split the seconds between staring at me and watching what was happening with Jimmy.
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