Ten minutes later, the barking was getting steadily louder, and all five of them were walking faster, knowing they were catching up to Sam. They had to be. Gabi tried not to think about how quickly they were catching up at this point, since it seemed pretty obvious that the girl was no longer moving forward.
They just needed to find out why.
Just then, Luke put a hand up to stop them, and he looked at Gabi long and hard before crouching down to the ground and sweeping pine needles with his fingers. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. That was his signal. He thought he knew where she was.
She was torn between elation and terror.
Luke pointed at the ground. “I think I see a track. And another one. Looks like she might have veered off here.” As he pointed down a hill that opened into a clearing to their right, Gabi found herself looking left, wondering what he’d seen that had triggered him to send them in a different direction. The dogs had gone quiet, and she saw nothing physical that would indicate they were right on top of her.
Then she looked up.
And saw thin vertical stripes on the huge pine next to them, sap still dripping from them.
Chapter 30
“Okay, you guys head for that clearing, but freeze when you get to the edge of it. Gabi will be right behind you. I need to go find a tree.”
The girls rolled their eyes at his code for having to pee, but it did the trick. They immediately turned and headed down the hill, leaving Gabi and Luke alone. He quickly unclipped his radio and handed it to Gabi.
“If I don’t signal you within fifteen minutes, just press this button to talk, and Oliver will be on the other end.”
“Wh-what should I tell him?”
Luke pulled out a map and pointed to a spot. “Give him these coordinates right here, and he’ll send one of the teams your way to get you out of the woods.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ll be fine. When the team gets to you, send them up to this spot. I’ll leave an obvious trail so they can follow me to her.”
He unholstered a pistol she didn’t even know he’d brought, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh, God.”
“Do not freak out right now, Gabriela. Freaking out is the worst thing you can do.”
“Okay. I know.” She fought to control her racing pulse. “I’m trying. I’m sorry.”
He turned her shoulders. “I’ll whistle when it’s okay to come back. Go. Catch up to the girls. And if you get into any trouble, use this.” He handed her an air horn. “And the radio.”
“Okay. All right.” She clipped the radio to her own backpack, and slid the air horn into a loop of fabric. “Go find her.”
As she stumbled down the hill, her vision clouded by a stream of tears, the entire summer flashed through her brain, as well as vivid scenes from the school year. She’d plucked Sam out of a hellish foster home, but what had she thrown her into? A boarding school where the girls treated her like shit, and then a camp where she continued to struggle, and now what? Things were so bad for her that she’d fled in the middle of the night into a strange forest.
That had been preferable to the life she was living.
Gabi took a catchy breath, realizing that in her zeal to provide an opportunity to Sam and Eve, maybe she’d called it completely wrong. She’d had some idealized, rose-colored vision of how it would go—like a Hallmark movie where the two girls were plucked out of obscurity by a caring, devoted woman, and went on to have beautiful, successful lives because of her efforts.
Bullshit.
Eve and Sam had stuck out like sore thumbs from the day they’d walked onto the Briarwood campus, despite their new school uniforms and materials Gabi had purchased for them so they wouldn’t look and feel different.
But uniforms couldn’t cover up the scars of lives like theirs. New notebooks couldn’t mask the fact that they’d never owned a book in their lives. And Ralph Lauren bedding couldn’t make up for the fact that they’d both spent most of their lives not even knowing whether their current bed would last through the next month.
Dammit, maybe she’d been totally wrong. Maybe by bringing them to Briarwood, she’d only made things worse for them. The thought was sobering, and terrifying. She’d built her entire career on this drive to bring more opportunities to those who deserved them, and yet her first try was going up in smoke.
Literally.
She wrinkled her nose as she sniffed the air. Wait—she did smell smoke. Someone had built a fire. Could it be Sam?
“Smoke!” The girls came running back up the hill, pointing at the spot where they’d left Luke. “It’s coming from up there!”
She wiped her eyes quickly so they wouldn’t know she’d been crying, then put out a hand to stop them.
“Hold on a second. Luke hasn’t signaled us yet.”
“Signaled?” Madison looked perturbed. “He had to pee.”
“Right.” Gabi nodded like she’d forgotten. “And we don’t really want to walk up on him, right?”
Madison growled. “But we see smoke! It could be Sam! She was always the best one at starting fires.” She stepped from foot to foot, itching to go past Gabi. “Come on. We have to go check it out.”
Just then, they heard a piercing whistle coming from the same direction as the smoke. Luke!
“Is that the signal?” Eve’s eyes widened. “Can we go?”
“Yes!” Gabi practically pushed them by her. “Go! Go! I think he found her!”
Five minutes later, they emerged into a tiny clearing and broke into a run when they saw Sam lying on the grass against her backpack. Luke stood right next to her, digging into his own backpack, and when Sam spotted the girls sprinting toward her, she smiled wider than Gabi had ever seen her.
Eve, Madison, and Waverly slid their backpacks off and fell down on the ground beside Sam, hugging her while Gabi watched. She met Luke’s eyes, and he gave her a tiny thumbs-up. She turned away and blinked hard, trying not to let the relieved tears flow. Sam was okay. She was really okay.
“Gabriela, I need the radio.” Luke reached out for it, then called in their coordinates as he checked his compass, then the map.
Madison looked up. “This would be an awful lot easier if you could use a cell phone up here.”
“Nah. Cell phones are for sissies. I got this.” He turned away, walking a few steps toward the woods as he talked to Oliver.
“He’s such a dinosaur,” Madison grumbled.
“He has a GPS, Madison.” Gabi winked. “He’s just playing you.”
Madison narrowed her eyes as she watched Luke walk away. “Figures.”
Gabi crouched down beside Sam, touching her hand as the dogs jumped up to kiss her cheeks with their cold noses. The poor girl had dirt everywhere, and for the first time, Gabi noticed her right boot was off and her ankle looked huge. Before she could formulate the best way to start talking with Sam, the teenager saved her the trouble.
“Gabi, do you remember that day back in June when you came up to the lounge to deliver our doom?”
Gabi’s eyebrows went upward. “Yes?”
“And remember how you admitted you were plotting our murders?”
“I don’t think I ever admitted that, really.” Gabi smiled. “Considering, maybe. But definitely not plotting.”
“Well, I was just thinking that the murderous feeling you had then is probably nothing compared to the one you have right now.”
“Not true.” Gabi shook her head. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Gabi?” Sam’s eyebrows matched her own. “You are a seriously sucky liar.”
“True, but I’m not lying right now. I’ve been far more worried than mad this whole time.”
Eve nodded. “It’s true, actually. She didn’t even threaten to leave you out here for the bears once.”
“Thank you, Eve.” Gabi rolled her eyes. “See? I even let them call a search team.”
“What?” Sam’s eyes looked sudden
ly frightened. “Oh, God. I’m in so much trouble. I was already in so much trouble. But now?” She laid her head back on her backpack, closing her eyes. “I’m dead.”
“Actually, you’re not.” Madison pointed to her. “Disgusting and dirty, but definitely not dead. What the hell happened, Sam? Why did you take off without telling us?”
Sam kept her eyes closed for a long moment, then opened them. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Luke came back over just then, clipping the radio back to his pack and pulling out a med kit. He pointed to Sam’s ankle and raised his eyebrows.
“Okay, team. What do we have here?”
All three girls leaned over to view her purple, swollen ankle. It was at least sprained badly, maybe broken. Gabi glanced at Sam’s eyes. The girl had to be in some serious pain.
Waverly tipped forward onto her knees. “She’s got a sprain or a break. We need to splint and wrap it, and somehow we’re going to need to carry her out of the woods, because there’s no way this girl can walk on this foot.”
“Good,” Luke replied, handing her a med kit. “Go to it.”
“Me?” Her eyes widened.
“Yup.” He shrugged. “You diagnosed the problem, you get to direct the treatment. Eve and Madison? Do what she asks.”
Gabi watched as a glow came over Waverly’s face. Then she turned to Madison, and probably for the first time in her life, gave her a command. Madison, probably for the first time in her life, merely nodded and did exactly as Waverly directed.
As Gabi watched, she felt Luke’s eyes on her, but when she looked up to meet them, he suddenly got busy with the map.
“We’re about two miles in from the road right now,” he finally said. “We’re going to need to do a carry.”
Sam’s eyes widened. “You’re going to carry me out of here?”
“You have a better suggestion? Feel like walking on that ankle?”
Sam winced. “No.”
“Then we’re carrying.”
“Okay,” she whispered. Then, as Gabi watched her, huge tears started dripping down her cheeks toward her ears. She closed her eyes, wincing as Waverly picked up her ankle to wrap tape around it. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why did you take off, Sam?” Luke’s voice was conversational, nonconfrontational, like they were just sitting around the campfire discussing why someone’s favorite food was spaghetti instead of steak.
“I—don’t think I can explain it right now.”
“It’d be really helpful if you could, because guess what? A hell of a lot of people are going to be asking.”
“I was—scared.”
“More scared than heading out into the woods in the middle of the night was likely to make you?”
She nodded miserably. “Yeah.”
“Why, Sam? What in the world were you scared of?”
She shook her head, looking at the girls, and Luke seemed to understand at the same moment Gabi did. He cleared his throat and put his hand on Waverly’s shoulder.
“Okay, team. Let’s give the ankle a break for a minute. We need to make a litter for her. You remember what we need?”
Eve nodded. “We’re really going to make one?”
“Unless you want to carry her piggyback, yeah. We’re going to make one.” He pointed at the edge of the clearing. “That looks like a good spot there. Take my hatchet and see what you can find.”
Gabi’s eyes widened, but Luke put up a hand. “Gabriela, if you say anything about sharp objects right now, I might just leave you out here.”
Gabi buttoned her lip, suitably chagrined. As the girls headed away from them, Luke positioned himself at Sam’s ankle and resumed the splinting job Waverly had started. He wound tape around and around her foot and calf without speaking, and Gabi waited him out, not even really knowing why she did.
Finally, he looked up at Sam. “What got you this scared, mermaid?”
At his use of the affectionate term, Sam’s face completely crumbled, and tears poured out of her eyes. Gabi crouched down and took her in her arms as the girl sobbed. For two full minutes, her tiny body shook, until it finally seemed she was empty. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, then crashed back onto her backpack.
She looked from Gabi to Luke and back again, then took a deep, pained breath.
“I’m pregnant.”
Chapter 31
Three hours later, Gabi parted the curtain to Sam’s emergency room cubicle, still unsure of what she was going to say to her. She’d just finished talking with the doctor, who’d pointed out a fracture on her X-ray, and had then showed Gabi some lab results.
She sat down carefully on a stool, waiting for Sam to meet her eyes. When it appeared she wasn’t going to, Gabi decided to start with the obvious.
“Looks like your ankle’s actually broken. He’s going to send someone in to put on an air cast sort of thing in a few minutes. It’s too swollen for a real one right now, so we’ll have to handle that when we get back to Briarwood.”
“Okay.” Sam’s voice was almost a whisper, and it broke Gabi’s heart to see her lying so small in the ER bed, her arms crossed like it was her against the entire, big-bad world.
“I have some other news, too.” Gabi waited a beat, and finally Sam looked at her. “You’re not pregnant, Sam.”
Sam nodded slowly. “I know.”
Gabi tipped her head. “What do you mean, you know?”
“Because I’ve never—y’know. Never mind.” She shook her head. “It’d be a miracle, okay?”
“Then why did you tell us you were?”
Sam pulled her arms tighter to her body, and Gabi saw her chin start to quiver. What in the world was going on?
“Sam, honey. You’ve gotta tell me what’s happening, or I can’t help you. I want to help you. I’ve been trying to help you since I read your application a year and a half ago. But honey, you’ve got to be honest with me. Why did you say you were pregnant?”
“Because.” Sam took a deep breath, closing her eyes. “Because my epic escape failed miserably. I was out of options. I … wanted to be expelled, Gabi.”
“What?”
“I hate it at Briarwood. Hate it worse than where I was. I don’t belong there, I have no friends, the teachers look at me like I’m going to steal their precious pencils, and I just—hate it, okay? I’ve been trying to get expelled for months, but you keep covering for me and giving me more chances. I know you’re trying to help, but please, Gabi, just let Pritch-bitch expel me, would you?”
Gabi sat back, shocked. “What do you mean, you’ve been trying to get expelled for months?”
Sam looked at her like she was dense. “Smoking in my room? Feeding the lab rats Pop Rocks? The Ex-Lax? After a certain number of those incidents, I should have been put up before the disciplinary board. And they could have decided I didn’t belong.” She hugged one knee to her chest. “Because that would have been news and all.”
“But…”
“I know you were trying to do what was best. I get it. But Gabi, even you can see that letting me come to Briarwood was a mistake. I am so not a Briarwood girl, and I never, ever wanted to be, anyway.”
“I was just trying to give you opportunities, Sam.” Gabi felt her voice falter. She’d known Sam wasn’t happy, but clearly she’d had no idea just how unhappy she’d been.
“I know. But honestly? I don’t think I want that kind. I just want to go back.”
“To the home you were in when I came to get you?” Gabi felt her eyebrows hike upward. She couldn’t help it.
Sam shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. Not nearly as bad as some of the others, anyway.”
“Sam, I can’t guarantee where you’d end up if I brought you back. It could be much, much worse than what you left.”
“I know. But at least I’d fit in, you know? I’d be watching my back for the things I understand. Briarwood? That’s something I’ll never understand.”
“The first year is always a little rough somewhere
new, honey,” Gabi pleaded. “I’m sure this fall will be easier, don’t you think?”
Sam leveled a frustrated look her way, then pointed at her ankle. “If I thought that, would I have taken off and gotten myself into this situation?”
Gabi looked at the ankle, which was now an angry purple color under the swelling. She shivered when she thought of Sam lying in that clearing by herself, alone and scared.
As much as she hated to see a parallel, it reminded her of when she was seven. She’d never forget when the housemother at her dorm had fetched her from her bedroom to the hallway phone three days after her birthday because her mother was on the other end of the line. “Happy birthday, darling,” she’d said, and even at that age, Gabi had known better than to remind Mother that she’d missed it. She’d just been happy to hear her voice, late or not.
And when she’d thanked her mother for the stuffed giraffe and drawing set and new dresses, Mother had sounded mystified. Two minutes later, Mother had given her signature “ta-ta!” and hung up. Ten minutes later, the housemother had come out into the hallway and lifted a tearful Gabi to her shoulder. She’d taken her into her own apartment and given her hot cocoa and Oreos, then let her watch a birthday cartoon.
When she got back to her own room, Gabi’d stuck the giraffe and dresses under the bed, and she’d given the drawing set to her roommate. The two Oreos she’d slid into her pocket, however, stayed tucked under her pillow until they were a pile of crumbles.
She took a deep breath and looked at the emergency room floor for a long moment, then back up at Sam. “So taking off and heading for Pendleton? Your idea?”
“Um, hello.” Sam rolled her eyes. “You weren’t letting me get booted. I had to take it up a notch, out of your jurisdiction.”
“Oh, God.” Gabi held her stomach. “I’d pinned this all on Madison. And it was you? You’re the one who got them to go?”
“Yeah, because it was really hard.” She shook her head. “I said the word ‘boys,’ and Madison said, ‘Shotgun!’”
“You wanted out of Briarwood so badly that you did—that?” Gabi felt sick.
“In my defense, I drove really slowly. I never thought we’d get to Pendleton before you caught up to us. I figured Kacey would narc before we left the parking lot.”
She's Got a Way Page 24
