Then the phone started ringing.
The first few calls were from reporters standing outside, using their cell phones. They wanted me to come out and make a statement, just one. Then they promised to leave. My dad hung up on them.
Then people who weren't reporters, but whom we still didn't know, started calling, asking if I was available to help them find a missing relative, a child, a husband, a father. At first my dad was nice to them, and told them that it didn't work that way, that I had to see a picture of the missing person. Then they started saying they'd fax a picture, or e-mail it. Some of them said they were coming right on over with one, they'd be there in a few hours.
That's when my dad disconnected the phone.
I was a celebrity. Or a prisoner in my own house. Whichever you prefer.
I still hadn't gotten to talk to Ruth, and I really wanted to. But since I couldn't go outside or call her, my only resource was to instant-message her from Michael's computer. He was feeling sorry for me, so, in spite of my crack about Claire Lippman, he let me.
Ruth, however, wasn't too pleased to hear from me.
Ruth: Why the HELL didn't you tell me about any of this?
Me: Look, Ruth, I didn't tell anybody, okay? It was all just too weird.
Ruth: But I'm supposed to be your best friend.
Me: You are my best friend.
Ruth: Well, I bet you told Rob Wilkins.
Me: I swear I didn't.
Ruth: Oh, right. You don't tell the guy you're boffing that you're psychic. I really believe that one.
Me: First of all, I am not boffing Rob Wilkins. Second of all, do you really think I wanted anyone to know about this? It's totally freaky. You know I like to keep a low profile.
Ruth: It was totally uncool of you not to tell me. Do you know people from school have been calling, asking me if I knew, and I've had to pretend like I did, just to save face? You are the worst best friend I've ever had.
Me: I'm the only best friend you've ever had. And you don't have any right to be mad, since it's all your fault anyway, for making me walk in that stupid thunderstorm.
Ruth: What are you going to do with the reward money? You know, I could really use a new stereo for the Cabriolet. And Skip says to tell you he wants the new Tomb Raider.
Me: Tell Skip I said I'm not buying him anything until he apologizes for that whole strapping-my-Barbie-to-the-bottle-rocket business.
Ruth: You know, I don't see how any of us are going to be able to get to school tomorrow. The street is totally blocked. It looks like a scene out of Red Dawn down there.
The truth was, Ruth was right. With the cops forming this protective shield in front of my house, and our driveway all blockaded, it sort of did look like the Russians were coming or something. No one could get up or down our street without flashing an ID that proved they lived there to the cops. For instance, if Rob wanted to cruise by on his Indian—not that he would want to, but let's say he took a wrong turn, or what-ever—he totally couldn't. The cops wouldn't let him through.
I tried not to let this bother me. I logged off with Ruth, after assuring her that, though I hadn't told her, I hadn't told anyone else, either, which seemed to placate her somewhat, especially after I told her, if she wanted to, she could tell everyone she'd already known—I certainly didn't care. This made her very happy, and I suppose after she logged off with me, she logged on with Muffy and Buffy and all of the pathetic popular kids whose friendship she so assiduously courts, for reasons I had never been able to fathom.
I took out my flute and practiced for a while, but to tell you the truth, I didn't really put my heart into it. Not because I was thinking about the whole psychic thing. Please. That would make sense.
No, in spite of my resolve not to allow them to, my thoughts kept creeping back to Rob. Had he wondered where I was when I didn't show up for detention that afternoon? If he tried calling to find out where I was, he wouldn't be able to get through, since my dad had disconnected the phone. He had to have seen the paper, right? I mean, you would think, now that he knew I'd been touched by the finger of God, he might want to talk to me, right?
You would think that. But I guess not. Because even though I listened for it, I never did hear the purr of that Indian.
And I don't think it was because the cops wouldn't let him through the blockade. I think he didn't even try.
So much for unrequited love. What is wrong with guys, anyway?
C H A P T E R
12
When I woke up the next morning, I was kind of cranky, on account of Rob preferring not to have to go to jail rather than spend time in my company. But I perked up a little when I remembered I didn't have to slink around anymore, looking for a pay phone in order to call 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU. Hell, I could just call them from my own house. So I got up, reconnected the phone, and dialed.
Rosemary didn't answer, so I asked to speak to her. The lady who answered went, "Is this Jess?" and I said, "Yes, it is," and she said, "Hold on."
Only instead of connecting me with Rosemary, she connected me to Rosemary's butt-head supervisor, Larry, who I'd spoken to the day before. He went, "Jessica! What a pleasure. Thank you so much for calling. Do you have some more addresses for us today? I'm afraid we were cut off yesterday—"
"Yes, we were, Larry," I said, "thanks to your phoning in the Feds. Now, connect me with Rosemary, or I'm hanging up."
Larry sounded kind of taken aback. "Well, now, Jess," he said. "We didn't mean to upset you. Only, you have to understand, when we get a call like yours, we're obligated to investigate—"
"Larry," I said, "I understand perfectly. Now put Rosemary on the phone."
Larry made all these indignant noises, but, eventually, he transferred me to Rosemary. She sounded really upset.
"Oh, Jess," she said. "I am so sorry, honey. I wish I could have said something, warned you somehow. But you know, they trace all the calls—"
"That's okay, Rosemary," I said. "No harm done. I mean, what girl doesn't want a news crew from Dateline in her front yard?"
Rosemary said, "Well, at least you can joke about it. I don't know if I could."
"Water under the bridge," I said. At the time I really meant it, too. "So, look, here's the two kids from yesterday, and I have two more, if you're ready."
Rosemary was ready. She took down the information I gave her, said, "God bless you, sweetheart," and hung up. Then I hung up, too, and started getting ready for school.
Of course, that was easier said than done. Outside our house it was a zoo again. There were more vans than ever before, some with these giant satellite dishes on top of them. There were reporters standing in front of them, and when I turned on the TV, it was sort of surreal, because on almost every channel, you could see my house, with someone standing there in front of it going, "I'm here in front of this quaint Indiana home, a home that has been declared a historic landmark by the county, but which has reached international fame by being home to heroine Jessica Mastriani, whose extraordinary psychic powers have led to the recovery of a half dozen missing children. . . ."
The cops were there, too. By the time I got downstairs, my mom was already bringing them seconds of coffee and biscotti. They were gulping them down almost as fast as she could bring them out.
And, of course, the minute I had put the phone down, it started ringing. When my dad picked it up, and someone asked to speak to me but wouldn't give his name, he disconnected it again.
It was, in other words, a mess.
None of us realized how bad a mess, however, until Douglas wandered into the kitchen, looking a little wild-eyed.
"They're after me," he said.
I nearly choked on my corn flakes. Because the only time Douglas ever starts talking about "them" is when he is having an episode.
My dad knew something was wrong, too. He put down his coffee and stared at Douglas worriedly.
Only my mom was oblivious. She was loading more biscotti onto a plate. She said, "Don't
be ridiculous, Dougie. They're after Jessica, not you."
"No," Douglas said. He shook his head. "It's me they want. You see those dishes? Those satellite dishes on top of their vans? They're scanning my thought waves. They're using those satellite dishes to scan my thought waves."
I dropped my spoon. My dad went, gently, "Doug, did you take your medicine yesterday?"
"Don't you see?" Douglas, quick as a flash, yanked the biscotti out of my mom's hands and flung the plate to the floor. "Are you all blind? It's me they want! It's me!"
My dad jumped up and put his arms around Douglas. I pushed away my cereal bowl and said, "I better go. Maybe if I go, they'll follow me—"
"Go," my dad said.
I went. I got up, grabbed my flute and my backpack, and headed for the door.
They followed me. Or, I should say, they followed Ruth, who'd managed to convince the cops to let her out of her driveway and into mine. I jumped into the front seat, and we took off. If I hadn't been so worried about Douglas, I would have enjoyed watching all the reporters trying to scramble into their vans and follow us. But I was concerned. Douglas had been doing so well. What had happened?
"Well," Ruth said. "You have to admit, it's a lot to take."
"What is?"
Ruth reached up to adjust her rearview mirror. "Um," she said, staring pointedly into it. "That."
I looked behind us. We had a police escort, a bunch of the motorcycle cops rolling along beside us in an attempt to keep the hordes of news vans from bearing down on us too hard. But there were a lot more news vans than I would have thought. And they were all coming right at us. It wasn't going to be very funny when we tried to get out of the car.
"Maybe they won't let them onto school property," I said, hopefully.
"Yeah, right. Feeney's going to be standing there with a big welcome banner. Are you kidding?"
I said, "Well, maybe if I just talked to them …"
Which was how, just before the start of first period, I found myself standing on the school steps, fielding questions from these news reporters I'd been watching on TV my whole life.
"No," I said, in reply to one question, "it didn't hurt, really. It just felt sort of tingly."
"Yes," I said to someone else, "I do think the government should be doing more to find these children."
"No," I replied to another question, "I don't know where Elvis is."
Mr. Feeney, just as Ruth had predicted, was there all right. He was there with a little flock of reporters all his own. He and Mr. Goodhart stood on either side of me as I answered the reporters' questions. Mr. Goodhart looked uncomfortable, but Mr. Feeney, you could tell, was having the time of his life. He kept on saying to anyone who would listen how Ernest Pyle High School had won the state basketball championship in 1997. Like anyone cared.
And then, in the middle of this lame little impromptu press conference, something happened. Something happened that changed everything, even more than Douglas's episode had.
"Miss Mastriani," someone in the middle of the horde of reporters cried, "do you feel any guilt whatsoever over the fact that Sean Patrick O'Hanahan claims that, when his mother kidnapped him five years ago, it was in order to protect him from his abusive father?"
I blinked. It was another beautiful spring day, with the temperature already climbing into the seventies. But, suddenly, I felt cold.
"What?" I said, scanning the crowd, trying to figure out who was talking.
"And that your revealing Sean's whereabouts to the authorities," the voice went on, "has not only endangered his life, but put his mother's freedom in jeopardy?"
And then, instead of there being a sea of faces in front of me, there was only one face. I couldn't even tell if I was really seeing it, or if it was just in my mind's eye. But there it was, Sean's face, as I'd seen it that day in front of the little brick house in Paoli. A small face, white as paper, the freckles on it standing out like hives. His fingers, clinging to me, had shaken like leaves.
"Don't you tell anyone," he'd hissed at me. "Don't you ever tell anyone you saw me, understand?"
He had begged me not to tell. He had clung to me and begged me not to tell.
And I had told anyway. Because I had thought—I had honestly thought—he was being held against his will, by people of whom he was deathly afraid. He had certainly acted as if he were afraid.
And that was because he had been afraid. Of me.
I had truly thought I was doing the right thing. But I hadn't been doing the right thing. I hadn't done the right thing at all.
The reporters were still yelling questions at me. I heard them, but it was as if they were yelling them from very far away.
"Jessica?" Mr. Goodhart was looking down at me. "Are you all right?"
"I am not Sean Patrick O'Hanahan." That's what Sean had said to me that day outside his house. "So you can just go away, do you hear? You can just go away."
"And don't ever come back."
"Okay." Mr. Goodhart put his arm around me and started steering me back into the school. "That's enough for one day."
"Wait," I said. "Who said that? Who said that about Sean?"
But, unfortunately, as soon as they saw I was leaving, all the reporters started screaming questions at once, and I couldn't figure out who had asked me about Sean Patrick O'Hanahan.
"Is it true?" I asked Mr. Goodhart as he hustled me back inside the school.
"Is what true?"
"Is it true what that reporter said?" My lips felt funny, like I'd been to the dentist and gotten novocaine. "About Sean Patrick O'Hanahan not having been kidnapped at all?"
"I don't know, Jessica."
"Could his mom really go to jail?"
"I don't know, Jessica. But if it is, it isn't your fault."
"Why isn't it my fault?" He was walking me to my homeroom. For once I was late and nobody gave a damn. "How do you know it isn't my fault?"
"No court in the land," Mr. Goodhart said, "is going to award custody of a child to an abusive parent. The mother's probably just brainwashed the kid into thinking his father abused him."
"But how do you know?" I repeated. "How can anyone know? How am I supposed to know if what I'm doing, revealing these kids' locations to the authorities, is really in the best interest of the kids? I mean, maybe some of them don't want to be found. How am I supposed to know the difference?"
"You can't know," Mr. Goodhart said. We'd reached my classroom by then. "Jess, you can't know. You just have to assume that if someone loved them enough to report them missing, that person deserves to know where they are. Don't you think?"
No. That was the problem. I hadn't thought. I hadn't thought about anything at all. Once I'd figured out that my dream was true—that Sean Patrick O'Hanahan really was alive and well and living in that little brick house in Paoli—I had acted, without the slightest bit of further consideration.
And now, because of it, a little kid was in more trouble than ever.
Oh, yeah. I'd been touched by the finger of God, all right.
The question was, which finger?
C H A P T E R
13
It wasn't all bad news.
The good news was, I no longer had detention.
Pretty impressive, right? Girl gets psychic powers, girl gets punishment lifted. Just like that. I wonder how Coach Albright would feel if he knew. Essentially, I'd pretty much gotten away with punching his star tackle. That's gotta be a kick in the pants, right?
In the midst of beating myself up over the whole Sean Patrick O'Hanahan thing, I spared a thought, every once in a while, for Miss Clemmings and the Ws. How was she going to handle Hank and Greg without my help? And what about Rob? Would he miss me? Would he even notice I was gone?
I got my answer after lunch. Ruth and I were making our way toward our lockers, when suddenly she elbowed me, hard. I grabbed my side and was like, "What are you trying to do, give me a splenectomy? What is with you?"
She pointed. I looked. And th
en I knew.
Rob Wilkins was standing by my locker.
Ruth made a hasty and completely obvious retreat. I squared my shoulders and kept going. There was nothing to be nervous about. Rob and I were just friends, as he'd made only too clear.
"Hey," he said when I walked up.
"Hey," I said. I ducked my head, working my combination. Twenty-one, the age I'd like to be. Sixteen, the age I am. Thirty-five, the age I'll be before Rob Wilkins decides I am mature enough for him to go out with.
"So," he said. "Were you ever going to tell me?"
I got out my geometry book. "Actually," I said, "I wasn't planning on telling anyone."
"That's what I figured. And the kid?"
"What kid?" But I knew. I knew.
"The kid in Paoli. That was the first one?"
"Yep," I said. And all of a sudden I felt like crying.
Really. And I never cry.
Well, except for that time with the FBI agents in Mr. Goodhart's office.
"You could have told me," he said.
"I could have." I took out my geometry notebook. "Would you have believed me?"
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I would have."
I think he would have, too. Or maybe I just wanted to think he would have. He looked so … I don't know. Nice, I guess, standing there, leaning against the locker next door to mine. He didn't have any books or anything, just that ubiquitous paperback in the back pocket of his jeans, those jeans that were butter-soft from constant wear, and faded in spots, like at the knees and other, more interesting, places.
He had on a long-sleeved T-shirt, dark green, but he'd pushed up the sleeves so his forearms, tanned from all the riding he does, showed, and …
See how pathetic I am?
I slammed my locker door closed.
"Well," I said. "I gotta go."
"Jess," he called after me, as I was turning to walk away.
When Lightning Strikes Page 10
