by Susan Vaught
I shouldered Darth. “Probably I’d definitely go around behind all the cars and count the shutters, so I’d get the real number of shutters, and not just the front half number.”
As if to show me why I liked him better than most people I’d ever met, Springer didn’t ask why having the real number mattered, and make me have to explain when I really didn’t understand it myself. Instead, he said, “Well, it’s probably good your dad and your aunt didn’t let you walk alone, because you could have gotten arrested and charged with trespassing for going into people’s backyards without asking. And if you were in kid jail, you wouldn’t be able to help your dad this morning.”
“Trespassing,” I said. “I should have thought about that.”
We started walking again, and I asked, “Why didn’t I think about getting in trouble if I went into somebody else’s yard? Why don’t I remember—you know, normal stuff like normal people?”
“Maybe because it’s not important to you right then,” Springer said. “That’s why I don’t remember normal stuff sometimes. When we get to AJS, can I have the Jelly Fruit Bites? Grape is my favorite.”
“Sure.” I squinted ahead, because I knew we didn’t stay on Maple for very long. Our last turn was coming up. “According to the map I looked at, the Spruce stretch is the longest.”
“Is that house, like, yellow?” Springer muttered, nodding his head forward.
I looked toward the next corner, and—
Wow.
“Yeah. Really bright. It doesn’t look that bright from car windows.” Already, I was noticing no flamingos, no gnomes, no green shutters, but instead there were little bushes along the front sidewalk, twelve on each side, so twenty-four all together. By the time we turned left on Spruce, I had counted every little bush in the yard, coming up with thirty-seven. If it were my yard, I’d plant one more to get thirty-eight, but it wasn’t my yard, and I never, ever needed to go in it.
• • •
Even though Springer and I made good time on our walk, AJS already seemed busy. When we got close to the drive-around, cars lined up and cycled through, spilling out kids who headed into the junior high side of the complex for before-school care and breakfast. Teachers wandered in different directions, wearing yellow traffic caution sashes and carrying stop signs, motioning cars and trucks and vans into different lanes.
Without talking about it, Springer and I kept our heads down and skirted the traffic area, hoping nobody would notice us or talk to us as we edged toward the senior high entrance. The outside lights were still on at the senior high building, but people moved around on the other side of the glass panels that bordered the metal doors, and a few groups had already gathered near the big school sign, talking and gesturing.
I glanced around the big sloping front lawn, at the cars and kids and parents and teachers behind us. Springer slowed, studying the senior high door, then the groups near the entrance. My breath caught in my throat as I realized that the person who stole the library money and let my father take the blame might be in the senior high building already, maybe even standing close to us.
“Oh,” Springer muttered. “Not good.”
My heart skipped, then sped up. “What?”
When I looked at him, I could tell he was trying not to glance in the direction of what had bothered him. “Coach Sedon’s already here,” he said. “He’s talking to Ms. Jorgensen over there, by the sign.”
I kept my face turned toward the senior high door, but I could see them from the corner of my eye. Until it got cold, Principal Jorgensen always wore blue slacks, a short-sleeved white blouse, and a blue scarf. After it got cold, the sleeves got longer and she added a suit jacket. She was tall, but not as tall as Coach Sedon, who used to play basketball in college just like Jerkface’s mom. Coach, who had short brown hair just like his son, was almost taller than the sign he was leaning against. He had on AJS-green shorts that reached to his knees, and his long basketball shirt was green, too. A whistle hung around his neck, and he pulled at it and looked annoyed as Ms. Jorgensen, who seemed red in the face, pointed in the general direction of my neighborhood and fussed at him about something.
“Come on,” I whispered to Springer. “Let’s just get inside.”
“But—” Springer started.
I ignored him and walked away, squeezing the black straps of the Darth Vader pack until I heard him shuffling along behind me.
The senior high entrance wasn’t locked, so we slipped in without attracting any attention. Dad’s hall was to the right of the big center room called the study hub, and it was the middle corridor of three options. About fifteen kids were in the study hub, which was sort of the senior high version of before-care, with one teacher at a desk far away.
Looking around for possible surveillance cameras, I led Springer across the edge of the study hub to the middle hallway. I didn’t see any cameras, but as soon as we got about halfway down the long hall, I did see a big problem, and I stopped.
Springer came up beside me. “What? You know where your dad’s class is, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, gesturing at the long row of closed rooms. “But the doors are still shut. They’ll be locked. We’ll have to go to the office and see if we can talk Mr. Chiba into letting us in.”
“Listen,” Springer said. “What I was going to say outside about Coach Sedon—”
“Oh, look,” came an all-too-familiar voice from behind us. “It’s Messy Jesse and the beached whale from Alabama.”
Springer clamped his mouth shut. His bruised eye twitched.
So did my whole body.
Why was Jerkface at school so early?
“What I was going to say outside,” Springer said very quietly, “is if Coach Sedon’s here, probably Chris is here, too. And maybe the rest of them.”
I wanted to groan, because if one cockroach was in the hall, they all were.
And when I turned around—yep. Ryker, Chris, and Trisha blocked the open end of the corridor. They had on jeans and pressed button-up shirts, blue for Ryker, yellow for Chris, and green for Trisha. No backpacks. They looked sharp and tall and . . . older. If the senior high side didn’t have to wear their khaki uniforms, these three would fit right in with the ninth graders, at least.
I held on tight to the Darth Vader straps on my shoulders and glanced at the green pack Springer carried for me. We weren’t very stylish. I usually didn’t care, but for some reason the packs and my rumply jeans and my black T-shirt with Happy Buddha on it made me feel soooo . . . junior high.
Springer still hadn’t turned around. He kept facing the far end of the corridor, probably staring at the doors to the outside—which would be locked this time of day, just like the classroom doors.
“What are you two losers doing on the senior high side?” Trisha asked, her voice flat and dangerous-sounding. “Little kids might get hurt in these hallways.”
“Where’s your dad, Messy?” Chris asked, almost at the same time.
“At home,” I muttered before Springer elbowed me and I realized I should have lied.
“Not in jail?” Jerkface looked fake-sympathetic. “Because by now, everybody in Avery knows he got arrested.”
Springer slowly turned around, easing closer to me as he did.
“Wow, big guy, that’s a heck of a shiner,” Chris said. “Did you trip over something? You know, like maybe a plastic . . . cup?” He snickered, and Jerkface and Trisha laughed even louder.
Then Jerkface walked toward us.
I backed up.
“What, not so brave without steps to shove me down?” Jerkface spread his arms wide. “Come on, Messy. Give me your best shot.”
“I don’t get you,” I said as I reached over and unzipped the green pack on Springer’s back and pulled out two bottles of water. “Why do you have to be so horrible all the time?”
“Why do you have to be weird all the time?” Jerkface shot back.
“We’re not horrible,” Trish said. “That would be you tw
o stains on humanity.”
I handed a water bottle to Springer, then got another for myself. He looked at his bottle, then looked at me, obviously confused and scared. The bruise on his face seemed twice as big and twice as dark, now that he was likely to get a matching one, and it would be all my fault.
“Ooooh,” Chris said, his face twisted in a sneer as he came closer, too, with Trisha right behind him. “They’re gonna give us a shower. I’m so scared.”
“Hate to break it to you,” Trisha said, “but I can fix my hair and makeup if you get me wet.”
They stopped. Laughed. Took another step toward us. Stopped again. Each time we backed up, they laughed more. They were moving together now, and I knew they liked seeing us scared.
“Are you sure about this no-hitting thing?” I asked Springer.
The question made the cockroaches hesitate, but Springer just kept staring at his water bottle. I thought I saw a tear leak out of his hurt eye. My pulse thumped in both my ears, and my mouth went dry. I forced myself to look at the cockroaches, straight in the face. I tried to focus on one of them, but they blurred together, probably because I had tears, too.
“Leave us alone,” I said, my voice whispery and small. “We just came here to look at my dad’s classroom. His desk. We need to see the desk.”
Jerkface and Chris and Trisha laughed some more. I couldn’t decide which one I hated worse.
“We need to see the desk,” Ryker echoed me in a high, silly voice. Not a nice echo. Not a nice Ryker.
“Wait,” Chris said. “I get it. I bet they’re playing detective. Isn’t that cute?”
Trisha’s eyes narrowed, and her mean grin flattened. “Seriously? Is that what you’re up to, Messy?”
Jerkface shook his head. “That’s twice as sad as usual.”
I gripped my water bottle tighter, the plastic making crinkly sounds as I dented it. I tried to think about Mom and Shotgun, and how they were soldiers, and got scared but fought anyway, because other soldiers and the whole country counted on them to do their jobs. Well, Dad was counting on me, even if he didn’t know it. And Sam-Sam would be sad if I got my face broken and couldn’t play with him for weeks. And Springer—they’d hurt him again, and Springer was too nice to get hurt, and nobody should have to deal with Jerkface and cockroaches and a mean dad who yelled at him for not fighting back.
When Ryker took his next step, I reared back and threw my water bottle as hard as I could, right at his face. He tried to move, but he didn’t dodge fast enough. My bottle smashed him in the cheek.
He spun around, grabbing for his jaw and saying ugly words as he staggered toward the wall. The bottle hit the floor and burst open, spurting water up the leg of his jeans.
“Hey!” Trisha yelled, and I threw my second bottle at her. It bounced off her shoulder, smacked the floor, and drenched her shoes.
As she screeched hatred at me, Springer threw his bottle so high and hard that if it actually bashed Chris, it might knock him out. Chris hollered and hit the deck, but the water bottle sailed way above him, on and on down the hallway, and out into the study hub. It hit the ground with a huge thump, exploding and spraying water everywhere.
Kids shouted.
Ryker was still saying ugly words, and he swung around to face us.
Somewhere off in the distance, I heard grown-up voices. Too far away. The cockroaches were pulling together again, and all three of them had murder in their eyes. Three sets. Six eyeballs. Clenched teeth. I couldn’t count the teeth.
I imagined I had on desert fatigues and they were the enemy, coming for me and my dog. My hands shook. My legs shook. But I stepped in front of Springer.
“Jesse,” he said, but I wasn’t listening.
Instead, I filled up my lungs and screamed like the world was cracking straight down the center, like I’d seen a house-sized spider or a snake big enough to eat people, like I was having the kind of meltdown I hadn’t had since I was five or six years old. I imagined the sound coming out of my toes and shooting through the air like daggers, ripping up cockroach ears and melting their brains.
Ryker and Chris and Trisha froze.
Chris covered his ears.
I screamed even louder, and lots of people came running toward us then.
As senior high students and Coach Sedon and Ms. Jorgensen and Mr. Chiba from the office ran into the hallway, the cockroaches finally scuttled back, arranging themselves in front of nearby lockers.
Little by little, I ran out of air. When I finally stopped screaming, the hall rang with quiet. For a second, everybody seemed to be staring at me and holding their breath. Then Trisha helped Chris to his feet and started pointing at me and saying how I hit them with water bottles.
“She was trying to kill us,” Trisha wailed to Coach Sedon, who glanced in our direction with something like a worried expression. “They both were! That big kid almost took Chris’s head off with a water bottle!”
“That’s enough.” Ms. Jorgensen held up both hands. “Settle down. Everyone, please. Jesse, she’s—well, just, let’s talk about this in the office. Can everyone clear the hall? Clear the hallway, please.”
Ryker glared at me. He still had his hand on his jaw. I couldn’t see a bruise, but I hoped I’d made one.
Oh, wait. No. That was seriously mean. Did that make me a bully like him? New tears swelled into my eyes, and I said, “Touch coming,” and grabbed Springer’s hand and sort of dragged him to my father’s classroom door.
“Let us in,” I told Mr. Chiba, each word hurting my throat after that scream. When he didn’t move, I got louder. “Let us in, let us in!”
I saw him get afraid I was about to have another meltdown, a way worse one, and I sort of felt guilty, but then I didn’t, and I yelled, “Let us in!” one more time.
Mr. Chiba hurried forward, and he unlocked my father’s door, and I took Springer inside, where it was safe, and I closed the door behind us.
11
Wednesday, Five Days Earlier, Morning
I can’t believe you screamed like that.” Springer stood inside my dad’s classroom and rubbed his ears. “I think you popped my brain.”
“Hush,” I told him. My hands shook. I figured all the grown-ups had gone to take Jerkface and the cockroaches back to the junior high, and to find my dad before I went off like a screaming bomb, like I used to. We probably had five minutes, maybe just four before they came back.
“You sounded like a banshee,” Springer went on. “Maybe half the school will be dead by morning, and—”
“Please hush?” I realized I was sort of growling through my teeth. It took me a second to unlock my jaws, and another second to realize that Springer seemed afraid of me. I held up both hands, palms out, fingers still trembling. “We won’t have another chance to look at Dad’s desk, so we should—you know, do it. Or something.”
But Springer didn’t answer. He was too busy drifting toward the shelves lining the walls. He stopped in the middle of the classroom, gaping at the literary and movie posters, at the figurines dotting flat surfaces, at all the books—The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Akata Witch, dragons of unknown origin, warriors, old guys with bears who looked like they came from Shakespeare’s time—Dad had just about everything a book person could want.
“I—” Springer started. “Wow. This—” and then he just couldn’t.
He sat on the floor.
I’d had my own floor-sitting moments in life, so I didn’t bug him. I figured he needed to calm down, just like I did. For a few long breaths, I squeezed my fingers into fists and counted to twenty, then back down again. I thought about dancing puppies and wiggling puppies, and Sam-Sam’s cute little smile.
Jerkface and the cockroaches made me so mad. And they were so mean! And I’d busted Ryker in the face with a bottle of water, and I’d hit Trisha, too.
Did that make me mean?
“No,” I mumbled out loud. “Self-defense is different. Right? It sort of h
as to be. I hope it is.”
My gaze flicked back to Springer, who had defended himself and me, too, without hitting anybody at all.
Blowing out a breath, I turned to the desk, which was a lot easier to stare at than Springer. It seemed sort of weird that it wasn’t wrapped in yellow police tape or something. Had the police already investigated the crime scene? I was pretty sure they should have, especially since they’d put Dad in awful metal handcuffs, but I didn’t know.
As school desks went, Dad’s was medium-sized. It was made of dark wood, and people had etched things into the grain, small letters and symbols, sometimes in ink. I couldn’t make out most of the carvings as I walked around it, trying to take in the details. On top of the desk, Dad had a cube of Post-it notes, a big planning calendar, a daybook, and a gigantic coffee mug labeled ROCKET FUEL. Class textbooks were lined up across the front, held in place by two bookends shaped like Shakespeare’s head. Dad had a pencil holder made to look like an open novel, and beside that, a tape dispenser. The desk had five drawers, two on either side of where the chair went, and one wide, thin one in the middle. None of the drawers had locks. The drawer on the bottom right had a label on it reading LIBRARY FUND DONATIONS.
“Good one, Dad.” I sighed. “Just make it easier for the thieves next time, okay? Leave the money on top with a sign reading STEAL ME.”
“What?” Springer asked. He was still sitting on the floor.
I ignored him and sat in Dad’s rolling chair. My eyes went to the big calendar, to the day the money got stolen. Dad—or somebody—had circled it in red. Staff Meeting 2:30–4:30 was the only thing scribbled onto the lines.
“Huh,” I said out loud, mentally making a note that Dad would have been out of his class the afternoon when the money was taken. In fact, all the senior high teachers would have been in that meeting, right? “Unless some of them missed it . . .”
I needed something to take notes on, since Dad had taken my phone. Dad’s Post-its were good enough, so I pulled a blue square of paper off the top of the cube. Then I picked up a black pen with a raven on top and wrote, Check to see if any teachers missed the staff meeting.
