by Steven Gould
They were on the ridge crest above the roadblock. While it was early afternoon in New Prospect, it was black predawn here. Davy was studying the scene below. The armored car was idling, its headlights shining up the road away from the camp. Two sentries leaned against the armored car, and several men slept away from the headlights, nestled between the hillside and a fire.
“Uh, besides,” Davy said, “I don’t think there’s anybody in the armored car. You said there were eight, right?”
“That’s what Patel said. We can’t be sure.”
“Right.” He vanished.
Millie swore and looked down at the campfire. Something flickered, and then Davy was back beside her, six rifles in his arms.
“They notice?” he asked.
She looked back down the hill. The two sentries continued looking up the road, away from the fire.
“No.”
“Well, help me set these down without making a lot of noise. They’re not as light as you’d think.”
She helped set them down, barrels pointed away. “What are those, AK-47s?”
“Chinese version: the Type 56.” Davy grinned. “They had them stacked, leaning against each other, just like in the movies.”
They looked back down at the sleeping men.
“You’re sure no one is in that thing?” Millie asked.
“Sure? No. But it’s the first thing I’ll be checking, right? You don’t let them point their rifles at you, okay?”
“Right.” Millie took off her coat and laid it on the ground. She was still wearing a hijab, and was grateful for the chador over her head.
She jumped down to the road, beyond the range of the headlights, and started walking. Her clothes were light colored and her scarf had silver thread worked into its trim, so the headlights soon lit her up. She saw the sentries straighten, but they left their rifles slung over their shoulders.
Behind them, she saw Davy appear on the roof of the armored car, by the open hatch over the driver’s seat. But the guards still looked in her direction. Davy stuck his head down into the hatch and disappeared.
Millie held her breath.
Davy had spent some time the day before in Russia, at the Museum of Artillery in St. Petersburg. The museum had two different models of the BRDM-2 armored car. He’d told Millie, “It has a steering wheel, accelerator, and a brake pedal. If I can get it into gear, we’ll be good to go.”
There was a mechanical sound from the armored car and both sentries twisted around, then ran to the side of the road as the car lurched toward them. They began shouting and the men sleeping around the circle sat up.
Millie jumped back to the hilltop and looked down in time to see the armored car turn sharply to the right and off the cliff.
Davy appeared beside her in time to see the armored car crunch nose first into the rocks below, then fall over onto its turret in shallow water.
Millie said, “Ha. They’ll never—”
“Cover your ears!” said Davy, following his own advice.
The explosion came in stages: a sharp, loud bang; a fireball as the fuel tank detonated; and then the ammo, en masse. A hunk of metal whizzed by and they both stepped back away from the edge of the ridge.
In the glow from the fireball, Millie saw Davy’s teeth gleam. He said something, but Millie’s ears were ringing. She cupped her ear.
He spoke louder. “They had eight of these on a bandolier behind the driver’s seat.” He reached into his pocket and took out a grenade.
“Why did you take that?”
He pointed at the six rifles lying on the ground. “Thought I’d just leave it with when we go. But take the pin.”
Millie scooped up her coat. “Fewer guns the better, I guess,” she said.
“Right.” Davy made a shooing motion with his empty hand. “You go first, okay?”
Millie jumped away, but not home. Instead she jumped to the edge of the camp, a kilometer away, where Patel had first shown her the roadblock. She waited, frozen, looking toward the glow of the burning armored car. People were coming out of tents and looking in the same direction, wakened by the explosion. Then, from the hilltop, came a flash and the sharp crack of a grenade exploding.
She looked around and found Patel, struggling into a coat as he came around a tent. She got his attention by grabbing his sleeve.
“What happened?”
She pointed at the glow from the riverbed. “Someone stole their armored car and pushed it into the gully where it blew up.”
He frowned.
“No one was hurt,” she added, “But I’m betting the convoy can get through now.”
When Patel turned back to look toward the roadblock, she stepped behind him and jumped back to the Yukon.
Davy was there, looking for her, anxious.
They both exhaled.
Millie said, “Remember the time you gave Cent so much grief for blowing up all her firecrackers at once?”
Davy blushed. “What’s your point?”
“Like father, like daughter.”
Millie looked at her watch. “If you want to go car shopping with Cent, she gets out in twenty minutes.”
EIGHT
Cent: “Daddy! Look at me!”
In art class, the last period of the day, Mrs. Begay took roll. “Where’s Caffeine?”
A girl I didn’t know said, “She fell in the shower after PE. They took her over to the ER to X-ray her wrist.” She looked over at me as she said it, then away.
I blinked and looked straight ahead.
After class, as I walked to my locker, kids were glancing my way and whispering to each other.
Great. First day of school and already notorious. Oddly enough, even though the halls were just as crowded they’d been in the morning, I had no trouble walking. They didn’t clear a huge path, but they also didn’t bump and jostle me. I should’ve been glad, I guess, but it just made me more aware of the watching eyes. My ears were hot and I put my head down and walked faster. It was just above freezing outside and the cold air felt good on my hot face.
I heard feet scuff the ground and a voice said, “Hey.”
I jerked my head around, eyes narrowed.
It was Tara. She flinched back when she saw my face and I held my hand up and smiled weakly. “Hey.”
She still looked at me warily.
“Sorry,” I explained. “Thought you were someone else.”
“Someone else like Caffeine Barnett?”
I looked away.
“What happened?”
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“What didn’t I hear?” Tara held up her fingers and counted them off. “I heard that Caffeine broke her wrist punching you in the head. I heard that you broke her wrist using jujitsu. I heard that she broke it punching a wall. Oh, and Linda Romas gave Bobby Marisco a blow job under the gym bleachers.”
I let out a deep breath. “I didn’t need to hear that last one. Did anyone say Caffeine just slipped and fell?”
“Oh, the official line. Sure. But nobody believes that. Everybody heard what she did during PE and how you showed her up. And the girls who left the shower said Caffeine was ‘bringing it’ when she came in.”
“I didn’t touch her!”
Tara raised her eyebrows.
“Really, I didn’t. She charged me, but I dodged and she ran into the wall and then slipped and fell. I skedaddled.”
“You ‘skedaddled’?”
“I’m not stupid. Would you have stayed?”
“Oh, no. I, too, would have ‘skee-daddled,’ or perhaps I would have ‘va-moosed.’ Or ‘high-tailed it.’”
I felt my shoulders drop and the corners of my mouth twitched. “You’re sassing me, that’s what this is. Or should I say ‘disrespecting’?”
“Sassing works for me. Some words are just timeless. Unlike, say, ‘skedaddled.’”
I swung at her arm but she skipped back out of range.
“Nice skedaddling,” I said.
&n
bsp; There was a buzzing noise and she took a beat-up cellphone out of her hoodie pocket and glanced at it.
“Jade wants to know if it’s all clear.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“See, for all we knew, you’re as psycho as Caffeine. Uh, Jade hates confrontation.”
I raised my eyebrows even higher.
“Okay, so maybe you’re not psycho. But we just met you. Been burned before.”
“What are you going to tell Jade?”
“Java, East of Krakatoa.”
“The coffee place?”
“Right. For homework, but we’ll have to move. The tables go quick.”
“Uh, I’ll have to check in.”
“You want to use my phone?”
“Sure.” I dug into my pocket for the card with the house’s new phone number, installed especially for school registration. I punched in the number but Tara had to tell me to push the “call” button.
Mom answered.
“Everything all right?”
I gave her our all-clear phrase, “Good as can be expected.” If I was making the call under duress, I was supposed to say, “Great.”
“What’s up?”
“We’re going to the coffee shop to do homework.”
“First person plural. Who makes up the plurality?”
“Jade and Tara. Tara is in my biology class. She’s a sophomore. Jade is a junior. I will learn how to interact in an informal social environment, gaining valuable insights into the local customs and mores.”
Tara rolled her eyes.
Mom chuckled. “Very nice, dear. Find your father, though. He was going to pick you up to go car shopping, so you should let him know what’s going on.”
I grimaced. Dad would probably want to do a big postmortem on my day. Well, he could wait.
“Got it.”
Dad was waiting around the corner, on the side of the school that faced toward our property.
I introduced Tara and told him what was going on.
“Oh.” He blinked and started to say something, but then shut his mouth. Finally he said, “Okay. You have any input on the car thing?”
I shook my head. We didn’t need a car, of course, but it would look strange if we didn’t have one.
Tara blurted, “Green. Not the color, I mean. High gas mileage. Low carbon emissions.”
I jerked my thumb at Tara. “What she said.”
Dad nodded seriously. “Very good.”
I hugged him. “What’s that smell?”
Dad shrugged. “Diesel,” he said. “And, uh, smoke.”
I raised my eyebrows but didn’t want to ask for details with Tara there.
Dad said quietly, “Home for supper, right?”
“Right.”
* * *
“My mom works until 6:30,” Tara said. “She’s a radiology tech, mostly CAT scans. Anyway, no reason for me to be home until later.”
“This is the good time to be here,” Jade said. “The sports teams are still at practice, and Pep Squad and Dance Committee is still going. When that crowd moves in you can’t hear anything, much less find a seat.”
We were on the upper landing, at a table by the railing with a view of the tables below and the front door. Big photos of rain forests and Indonesian temples decorated the brick walls.
“What does your father do?” I asked Tara.
Her face closed down and Jade looked anxious.
“I said something wrong, didn’t I?” Damn.
Tara clenched her teeth. I could see the muscle bulge at the corner of her jaw. Then she blurted out, “I don’t care what my father does as long as he does it far away from me!”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
Tara visibly exhaled. “You didn’t know. Far as I’m concerned I don’t have a father. And the courts agree. Single-parent families for the win.”
“We don’t talk about him,” said Jade. “Clear?”
I nodded. “Clear.”
Jade looked back at Tara with the worried look on her face. Tara stared at the table top.
“So, I’m unsocialized and very likely to say the wrong thing. Just want you to know that I was raised in a box, right? I’m not trying to be mean—I’m just stupid that way.”
Tara’s mouth twitched and Jade’s shoulders dropped lower.
I looked at Jade. “Any other awkward topics? Your parents?”
She shook her head. “Nah. They’re all right. But we’ll have words if you dis my sense of fashion.”
Tara said, “Fashion? Is that what you call it?”
Jade jabbed her elbow into Tara’s ribs. “Shut up, you.”
We did homework. They drank tall espresso chocolate drinks with whipped cream on top. I stuck with water, but bought cookies to share.
Jade was helping Tara with her algebra and offered to help me, too, until I showed her my worksheet. “Oh. Never mind, genius. You should be helping us both.” Tara raised her eyebrows. “She’s in precalc,” Jade explained.
I finished the worksheet, then wrote a humanities essay. I looked up to see both of them staring at me.
“What? I did something wrong, didn’t I?”
Tara blinked. “You just wrote four pages … and your print is tiny. In like twenty minutes.”
“Sorry? I thought we were doing homework?”
“That’s homework? It’s not like journaling? That’s an assignment?” Tara said.
“Humanities essay.”
“Ms. Grey’s assignment?” said Jade.
I nodded. “Are you in my humanities class, too?”
“Different section, same level. That’s not due for two weeks.”
“So? I’m done with my other assignments.”
Jade blinked. “You’re doing it wrong. You never write an essay like that!”
I felt my stomach sink. What had I done now?
“You’re supposed to wait,” said Tara. “Sometime next week you should start thinking about it. Then, put it off some more.”
“Yeah,” said Jade. “You never write an essay until the night before.”
“At the earliest,” Tara added.
“The true essay is written the morning it’s due, or even the period before,” said Jade earnestly.
I stared back and forth at them. “Uh, well, it is just a draft.” Were they insane?
They both burst out laughing.
“Oh,” I said. “I have read of this phenomenon. You are … what do they call it?”
They both giggled some more.
“Kidders?” said Jade.
“Procrastinators?” said Tara.
I shook my head. “I believe the technical term is ‘assholes.’”
They tried to look offended but instead we all laughed so hard that the kids at the tables below glared up at us. Which made us laugh even harder.
The place really filled up at five, as more kids finished after-school activities, but we stubbornly held on to our table, despite pointed glares and even inquiries of, “You leaving soon?” from older and bigger kids. To justify our occupation I bought another round of drinks, decaf this time, but the baristas could care less. The place was doing brisk business and the noise level was so high that I barely heard Tara when she said, “Isn’t that your dad?”
It was Dad, sitting in the far corner on the main floor below, with a coffee. He was facing away, but there was a framed picture on the wall at just the right height. I could see his face reflected in the glass, so I knew he was watching us. He’d taught me that trick—to use reflective surfaces to check behind me without seeming to. I felt a deep stab of resentment. I didn’t know how long he’d been there—I’d been having a good time.
Tara added. “Do you think he bought a car?”
Jade started shoving her things into her backpack. “Well, time for me to get home. Maybe your dad could give us a ride.”
Dad had bought a plug-in hybrid, used, the sporty one with the electric motors integrated into each wheel and an auxiliary gen
erator for long-range driving. Tara definitely approved. “This has got, like, a seventy-mile electric range, right? Around here, you’ll be able to get along on just plugging it in.”
But Jade had doubts. “Don’t make a big deal of it, okay?”
Dad was amused. “Pardon?”
“This town is all about the oil and gas industry. One of the teachers at school bought an all-electric. It had ‘Electric Vehicle’ painted down the side in eight-inch letters. She lost three windshields in a month. When she replaced the last one, she had the words painted over as well, and hasn’t had any trouble since.”
Dad blinked. “Really?”
“Honest,” said Jade.
Dad dropped Jade at her house and Tara at her apartment complex, which made me nervous. Dad doesn’t really drive much. Mom’s the driver. Dad could jump before he was seventeen and never really had to drive.
“You were spying on me,” I said, when we were alone.
He shrugged. “Just checking out the local scene.”
“Spying on me is not cool, Daddy.”
He sighed. “Cent, you don’t know these people. You don’t know what they’re capable of.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about Tara and Jade. “‘These people’ aren’t here.”
“You don’t know that.”
I bit back a scream. He was impossible. “See you at home,” I said, and jumped.
* * *
I didn’t tell Mom everything about my day.
Things I left out: comments about my breasts in the locker room, being knocked down on the basketball court, almost tripping Caffeine on the basketball court, and the shower incident.
OK, pretty much anything related to PE and Caffeine Barnett.
I did discuss Jade and Tara. I discussed Mrs. Hahn’s schizophrenic attitude toward girls in math class. I talked about Mr. Hill and biology and how it was okay with him to know more than class requirements. Finally, I returned to Tara and what happened when I asked about her father.
“Ouch,” Mom said. “So she covers up a lot?”
“Yeah. Really baggy pants, this enormous hoodie. She could be cold. Her arms are really thin.”
Mom frowned. “Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
Mom shrugged. “Hard to say. I’d like to meet both of them.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why?”
