I jumped to the blue spruce first. Its limbs reached all the way to the ground, shielding me from most of the houses. Next I jumped to the corner, between a beat-up panel van and a four-wheel-drive pickup with oversized wheels.
Dakota had crossed to the far sidewalk. He was still looking over his shoulder. I waited until he was farther down the block before I crossed, too.
He looked back while I was in the middle of the street and began walking faster.
Think I’m one of them, do you?
I turned away from him when I reached the far sidewalk and headed in the opposite direction. When I reached Third Street, I glanced back. He was standing at the intersection at the other end of the block, looking toward me. I turned the corner and when I was out of his line of sight, jumped back to the panel van and off-road pickup.
Dakota had walked on, but he was still looking over his shoulder.
I used the binoculars and jumped ahead of him, and then a block further, past Sixth Street, so I was well in front of him, behind a pile of plowed snow made higher by the snow cleared from someone’s driveway.
I was glad I’d changed to the hoodie. It was practically the local school uniform. Tony and Dakota had each been wearing one, though Tony’s had been white. Dakota’s was gray, like mine.
I kept my eyes open for Caffeine, too. Anybody walking got a scan with the binoculars, but I almost missed Caffeine and her buddy because they were in a car. I saw her by chance. I was checking out a figure a block behind Dakota when a tricked-out Honda Accord turned the corner toward me. The side windows were tinted so it was hard to see into the interior but as I scanned past the car through the binoculars, the driver turned her head and I saw a flash of blonde with black roots. I flicked the binoculars back and confirmed it: Caffeine driving with one of her guys in the front passenger seat.
Dakota, from half a block away and without binoculars, took one glance over his shoulder and ran, so I guess he recognized the car.
He was pounding up the sidewalk toward me. I heard the engine on the Honda rev up as they spotted him. I ducked down. When Dakota shot past my snowbank, I snagged his arm and pulled. He crashed into the snowbank on the other side of the driveway opening. Before he could get up, I grabbed his shoulders and jumped away, back to the gap between the SUV and the panel van, two blocks back.
He was thrashing, trying to get up, to turn, but I jumped away before he ever saw me, going back to the driveway where I’d snagged him.
I arrived just before Caffeine’s Honda passed the gap and they saw me, or at least the gray hoodie, and rubber on asphalt shrieked. I ran back down the sidewalk, in the other direction. Caffeine didn’t bother to turn the Honda, but threw it into reverse.
I cut left at the intersection, not wanting to lead them back to Dakota. Sixth Street had been plowed, but obviously before all the snow had finished falling, because the asphalt was still covered with packed and rutted snow dappled with sand spread for traction. Caffeine backed past the intersection and then turned in. She gunned it, but the tires slipped and the front end walked sideways for a second, so she had to cut back and accelerate more carefully.
I waited until they were almost up to me, then ran out into the road, in front of them.
Caffeine hit the brakes, but the crusted snow didn’t have enough sand on it and the car slid. I could hear the “tuk, tuk, tuk” of the antilock brake, but the car wasn’t slowing noticeably. I waited until the Honda was about ten feet away and then “tripped” falling forward, still in the street. I jumped away before the car reached me, but later than I’d intended.
I’d felt the bumper brush my leg.
There was the sound of breaking glass and cracking plastic and a car alarm went off. I was back in the cleared driveway just around the corner, on Maple. I ran back and peered down the street.
Caffeine must’ve jerked the steering wheel in an attempt to miss me, ’cause her car was jammed into the side of a parked Nissan, the source of the car alarm. There was steam around the front end of the Honda from a ruptured radiator. The driver-side door was open and Caffeine was in the road, on her hands and knees, looking under the Honda.
House doors were opening and a woman, coming out of the house in front of the Nissan, was talking on a cellphone. With her other hand she pointed something toward the Nissan and the siren cut off.
Caffeine’s friend got out of the passenger side of the Honda slowly, unable to open his door fully because the car was jammed up against the Nissan. He had one hand pressed to his forehead and blood seeped down into his eyebrow.
They hadn’t been going that fast.
Somebody wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.
I looked back down Maple but there wasn’t any sign of Dakota.
Good.
SEVENTEEN
Millie: Hilltop
Millie got to the site by hiring a boat taxi in Bhangura and traveling down the Baral River fifteen kilometers, using her own GPS to verify her location. When she’d gotten as close as she could, she paid and dismissed the boatman and walked west on a raised path between rice paddies and jute fields.
Her destination was in sight almost immediately. The ridge rose only a bit around the surrounding farms, but it looked taller because of a stand of trees.
The Bangladeshi army had set up a mobile clinic at the north end of the trees.
Akash, an aid official with Pabna District who was coordinating with the local Bhangura Upazila, told Millie, “There are higher sites north of here, but the ground is steeper and prone to mud slides.”
He was greatly relieved when Millie told him she was bringing in two tons of rations.
“Bloody marvelous! I was counting on Hunger Free World, but most of their supplies went south. This just isn’t the season. Four more months and we’d be ready for it.”
Davy brought in a U.S. Army surplus tent, fourteen by fifteen feet, double-walled, which broke down into two luggable bags. They could’ve set it up themselves, but enlisted men from the army medical unit next door, already set up and waiting, came over and with much confusion and laughter got the thing set up and thoroughly anchored. The forecast called for winds up to ninety kilometers per hour, and Davy had brought extra stakes and straps to reinforce the structure.
“When do your rations arrive? We will be glad to unload the trucks,” the medical unit’s lieutenant said.
“Tomorrow,” Millie said.
“Before the rain, I hope!”
“Early,” Millie said. Very early.
The next morning, as the winds picked up and the rain began, Akash came to Millie, worried. “Where are your trucks coming from? The road to Bhangura is going to be a swamp, soon.”
Millie led him into the tent.
Though the tent had an integrated floor, they’d stacked the rations on doubled pallets, in the event there were any local drainage issues. The cases were piled nearly to the roof of the tent. Davy had also brought all the water filters from the warehouse, but this was only a few cases.
Akash blinked. “Oh. Didn’t see them come and go. I guess that was while we were setting up tarps.” The aid workers had been stringing tarps through the stand of mixed trees, both overhead and horizontally, attempting to turn the woods into a giant rain shelter.
Millie made a noncommittal “um” sound. “Hope to have more water filters, later.”
Akash nodded. “Well, I’m glad they got through. Roads are mostly mud.”
“Good timing, then. Is there anything else you need?”
He sighed. “We’re short on rope. Someone sent half as much as we were supposed to get.” He looked around, then said quietly, “Someone took a bribe, I think, to sign the manifest as ‘received in full.’” He gestured at the cases of rations. “Your shipment was intact, right?”
Millie nodded. “Oh, yes. Our people supervised it the whole way.”
Akash went back to the tarp-lashing project. Millie walked to the edge of the grove and looked at the rope they were using to t
ie down the tarps. It was eight-millimeter jute, the same fiber that grew in many of the fields between the ridge and the river.
It was midnight in Michigan and the only rope she found in the warehouse were scraps or in use, but she was able to jump to a still-open Home Depot on Oahu, in Pearl City.
They didn’t have raw jute, or even hemp, but she bought ten packets of quarter-inch nylon-and-polypropylene braided rope, one hundred feet each. She transferred it from the store bags to a battered cardboard box and found Akash back in the trees.
“Can you use this? We had extra in our supplies,” she said.
He looked in the box. “Bloody marvelous!”
EIGHTEEN
“Tag, you’re it.”
I was at school a half hour early and intercepted Grant as he arrived. “Let’s talk,” I said.
“What about?”
He started backing away and I reached out and snagged his backpack strap and pulled him forward again. He didn’t resist but he looked worried.
I said, “Have you spoken to Tony and Dakota about yesterday afternoon?”
His mouth opened like he wanted to say something but nothing came out.
“So you have.” I threaded my arm through his in a way I thought of as friendly, but then I remembered Caffeine walking down the sidewalk with Tony and Dakota in much the same way.
Too bad.
I kept my arm linked and led him to the library. Mrs. Bancroft, the librarian, was in the morning staff meeting in the teacher’s lounge, but in this cold weather, the library opened early, staffed by student aides. It wasn’t a likely place for Caffeine’s crew. They would either be in the cafeteria or out by the bleachers, smoking.
I took Grant back to one of the study tables out of sight of the main door. There was one of those antishoplifting mirrors in the ceiling corner, but it was angled to let the guys at the information desk see this area, not anyone passing in the hall.
“Have a seat,” I said, pulling out a chair. He stood there, so I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed down.
He resisted, then gave way suddenly, dropping heavily into the chair. He exhaled, loudly. “What do you want?”
I took the chair across from him. “I want to know about Caffeine. I want to know what she has on Tony and Dakota.”
The blood drained from Grant’s face.
I raised my eyebrows. “You, too?”
He shook his head vehemently.
I pretended to believe him. “Right. Just Dakota and Tony.”
“Why?” His voice was a whisper. He looked around but there was no one at this end of the library.
“She’s got to be stopped, right?”
He looked away from me. “Not necessarily.”
My eyebrows went up. “Really?”
He still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I mean, it would depend on the cost, wouldn’t it?”
I sat back and waited. He glanced at me, then away again.
Finally I said, “The cost to who? Caffeine? Her peeps?”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. I don’t care what happens to them.”
“So the video is that damaging? What did she catch them doing?”
If I thought he looked upset before it was nothing to his expression now. “You know about the video?”
“Of course. I mean, who doesn’t?”
He stuck his hand in his mouth and I relented.
“Nobody knows. I only know that there is a video. From Dakota.”
“Dakota told you about the video?”
I shook my head. “He mentioned the video when he was talking to Tony. He didn’t say what was on it. He just said, ‘And when the video is all over school?’ That’s when Tony shut up.”
Grant exhaled and looked slightly less miserable. After a moment, he said. “Oh.”
I tried to do that thing Mom does, aiming for stillness yet engaged and nonjudgmental.
He tried to meet my eyes but couldn’t. Finally he said, “I can’t talk about it.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.” He looked like he was trying to say it firmly, but the underlying desperation was obvious.
I shook my head, got up, and walked away.
* * *
We were playing volleyball during PE, and the class neatly broke down into four teams and a few extra. I’d just rotated off to the sidelines when I saw Donna duck into the girl’s locker room.
I was sensitized to her because she was Brett’s girlfriend, but the thing that made me think twice was that she was also Caffeine’s friend. She didn’t have PE this period and there was something odd about the way she’d looked around before pushing through the door.
It was egotistical of me to think I had anything to do with her visit, but even if it did, I wasn’t particularly worried. My backpack was on top of my PE locker but the only things in it were my art supplies and a few pens. Everything else was either locked in my PE locker or in my hall locker.
I didn’t see her leave but there was no sign of her when we went to change before last period. However my backpack was not as I’d left it. Nothing was missing, it was just turned ninety degrees to the left and the zipper on the back pocket was partially open when I remembered zipping it completely closed.
I wondered what she’d been looking for, then laughed.
I’d pretended to take that picture of Caffeine and her guys roughing up Dakota and Tony the day before. I actually hadn’t but Caffeine didn’t know that.
I kept my phone in my front jeans pocket most days. We’re not supposed to use them in class or even have them on, but most kids did, texting throughout the day. Dad said as long as I was going to have a phone he wanted me reachable in emergencies, so it stayed in my pocket, switched to vibrate.
So the phone had been in my jeans, in the locker, where she couldn’t get at it. Normally I would’ve left my locker open while I showered, but this time I didn’t. I’d started out amused by the situation, but the more I thought about it, the more irritated I got. When I finished dressing, I was surprised that I was the last one in the locker room.
Shit. I’m gonna be late for art.
I heard the door and I thought it was just the girls coming in for last period, but then I remembered they didn’t have any PE sections for last period. I leaned over to look past a row of lockers to the door.
It was Caffeine and she wasn’t alone. Her two large friends from the day before were with her, including the guy who’d hit his head on the windshield. He wore a white dressing taped across his forehead.
I snagged my backpack and she stepped around the lockers into view.
“I’ll take that phone, now,” she said.
Her friends hadn’t come around the corner yet but I could hear slight movements which made me think they were working their way around the lockers to come up behind me. I wasn’t feeling kind and I definitely wasn’t feeling friendly.
“I know you can’t take it from me by yourself.” I slung my backpack over my left shoulder, raised my right hand, and pointed behind her. “Can they?”
She frowned and looked behind her. The instant her head was turned, I jumped the distance between us so that when she looked back, I was right there.
She screamed and recoiled away. I heard movement behind me, but it was well behind me, where the two guys had just rounded the row of lockers. I darted past Caffeine and pushed through the door to the gym.
At the far corner of the gym Coach Taichert was leaning out of his office, frowning. “Who screamed? Was that you, Cent?”
I ran toward him and called, “There are men in the girls’ locker room, Coach, and I don’t think they’re students.”
Caffeine’s two friends came through the door. I saw Caffeine right behind them, but she ducked back as she saw Coach.
Coach Taichert said, “Cent, go see if Deputy Tomez is in the office or out front. If he’s not, ask the secretary to call the police.” He raised his voice. “You two. Come here!”
I headed for th
e hallway door but heard feet running away as I did. I glanced back and at the far end of the gym, one of the outside fire exits banged open, spilling snow-reflected light across the floor.
* * *
I didn’t go to art class.
Dr. Prady, the principle, was out, but Dr. Morgan wasn’t. We used Ms. McClaren’s office and she was in the room, along with Dr. Morgan, Coach Taichert, and Deputy Tomez. Deputy Tomez asked most of the questions.
I decided not to mention Caffeine, not yet.
“I had just finished dressing when I heard the door open. I went up one aisle of lockers and they came down a different one. When I saw them behind me, I ran out and got Coach.”
“That’s when you screamed?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember screaming, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Well, actually, I would. Not that I wasn’t ever scared, but the first thing I’d probably do was jump, not scream.
They had me look through the previous year’s yearbook, especially the juniors and sophomores who were seniors and juniors this year, ’cause “You’ve only been here a month, right? You might not know all the students.”
It was possible, but I’d thought I’d checked out all the boys. I was wrong. One of them was in last year’s junior photos, but I let my finger slide past him without pausing. My friend with the bandage on his head was named Hector Guzman. He was a senior this year.
Ms. McClaren said, “Are you sure you didn’t know them?”
“She already said, no, Janet,” said Dr. Morgan.
Ms. McClaren wouldn’t leave it alone. “It wouldn’t be the first time that a student was meeting with a nonstudent on campus.” She used those words but the emphasis she used on “meeting” made it all too clear what she meant.
My jaw dropped open.
Deputy Tomez took one look at me and said, “Thanks, Ms. Ross. I don’t have any other questions. Do you want a ride home?”
I shook my head. “No, thank you.”
The bell rang. Dr. Morgan said, “Are you sure you’re all right? I could call your parents for you.”