Bang

  Trey shrugs. “All we know is that it isn’t happening tonight. And that’s the best we can do.”

  • • •

  We stop by the food truck festival grounds to check it out like Dad’s expecting Trey to do. Trey takes care of booking a spot tomorrow for the meatball truck, and finally we’re on our way back home to Melrose Park. We don’t say much, but we’re all wondering. What day? What time? What building? What room? And I remember the way it was with the crash. Everything pointed to Valentine’s Day, but at the last minute I realized it was happening the night before. It was all about observation, noticing the littlest things in the vision, that made the difference. It’s unbelievably frustrating that I can’t see this thing myself.

  “How are the visions?” I ask. It’s dark now, and we’re out of the city, heading back to school. Trey’s driving, I’m in the middle seat. Sawyer’s by the window, staring out, tapping out the sound of eleven gunshots on his thigh.

  “They come and go.” He winces and closes his eyes, and his fingers stop tapping.

  “Were you able to decipher any words from that whiteboard once you did a close-up?”

  “No.”

  I look at my lap, cringe, and ask another question. “In the vision, when you see the shot of the building, is there any particular part of the building that seems to be, like, the focus of the scene?”

  He’s quiet. Trey glances at Sawyer and then at me. I shrug. He frowns and looks back at the road.

  “Yeah,” Sawyer says after I’ve already given up on him. He shifts and stares out the window, and I realize he’s looking into the side mirror of the truck. “I mean, not any specific window, but there’s a section of what I think is Cobb Hall that gets a close-up.”

  Without a word, Trey slips his phone from his pocket and hands it to me. I look at him, puzzled, but then remember he took pictures of the building. I go through them until I find a shot of Cobb Hall. I touch Sawyer’s arm. “Which part?”

  He startles and looks at Trey’s phone for a long moment. And then he looks at me. “I can’t see the photo,” he says.

  We stop talking.

  Trey pulls the truck into the school parking lot. “Jules, I think you should drive Sawyer home. I’ll take this ball bus home and pick you up from Angotti’s back parking lot on my first delivery. That’ll give you two a little chance to . . . do . . . whatever it is you do when you’re alone.”

  Sawyer doesn’t argue, and he and I get out. I wave my thanks to Trey as he takes off again.

  We stand face-to-face in the warm, wet air as everything around us melts. I look up into Sawyer’s eyes, and he cringes and looks away. “Dammit.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He doesn’t look at me. “It’s in your eyes,” he says. “The vision. It’s playing in your eyes.”

  It makes my stomach hurt. I close my eyes, reach up to touch his face, turn his chin back toward me. “Better?”

  I feel his breath on my face a split second before his lips touch mine. A thrill runs through me, from my toes up to my throat and ending in a low moan. Sawyer sucks in a breath and kisses me hard, his hands sliding around my neck, under my hair. I lean back against the car door and he presses against me, setting me on fire.

  My fingers explore his chest inside his jacket and he flinches once, just barely, just enough to remind me that his father beat the shit out of him last night. I lighten my touch and slide my good arm around his back, pulling him close, chest against chest, legs clenching legs, wishing I could pull his entire body into mine. Wishing I could fix him.

  His lips find my neck and I can’t think straight. I reach up and slide my fingers through his hair, whisper his name in his ear. His hot breath rakes over my collarbone and his fingers tremble at my shoulder, his other hand sliding down my side and finding the hollow of my back, and then our lips are together once more, softer, gentler, and we’re breathing hard.

  Sawyer reaches around me for the handle of the door to the backseat, fumbles with it, and then lets it go. “No,” he says like he’s reprimanding himself. And then, after a deep breath, “No,” again. And then he lets the breath go, his cheek against mine and his sigh in my ear. “Jules Demarco,” he says, “you scare the hell out of me.”

  I smile against his earlobe. “I know,” I say.

  Truth is, he scares the hell out of me, too.

  Thirty-One

  Saturday dawns clear, sunny, and unseasonably warm, and all I can think about is that we’re running out of time and there’s nothing I can do. I have no job for the first Saturday in years and I don’t know how to occupy my time. I hawk over the weather report, put on my wellies, and sneak out for a walk, studying tree buds and pining for Sawyer, closing my eyes as I slosh through puddles in the elementary school playground nearby, remembering the melty feeling I get when he touches me. But every time my mind goes there, reality slams me in the face and I remember all the shit we’re in.

  And I think it’s so ironic that as grounded as I supposedly am right now, I have never felt freer to wander around and not tell anybody where I am. After I test out all the swings, I start walking, trying to figure out what we have to do. What I have to do to solve this mystery, to finish the puzzle. Because it still feels like it’s my fault—or at least my family’s fault for passing down the crazy gene—and I can’t not take responsibility for it.

  By the time I’ve walked an hour, I realize I’m not far from the Humane Society. I hesitate at the door and go inside, look around, but I don’t see Sawyer. The employees are busy with adoptions, so I wander into the dog room and look at all of them, some begging for love, others having given up, still others faking it, pretending they don’t need anybody. And I see myself in all those dogs.

  • • •

  Five weird thoughts I’ve had in my life that I would never admit to having:

  1.Um, that one

  2. That I’m not really me, but I’m sort of just floating above myself watching my body do things

  3. That there’s something really stable and comforting about hoarding

  4. That there’s probably an opposite me somewhere in a parallel universe doing everything right, and my job on earth is to make her look good by messing everything up

  5. That monster spray secretly invites more monsters to hide under the bed rather than repels them

  And while I’m standing there thinking weird thoughts and watching this sweet-looking boxer mutt named Boris, and all the dogs are barking as loud as they can at me and the other people walking through, I feel somebody’s gaze boring into my skull. I turn around, and there’s Sawyer watching me through the wire-mesh window to the cat room. He’s got two black kittens crawling up his sweatshirt, and he’s just standing there with this amazingly sweet, kind look on his face. I raise my hand in greeting, and he mouths the words “I love you.”

  I smile and blush, and weave my way back through the dog room to the lobby and into the cat room, because when a boy with two kittens says he loves you, you do whatever you can to get to him as quickly as possible.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You found me,” he says. He pushes a lock of hair out of my eyes and looks away quickly.

  My heart sinks. “Still with the vision in my eyes?”

  “Yeah. And all the kitties’ eyes too.”

  “Dude,” I mutter, because I never had that. It was never that bad. “How did you get here?”

  “Took the bus. I—there’s no way I can drive.”

  I study his face, and even excluding his black eye, he looks exhausted, and I know he’s been keeping the intensity from me. “Sawyer . . . I just don’t understand. The times when it got really bad for me were when I had things wrong or the crash was imminent. I just don’t know why it’s not letting up on you when we’re making progress and figuring things out.”

  And then we both stare at each other. Sawyer says it first. “Maybe we have things wrong.”

  My heart clutches. “Or maybe it’s imminent.
”

  “Shit.”

  “But it can’t be. There are hardly any students on campus. It’s spring break.”

  “Yes, but they’ve got to come back sometime before classes start Monday.”

  “You mean, like, today and tomorrow? But who would be using those buildings?”

  Sawyer puts the kittens back into their cage and goes to the next cage, pulling a single gray kitten out and handing it to me. He reaches in for another one—a blue tortie, according to the label on the door—and cradles it. “I don’t know. But colleges aren’t like high schools, are they? I mean, they might have meetings. . . . ” He strokes the kitten’s back and it mews and tries to bite his thumb. Sawyer readjusts the kitten and gazes down at it, then back at me. “Can you try a search to find out? I’ve got my laptop with me, but I’m scheduled here until two today.”

  “Sure. There’s got to be Wi-Fi around here somewhere.”

  “Meet me back here at two?”

  I nod. We put the kittens back in their cage and he whispers, “I’m scared.”

  My spine tingles, and not in a good way. “Me too,” I whisper back.

  • • •

  I return at two with no information on any classes meeting this weekend but with a lot more info about U of C and a possible clue to the actual motivation of the shooters. “I think we need to go back to the campus,” I say. “Like, now. There has to be a clue. Something.”

  “What’s Trey doing today, working?”

  “He and Rowan are at that food truck festival.”

  Sawyer washes his hands at the sink and says good-bye to the other volunteers and employees. We walk out. “I have to work tonight,” he says. And then he frowns and shakes his head. “No, I don’t.” He pulls out his phone.

  He dials and waits. “I’m taking the weekend off,” he says in a dull voice, a voice I’ve never heard.

  “Yeah, well, if you make me come in, I’m telling everybody who asks how I got this black eye.”

  He listens for a second, and then, with no emotion, says, “Fire me, then. I really don’t care.” He hangs up. “Jesus,” he says as we reach the bus stop, his face gray and dead. “I can’t deal with this. I really can’t.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean it, Jules.” He rakes his fingers through his hair and cusses under his breath. “My family is a mess. The visions and the gunshots are killing me. I don’t have anything . . . left. . . . Shit.” He jams his fingers into the corners of his eyes and lets out a shuddering breath, and he turns toward me. I wrap my arms around him, feel his shoulders tremble.

  He can’t stop. “I mean, what the hell are we supposed to do? We’re teenagers. We have no weapons or magical powers here. What are we going to do, Jules? Can you tell me, please? Because we’re going to fucking get our heads blown off.”

  “No, we’re not. And today is the day we figure it out. Right now. You and me. And we’re not going home until we know what’s happening.”

  He sniffs and clears his throat, like he doesn’t want me to see his emotion. But I understand tears, especially about this. Hell, I wish all guys could just cry and not have it be such a big stupid deal. Shed a tear. Be a man. Whatever. But I guess when you live in a house where your father and grandfather beat the crap out of you, maybe you have a different mind-set on that topic.

  We get on the bus, trying to figure out where to pick up the transfer that will take us to U of C, and then I open Sawyer’s laptop and click on one of the tabs of the web pages I left open. I show Sawyer the history of the school and its beginnings, involving John D. Rockefeller, Marshall Field, and—what I think is the most interesting fact that I didn’t know before—the American Baptist Education Society.

  I point out the highlights. “So it’s this private college with that big Rockefeller Chapel we saw, started by Baptists, yet totally secular from the beginning, I think. The dorms have coed floors, and there’s a strong LGBT community.”

  Sawyer looks puzzled. “I’m not getting why any of this matters to the shooting.”

  “Rowan said something off the cuff the other day—she wondered what the motivation of the shooters might be. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And if you think about what happened here this week with the graffiti and what the workers told you about a protest over equal rights, and the defaced stop sign that Trey found, it’s pretty obvious that somebody’s upset with this school or some of the organizations in it, and it has something to do with equality. Since the slur “fag” was used, I’m guessing that it’s gay rights that are being protested.”

  “Okaaay . . . but . . . ”

  “Hang on,” I say, looking up, realizing it’s time to transfer.

  We change buses and keep reading. Sawyer sets his phone up to be a Wi-Fi hot spot so I can get online on his computer and he can search for more news on his phone, but it’s no use for him. His screen is just a medium for the vision. He leans back and closes his eyes. “I don’t know how many more piles of dead bodies I can see before I lose it completely, Jules,” he says. “What are we doing wrong?”

  I pull up the Wikipedia page for U of C. Normally I don’t trust Wikipedia, but this page has a bunch of great photographs, so I browse through them. I locate several of the buildings we saw on the main quadrangle and study them. There’s a ton of great detail about the insides of the buildings too—stuff I never expected to find. “Hey,” I say, looking over. But Sawyer’s eyes are closed, his head nodding against the window. Sleeping. Thank dog. I have a feeling he’s going to need it. I go back to scouring headlines.

  What I find next stops my breath.

  Thirty-Two

  I can’t help it. I have to wake him up. He blinks and looks around, like he forgot where he was.

  “I found something,” I say, jiggling my foot impatiently.

  “Whoa,” he says. “Power nap.” The sleep confusion clears, and his face grows concerned. “What is it?”

  I turn the computer screen toward him. “Can you see?”

  “Yeah. At the moment.”

  “Cool. Look here, where I researched other local news and protests,” I say, clicking over to another tab. “There’s that local cult preacher dude who always hangs out by Water Tower Place—you know the one, right? Same guy as always. Anyway, he’s been shouting about gays taking over the government again, and he’s been ragging on U of C lately because their rights groups have been picketing the guy.

  “See this article, ‘A Call to Arms Goes Too Far: Free Speech at All Costs’? The dude has been riling up his followers, saying God wants his cult to rid the country of homosexuality, and that the local Chicago universities are the heart of the nation’s problem and the leaders of the so-called gay uprising.” I look up. “Isn’t that insane?”

  Sawyer takes it all in. “There’s a lot of insanity these days,” he mutters. “So you think our shooters are some outsider cult followers of the raging lunatic, coming to campus to . . . do God’s will.”

  “I don’t know. But seeing that, plus the graffiti, and the timing of this . . . ” The whole idea of it turns my stomach. Who would want to believe in a God like that? If God is not, like, totally in love with all the people he created, why would anybody want to believe in him?

  Five things a real God should be:

  1. Not a hater

  2. That about sums it up

  After a minute Sawyer nods. “It fits. It’s fucking sad, but it fits.” He looks at the window for a long minute. He’s watching the vision again.

  • • •

  The bus stops near the college and we walk to campus. There are more people wandering around today than yesterday. The stop sign has been replaced, all the snow piles are melted, and the tree buds are just noticeably more in bloom than yesterday. The grass is sodden and the botanical gardens on the property look pretty bedraggled, but spring is clearly on its way. And the vision clock is ticking.

  “How do the buds and ivy compare today?” I ask. We wander around the quad, really lo
oking at each building now that we have a good feel for the lay of the land.

  “Really close,” Sawyer says.

  We go to the other end of the quad to make sure we haven’t made any mistakes, and sure enough, there are old, ivy-covered buildings, streets, little stop signs, and sidewalks on this side of things too. Sawyer stops in front of a gorgeous ivy-covered building as a few people come out of the wooden door. He stares at it. I read the words above the door. It’s a dormitory—Charles Hitchcock Hall.

  After a minute, Sawyer looks all the way down toward Cobb Hall, and then he looks back at the dormitory in front of us. “I wonder if I have the wrong building,” he murmurs. “I mean, just because I see the stop sign in the vision doesn’t mean it’s near the scene of the shooting—they’re different frames.” He puzzles over it some more. “No. It can’t be a dorm room. There’s a whiteboard and tables.” He shakes his head like he’s reprimanding himself. We start walking.

  A cute guy wearing funky glasses comes out of the dormitory and sticks a flyer to the building wall. He walks into the quad, heading toward us, handing out more flyers. He looks at us, hesitates, then holds one out and smiles brightly. “GSA is teaming up with the Motet Choir for our final spring food drive and fund-raiser. Meeting in the Hitchcock green room tomorrow night. You should join us.”

  I reach out and take it, and the guy moves on, heading toward the next dorm. I read the info. Eight o’clock tomorrow night. “GSA. Gay-Straight Alliance,” I say, looking up.

  Sawyer nods, his voice taking on a trepid tone. “Sounds like this could be the group we’re looking for. Plus the time is after sunset, which would make the room naturally darker. Though they’d have lights on, presumably.” He frowns.