Camo Girl (12 page)

I push up my sleeves.

“Thought you didn't want to play with me anymore.” Bailey bounces the ball in a wide, slow V between his two hands. He looks like some kind of strange bird, raising one wing at a time.

“After the fight,” I say, “Max was telling everybody about all the combat moves your dad taught you.”

Bailey dribbles fast, glances at me. He passes the ball to
himself over my head, racing around to receive it. “Yeah.”

“And all these other stories . . . ,” I trail off.

Bailey dribbles through the silence.

“How come you didn't tell me?” I say.

Dribble. Spin. Dribble. “It's no big thing.”

“Yeah, huh.” I cross my arms.

Dribble. Dribble. Shoot.

“Well . . . ?” I say.

“So, he's a war hero. So what?” Bailey snaps. “Maybe I still don't like to talk about it.”

“Then how come everybody knows?” I snap back.

“The guys at school,” he says. “They're all into that kind of stuff. So I just—” He waves his hand. “It's easier.”

Bailey grins, dribbles the ball, glances up at the basket, so natural. So easy.

Then I see it. His perfect, smiling expression cracks. It's only for a second, but his face splits into something so familiar, so broken. I find myself looking harder.

“Can we just play now?” he says. He cups the ball at his chest, ready to send it my way.

“Wait—,” I blurt.

He doesn't. The ball comes at me fast. My hands go up to stop it, but I'm not that good. It smacks my palms and bounces away.

Bailey hops to retrieve it, dribbles, shoots. But he's
looking at me as the ball swoops through the net. When it bounces this time, I'm close enough to catch it. This time I'm ready.

For a second I just hold it in my hands, feeling its skin. That little bit of roughness.

“C'mon, pass it.”

Bailey's eyes meet mine. “If you just play really hard,” he says, “nothing else matters.”

I
think I know what bailey's talking about.
We run and jump and wipe sweat off our faces, and it's like the rest of the world fades away.

It's all ball, and air, and net, and Bailey. Hands, and shots, and shoes, and jumps. Grinning, counting, dribbling, laughing. The time just goes by. After a while I begin to see what Bailey must see in basketball. It's not just a game. It's not just fun. It's another way to pretend things are different. If you just play really hard, nothing else matters. And I love it.

Problem is, there's no hiding forever.

“Who's that?” Bailey says. Our game is suspended. I look up to see a short, thin, blond woman leaping out of the passenger seat of a car. The car drives off,
and she rushes up our driveway. She hurries toward me, frantic.

“Is he here, Ella? Please tell me he's here,” she blurts.

It's Z's mom.

“W
ell, did you check the library?
He goes there every day.” I try to act like things are fine, but I know deep down something's wrong. I stand in my living room, staring at Mom and Lynn, sitting side by side on the couch.

“The quest begins, milady.”
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't understand. I wasn't listening.

Up until a minute ago Lynn was in full panic mode. I told Bailey he had to go; then I brought her straight inside to see Mom. Mom knows how to calm people down.

Lynn seems better now, but I think she's passed the not-calm onto me. My stomach hurts.

“Yes,” Lynn says. “The library and school. I was hoping—” She swallows hard. “If he's not here, then I'm at a loss.”

“Well, then, he must be at Walmart,” I say.
“The quest
begins, milady.”
Where did he go?

Lynn shakes her head. “He's not.”

“Of course he is.”

“We paged him throughout the store. Everyone who was on shift helped look.”

Lynn glances at me. I can tell she's nervous that I'll say something I shouldn't. It's a secret that they live in the store. One of the things I'm not supposed to know.

“He's small,” I say. “He likes to hide.” I list some places we've found him before: in the laundry machines, under the shelves, on the shelf pretending to be a piece of merchandise, behind other merchandise. Once he climbed inside a column of tire rims and couldn't get back out. As I'm talking, Mom gazes at me with an expression I don't quite recognize.

“If he's spying, you have to call him Agent Z or he won't come out, remember?”

Lynn shakes her head. “It's a gut feeling,” she says, holding a fist to her stomach. “He's not there.”

“Lynn,” Mom says. “How long has this been going on?”

“He's fine,” Lynn says with a tight smile. “He's just so creative. He gets carried away. It's all a game to him.”

Mom's wearing one of her super-grown-up looks now. The kind that means run for your life. I edge toward the doorway.

“It sounds a little more serious than that,” Mom says, laying her hand on Lynn's back. At the same time she pins a Look on me that says,
Where do you think you're going, missy?
and crooks her finger at me. Against my better judgment, I go over there.

“No, no. Everything's fine,” Lynn insists. “It's been so hard for him, since we . . . moved. Excuse me.” Lynn jumps up and hurries into the bathroom.

When we're alone, Mom brushes the sides of my head with her fingers. “Honey,” she says. “Why didn't you tell me what's been going on?”

“What's been going on?” I say. Because it's not going to be me who rats out Z and his mom.

Mom gives me a pointed look. “Don't play dumb.”

“Z's just being Z,” I say.

“Z?” Mom says, her eyebrows raised. “What is Z? You're calling him Agent Z?”

That's right. Mom only knows him by his real name, but that's not him anymore. And it's why I shouldn't say anything more.

“No. Well, that's what he wants. . . . Never mind,” I say. “It's a long story.”

I'm not good at lying. I'm not good at the truth. So it's best not to say anything at all.

“Where is he, Ella?” Mom says.

I shake my head. “I'm sure he's in the store. Or the library.” But I'm not sure. There's something more, there's something else. If he's not there, he's somewhere, and I'm the one who should know where.
“The quest begins today, milady.”

Mom studies me, maybe upset, maybe disappointed. I don't know, but I don't like it. “Truth,” she says softly, just as the bathroom door opens. “Do you know where he is?”

I'm scared now. Because I really don't.

M
om offers to drive Lynn to the
police station so she can report Z missing. I can't believe he's really missing, but in the bottom of my stomach, I know he's gone someplace.

Out the window, I watch the car pull out of the garage and take off down the street. Bailey's sitting on the front porch step, staring into space.

“What are you still doing here?” I snap. He pivots around to look at me. Something about the way he is right now makes me think I should've just let him come in before.

“What do you want?” I say. “Z's missing. He might have run away.” As the words cross my lips, they don't feel right. To Z, it wouldn't be running away. To Z, it would be a
grand adventure, something with meaning, something with weight. There would be a reason. What was his mission? Where would he go?

“Yeah, I picked up on that.”

I cross my arms. I can barely contain the scared feeling. Z's out there somewhere, alone. He shouldn't be alone.

“I think I know where to look,” Bailey says.

“What?” There's no way he can know. No way to get inside Z's head. If I can't, no one can. “No, you don't.”

“I have an idea,” he says. “From something he said the other day.”

“Forget about it,” I say. “Wherever he is, he's fine. He's just . . . he plays games. He'll be fine.”

The way Bailey looks at me then, I know he can see through me. I'm not a great liar, but it's not about that. Whatever the stuff is that he won't talk about is still there, in the air. It reaches out and finds the same thing in me. His voice is soft. “Yeah, 'cause you're not at all worried.”

Bailey James. Somehow he knows how to rip my heart wide open. I almost feel like I could tell him everything. But I can't tell him the truth about Z. Maybe Bailey is a good secret keeper, but they aren't my secrets to tell.

“You don't know me,” I say. “You don't know us.”

Bailey shrugs. “It was just an idea.” He rolls the basketball against the porch with his palm pressed over it.

“Okay, fine. Where is he?” I hug my arms tighter. I tap my toe.

Bailey reaches into his pocket. He flicks his wrist and a small item comes sailing through the air toward me.

My hands fly up to catch it. My fingers slide along the chip's smooth edges.

“What?” I turn the chip over. Its neon palm trees and bold black stamp scream at me. Still, it takes me a moment to get Bailey's point. “You think he went to The Mirage? But that's on the Strip,” I say. “In Vegas.”

“I've been thinking about it,” Bailey says. “He wigged out when he saw the chip.”

“He did not ‘wig out,'” I snap.

“Yeah,” Bailey says. “He's weird to begin with, and that's cool”—he raises his hands to ward off my protest—“but when he saw me with the chip, he went a little postal.”

“Why would he care about a stupid chip?” But I'm remembering the look on his face when I laid it on the table.

“There are many more where that came from.”
Z's words float back to me, from somewhere. I thought he was being matter-of-fact. Trying to put Bailey's gift down, in a small way.

“He would never go all the way to Vegas. Not by himself.”

“It's not that far,” Bailey says. “Not even half an hour on the bus.”

“I know,” I say. “But still.” It's on the tip of my tongue to say that he not only wouldn't, he couldn't. To get on a bus and ride all the way into the city would have to bring him pretty close to reality at some point. I don't know how he could make it fit into his fantasy. But, then, Z's magic was that he could make anything fit. Absolutely anything.

My hand begins to ache. My fist is clenched around the chip, and it's leaving indentations in my palm. I relax.

“Well?” Bailey says.

“I don't know. Maybe.” It was a theory. And heaven knows, I didn't have one of my own.

A thought crystallizes in my brain. Z saw Bailey with the chip. Bailey gave me the chip. Z saw me with the chip and knew where I got it.
“There are many more where that came from.”
What if he went to the casino hoping to get a chip to give me? Maybe he thought if he could deliver, I would forget about Bailey once and for all.

“It's my fault,” I murmur. I turned my back on Z, and he panicked.

“Naw,” Bailey says with a frown. “It's way bigger than that.”

And maybe it is.
“There are many more where that came from.”
Bailey's chips are ten-dollar chips. If Z understands that chips equal money . . . well, he needs money.

Bailey says something else, but I ignore him. I'm
already running into the house. I make straight for the kitchen cabinet where Grammie keeps her wad of cash. I tug four ten-dollar bills out from under the rubber bands, vowing that I'll pay her back out of my allowance, even if it takes all year.

I move fast. Bailey's just in the doorway when I'm back. He holds the screen open as I go streaking past.

“You okay, Ella?” Bailey chases me down the driveway.

“I have to go find him,” I blurt. “Right now, before he does anything he shouldn't.”

I
jog down the street, headed into town.
By the time I round the corner, Bailey hasn't dropped back, although his house is in the other direction.

“What are you doing?” I pant.

“Well, obviously, I'm coming with you.”

“What?” I stop running. I'm out of breath, anyway. “You get that I'm going to Vegas, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” Bailey shrugs. “I'm grounded, anyway. It's not like I have anything better to do.”

My eyes narrow. “Oh, yeah. What are you doing out in the first place?”

Bailey grins mischievously. “My mom's still at work.”

I shake my head. “Go home, then. We won't be back in time.”

“Whatever,” Bailey says. “I can't let you go alone. This is way too awesome.”

Not the word I'd use to describe it. But to be honest, I don't want to go alone. And I want to stand here arguing with Bailey even less. “Well, come on, then.”

We hurry toward town. The public buses run to and from Las Vegas every so often, but I don't know the schedules and I'm not about to miss a bus by mere minutes.

“We're good,” Bailey says, pointing at the departures board. “Carson City is leaving now, but the five thirty-five to Vegas leaves in ten minutes.

“Give me the cash,” he adds. “I'll buy us tickets.” The forty bucks are clenched in my now-sweaty fist. I hand him twenty.

“Great. Stay out here for a minute,” he says, peeking in the bus depot window. “And stay out of sight. I don't think they're supposed to let kids buy bus tickets.”

My hopes fall flat. I hadn't thought of that. At all. “Oh. So it's hopeless.”

“No, no. Let me work my magic,” he says, slipping through the bus station door.

I squeeze one eye up against the window, peering through a narrow space between the edge of the wall and a sun-bleached poster inviting me to join the National Guard. When it's Bailey's turn at the window, I hold my breath. After several long moments
of talking and a few wild hand gestures by Bailey, the clerk reluctantly stamps two tickets and hands him his change.