Dull Boy (22 page)

“You’re lucky these kids aren’t old enough to ask you on a date,” I say.

She treats me to an exasperated eye-roll but I think secretly she’s flattered. “Oh, shut up before I rip your guts out. And don’t touch me,” she snaps at the peeing kid. “Hello, you have pee on your hands!” Which I think just makes them worship her even more.

We make it back to the group in one piece, arguments kept to a minimum now that Catherine’s the boss. We’re greeted with cheers from Sophie and Darla when we arrive; Nicholas unzips his backpack and goes on water duty, hydrating the scouts while Sophie plies them with granola bars and I go around whacking the kids who are too obvious about staring at her butt.

“Is anyone injured?” Jacques asks. “I can provide an ice pack.”

“Um. No, I don’t think so.” I turn back to the scouts, take a sec to look them over. Oops. I never thought to ask them that. But I’m pretty sure they’re okay. “Not unless you have a balm for broken hearts,” I say.

“Do you have any disinfectant?” Catherine asks. “This kid’s covered in pee.”

“I am not!” he cries, squatting down to rub his hands on the fallen leaves. Vigorously, like he’s willing to sandpaper his skin off in exchange for her approval.

Jacques looks mildly ill and backs away.

“Uh, they’re fine,” I say. “But thanks for asking.”

Once the kids have had a chance to rest and refuel, we get started on the long hike back. If we could get to the trail and find the official rescue team, that would probably be best—but we’re all stubborn enough to want this to be
our
victory. No adults—
we
did this.

“Time to do your thing, Nicholas,” I say, smacking his shoulders. “Think you can get us out of here?”

“It’s easy,” he says. “All you have to do is remember where you went before. Darla’s crazy if she thinks that’s a power.”

“Um, okay—then how come no one else in the world can do that?”

“I’m sure someone can.” He shrugs. “Most people just don’t pay attention.”

“You think a
genius
doesn’t pay attention?” Darla huffs, butting into our conversation.

“A genius who managed to break both her compass and her GPS system right before this mission?” Nicholas says. “Hmm, I’d say she pays too much attention, except when it comes to herself and how easy it is to see through her machinations.”

“I’m leaving until he stops using words like that,” I say.

The return trip goes much more quickly. Sure, we’re still tripping over stuff and getting gouged by thorns, but Nicholas has the uncanny ability to determine the shortest distance between two points—and then lead us right to our destination. Superpowers are back under wraps, so we cross the gorge via an actual, man-made bridge before plunging back into the forest.

Sometime between three and four in the morning, we push through the thick wall of trees and emerge next to Jacques’s tarp-covered Jaguar. Nicholas dusts his hands off. “My work is done.”

“Whoa. Talk about exact,” I say. Even Jacques seems impressed.

The scouts sit down on the slope to rest (“My feet hurt!” one kid whines; Catherine tells him not to be a wuss) and Darla digs out her supersatellite cell phone to start making calls, before we lead the kids to another location. Within half an hour, Darla, Catherine, and I are greeting ten parents, a scattering of siblings, and the scout troop leader outside the gates of a local farm. Reunions begin, and when the adults start looking around for the rescuers, they’re stunned to discover
we
found their missing kids.

“She scared away a mountain lion!” one of the scouts exclaims, pointing at Catherine. The others start jabbering excitedly, and Catherine just gives this I-don’t-know-what-they’re-talking-about shrug.

“They’ve had a long night,” she says.

“And so have we,” I interrupt. “It’s past our bedtime. So we have to get going.”

The glory is great, it’s nice, I like being appreciated—but I’m exhausted and all this fresh excitement is wearing me out.

Before Catherine and Darla and I can beat a hasty retreat, one of the moms says, “I recognize you! You were on the
Today
show last summer!”

“Um.” I glance around, fear crawling like spiders under my skin. “No, that was probably someone—”

“Avery something!” the mom says. “You saved a little boy who’d been trapped under his mother’s car.” She’s getting more and more sure of herself, nodding as it comes back to her. “And here you are, doing it again. That’s amazing.”

I must have a save-me look on my face, because Darla jumps in to run interference.

“It’s hard to get into a good college these days. You have to start early. Pick up some extracurricular activities no one else has. You know how it is.”

“Oh, I know,” another mom agrees. “My oldest is applying next year and it’s a nightmare. There’s so much competition, you have to really stand out.”

“Avery wants to go Yale,” Darla continues—um, pushing it a bit
far,
in my opinion. “So he has to work even harder.”

“Well, good luck, honey!”

I thank the moms for their well-wishes and we get the hell out of there, disappearing into the trees across the street and running until we get to the Jaguar, now revved and ready to go. Sophie and Nicholas are belted in and bobbing along to the dreamy electronica on the radio. Jacques is sucking on a piece of peppermint candy to keep himself awake. We all trade smiles and sleepy high fives.

“We did it,” Sophie says.

Darla grins big, taking some robot-shaped lollipops from her bag to celebrate and tossing one to each of us. “Was there ever any doubt?”

“Superstars!” I throw my arms around Nicholas and Catherine. “These two have futures so bright I need sunglasses. Even in the dark.”

Catherine pokes me in the ribs. “Shut up, sidekick. Before you get demoted to lackey.”

At this moment, I feel ridiculous, obnoxious, accomplished, and popular. (In a non-annoying way.) I can’t imagine this getting any better. And yet we’re just getting started.

“We need to rethink this sidekick business,” I say to Catherine.

B
ack at my sanctuary (uh, that would be my messy room), I kick some dirty clothes out of the way and sit down at my computer. My body’s ready to lose consciousness, but my brain’s too wired to conk out right away. I check to see if anyone else is killing time online.

Damn it. I spin back and forth in my creaky desk chair, anxious to talk to him again and make sure that everything’s okay. Minutes tick by like hours and I’m still staring at a blinking cursor. I dial Darla and hope she left her phone on.

“Hmm, hello?”

“Nicholas got in a big fight with his dad, and they’re still fighting and I’m freaking out because I’m worried this might be it—”

I stop to breathe and Darla takes it from there. Her voice fades in and out as the phone gets jostled around. “I’m already getting dressed. I’ll sneak over and see what’s going on. I can be there in like two minutes.”

“Okay,” I say, swallowing hard at the sight of the blinking cursor. No news. “Please hurry.” No news is bad news. I hang up with Darla and wait.

Five minutes pass. She’s probably there by now.

Ten minutes later I’m shredding a magazine, nervously rolling it up and ripping it to bits. I start typing just to keep my hands busy.
U ther? U ok?
But he doesn’t answer.

I’m about ready to fly over there myself when a new message appears.

He signs off before I have a chance to ask him anything else. I lie down on my bed, woozy and sick to my stomach. Call Darla again.

“Is he really okay?”

“I think so,” she says. “He’s acting weird, but his eyes weren’t glowing or anything. He just didn’t want to talk about what happened. And his dad’s fine; I heard him clearing his throat really loud, so it’s not like he got sucked into the vortex.”

“His dad wants to send him to military school.”

Darla sighs. “I know. I think it’s just a scare tactic, but I’ll check in with Nicholas after I wake up. Make sure he doesn’t freak out too much. He’s been really on edge lately.”

“Sounds good. I’m just glad he’s . . . and his dad’s not . . .”

“Tell me about it.” Darla yawns. “Okay. Too sleepy now. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Yeah. ’Night.”

I close my eyes. Tell myself that I’m overtired, worried about nothing. Tomorrow everything will be fine. Nick’s dad will chill—it’s not like he never snuck out when he was young. And Darla will talk to Nicholas, and my mom will make pancakes or something because now that I’m an A student I’m pancake worthy, and I’m not going to think about anything else because not everything is my problem to solve and and and . . .

Sleep.

 

MY DAD AND I
are eating coffee cake for breakfast (totally acceptable behavior so long as my mom’s still in the bathroom) and watching the local news on TV. I’m recording it, ostensibly for a “media” project at school, but really because I want to preserve some footage of the rescued scouts for posterity. One day when I’m old I’m going to look back on this stuff, along with my yearbooks and prom pictures or whatever, and relive my glorious youth. It’s important.

Finally! After sitting through a bunch of boring local-interest segments, the newscasters start introducing the rescue story and I sit up a little straighter. They cut to footage of the rescued scouts, wrapped in blankets and surrounded by their parents. My dad’s slurping his coffee, nodding approvingly. “Glad those kids are safe.”

I have to hide the smile on my face when the newscasters start talking about the “mysterious circumstances” of the rescue: how the scouts were missing for almost forty-eight hours before a group of anonymous teenagers found them and led them to safety. Meanwhile, a massive search party, rescue dogs, helicopters, and even sophisticated heat-detection equipment failed in the attempt.

My dad spews his coffee as my most recent school picture appears on the screen. My giddy smile changes to a horrified
O
.

I don’t even have a chance to get out of the kitchen before the hammer comes down.

My dad slams his fist against the kitchen table—rattling his coffee cup and shocking the crap out of me. He doesn’t usually get angry like that. He’s supposed to be the understanding one.

“Do you know what could have happened to you out there? You need to leave this kind of work to professionals—people who are trained to do this! You can’t just . . .”

My mom comes running into the kitchen like the house is on fire. She’s only half made up; one set of eyelashes is significantly thicker and blacker than the other. She stopped mid-mascara to get the details and punish me—that’s how bad this is.

I am so dead.

My dad stops yelling at me long enough to fill her in, and the two of them rewind the footage so my mom can get all the sordid details. She clutches the remote, watching and rewatching the segment, her forehead knotted with instant rage.

“Yale?” she snorts. “That’s your excuse?!”

“Uh . . .”

Crap.

“It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than stupidly risking your life to get into an Ivy League college, let me tell you that. You need to show good judgment if you ever even want to leave this house again, Avery—do you understand me?”

“I was trying to . . .” I’m having trouble articulating what I want to say. But I feel like I have to make them understand, at least partially. “I wanted to do something good. And I did, okay?”

“If you want to do something good, you need to concentrate on your schoolwork and on not getting in trouble,” my dad says. “Leave being a hero to the professionals. That’s not your responsibility.”