Rebel, Bully, Geek, Pariah (13 page)

“Ignore them,” York said.

“No, call them.” Andi had finally woken up, and I was relieved to hear the calm in her voice. “Everyone call your mommies and daddies and tell them you're staying over at a friend's house.”

Great idea. If you're the kind of person who has friends.

My hand twitched over my purse. It had to be midnight now. Where was
my
phone call?

“I don't know—” York started, but Andi cut him off.

“They're just going to keep calling. You have to tell them something.”

York still hesitated, and Andi leaned in, threatening. “Don't make me throw yours out the window, too.”

“Fine.” York tipped his phone to the side and started texting.

“What about me?” Boston said. “I bet my phone is ringing, too.” He shot Andi a dirty look. “Wherever it is. They'll be more worried about me.”

“Uh, I'm sitting right here,” York said, pointing to himself. He grinned like it was a joke, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

Boston flushed. “I just mean—you're
always
with friends on the weekends. You're never home.”

“And if it wasn't for me, you'd
always
be home.”

“They're probably freaking out,” Boston said, stricken.

York smirked. “Oh, they're definitely freaking out.” He went back to texting and spoke as he typed. “Went. To. A. Movie. Staying. At. Jordan's. Boston, too.”

He finished the text and then powered down the phone and pocketed it. “What about you?” he asked Andi. “You going to call your mommy and daddy?”

Andi pressed her lips together for a moment, then seemed to collect herself before biting back. “You don't hear my phone ringing, do you?”

Mine, either.

I dragged my phone from my purse and stared at the blank screen. Everyone was watching me, so with a little bit of shame, I pretended to send a text message. Something small and sharp twisted in my gut. So many nights I had spent worrying about Mama. But apparently she couldn't be bothered to worry about me.

 

17

“THE NEXT PHONE that rings goes in the toilet,” Andi said.

She sounded like she meant it, so with a deep breath, I powered down my phone, watching the screen go completely dark.

“And if you answer it,” York said, mimicking her serious tone, “
you
go in the toilet.”

He waited for a laugh, but I couldn't even muster up half a grin. I pulled off my cap to run my fingers through my hair, digging for the smooth lumps of scar tissue underneath. I tried to retrace my steps over the last few hours, to figure out which decision, which turn, had been the point of
no
return. No doubt I should not have gotten into the SUV, but even before that, I should never have set foot in River City Park. I should have let the violin go.

But I wasn't really chasing the violin so much as a piece of Mama. I couldn't let that piece fly away, not when so much of her had already been stolen from me over the years. I was robbed of her smile when meth took three of her teeth; I lost her soft
hugs when heroin sapped her will to eat and turned her body to bones; I'd even lost things I never had, because the thief of time kept Mama behind bars and left me with so many months of memories unmade.

I couldn't reclaim those things, but now that Mama was done breaking apart, I could help put her back together. I took comfort in the fact that some of Mama's stolen pieces could be tracked down. At least when those pieces were locked up in pawnshops, I knew where to find them. So even though I knew running after the violin was my first mistake, I couldn't say I would have done things any different.

My eyes strayed toward the violin, now spilling half out of Andi's messenger bag and onto the counter, alongside my purse and the drugs and the keys to the SUV—the whole story of our night on display.

I unthreaded my fingers from my hair and reached for the instrument. Andi made no move to stop me, giving me an almost apologetic smile instead.

“Bet you wish you'd just lifted that thing when I told you to,” she said.

For once, we agreed.

As I pulled the violin free of the bag, I liberated more of its contents than I intended. A spiral notebook slid out of the open flap, followed by the flashlight and what looked like 3-D glasses. Andi hustled to shove it all back in her bag, but York was quicker. He snatched up the glasses.

“What the hell are these?” He slipped on the chunky plastic wraparound bands and tipped his head this way and that,
looking through the lenses, which protruded like eyepieces on a microscope. “Whoa! They're like binoculars you can wear. Cool.”

Andi yanked the glasses off his face and shoved them back into her bag. “They're not cool. They're lame.”

“Did you steal them?” I asked.

She slapped the flap of the messenger bag closed. “Oh my God, will you just get over it? I didn't steal everything I own.”

“It's another infomercial thing,” Boston observed. “Like the flashlight.”

Andi rounded on him. “So?”

He flinched. “So . . . you can't steal from infomercials.”

“Oh,” she said, placated. “Right.”

“You don't have a laptop in there, do you?” Boston asked.

“No; why?”

“We need to type up our statement, and we need the Internet to figure out where to send it. I'd use my phone, but . . .”

Geez. Let it go, dude.

“You can use mine,” I said. I tucked the violin under my arm and grabbed my purse, but Boston waved me off.

“Not yet. Let's write it all out first, then we'll—what's that?” He was staring at the purse in my hands.

“Uh, it's a purse. What about it?”

“Not that.” He stretched across the counter to peel something from the bottom of my bag. “This.”

When he pulled back, a small slip of paper was in his hands. I inspected my purse to confirm nothing else was stuck to it, then set it down again. Boston shoved a few of the plastic packages to
the side and set the palm-sized scrap on the counter in front of him. It was lined paper, torn from a spiral notebook, and someone had written on it in black ink. I walked around the counter to read over his shoulder and found myself crowded in close between the boys as we all hunched over.

I had only a second to register that one of them smelled like spice before I was distracted by the words on the paper. I choked at what I read.

Forest Road 6

Trail to old launch

9 pm

York snapped upright, and the faint aroma of spice went with him.

“That's the spot . . . that's the—the SUV—the cops—”

“Coordinates for the drug drop,” Boston supplied.

“Coordinates?” I leaned away from Boston, in case his nerdy jargon was contagious.

“Call it whatever you want.” Boston snatched the paper off the counter and shook it. “But this is the exact time and place.”

“Where did it come from?” York asked.

“From the bottom of her purse.” Boston pointed at me.

“No, before that, genius.”

“Well, that's obvious,” I said. I lifted one of the heroin bricks from the table and let it fall back with a thud. “We dumped out an entire bag of this stuff. The slip had to be in there.”

Boston pushed the block I'd dropped back in line with the others. “We didn't ‘dump' the bag,” he said. “We unpacked it very carefully.”

“Point?” York asked.

“The
point
,” Boston said, “is that I checked every inch of that bag, and every one of these . . .” He waved a hand at the drug pile. “Whatever they are.”

“It's small,” Andi said, pulling the paper from Boston's hand and letting it flutter back to the counter like litter. “You just didn't see it.”

Boston looked her steadily in the eye. “I don't miss things. I promise you, it wasn't in there.”

I shook my head. “But if it didn't come from them, that means—”

“It came from one of us,” York finished.

Boston exhaled through his nose. “Exactly.”

No.

Andi echoed my thought. “No way.”

York grabbed the paper and held it up accusingly. “Whose is this?”

I stared hard at the slip in his hand, at the college-ruled lines cutting through the black ink, at the jagged edge where it had been ripped from a notebook.

From a notebook
.

My heart skipped as I glanced involuntarily at Andi's messenger bag—the one stuffed with strange glasses and obnoxiously bright lights and one very normal-looking spiral notebook.

“I know whose it is,” Boston said, his voice low and serious.

I nodded and swallowed hard. I knew, too.

I looked at him to confirm that our suspicions were the same, but when I caught his eyes, they were fierce, drilling straight into mine.

“It was you.”

Me?!

“Whoa.” I held up one hand, the other holding tight to the violin still tucked under my arm. “I followed you guys, remember?”

“You tried to ditch us, though,” York said.

The paper was crumpling in his tightly clenched fist. I stared at it as if it were contaminated. And everyone else stared at me as if
I
were contaminated.

“That note was stuck to your purse,” Boston accused.

“It must have already been on the table,” I insisted.

Boston pressed on. “And you knew this stuff was heroin. Who knows that?”

“No!” I said. “I've never seen that paper. It's Andi's!”

“Hey!” Andi reeled. “You don't know that. Why would you say—”

“You're carrying a notebook,” I said, pointing wildly at her messenger bag. “And who knows what else.”

“She's right,” Boston said, chewing his lip.

“Oh please.” Andi looked genuinely insulted, and she grudgingly yanked her notebook out of the messenger bag. “Take a look. No torn pages.”

She dropped the spiral onto the counter and flipped through the pages. She wasn't lying. The pages were intact. And they
were beautiful. Colors flew by as Andi thumbed the edge of the notebook, letting the pages fall one by one for inspection. I saw a flash of a red-and-yellow dragon sketched in colored pencil; a bright-green frog in midhop, looking like he might leap right off the page; and a dancing leprechaun that matched the one on Andi's back.

But the most important thing I saw was that Andi's notebook wasn't lined at all. It was a spiral-bound sketch pad. Of course, it
could
still be her piece of paper, but I couldn't deny the lump of shame I felt rising in my throat.

Andi plucked the paper from York's hand. “If this belongs to anyone, it's you two. You're the ones who couldn't wait to get to the dock.”

Hmm. Good point.

Andi went on, “You're the ones who hopped into an SUV that just
miraculously
had keys in the ignition.”

Holy shit
.

“That's crazy,” York said.

Beside him, Boston had fallen quiet. He looked up at York, his eyes hooded, and whispered, “You swear the keys were in the ignition?”

“I swear!” York threw his hands up. “Boston, come on! You can't listen to this—this—
bullshit
. Please!” Then his voice dropped so low I almost couldn't hear him. “Please.”

Andi cocked her head to one side. “Sounds like the yeti left you out of the loop, little bro.”

Boston didn't respond at first. He studied York's face, letting his brother's unanswered plea hang in the air for a few more
seconds. Then, with his eyes still on York's, he told Andi, “I believe him.”

York let out an audible sigh, and I felt my own tension release with his.

I believed him, too. I believed them all.

So then, how
 
. . .
My eyes crawled over the bricks that Boston had insisted were alone in the bag, past the unlined spiral sketch pad that exonerated Andi, and landed on my purse.

“Guys,” I said. “My purse . . . the car  . . . that's probably where I picked it up.”

Boston propped an elbow on the counter and rested his chin in his hand. “You think it was in there and somehow got stuck to your bag?”

I held my breath while he pondered the possibility.

“Makes sense,” he finally admitted.

York just looked relieved that no one was pointing at him. He fingered the torn edge of the paper scrap. “Maybe. Dumbasses just had this sitting in their car? Not exactly a professional job if you can't remember a few simple directions.”

Andi grinned. “Hey, don't complain that our enemies are amateurs.”

I studied the faces around me, nodding together now instead of hurling accusations at one another—smiling instead of shouting—and I felt something warm feathering in my chest.

If we had enemies, did that make us friends?

 

BEFORE

I KEPT MY head low as I rounded the corner into the junior wing. The end of the school day was always the best and worst part of my day. In a few short minutes, I would be out the door and embracing the next seventeen hours of freedom, but first I had to go through the daily torture ritual known as J-wing—navigating the crowd of juniors, whose favorite hobby was razzing underclassmen who passed through their territory. Usually, it was the freshman boys who got called out, but a sophomore girl wasn't off-limits.

I patted the wool of my slouchy beanie hat to make sure it was firmly in place, then did my best to push through the crowd without actually touching anyone. That got tricky halfway down the hall, where traffic came to a sudden stop.

I heard what was going on before I saw it. The tinny sound of Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” was straining out of someone's phone, and people at the front of the pack were whooping and whistling at something I was too short to see.