Running in a Pack

by A M Burns

  Finn rolled his eyes at her and grabbed a few pieces of peanut butter toast his mom had made for him. “Dad already off to work?” he asked.

  Shelby nodded and stuffed another spoonful of cereal into her mouth. “Yeah. And Mom’s getting ready right now. I’m so excited!”

  “Why?” He was barely awake as it was. He didn’t have the energy to reach excited proportions yet.

  “Because this is my first day of high school. Duh. I’m going to try out for sports. Maybe even cheerleading.”

  Finn didn’t want a cheerleader for a sister, but if she were busy, maybe that would mean he’d get the house to himself in the afternoons while she was away. That was definitely something he could look forward to.

  Their mom came downstairs with a towel wrapped around her hair as she went to grab her purse and keys. “You two ready?” She looked at the clock on the microwave. “Well, I guess you’d better be. Come on. Grab your things.”

  Finn didn’t move. “Uh. You know you have a towel on your head still, right?”

  She huffed at him. “Yes, yes, you have perfectly good observational powers, and you’re very smart. That’s why you’re going to get all As this year. Aren’t you?” He’d never had all As, so he didn’t say anything. “Okay.” She pulled the towel off her head and tossed it down the basement steps toward the laundry room. “Into the car now. Both of you. We can’t be late for your first day at a new school.”

  Finn shuffled along behind Shelby as she picked up her bright purple backpack and he grabbed his green messenger bag. They were in the car a few minutes later, and less than five minutes after that, his mom pulled in front of the small school that was barely a third the size of his old one in Austin. They were stopped in a long line of traffic made of parents dropping off their children, but as far as he could tell, his mom had the only car in the bunch. Everyone else had big SUVs and trucks. Was this going to be the thing that made him stand out even more than him being new to Colorado? He hoped not.

  Shelby seemed to carry none of his worries or reservations as she grabbed her backpack and bounded toward the front of the school with their mother calling, “Have a great day!” after her.

  Finn wasn’t nearly that energetic as he got out of the car. “Bye, Mom. See you tonight,” he said as he stopped by the driver’s side door.

  She reached out and took his hand. “You be good, and watch out for your sister.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  She didn’t let go of him right away, though. “You’ll be okay. New school year. New friends. Everything will be just fine.”

  He hoped she was right, but he didn’t want to worry her with his uncertainties. “I know. I’m sure you’re right. Everything’s going to be great. I better go get my locker assignment and meet up with Ivan and Adrian.”

  He waved to her over his shoulder and got in the line of other seniors, directed by neon poster boards, to get his locker assignment.

  Back in Austin this had all been done a week or two before the start of the year. Here they expected it all to be done an hour before his first class. After waiting to move up behind seven other seniors, Finn finally got his locker assignment, the code to get into the thing, and his class schedule.

  The first bright spot of the morning was, when Finn went to find his new locker, Ivan stood at his own locker only six down from Finn’s. Ivan waved, and Finn waved back at him, then fiddled with the combination lock a couple times before finally getting it open on the third attempt. By then Ivan was next to him and leaning against the lockers.

  “They’re old. Sometimes they stick,” he explained as Finn looked at his empty locker and realized there had been no real reason for him to go to it other than to make sure the combination worked. He didn’t have a jacket to put in there, like Ivan had, and he hadn’t gotten any books from classes that hadn’t started yet.

  “Do you know where Adrian’s locker is?” Finn asked.

  Ivan nodded. “Yeah, and he’s not happy about it. Only three down from Channing.”

  Finn scowled. “They’re homeschooled. Why do they even get lockers?”

  “So they can put their junk somewhere when they do come here for stuff?” Ivan shrugged. “It’ll be okay. He usually just carries his books around with him anyway.”

  “Must get heavy,” Finn said.

  Ivan didn’t say anything back to him as Adrian came over to join them.

  “Hey,” Adrian said as he shifted his backpack to his other shoulder. Finn nodded to him. Ivan smiled at him.

  “All right. Let’s compare schedules,” Ivan suggested, so the three of them pulled out their schedules. Finn hoped he had every class and lunch with the other two boys but knew that probably wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t usually so lucky.

  As expected, they only had one class, biology, together, but they did all have lunch together. And Finn had English literature with Adrian and geometry with Ivan. That was something. But when Adrian saw he had PE without either of them, he got super quiet.

  “You okay?” Finn asked.

  He shrugged. “Sure.” There was no use in him even pretending nothing was wrong, and Ivan’s worried expression didn’t help matters either.

  “I’ll see if they’ll switch me,” Ivan said.

  Adrian looked a little better at his suggestion. “If you wouldn’t mind….”

  “I’ll ask too,” Finn added. “It’ll be fun. Then the three of us could have another class together.” It would mean him losing geometry with Ivan, since Adrian’s PE class was in the same time slot, but he would rather have PE with them than geometry. Especially if there was a problem with Adrian being in PE by himself, as it seemed there was.

  Adrian frowned a little. “You’d be okay with that?”

  “Sure.”

  He was rewarded by a real smile from Adrian. “Thanks.”

  Finn nodded and closed his locker door. A check of his phone showed he had twenty minutes before the start of his first class, same as they had. “Should we go talk to whoever now?”

  Ivan nodded. “Probably. That way we can get in there and beat anyone else before people start asking to be in the same classes for no reason.”

  Finn was pretty sure some people would think they had no reason to want to be in the same class either, especially since most people slacked off in PE, but this seemed important to Adrian, so he wanted to do what he could to help him.

  When they got to the scheduler’s office, though, there was already a long line of people waiting, and nearly all of them were loudly complaining about who they had for teachers or who else was in their classes.

  “This is going to take forever,” Finn grumbled as he counted the number of people in line ahead of them. There were twelve of them. And they only had twenty minutes before their first class.

  “You guys don’t have to do this. I might be fine,” Adrian spoke up from behind him.

  Ivan shook his head. “We want to do this. Better safe than sorry and all, you know.”

  Finn still had no idea what was going on or what Ivan and Adrian were talking about, but he knew better than to think standing in line with everyone able to hear them was a good place to talk about whatever was going on.

  The line moved quickly, since the woman behind the desk barely let any of the people in front of them get more than a few words out before she denied their requests to change their schedules. They still had ten minutes left to get this all fixed and get to their first classes when Finn, Ivan, and Adrian got up to the desk.

  “And what is the catastrophic problem with your schedules?” she asked them blandly, as if she’d already had enough of the school year when it hadn’t even started yet.

  Finn handed her his schedule, and so did Ivan and Adrian. “We’d all like to be in the same PE class, please.”

  She huffed, sounding very dramatic, just like his mother sometimes when she was fed up with him or Shelby. “Finn Ryan,” she read over his schedule. “You’re new here. Aren’t you?”


  “Yes.”

  She looked up at him and pushed her bright yellow glasses a little farther up her nose. “Are you already trying to start trouble for yourself? Despite what you’ve probably heard, Mr. Reynald is not a bad gym teacher. He’ll make you run laps, but you seem to be in decent shape, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.”

  That wasn’t the problem at all, and he wasn’t asking to be switched in order to get an easier time in PE. But the issue was he didn’t know enough about the situation to be able to tell her anything other than that being alone in gym was a problem for Adrian, and he wanted to be there to help him out. He looked to Ivan for assistance.

  Ivan came up to the desk too, and Finn stepped aside to give him some more room since he was just that huge. “Hey. So we go through this pretty much every year. Adrian can’t take PE by himself. The office has a file full of complaints from previous years that the administration is aware of. Since he has to take gym, we’d like to be there with him, and maybe there won’t be as many complaints this year from his parents.”

  Finn’s eyebrows shot up, and he looked over at Adrian, who was trying to be very small as he hid behind Ivan, embarrassed. The new information explained exactly nothing, but at least now he knew it was a big deal for Adrian and it had been a problem for a while.

  The woman softened her expression a bit as she nodded. “Okay, boys, let’s see what we can do for you. Ivan, that’ll move you to… Environmental Sciences. Finn, I’ve got Calculus open for you. Both of you okay with that?”

  Finn shrugged. Harder math was still just math for him. He looked over at Ivan, who was smiling. “You do know my parents run a wolf center right? That class is going to be a cakewalk.”

  She chuckled. “Yes, I do. And my son had his seventh birthday party there, and you let him pet a wolf. Now he’s convinced he wants to run away to live in the center and become a wolf.” She printed out new schedules for Finn and Ivan. “You three take care. Have a good senior year. And remember to come to the office if there are any problems.”

  They took their new schedules. “Thanks,” Finn said. He was surprised it had been so easy.

  Ivan nodded to her, and the three of them left the line behind with a lot of the students glaring at them in envy. Finn was pretty sure not many of them would get to move their classes around. “Why did she let us do that?”

  “Probably to avoid getting negative attention on the school,” Adrian murmured.

  Finn frowned. He had no idea what Adrian could mean by his statement. They still had five minutes to go, and Finn could see the door of his first class from the corner they’d found to stand in.

  Ivan filled in the missing pieces of information for him. “Last time things got bad, Adrian’s mother threatened to call the police if her son wasn’t given a safer learning environment than the one he had. So she was probably just helping them cover their asses.”

  That made a bit more sense, but Finn wondered how bad it had to have been for Adrian’s mother to threaten to call the cops. It wasn’t the time to ask, though, as the warning bell sounded and they had to get to their first classes.

  7

  When Finn’s phone started ringing in the middle of dinner, he expected his mother’s dark look. “No phones at the dinner table, young man.”

  Nodding, Finn took out his phone to silence it and saw that it was Ivan calling him. “It’s Ivan.”

  “I don’t care,” his mother said.

  He stared down at his still ringing phone. “It could be important. Maybe there’s an emergency at the center.” He didn’t have a pressing feeling that should accompany an emergency, but if it made his folks let him take the call, it was worth a try.

  His dad shook his head. “Then he has his parents for that. You know our rules. Silence it and put it away.”

  Finn tried not to be distracted as he obeyed and went back to eating dinner. But he kept wondering what Ivan would want and how important it had to be for him to call and not just text like they usually did.

  As soon as his dishes were in the dishwasher, he was free to call Ivan back, which he did the second he was in his room.

  “Hey,” Ivan answered on the second ring.

  “Hey. Sorry I couldn’t answer before. We were eating dinner.” He pulled his legs up under him on the bed and looked out at Pikes Peak. The sun was setting to the west of the mountain, and in the gentle light it really did look pretty purple. He hadn’t expected that.

  Ivan chuckled. “It’s fine. But hey, there’s a meteor shower tonight. Want to go see it? I was thinking about going to this high campsite by Rainbow Falls and taking my sleeping bag, but my parents won’t let me go alone, and I would rather have some company.”

  Finn’s heart picked up the pace. “All night?” Sleeping under the stars with Ivan? Of course he wanted to go.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, they peak around one in the morning, so we wouldn’t be coming back until early tomorrow. At least it’s Friday night.”

  Finn didn’t hear much past when he realized he’d be spending the night with Ivan. Sure, meteors could be cool, but he’d seen them in Austin, and there was never much to look at since the lights of the city got in the way. Maybe he’d see a little more in Woodland Park, but he kind of doubted it. Getting to spend the night with Ivan, though, now that was a big deal. Nuclear-explosion type of big.

  “I’d have to ask my parents,” he hedged, already dreading what they’d say. If they refused to let him go, or worse, said he had to take Shelby along with him, that would be a disaster. He really wanted to go out with Ivan tonight. They just had to let him.

  “Sure. Call me and let me know either way? I’ll be leaving in about an hour. You do have a sleeping bag, don’t you?”

  “Uh….” It was somewhere in the garage, if he had to take a guess. Really he hadn’t seen it in over a year. “Yeah. I’ve got one. I’ll go ask them right now.”

  “Cool. See you.”

  “Bye.” Finn wasted no time in rushing down the stairs seconds after he’d hung up with the phone still in his hand. “Mom! Dad!” he called out to them as soon as he was on the main level.

  “We’re in the back!” his dad yelled, so Finn went to the backyard with his thoughts racing and his phone shaking in his hands as he tried to come up with something to say, some way to convince his parents to let him go spend the night with another boy out in the woods.

  “So…,” he began and had no idea where he was going with that thought.

  His mom looked up at him and brushed some dirt off her hands and onto her jeans. It didn’t make either of them any cleaner. “What did Ivan want? Is everything okay?”

  “Actually, there’s a meteor shower tonight, and he was wondering if I wanted to see it.”

  His dad nodded and continued planting some flowers along the back deck. “I heard something about that. Are his parents going?”

  Finn shifted his weight and pushed his hands into his pockets. “He didn’t say. I got the impression that they weren’t, though. I think it would just be us.”

  That got them both looking up at him with unreadable expressions that put him on edge. Although his mother often complained about not having the sight as well as his grandmother had, or even as he had, he knew she did occasionally have visions, or sometimes tried to see things. He hoped she wasn’t doing that.

  “Where’s he planning on going?” his mom asked.

  Finn had to backtrack through their conversation to try to remember the details. “Uh. Rainbow Falls? He said something about having a high campsite. The meteor shower doesn’t peak until one so… all night and stuff.” He wished his face didn’t feel like one giant flame, or that his voice hadn’t broken while he’d been trying to explain things. Now they’d for sure never let him go.

  But his dad just shrugged. “Ivan’s grown up around here, so I’m sure he knows how to be safe. And you’re both seventeen. There are a lot worse things to be doing at your age than looking up at a bunch of stars
. I think it’s fine.”

  His mom smiled at him. “I do too. Take your phone, a couple of bottles of water, a sleeping bag, a pillow, a change of clothes, a hoodie, a safety whistle, a—”

  Finn held up his hands to stop her in midlist. “I got it.” He shook his head, not believing how easy it had been. His parents actually thought he’d be okay camping overnight with Ivan? He would have never thought it possible. It was crazy but also wonderful. “Thank you both. I better go get ready. He said he wanted to get going in an hour.”

  “You boys be safe. I want you home before eight tomorrow morning!” his dad shouted after him as Finn charged back inside and up the stairs so he could go get ready. He gave his dad a thumbs-up before he was too far out of his sight, though.

  He had his phone out and was about to open the door to his bedroom when Shelby came out of her room. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing much.” He hoped his blush didn’t give him away. “Just that Ivan and I are going to go watch a meteor shower tonight.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “And Mom and Dad fell for that? Wow you must be extremely good at lying all of the sudden.”

  “Hey! It’s not a lie. He’s taking me to Rainbow Falls, and we’re going to see the meteor shower.”

  “Sure you are. Say hi for me.” She waved to him before she went back into her room. A second later pop music came blaring out from around her door, and Finn shook his head at whatever had gotten into his sister.

  He went back into his room and called Ivan.

  “Hey. What’d they say?”

  Finn felt like there was too much excitement within him. Like he’d burst at any moment. “They said yes. Seems you’re responsible, and I won’t get into too much trouble with you.”

  That made Ivan laugh in his warm, deep way, which made Finn smile. “Sure you won’t. Okay, get your sleeping bag and something warm to wear. It gets cold out there at night.”

  “I’ll be ready when you get here,” Finn promised before they said good-bye. Then the mad scramble began as he tried to find his sleeping bag in all of the clutter and boxes that still awaited sorting in the garage. He’d barely managed to grab it, then pull on his sweatshirt, when he heard Ivan rumble up to his house in the center’s truck.