“Remember last year’s homecoming?” he asked, putting his hand under her arm as she slipped and almost crashed into a locker.
“I’m not really into homecoming,” she said, tensing under his touch.
Of course she wasn’t, he thought, making sure she stayed steady as their feet crunched the debris. “Well, you might remember last year coming to school and finding all the homecoming posters had been replaced by ones that didn’t take themselves quite so seriously.”
They were also not all that attractive, since the four linemen he’d roped into helping with the project had painted about as well as a couple of monkeys. But he thought the posters he’d created with the paints he’d swiped out of the art department storage room urging people to vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE for Homecoming King and Queen showed a certain level of talent.
“You painted those?”
“And you thought I didn’t know anything about art,” he said, trying the doorknob. Ha! The art office door wasn’t locked. Bonus.
He made a beeline for the storage room to the left. The door was locked, but the metal bar and a lot of grunting fixed that problem.
Inside, the small room was dark as a tomb. He stubbed his toe and swore as he held his hands in front of him, trying to find the other door. Then it took a dozen tries to snap that lock, which he blamed solely on the lack of light and not on his limited breaking-and-entering skills. Once the lock gave way, he said, “If you believe in praying, Cas, this might be the time to send one up.” Then he gave the door a shove. It started to open, then stopped.
Damn it.
“We’re stuck?” she asked.
Frankie shook his head. “Not yet. Give me some room.” He took three steps back, squared himself like he would do in a drill, and bolted forward, angling his shoulder toward the door.
Oof. That was going to leave a mark.
His shoulder sang, and he bit back a yelp as the door flew open. He sailed through, stumbled, and went crashing to the ground on top of a bunch of broken boards and beams and water. Ow.
“You did it. That was amazing!” Cas yelled before asking, “Are you okay?”
“Too much power,” he said, pushing off the wet ground, refusing to admit that it hurt like hell. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
He looked down to where she pointed. A streak of red trickled down his calf from his knee. “Not enough blood for the vampires to notice,” he assured her. But the way Cas was swaying and holding on to the wall for dear life made him pretty sure she couldn’t say the same. How the girl was still upright and not complaining was beyond him. He wished the guys on his team had half as much grit.
“Take a seat for a second and let me rewrap your arm.” When she shook her head and started to say they should just keep going, he said, “Please, Cas. Let me help.”
She stared at him, then slowly sank into a chair. With both doors open, he had enough light to work with.
“Sparkly,” he said as he slowly unwrapped the slick fabric she was using as a bandage.
“Yeah. And?”
“And you don’t strike me as the sparkly-clothes type. No offense.” He finished removing the bandage and was glad the light was dim. He’d been prepared for bad, but the gaping, jagged cut in her arm was worse than he’d imagined.
“No offense taken.” She gasped as she glanced at the cut, then turned her head, pain flickering across her face. “My mother thinks girls are supposed to like shiny clothes. Crazy, right?”
“My dad believes all boys want to play football—I guess everyone has their thing. Hold still. I have an idea.” He pulled his shirt over his head, folded it quickly, and pressed it firmly over the injury. Then he took the scarf she’d used before and quickly wrapped it as secure as he could around the T-shirt and her arm. She flinched, bit her lip, and closed her eyes so tightly that he thought her forehead was going to pop, but she barely made a sound as he pulled the fabric tight.
Most of the guys on the team would have had a hard time sucking it up the way she had. Even Tad would have had trouble.
Frankie ignored the way thinking of Tad made his stomach lurch, and he finished tying the final knot. Either Tad was still alive or he wasn’t. Frankie had no way of knowing.
“That should do it.” He wiped his blood-streaked hands on his shorts and looked back at the empty art office. Not much smoke. No fire . . . yet. Holding out his hand to help her up, he said, “Let’s get the hell out of this place. What do you think?”
“Do you honestly expect me to say no?” she asked.
With more energy than she probably felt, Cas pushed up from the ground with her good hand as Frankie grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet. Together, they walked down the long corridor, climbing up and over the broken pieces of hallway and ceiling in their path. When they got close to the collapsed staircase at the end of the hall, Cas asked, “Do you think there’s another way down?”
“Could be.” The stairs that mirrored this set down the front hallway on the other side of the school were their best shot. If those were destroyed, their only other option would be the ones at the rear of the school—which meant going back toward the fire. No, thanks.
“Don’t take offense, since this has nothing to do with you, but I didn’t think I could hate this place more than I already did before.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Frankie pitched a board obstructing his path to one side, shoved another, and then realized Cas hadn’t answered. Turning, he asked, “You must have a pretty good reason for being here at school today.”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
It didn’t. But the way she was evading the question told him it should. So instead of dropping it, he said, “Humor me. School isn’t in session. You aren’t interested in being fashionable in polyester marching-band uniforms. You could have found someplace else to practice clarinet if you wanted to. So, why come? And why come up here?” It’s not as if the art room she’d been stuck in was right around the corner from the music department, where he’d first spotted her. Far from it.
Cas hugged her bag to her chest. “The art room was quiet, and I figured no one would notice me in there. Things have been . . .” She shrugged again. “I needed to get away.” Before he could comment, she asked, “What about you? Why are you here instead of off doing whatever it is football players do?”
Frankie mentally ran through the path he’d taken to get here and the stops he’d made along the way and Tad, who had said his time was up just before the first bomb went off. He started to answer when he heard someone shouting.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
Cas turned. “I think it’s coming from down that way. Someone must need help.”
It could be Tad.
“Let’s go find out.”
Rashid
— Chapter 30 —
“THEY’RE DEAD.”
One of them must have been alive only a few minutes ago. The call had been weak, but he’d heard it and followed the sound. If he’d only gotten here a few minutes earlier . . .
Nothing would have changed. Nothing he could have done would have saved them. Rashid smoothed the dead girl’s sleeve. The pool of blood under her head ran along the cracks in the bathroom tile near where the other woman, Mrs. Barnes, lay on the floor. The two of them must have gotten caught in the bathroom when the bomb went off, or maybe Mrs. Barnes pulled the girl in here thinking it would be safer when the building started to come apart. The broken glass that had sliced the artery in Mrs. Barnes’s neck showed how little was safe now.
Tad turned and stared down the hall. Rashid wished he could look away. But he couldn’t. The stream of blood following the grout in between the tiles reached where he was kneeling, and still he didn’t move.
Mrs. Barnes had taught history. Rashid had taken AP American History from her. He was supposed to have AP European History with her this year. She valued all her students equally and made sure they knew that every voice
was important to the conversation in her class. He remembered when the discussion turned to the Japanese internment camps during World War II. She’d made sure the class knew it was never fair to condemn an entire racial group based on the actions of a few and had everyone in the room do a project on the time and place when their heritage was considered a threat.
He’d wished everyone in the school could take her class. She’d taught her students that if people took the time and effort, they’d still believe in what America pretended to stand for. She’d given him hope that maybe, just maybe, things would change if he just waited.
But nothing had gotten better, and he’d realized that waiting around for other people to change was pointless. If you wanted something to be different, you had to do it yourself. The beard was to have been his first step. A small but important test to see how others would react. How he would feel before forging down a path different from the one his father expected him to take.
“Come on. They’re dead. There’s nothing we can do.” Tad stalked into the hallway, letting the door he’d been holding open close behind him.
Darkness wrapped around Rashid. He let it settle on him for a moment before reaching for his phone. Using the glow, Rashid looked at the unfamiliar girl. She had long, dark hair that she wore tied back behind her neck, and deep brown skin. Her face must have been beautiful before today. The side of it that hadn’t been smashed open still was.
Rashid turned away from the blood and gore that seemed even more horrifying in the dim light. He’d seen pictures of worse things that had happened in bombings in Palestine. In an effort to make him understand what it meant to really be a Muslim, his cousins had shown him places where people had died. They wanted him to feel what they thought he was supposed to feel. Sadness had walked the streets with him while his cousins had described the people who had been bombed as they shopped at a market. How could anyone see the scars on the streets and buildings and the wariness in the eyes of people trying to go about their lives and not feel their anxiety and fear?
He had wanted neither. But right now he was filled with both, in ways he had never felt on those streets. This blood was real. Mrs. Barnes and the girl were walking these halls an hour ago. They never knew they were supposed to be afraid. They didn’t know they’d stayed too long at a place they had every right to believe was safe.
Until it was too late.
Slowly, Rashid wrapped his fingers around the dead girl’s hand. He then reached out and put his other hand on Mrs. Barnes’s shoulder.
Even though Rashid didn’t know the girl, he felt the loss of the life that was cut short, one that he would now never have the chance to be a part of. She probably wouldn’t have wanted to know him. She might have even called him names. But if she had, he forgave her.
He looked at both of them, then closed his eyes and quietly said, “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah.” The words had to be said by a Muslim when dying. They were not meant to help those who did not believe in Islam, but Rashid felt the need to say the words anyway.
For them.
For himself. Because he had come into this school to do something to change his life. To find a way to be seen for more than his religion, to be a person who was more than just one thing. And this is what had happened.
Sitting back on his heels, Rashid said the words a second time, then prayed for forgiveness from Allah. The door to repentance was always open. Rashid had heard those words all his life, typically after he’d done something his parents disapproved of. Often he said “I’m sorry” because it was expected of him. Rarely did he mean it with his whole heart. Today he meant it down to his soul.
I’m sorry.
Shifting the light, Rashid looked at the girl again and spotted a small yellow bag sticking out from under one of her legs and slid it out. He unsnapped the flap of the purse and was rummaging through the zippered compartments when the door opened.
“What are you doing?” Tad appeared in the entrance. His body was framed by the faint light behind him, making him appear almost spirit-like. A shiver went up Rashid’s neck.
“What does it matter to you?” Rashid asked, willing Tad to close the door and go away. “I thought you were going to find a way out.”
“I was, but then I thought about that 911 call you didn’t make and . . .” Tad crossed his arms over his chest and stood in the middle of the doorway. “I just wanted to see what you were doing.”
“Because I might be planting a bomb in here?”
Tad tightened his arms over his chest.
“I’m looking for her ID!” The words shot like a bullet out of Rashid. “I want to be able to pray for her by name. She deserves for someone to know her name.” He opened the purse and dug through the contents.
There was an open pack of gum. A wallet with money and pictures. A small, almost crumpled photo hidden in one pocket along with a half-eaten roll of mints. A set of keys on a fuzzy bee keychain. Pens. Earbuds. A bunch of receipts and other trash, and finally a school ID card with the girl’s smiling face beaming from it.
“Angelica Johnson,” he said, wishing the girl could still smile. “She was going to be a freshman this year.”
Not someone who had called him names. Just a girl waiting for the next part of her life to start. And it was over.
“Now what are you doing?” Tad asked as Rashid closed his eyes.
Rashid didn’t answer as he sent a silent prayer to Allah to take care of the teacher and young girl who should not have been caught in a war zone. Then Rashid pulled from her wallet the small, bent picture of her and two of her friends making stupid faces in a photo booth. He grabbed his bag and slid both the ID card and the photo into a side pocket.
“What did you take?”
That was it.
Rashid spun around. “What is wrong with you?” He dug back into the pocket, pulled out the ID card, and held it up. “Here. This is what I took. If we get out of here, I thought I could give it to the police. I thought . . .” He shook his head and raked a hand through his hair. Shrugging, he said, “I thought if I get out of here, I could let the emergency workers know where she died so they could find her and bring her back to her family. I thought her family might want to know what happened to her and that they might want her ID.”
If she’d gotten the identification card today, it was the last photograph ever taken of her. Her family would want to see her last smile.
Rashid waited for Tad to say something horrible. When he didn’t, Rashid slid the card back next to the photograph he planned on keeping for himself no matter what happened.
“Now where are you going?” Tad shouted as Rashid pushed past him out of the bathroom and back into the hall.
Turning, he looked Tad dead in the eye and said, “I’m going to look for a way out of the school. While I do that, feel free to check the bathroom for the bombs you seem to think I am setting. I’m sure that’ll be a good use of your time and will keep you far away from me. And who knows? Maybe part of the ceiling will fall in and kill me. That would no doubt make you very happy.”
Then, without looking back, Rashid strode down the hall to his right, around the wreckage, looking for a path that would get him as far away from Tad and his hate as possible. He was grateful to Tad for helping him get out of the bathroom he’d been trapped in. If not for Tad, he could have died exactly like Mrs. Barnes and Angelica had. But he was done letting the idiotic football player kick him over and over as if he were a dog. He wasn’t a dog or a Moo-slim or any of the other names he’d been called by Tad and his friends over the years. He was just Rashid Farsoun, and all he’d ever wanted was a chance to live his life like everyone else did.
Carefully, he pushed aside wires with part of what he was assuming used to be a door frame so he could get closer to the collapsed staircase. Maybe the damage wasn’t as bad as it looked from afar.
Fluorescent lights dangled from the ceiling. Water poured out of an exposed pipe on the far end of the hallw
ay. There were broken beams and smashed ceiling tiles, but aside from the smoke that seemed to be drifting from the missing tiles in the ceiling, the damage here wasn’t as bad as it was behind him.
At least not yet.
Rashid checked his phone. Still no signal.
Putting the phone back in his pocket, he continued down the hall. The smoke grew thicker and the temperature was getting warmer.
12:34 p.m.
Tad
— Chapter 31 —
“HEY,” TAD CALLED as Rashid walked down the hazy hall. But Rashid didn’t stop or look back.
Damn it all to hell. He should have just kept his mouth shut. But seeing more people dead had freaked him out. He hadn’t meant . . . he didn’t really think . . . He saw Rashid disappear around the corner and hurried after him.
“Hey. Wait up. I’m sorry. Okay? I didn’t really think that you were planting a bomb.” He just couldn’t get the lie about the 911 call out of his head. And Rashid was hiding something.
“Really?” Rashid yelled without looking back. “Then what did you think I was doing in there? I’m pretty sure whatever you were thinking was terrible. But you want me to believe you’re really a nice guy.”
“I deserve that.” He did. And worse. “Just wait up, okay?” He was breathless as he reached Rashid, who had stopped and turned. Waiting for whatever it was he had to say.
Only what could he say?
Damn. He shoved a locker shut. Metal slammed against metal, making Rashid jerk, but he never took his eyes off Tad. Waiting for answers.
“Look,” Tad blurted. “There was a friend I was supposed to meet today. And I’m not sure if he’s still trapped in here.” Friend. Not exactly the truth, but it was close enough. “I’ve been thinking about him ever since the first explosion, and then we found someone and they weren’t alive, and it made me think . . .” Tad jammed his hands into his pockets and looked at the wet floor as the hollowness he’d felt when Rashid had announced the people inside the bathroom were dead returned. All the anger and frustration that had brought him here today had vanished in an instant when he thought Frankie might be one of them. He’d wanted Frankie to pay for hurting him, but now he wasn’t so sure what he wanted. Just as he wasn’t sure what Rashid wanted from him. He’d screwed up, but he wasn’t the kind of person Rashid thought he was.
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