“You can’t blame me for you wanting to kill yourself,” Diana snapped.
“She’s not.” Rashid wasn’t sure that was accurate, but they didn’t need more fighting. Not now, when Frankie and Z were out in the wreckage somewhere and one of them might be the bomber. And maybe trying to finish what he started . . . “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Tad, help me get Kaitlin on the stretcher.”
Tad grabbed one of the makeshift ropes and pulled on it. “These don’t seem strong enough. They could break, and she’ll drop to the cement. She’d die.”
“She’ll die if she stays here. The fire department has to have something they can put below so none of us hit the concrete. It’s risky, but if Frankie or Z set off the next bomb—”
“The bomber isn’t Frankie!” Cas yelled.
“It could be either of them. You saw Frankie downstairs in the music wing.” Rashid turned to Cas. “Why would he be there? And did anyone see Z or Frankie anywhere else in the building before the explosions started?”
Cas shook her head.
Tad frowned. “I think I saw Kaitlin and Z through the window in the media center when I passed by, and the last time I saw Frankie was near the field house. Diana, did you . . . Diana?” Tad yelled, and Rashid turned toward the door where Diana had been standing.
“Where did she go?” Rashid hurried to the door and stepped out into the corridor. Tad was right behind him. Side by side, they looked down the hall filled with broken beams and tiles and soot and destruction. But no Frankie or Z or Diana. She was gone.
“Guys!” Cas called from inside the room. Rashid ran back inside and looked at Kaitlin, expecting to see that she had stopped breathing, but her chest was still rising and falling.
“What’s wrong?” he asked Cas, who was standing next to a table near the windows, staring into an unzipped blue bag. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head and looked up at him as Tad walked into the doorway. “I took a gun out of my grandfather’s house and brought it with me to school today. I was going to use it to shoot myself.”
For a moment, Rashid couldn’t speak as he pictured the dark-haired girl with the olive skin and sad eyes pointing a gun at her head.
He could barely breathe as Cas tilted the bag and said, “The gun is gone.”
Frankie
— Chapter 43 —
“LEFT OR RIGHT?” Frankie asked as he stepped over a broken two-by-four, coughed, and peered down the hallway. The left looked like the clearest path, but between his eyes adjusting from the classroom lit by sunlight and the dim, smoke-filled hall, it was hard to tell for certain.
Z looked in both directions and pointed to the right. “I’ll shout if I find anything.” Before Frankie could nod, Z leaped over a bunch of debris and bolted down the hallway. The guy was on a mission. So was Frankie. He needed to get out of here. Away from the fire and explosions and Tad.
Experimenting with Tad had been a mistake. He wasn’t like Tad, Rashid, Cas, or Z. He wasn’t looking for who he was supposed to be or trying to find people to accept him. Did he feel sorry for the others? Hell, yeah, but that didn’t mean he had to make their choices. People liked him. He was a winner the way he was. Yeah, he needed to push boundaries every once in a while, but there were some boundaries he knew he couldn’t cross without changing everything.
Something clanged behind him.
Heart jumping, he spun and squinted into the haze.
“Z?” he called.
Nothing. No Z. No crazy bomber dude or firefighter coming to save the day.
God, this all really sucked.
“Z?” he called again.
Still no answer.
Frankie turned and spotted a body covered in dust and debris next to a classroom door. The guy wasn’t moving. Still, Frankie leaned down, felt for a pulse, and recognized the teacher staring lifelessly up at him.
Mr. Rizzo.
Frankie coughed. Bile burned up his throat. The taste of bitter metal and saliva flooded his mouth. Nope. He wasn’t going to throw up. Although he could see he wouldn’t be the first one to do so.
Kaitlin was near death. He was worried about dying himself. But the whole idea of dying still seemed unreal. Kind of like when Cas talked about killing herself. That seemed like something out of a story, not something that was really going to happen. Not like now. This was very real.
Shake it off, he could hear his father say. That’s what a winner did. That’s what anyone committed to a true purpose did. Shake it off and focus on doing what needed to be done. No doubts. Doubts only lead to hesitation, and hesitation to failure.
And failure here meant ending up like Mr. Rizzo or whoever else was buried under the rubble of the staircase that Frankie was heading toward. Because he couldn’t go back to the room and wait there for whoever might come to save them. He couldn’t because that’s not who he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be the guy everyone admired, even though no one could ever be all they expected him to be.
Frankie ducked under a bunch of wires to look at the mess that used to be the stairs. Through the haze of smoke and the dim light, he studied the wreckage. The stairs and the ceiling and roof had caved in, making the prospects of getting down this way slim. But when he looked down the hall that led to the back of the school, it looked even worse. Slim was better than nothing. Especially since Z wasn’t calling out to say he’d found a better way.
Glad to be doing anything other than sitting around in that room, Frankie grabbed a board, yanked it out of the wreckage, and threw it behind him. He yanked another out, then another, and held his breath as debris moved and then settled. He was reaching for another board when he heard voices. Not behind him, where Diana and Tad and the others were waiting, but somewhere . . . below. The voices were coming from below.
“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone there?”
Nothing. Then he heard the mumble of something . . . someone yelling. It had to be the firefighters working to come get them.
Yes. “Hey! We’re up here.”
Frankie heard something snap. He spun on his heel and almost barreled into Tad, who stumbled back, tripped over an iron bar, and slammed into an open locker with a crash.
“Sorry,” Frankie said as Tad pushed himself upright. “I think there are rescue workers trying to come up through the stairs from below. I need to find Z and tell him.”
“Wait.” Tad grabbed his arm. “Have you seen Diana?”
“She’s in the room with you.”
“No.” Tad shook his head. “One minute she was there, and the next, we all realized she’d disappeared. I was hoping she’d coming looking to warn you.”
“Warn me about what?”
“They have a suspect in custody, and he said there’s a second bomber and it’s one of us.”
Frankie turned back. “One of who?”
“Us,” Tad said, pointing in the direction of the hallway they’d both come from. “With Z leaving and you going after him and with the cops thinking there’s another bomb, we thought—”
“Wait a minute. You don’t think I’m the bomber, do you?” Tad’s hesitation kicked the air out of his chest. “Are you serious?” Frankie barely choked out. “Tad, you know me.”
“I thought I knew you. I was wrong.”
“And because I stopped answering your calls, you think I’m some kind of terrorist?”
“People do all sorts of crazy things when they don’t like something about themselves. Cas was going to kill herself. Rashid shaved off his beard. I wanted you to have to admit that what we had mattered. That all our talks and that kiss mattered.”
Frankie glanced down the hall. “It was a mistake. I made a mistake.”
Tad froze. Hurt flared in his deep brown eyes. “Good to know that’s what I am to you. A mistake.”
No. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t think you know what you meant, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. But you have to
understand—”
“Understand what? That we’re alike when we wear the same uniform and play on the same field, but beyond that, you want to be different from me? Trust me, I get it. I would have gotten it had you picked up the phone and given me the respect to tell me instead of just wishing I’d stay in the corner you shoved me into.”
“That wasn’t what I was doing.” Wasn’t it, though? Wasn’t that exactly what he’d wanted? To make it all seem as if it never happened? To make himself believe it?
“Sure. Then why did you look like you were going to flip out when I showed up outside the field house? Everyone else went to the lake—captain’s orders—but you were here. Why?”
“Well, it wasn’t because I wanted to blow up the school. I was welcoming the freshman team and adding a few decorative touches around the school that I knew I could get away with. You wouldn’t understand. You’re—”
“Not important?” Tad shot back.
“Not me.” Tad was just a guy on the field who didn’t say much or get in anyone’s way. Frankie won games and was a leader. He was perfect, even when he went out of his way to show everyone that he wasn’t. His parents and Coach and everyone else would never learn, because they didn’t want to learn. They didn’t want him to be anything other than what they needed. Tad got to be whatever the hell he wanted, and still Tad thought he was trapped. Tad didn’t know what trapped was. Or how hard it was to want to be the hero, even when you wanted nothing more than to crash and burn and break free.
“You’re right.” Tad nodded. “I’m not you, because I actually give a crap about other people, and right now I have to find Diana before she gets shot.”
“Shot?” Frankie asked as Tad turned his back on him and headed down the hall in the direction they’d come from. “What the hell does that mean?”
A smoking beam fell from above. The floor beneath him shuddered when it smashed to the tile.
Tad stumbled. Frankie grabbed on to a splintered door frame and looked down at the ground that was still again. But if the building was too unstable to stand from all the bombs and the fire, how long until something else collapsed?
“Why would Diana get shot?” he asked.
Tad turned back. “There’s a gun.”
Everything stopped. “A gun? Why would there be a gun?”
“Cas brought it to the school.”
To kill herself.
Despite what she’d said, Frankie hadn’t really believed her when she’d admitted that she wanted to die. He hadn’t wanted to believe her. He’d talked to her right before she went upstairs. He would have seen. He should have seen.
“The gun is loaded, and we think Z could have taken it. He told Cas he understood wanting to die.”
Oh, hell. Hell! Frankie looked down the hall and tried to decide which play to call. He always knew. He never doubted. He called the shot. He ran the ball or put it in the air. No second-guessing. Second-guessing was for losers. Only right now, he wasn’t sure what winning looked like.
Sweat trickled down Frankie’s back. Something crackled from the stairwell. People were coming to save them, but if Z had a gun and knew where another bomb was, the rescue workers weren’t going to make it in time.
“We have to find Z,” Frankie said. “Maybe we can talk him out of whatever it is he’s planning to do next.” It was a long shot, but at this point it was a shot, and sometimes you had to make the Hail Mary play.
“Are you crazy?” Tad asked. “If he wants to blow the rest of this place up, we aren’t going to be able to stop him. We have to—”
The air cracked.
A gunshot.
“Diana!” Frankie yelled, and bolted down the hall in the direction that Z had gone. He heard Cas’s and Rashid’s voices as he reached the room they were in. He grabbed the door frame and saw them carrying Kaitlin to the window on the stretcher they made.
Rashid spotted them and said, “The firefighters are setting up an inflatable cushion.”
“Tad, you should stay and help them,” Frankie said. “I’ll go after Z and Diana.”
Tad shook his head. “I’m not letting you go alone.”
“Cas and I can do it,” Rashid said, looking down at whatever was happening below. “Make sure no one else gets hurt.”
Frankie would try.
As Rashid yelled for Cas to fasten the ropes to the legs of a desk, Frankie turned and bolted down the hall. Tad raced next to him. They reached the corner together.
Smoke. Far down the hallway. It was thicker. Black. Coming toward them.
Another crack.
“Diana!” Tad yelled.
Frankie winced, knowing that if Diana was in trouble, she wouldn’t be the only one who could hear Tad yelling and the two of them approaching.
The cloud of dark smoke grew denser as they ran down the hall, which was streaked with soot and slick with water. With each step, Frankie waited to see Z appear or to hear Diana scream, but there was only smoke and debris and the sound of their footsteps as they raced through the hall that was pulsing with heat. Frankie rounded the corner right behind Tad, and another shot made him jump. He lost his footing, slipped, and crashed to the floor.
Oh, God. He yelped as something punched into his thigh.
“Frankie!” Tad called.
Pain flashed white in front of his eyes and up through his leg.
He bit his lip as he reached down and grabbed hold of the thin, metal spike protruding from his leg. “I’m okay.” Not even close, but he could handle it. He had to handle it.
Tad yelled, “Stay down!”
Not if he could help it. Frankie tightened his grip on the metal bar as someone down the hall shouted, “Stop!”
Z.
Frankie’s ears rang. Someone screamed. Frankie squinted into the haze.
“Get back,” he heard Diana call out.
“What are you doing?” Z yelled. “Are you crazy? Don’t do it.”
There was the crack of another shot. Someone screamed, and through the smoke, Frankie saw a shadow crumple to the ground.
Tad?
Diana?
Frankie tightened his grip, closed his eyes, and counted—one, two, three. Pull.
Pain swelled. Blood pulsed, and he gritted his teeth as the metal bar slid free. Tossing it to the side, he put a hand wet with blood onto the wall and got to his feet.
“Stay away from me!” Diana screamed.
“What are you doing?” Tad yelled back.
The world swirled, then steadied as Frankie balanced his weight on his good leg and peered through the thickening smoke. Sweat ran down his check. He spotted Tad standing beyond the entrance to what used to be the stairwell. He coughed, clenched his jaw against the agony in his leg, and limped forward, trying to see Diana and Z in the haze.
“You don’t need to do this.” Tad held his hands out and slowly crouched down near a classroom doorway. That’s when Frankie saw Z lying on the floor and Diana standing across the hall from the two of them, a red backpack dangling from one hand as she stood still as a statue.
“What’s going on?” Frankie asked.
Something crashed somewhere behind him. He started to glance over his shoulder when Diana swung her attention to him, and that’s when he saw it.
Diana was the one with the gun.
2:01 p.m.
Diana
— Chapter 44 —
“STAY BACK, FRANKIE,” Diana ordered. Her heart pounded in her ears. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. Nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go, and now she had no choice but to finish what she had started. It was the only way.
Still, she moved her feet and then the gun so that it was pointed at the football captain and all-around hero of the school. He didn’t look anything like the guy she had once kissed as he limped a step toward her. The torn, dirty shorts. Hair coated in dust and debris and plastered down with sweat. Blood streaking down his leg.
Not so perfect now. Neither was she.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move, and she swung the gun back toward Tad, who had inched toward her. “Don’t make me shoot you,” she said. Not until she got closer. She’d never fired a gun before today. She’d almost dropped it when she had fired the first time. She could still feel the jolt. Still hear the shot. She’d missed on the second, but she hadn’t missed the next time. Z was still alive, though.
Nothing was going as planned.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Z shouted. “Why the hell do you have a gun?”
“She thinks you’re one of the bombers,” Frankie said from behind her, and she angled so she could look back and forth among all three boys facing her, even as she wanted to scream.
They still didn’t see her. They still didn’t have a clue. They saw only what everyone saw, because it was all they wanted her to be—the popular girl from a wealthy, influential family. The one who smiled and followed the rules because that was the only thing her father needed from her.
But she needed more. She wanted to be more than that. And she’d figured out a way to do just that. Only now it was all falling apart. And even as she stood here in front of Tad and Frankie and Z, finally showing people that she wasn’t the perfect girl and that she was capable of doing more, they still didn’t see her.
Something cracked and crashed to the ground. The others jumped. Diana laughed. She couldn’t help it. She had a gun, for God’s sake. She had known why the first responders weren’t coming into the building before anyone else. She understood why the bomb was set off when the firefighters came in and why someone would want to wait to set off another. “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “It’s me. I helped build the bombs. I brought them into the school. I’m the one behind all this.”
It felt so good to finally say it. God, it was wonderful to tell someone other than Tim what she was capable of.
“You?” Z yelled as he struggled to get to his feet. Blood oozed through the fingers that he had clamped over his arm where she’d shot him.
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