“Where to?”
“Please drive all the way downtown. In fact, take us to Brooklyn.” He turned to me. “Are you okay?”
Since I didn’t know the answer to that question specifically, I just started to ramble. “My arm hurts, and I might have a blister on my left toe because I put my socks on wrong, but that was good that you had me change my shoes or I’d be dead. Did that guy want to kill me or get the bag or both? What’s in this bag, and how did you know that guy was going to try to kill us?” And, believe it or not, I’m a little disappointed because I really thought you were going to kiss me in that cab while we zoomed along the Hudson River with no one but the city lights watching us.
“Let me look at your arm.” I took off my suit jacket, and he gently poked the newly forming bruise on my left arm. “It’s going to be an ugly bruise, but it’s nothing to worry about. And I don’t know why you thought I was going to kiss you.” Hello?! Internal dialogue? Can you hear me now?! “I think you can see now how important the job is that I’ve been given. I am responsible for keeping you alive. And I nearly failed a few minutes ago. You are my charge, and I am an agent. I am an adult, and you are a minor. I could get fired or arrested, or worse. I am not going to kiss you. Clear?” He was all business; I was mortified.
“What’s in Brooklyn?” My survival instincts told me I’d have to change the subject before I spontaneously combusted.
“Nothing. I just want to get away. This guy’s okay,” he said, motioning at the driver. “But that last guy was talking into his cell phone in a rare dialect of Russian, and he was speaking very cryptically. These past few days, you must have turned me into some sort of code cracker. He was checking in with someone and told them that he had us and that, yes, we had bags with us. He confirmed that he’d dispose of us and our belongings.”
“He didn’t want the diaper bag?”
“No, I think that guy was just out to kill you.”
I looked out the window at the city lights as we zoomed back down the West Side Highway. No kiss, almost dead, and fully mortified. What a day. I wondered why I didn’t feel worse. There was something so exhilarating about this whole experience, sore arm and hurt pride included. It was as if for the first time, I was fully engaged in life. The promise of a kiss, broken or not, and the threat of death, averted, had woken me up. I hated the sting of rejection, but at least I felt something.
Follow Your Dreams, Except the One Where You’re at School in Your Underwear
“We need help. I’m calling Steven.” John was a man on a mission. I could tell his adrenaline was still high from the chase, and he was silently concocting a plan to keep us safe. He got Steven on the phone immediately. “We are in New York. They found us outside of Grand Central Station. A cabdriver speaking Russian had orders to kill us, but not to recover the bag. I believe that the bag is worthless and that it’s my charge they’re after. We need a place to hide tonight.” He was silent as he received his instructions. “Okay, we’re headed there now. We’ll head back to L.A. in the morning.”
“SoHo Grand?” A girl could dream.
“PS 142, Brooklyn.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a middle school. It’s Friday night, so it’ll be locked up and empty for the weekend. We don’t know what hotels they’re watching, and we can’t risk a big scene in a packed lobby, anyway. These guys won’t mind blowing up a few hundred innocent people just to kill you. So I can’t take you to an airport until we can rush directly on to a plane.” His human side returned long enough for him to see the terror on my face. He put his arm around me and let it rest lightly on my shoulder. “Steven thinks we need to be someplace where there are no other people, just in case. Plus, it’ll be like old times, camping out on the floor. I’ll even let you pick . . . the gym or the science lab?”
“I can’t remember the last time I slept on a real mattress. With clean sheets and a down pillow and maybe a bedside table with a cold glass of water and a book.”
“Maybe there’s a home ec class. We’ll have the run of the place.”
I smiled at him. He was trying to make me feel better, and I was not above letting him. “Do you mind if I get out of this costume?” He looked panicked. I went on, “Jeez, just look the other way, and I’m going to pull my jeans back on under this skirt. I’m not going to break into a middle school dressed like the principal.”
John did as he was told, and I slipped back into my dirty but insanely comfortable jeans. I slipped out of my silk blouse and back into my T-shirt, careful to stay low enough not to register in the driver’s rearview mirror and to hide the transfer of my phone. I powered it on in time to feel it vibrate with a few new texts. Would Olive give it a rest already?
“Okay, you can turn back.” But John looked straight ahead, silent.
By the time the cab stopped in Brooklyn, I was sound asleep. John woke me up, paid the driver, and led me into a Chinese restaurant. He offered an apology in Chinese to the woman who tried to seat us and then asked her if we could leave through the back. We went out into the garbage-lined alley and followed it three blocks to the back door of PS 142. It was a large building, painted public school beige, with prison-style gates over the windows.
“Does every FBI agent have a key to PS 142?”
“Sort of.” John pulled out his gun and fixed a silencer to the end. And as casually as if we were at the penny arcade, he shot off each of the four corners of the gate on the ground-floor window. He pulled off the gate and tossed it through the window (a less silent maneuver) and climbed through. “Come on in.”
“You can’t do that!” I stepped into what could have been a sixth grade classroom. Broken glass covered the floor, and the renegade security gate had knocked down a row of dioramas representing the polar biome. I was suddenly more afraid of the vice principal than the terrorists. “Are the kids going to show up for school on Monday and find their school vandalized? You know some kid’s going to get blamed for this, that kid with the dirty hair and shifty eyes who just broods because no one will talk to him . . . They’ll pin it on him, and it’ll ruin his future . . .”
“Better than ending yours.” We walked down the dark hallway and up a flight of stairs, looking for a windowless room where we could hide out in peace. We passed through the pitch-black main hallway, running our hands along a wall of lockers to guide us. We turned left at a small dark corridor, and John pushed open the first door on the right. He flipped on the lights to an office that must have belonged to the guidance counselor. “Now, how’s this?” It was equipped with a long sofa, bean bag chairs, and a mini fridge—all the things that guidance counselors deem necessary to get kids to spill their guts.
I was beyond tired and starving. I headed for the fridge and found four juice boxes, a bottle of water, and a banana. I helped myself to all of it. Hell, we’d already committed major vandalism—why not add a little petty theft?
“I’m too tired to eat.” John was taking the back cushions off the sofa to make more room.
“Where am I going to sleep? I can’t lie down on a bean bag . . .” I was chugging juice boxes at this point and wiped my mouth with the back of my arm.
He lay down and patted the spot next to him. “There’s plenty of room for both of us. Just imagine we have our air mattresses pushed together.” These sound like mixed signals, right? But I’d been burned by false hope before, and frankly I was feeling a little too tired, scared, and hungry to pucker up, anyway.
I lay down, back to him, spoon style, and said, “This is fine.”
“Good.” He put his arm around me, not romantically but protectively, like he was afraid I might roll off the couch in my sleep. So I let myself fall asleep in his arms, heart rate normal and unaware of whether my breath stank or not. There was no romance forthcoming. There’s such power in letting something go.
Panic Now
There’s nothing worse than getting woken up abruptly from a really good dream. Especially if you wake up in the
arms of the world’s dreamiest FBI agent with a gun in your face. I wish I were kidding.
I never heard them come in. I opened my eyes and couldn’t figure out what I was looking at. It was metal and dark, and by the time I focused, I saw three men standing behind the one with the gun. I could feel John’s arm tighten around me.
None of these guys looked like terrorists, which must be why I had a hard time getting my head around what was happening. They looked like a bunch of guys you’d see at the supermarket or at a movie. Their expressions weren’t particularly menacing; they weren’t wearing THINK GREEN T-shirts or carrying reusable bags. I could be wrong, but I think one of them might have been in a pair of Seven jeans.
The guy in charge had a long face and goatee and was speaking to John. “I’m not going to kill anyone in here. We’re taking you outside. Leave your stuff.”
John didn’t move but held me even tighter. “She knows nothing. Take the diaper bag—that’s what you need.”
The guy to his left didn’t seem to understand. “Why would we want the bag?” It was becoming obvious that the diaper bag theory was a figment of my imagination; they knew nothing about it. I’d set us out on a wild-goose chase to retrieve a bag full of nothing and was going to return home in a body bag full of me. Nice going, brainiac.
John let the diaper bag discussion go. “She can’t hurt you; she can’t identify anyone. I saw him. Let her go, and you can take me.”
Longface said, “Get up.” John stood up and put his arm securely around my waist. They frisked us both and took his gun, my last hope.
Longface reached out and took my face in his hands. He ran his fingers from my hairline, past my cheeks, and down to my neck. He rested his hands on my shoulders heavily and stared into my eyes with a hatred that I’d never seen before. And with as much hate, he smiled. I want to say that my blood ran cold with terror, but it was more like my blood stopped running at all. I was stone. All I could feel was the weight of John’s hand still around my waist.
The boss finally spoke. “No, I think we’ll do this my way. We’re going to take you outside and kill you. And the girl, we’ll take her with us. Won’t that be fun?” He was smiling at me still, stroking my face. My mind raced through all the hideous things that were going to happen to me, and then settled on the hand on my waist. He was still here, I told myself. Who was I kidding?
Another one of the henchman approached John and placed a gun to his forehead. He grabbed him by the arm and dragged him away from me, toward the door. John looked back at me with a stare, as if he were trying to tell me something.
They marched us out of the office, barefoot, back down the long dark hallway. I walked behind Longface and in front of two others. John was to my right, followed by the guy who now had a gun to his back. It was dark in the hallway, but not so dark that I couldn’t see John next to me staring straight ahead. I wondered how long until we got to where they would shoot him. I wondered how long they would keep me before they killed me too. I wondered what the rest of my life would have been like. Silently, I started to cry.
At the end of the hallway, we came to a set of double doors. The two guys behind me held them open for us and led us onto a walkway to what must have been a more modern addition to the school. It was a brick path lined with glass walls on either side that let the daylight stream in. The light burned my eyes at first, and I wondered what time it was. Looking down, I could see a track in the distance on one side and a baseball field on the other.
Out of nowhere I heard an explosive crash. My first thought was that I’d been shot, but I felt nothing but panic. The glass wall to my left had shattered and was raining tiny shards onto the grass below. While the glass was still falling, I was attacked from the back and propelled out the now-broken window. I landed behind a hedge with John flat on top of me and blood pouring from my arm. Without speaking, John pulled me to my feet and led me around the length of the hedge toward the back of the school. They had to be ten seconds behind us if they were going to jump, eighty seconds if they were going to take the stairs. John had one hand firmly around my good arm and a tiny gun that he must have had hidden (I don’t even want to ask where, eeew!) in the other.
We raced silently around the perimeter of the school, our backs to the building. There was a house to the left of the school with a low fence that we could easily hop. I motioned to the plastic playhouse in the yard, a favorite childhood hiding place that might really come in handy now. John shook his head and mouthed: Too dangerous. Of course, John was still expecting a shootout and was trying to keep me away from innocent bystanders.
We backed around to the far side of the school and came to a fenced-in garden courtyard. I peered through the iron bars and could see a huge vegetable garden in its center, with rows of plants marked with handmade signs indicating what was growing there. Kale, spinach, Swiss chard. All the stuff middle school students like to eat. John tried the gate, but it was locked. Barbed wire topped the fence, presumably to keep kale-crazed kids from ravaging the garden, but now prohibiting us from climbing over to safety. As I walked along the fence, my right foot slipped into a hole and I fell to the ground. John motioned to me to shhh. (My hero. Not.) As I got up, I examined the muddy hole that I’d fallen into. A large hedgehog or raccoon must have dug under the fence for a snack. With a few more kicks of my bare foot, I carved out a space large enough to climb through. I motioned to John from the inside of the garden to climb under too. He dug it a little deeper and slid under. We repaired the hole with dirt from the tomato plants and silently walked to the only walled side of the garden. A large tarp lay on the ground next to the gardening equipment. We lay down and quickly pulled it up over us. We were either completely hidden or completely trapped, depending on how you look at it.
The silence was broken by the sound of steps on the wood chips surrounding the track. They were approaching the back of the school, moving toward the garden. John and I were completely still, pressed against the ground. My clothes were soaked from my muddy trip under the gate, and I was freezing. The stench that surrounded me suggested that the tarp over my face had been previously used either to transport fertilizer or as toilet paper. It was the least of my problems as I pressed my eyes shut and waited for the sound of gunfire. The footsteps were close now, and I heard the rattle of the iron gate. John reached a few inches over and grabbed my hand. We lay there like that for hours—okay, maybe a minute—until we heard their footsteps retreat back to the track.
We did not speak. After about ten minutes, John pulled me close to him and held me close. “It’s okay,” he whispered. I took this as my permission to start to sob. I had been minutes away from being tortured by terrorists; John had been that close to death. He was brushing my hair from my face. “It’s okay now. Shhh. Let’s just lay here for a few more minutes. Shhh. Where are you hurt?”
I stopped crying and used my good arm to wipe up my puddle of a face. After what he’d just done for me, I didn’t need to torture John with my tears. “I think I landed on a sprinkler head or a rock or something. My arm is cut, same arm I landed on when you threw me out of the cab. What’s with you and tossing me into harm’s way? Some bodyguard.”
He laughed and hugged me again. “Let’s wait here for a little bit, just to be sure they are gone. Then we’ll get out of here and get somewhere safe. I’ll take care of your arm.”
As safe as this? I couldn’t wait to see Plan B. “Where are we going now?”
He lifted the tarp a little to let some air in. “You’ll see when we get there; it’s hard to explain.”
At this point I owed my life to John, so there was nothing I could do but trust that he was going to do everything he could to keep me safe. I was probably in shock but knew enough to take full advantage of the fact that he was still holding me and stroking my hair. I looked up at him, and we were nose to nose. “Would you really have gone with them in my place?”
“Yes. My first choice was to get us both out of there. But if
someone was going to die, it was going to be me.” He looked away, as if embarrassed by his own chivalry. “I mean, it’s my job.”
“Right. Well, thanks.” I turned away from him and lay on my back. I was stiff on the cold, hard brick, listening for footsteps, and wishing I was wearing socks . . . when it hit me. “What about our stuff?”
“What, our FBI-issued toothbrushes? And that sinister diaper bag that no one seems to want?”
“I was thinking more about my boots.” I looked over at him hopefully, willing him to agree to go back into the school without making me explain why I loved those boots so much.
He laughed at me. “What if we just try to live through the rest of the day, and then I’ll buy you a new pair of boots?”
“Thanks but no thanks. They can’t be replaced.”
“What? Do they have special powers or something?”
“Maybe. Plus, we should get the diaper bag. It may mean nothing, but I’d like to have a closer look at those numbers.”
He ran his hands along his pockets. “I actually think I left my phone in there too. Okay, I’ll go, but I’m leaving you right here. They could have gone back into the building. I can’t risk having you with me.”
But I can’t stand being away from you. Oh, thank God I didn’t say it out loud. “Never mind, it’s not worth it. We can get to your next safe spot without shoes. And maybe we can call the school on Monday to get the diaper bag and your phone back.”
“That might require a little more explaining than I want to do. I’ll go. Promise me you won’t move. Promise.”
A Girl Named Digit Page 9