“Brent,” I called out.
He pivoted, like he was going to nail a golf ball, and the stick smashed into my shoulder, ripping through my shirt and skin with the rough bark. I groaned as Brent pummeled me over and over until I blacked out for a moment. I spat a mouthful of blood and dirt and squinted at the two boys towering over me. Finch was actually filming this with a mini DV camera. No doubt he would post the footage over the Internet and brag about beating the shit out of the narc.
Finch passed the camera to Brent. They laughed and mumbled, stepped back and surveyed the damage. They were drunk, but I was no match for the two of them, especially after smoking that A-bomb and whatever Finch cut into it.
“Hey, Captain Save-A-Ho,” Brent said, aiming the camera in my face. “Smile.”
My ribs ached. Every muscle in my body thudded with dull pain. Tiny white fireworks exploded in front of my eyes.
“That’s enough,” Brent said. “Just leave him. It’s over.”
Finch reached for his gun. “It ain’t over yet.”
“Come on,” Brent said.
Finch waved the gun at him. “Get out of the way.”
Brent opened his mouth, but changed his mind. “Hurry up and waste that god damned snitch.”
“I got a better idea.” Finch shoved the gun at Brent. “You do it.”
Now Brent was shaking so hard, he couldn’t keep the gun steady. Finch wrestled the camera away and pointed it at me.
I looked up at Brent, trying to read his zombie expression, and thought about the time we played video games together, that night at the gallery. That thing he said about his dad hitting him. All the rage inside him. Then me and Finch, shooting targets in the backyard. Bet this didn’t seem any different to them.
“Brent,” I said, hoping he’d snap out of it. He looked at the gun, then at me. Behind him, the bushes snapped and rustled, and there was Haylie, barging her way toward us. She had no clue what was going on. She just stood there in her stupid cheerleader costume. I saw her face change as she slowly figured out that I was in trouble. That we were all in trouble.
Brent turned near Haylie, the gun still in his grip.
Finch snatched it away from him and took aim at me.
“Stop it, stop it,” Haylie screamed, running to me.
I lunged to my feet and tried to stop Haylie.
He fired.
The blast kicked up sand near my head. I flinched at the burst of light and noise.
Another blast. The gun went off and Haylie staggered back. She sank down, crumpled in the dirt, her mouth open in a silent shriek.
If I ever hoped to run away, there was no chance in hell now. White hot pain bloomed throughout my entire body. Somebody was screaming. It took a second before I realized it was me.
Finch shot again. His aim was off, which was surprising because he stood at point-blank range. He gazed into the distance, then he bolted.
I mustered enough energy to crane my head, and then it was clear why Finch ran.
The trees were burning.
26 : Swamp Rats
I was bleeding in the sand, watching the flames twist and curl against the horizon. Even from a distance, the heat was intense. My arm was scraped, my glasses gone. I managed to drag myself closer to the shoreline, but what good would it do? There was no place to go.
Birds of all shapes and sizes scattered across the sky. I choked and gagged on the minty smoke. All the wet burning plants leaked poison into the air. My eyes watered as I tried to make out shapes in the pines.
This was my fault. I’d barged my way into other people’s lives, just like Finch said. They had confided in me, trusted me with their secrets, and I’d turned my back on them. I just never imagined it would go this far. I thought I was doing something good. I saw myself as a peaceful warrior, but now I couldn’t tell what was right or wrong, real or fake.
I kept my eyes on the birds rocketing in every direction, and they were the most amazing things I’d ever seen. For once, I didn’t have to think. I could just lie there. All of a sudden, I was so damned tired.
Where was my sister? That’s the only thought that brought me back to reality. What if she got hurt? Or worse. God, this was all my fault. If anyone deserved to die, it was me.
Somebody grabbed my hand. I must’ve been already dead because I was looking at an angel, wings and all. Only it wasn’t an angel. Skully. And she wasn’t alone. Haylie was there, too, and behind her, Morgan.
Haylie’s sleeve was stained dark just above her left bicep. A bullet must’ve grazed her skin. Shit. I snapped back to reality. Even with a shallow wound, it was dangerous, losing that much blood. We had to stop the bleeding. Fast.
“My brother is missing,” Skully said. Her face was slick with tears.
“Listen. He’s here somewhere. First we need to make a tourniquet,” I told Haylie.
Haylie sat on the ground. “Everything is spinning.”
“Just sit tight. Try not to move.” I tugged my sweatshirt over my head. This was bad. Really bad. I folded the sleeves and clamped down on Haylie’s arm until the bleeding slowed a bit.
“They taught us how to do this in Health class,” she said. “We need a stick so we can tie the sweatshirt around it.”
“That’s right,” I said. Her voice shrank away. All I heard was a metallic ringing in my ears.
Morgan appeared with a tree branch. She helped me tie the tourniquet. The girls were putting up a decent front, but I knew they were freaking out. To be honest, I was, too.
“The shoreline is the safest place right now,” I said. “Do you think we can get over there?”
The girls plunged into the water, Skully helping Haylie hold her bandaged arm out of the dirty water. There was no telling what was lurking in it. Gators and snakes. Morgan sobbed quietly. Her dress swelled like a parachute as we treaded farther out. I bent down and kissed her, though I knew this wasn’t exactly the right time.
We held each other as the fire raged in the swamp. Plumes of pale smoke rose as solid as columns.
“Somebody’s coming,” Skully said. She waded back toward the shore, then stopped as another figure appeared.
Sebastian limped toward us. His face was pale and sweating. Just looking at him, I knew he was sick. He clutched his stomach and groaned.
“Oh, my god. Did you drink alcohol?” Skully was near-hysterical, frozen in place.
“Hey, you’re bleeding,” he said to Haylie. His words were slurry and faint.
“You know you’re not supposed to drink. Are you insane? Your blood sugar just crashed and now your numbers are wrecked. Where’s your flash-lancing thingie?”
“I forgot it,” he said.
She whipped around to us. “Does anyone have candy on them? Anyone? Please tell me. Someone’s got to have candy.”
Nobody moved.
Sebastian wasn’t alone. Brent stood behind him, his face twisted with fear.
I reached out and we pulled Sebastian into the water. Skully sobbed as she clung to her brother. I glanced at Brent, and he looked away.
“You’re a piece of shit,” he told me.
“Okay. Fine. What happened to everybody?”
“They took the airboat.”
“Where’s Finch?” I asked.
“Gone,” Brent said.
“You mean, they ditched you?”
Brent stared at the murky surface. “No way am I going in there.”
“We have to keep moving,” Morgan told him.
He didn’t budge. The girls tried to grab his hands, but he shook them off.
“Just go,” he said.
Morgan looked at Brent, then at me.
“Come on,” I said, taking her hand.
We left him behind on the shore and sank
deeper into the muck, inching our way through the tangled lilies. Who knew how much longer we could keep paddling? It wasn’t that deep, but I’d heard stories about kids drowning in the weeds, if the gators didn’t snatch them first. Haylie would be the first to go, since she was the smallest and bleeding.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Morgan asked.
I gave her a squeeze. “It’s cool. Everything’s cool,” I whispered. Another lie, but at that moment, I almost believed it.
After sloshing around in circles for a while, I couldn’t figure out if we had gone the same way before. Without a flashlight or a fire, the Everglades have a way of swallowing you up. When the girls wandered too far ahead, they disappeared, as if the blackness hadn’t simply covered them, but zapped them to another dimension. Luckily they stopped until we could see them again.
“This is insane,” said Morgan, clutching her purse under one arm and punching buttons on her cell. “There’s no bars on my stupid phone. Nobody knows we’re here.”
“Not true. The cops are looking for us right now. Maybe they sent out a search unit.” I was holding back tears, trying to keep it together. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
“When I saw you at school, I knew there was something weird about you,” she said. “I just didn’t know what it was. You didn’t have a clique, so I thought, maybe you just hung out with whoever you wanted. And I was like, ‘That’s cool. He’s doing his own thing.’ Now I look back and see how fake you were. You’re not really friends with anyone.”
Her words stung. Did I really come across like that?
Skully said, “I let you stay at my place. I thought you were in trouble.”
Only Sebastian stuck up for me. “He’s been through everything and he hasn’t ratted us out, right?”
I didn’t know what to say. Because technically I had.
“Right?” he asked again.
The sound of splashing water caught my attention. I turned and saw a shadow drifting towards us. An airboat. Did Finch come back? Or did the narcotics team bust their way through the swamp?
“It’s the cops,” Sebastian said.
I watched the boat zigzag until I saw a group of men crouched on the prow, shining their flashlights. They wore loose-fitting jeans and patchwork shirts. The oldest guy had knotted his silvery hair into a ponytail that flopped over his shoulder like a sash.
“What do we have here?” he said, peering down at the girls.
The man behind him, the one with gold hoops glinting in both ears, said, “Looks like a bunch of swamp rats.”
“Are you going to arrest us?” Haylie asked.
The men laughed.
“What for?” the older guy asked. “Something you wanna confess?”
“The fire,” I told them. “I think it’s our fault.”
The older guy laughed harder. “That what you think? Who started it in the first place?”
I chewed my lip. “You?”
“That’s right. It’s our land, not the park’s. Always has been our land. This here is a controlled burn.”
“Controlled burn?” I echoed. Talk about a contradiction.
“Cleans out the non-native plants, the invasive species.”
Invasive.
“Burns all the hammock scrub that doesn’t belong here, you know? So they don’t suffocate the pines. When we saw your little campfire, we thought the burn had spread.”
The man held out his meaty fingers. I reached for them, and he helped me scramble onto the boat. They had a dog on board, a slobbering mutt. The beast leaped at me, slamming its paws on my chest and nearly knocking me overboard.
“Don’t worry. She don’t bite … hard,” the older guy said.
We helped weak Sebastian up next, then together we pulled the girls onto the boat, one at a time.
“Do you have any candy on you?” Skully asked.
The older guy blinked. “That’s a strange question. Actually, I’ve got a chocolate bar in the cooler. Will that do?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at her brother. “It will do just fine.”
“Any more of you swamp rats?” asked the guy with the gold hoops.
I nodded. “Our friend is still on the island.”
“Then you better hang tight,” said the older guy. “We heard noises, smelled smoke. Were you shooting guns out here or just fireworks?”
Nobody said anything.
We sped back where we started. It didn’t take long to find Brent, standing waist-deep in the water, a few feet away from the shore. When he saw the airboat, he just stood there, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Haylie seemed to have sobered up and looked really tired now. Whatever Finch had laced into the joint he gave me had worn off as well. The girls huddled under blankets, and Sebastian was clinging to the dog, his arms cradled around its neck. So I slid into the water and waded toward Brent.
“It’s over,” I told him.
Brent looked at me and started to sob.
I held out my hand, but he didn’t take it. Just moved past me, as if I didn’t exist.
I was gone now. Disappeared. Erased.
The smoke rose higher, seeping into my clothes, my hair, my throat.
It would never wash out.
27 : Eden
The men were from a tribe of Miccosukee who made their homes near the Everglades. They didn’t live on the reservation, and they didn’t live in grass-covered chickee huts, the way I imagined. Their house looked like any other suburban fortress in Miami, complete with a flat-screen TV and a stereo the size of a station wagon.
Jim, the man with the silver ponytail, represented the Tiger clan. He and his sons were supervising a controlled burn on one of their islands. That’s when they discovered the bonfire.
“You kids are damn lucky we came along. Damn lucky. Especially you,” he said, jerking his head at Haylie. “Could get an infection real easy out there.” Jim bandaged her up. Turns out the bullet just grazed her skin. It may hurt like hell, but those types of scrapes always look messier than an actual puncture wound.
A tapestry stretched across the wall behind Jim’s head. Beneath it, a big-boned woman in an Elvis T-shirt sat at the table, stringing plastic beads.
“For the tourists,” she explained. “I tell ’em these necklaces are a hundred years old.”
“My wife, Sarah, thinks she’s funny,” Jim said.
“They’re funny because they believe me.”
We settled on the floor, picnic-style, and gobbled leftover Chinese out of little paper cartons. Sebastian and the girls chowed down like they hadn’t eaten in days. Alone in the corner, Brent stood back, stirring his tea with a chopstick.
“Pretty good death rate,” Sebastian said. “Only a few egg rolls made it out alive.”
“I need some Oompa Loompas to roll me out,” Haylie said.
It felt like my bones had been chewed up and spit out. Every part of me hurt, especially on the inside.
“Are you hanging in there?” I asked my sister.
“Kinda sorta,” she said, wincing. “As long as I don’t breathe too hard. Oh, wait a sec.” She pulled a cell phone out of her bag. “I think this is yours. I found it in the bushes before I saw you and …”
She looked away and handed it to me. The room spun.
“Is it on?” I managed to choke.
“I just checked to see if it still worked.”
My fingers trembled as I punched the button to wake up the screen and saw the three bars. There was nothing I could do.
Jim and the rest of the family headed for the kitchen and cleaned up. When I offered to help, they just waved me away.
Morgan nibbled a fortune cookie. “Happy birthday to me,” she sang under her breath.
“What’s you
r fortune say?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I never look at them.” She unfolded it slowly. “It says, Soft Drink.”
“What?” Skully giggled.
“I’m just reading what it says. The Chinese word for ‘soft drink’ is ke le.”
I shoved another egg roll in my mouth. “That’s supposed to be your fortune?”
“What’s yours say?”
I read, “Every person is the architect of their own future.”
The girls laughed. Hard to believe, only hours ago, we were trapped in the burning swamp.
Morgan flipped the paper over. “Oh. Cool. It says my team will be very prosperous.”
Brent threw his chopstick across the room. “You guys are a bunch of fools, sitting around, laughing with this freak.”
Would this kid ever let up? Rage boiled up in me suddenly. “You’re the freak. Who aims a gun at someone?”
He pointed at me. “Don’t you get it?” he shouted at the girls. “As soon as this is over, he’s going to narc us out.”
Morgan squeezed my hand. “I trust him.”
“Me too,” Skully said.
The room went silent.
Brent turned to Sebastian and clapped him on the shoulder. “What about you, big guy?”
Sebastian frowned. “Aaron’s always been cool with me. I mean, if he was going to do something bad, it would’ve happened already. Right?”
“Oh, my god. You people are idiots.” Brent stormed out of the room.
Jim came back and asked, “What’s his problem?”
“He’s pissed at me,” I said.
“Anger is a wasteful emotion,” Jim said. “Why get angry at the past?”
“Easier said than done.”
Jim sighed. “Who said life was easy?”
We camped on the living room rug. Jim was cool enough to let us use his land line to call our parents. As we waited to be picked up, the others conked out on the floor, but I stayed awake, listening to ice rattle in the freezer. I got up and went to the window. No pigeons stirring on the ledge. Just a broken flowerpot.
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