Perfect Glass (A Young Adult Novel (sequel to Glass Girl))

by Laura Anderson Kurk

  She parked behind me, talking on her radio. I glared at Quinn, reaching for my license and registration. “Not illegal?”

  “It’s not illegal,” he said. “I think she’s just checking us out for mischief because we’re kids.”

  The officer walked slowly to my window, shining a light into my backseat and on my inspection sticker. “What’s going on tonight, guys?” she said.

  Quinn leaned around me to speak. “We were just taking a look at the new building. My dad’s the manager of the store going in here.”

  “Um-hm. License and registration, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. She took my license and stared at it for a minute, comparing it to the Jeep’s registration.

  “Here’s the thing, Miss Kavanagh,” she said, looking straight at me. “I was just going to warn you off the property until I called your tag in and got a hit.”

  “Pardon me?” I croaked.

  “Someone called the station this evening to report you for harassment. I’m just trying to figure out how a girl that looks like you could scare an old lady. Were you hiding your vehicle in an empty construction site?”

  “What?” My jaw felt unhinged. The officer looked at me like she’d already stamped my juvie case file with a big red DELINQUENT. “I’m sorry. Who did you say called you?”

  She raised an eyebrow and checked her clipboard. “I didn’t say, but it was Jo Russell. She said you’ve trespassed and driven by her home erratically.” She leaned against my Jeep, propping an elbow on my open window. All the plastic and leather attached to her uniform creaked and groaned when she moved. “Now, between you and me, we field Jo’s complaints a lot, but I have to follow-up. Especially now that you’ve given me cause to stop you.”

  She stretched backward to look again in my backseat and shined the light in Quinn’s face, making him squint. He brought his hand up to shield his eyes and then dropped it quickly, probably afraid it would be considered suspicious body language. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Quinn O’Neill, ma’am.”

  “I’ll need your license, Mr. O’Neill. You two step out of the vehicle, please.”

  SEVEN

  meg

  The Chapin Police Department shared a building with the Chapin Roadhouse, a seedy bar. I guess it helped on Friday and Saturday nights. Cops could walk over around 2:00 am to bring the drunk and rowdies into the station through the backdoor. I got to walk in through the front, with my parents. But I still felt like a criminal.

  My dad found a corner where we’d have some privacy. “Tell me, quickly, what you were doing parked in an empty building,” he said. Not who is this guy, Quinn? Not is it true you’ve been harassing Ms. Russell? Just a car in a building…five seconds…go.

  “Tennyson had a lamebrained idea about a game called car tag,” I said. “We were hiding in Quinn’s dad’s building until our time was up. He said it wasn’t illegal.” My voice cracked and wavered as the full weight of the night settled in.

  “Okay.” Dad was panting a little. I had blown his mind by participating in some stupid teenage game involving two-thousand-pound moving vehicles. I don’t remember Wyatt ever being such a predictably disappointing teenager.

  Officer Bain, the one who’d told me to come to the station, appeared in the back hallway and motioned for all of us to follow her to a conference room…interrogation room…whatever. She started talking even before we sat down.

  “First, I stopped Meg when I saw her and the O’Neill kid drive out of a construction site. Mainly, I wanted to make sure they weren’t up to something.”

  My dad sat forward, waiting for his chance to defend me. Officer Bain noticed his posture and talked faster, holding her hand up to keep him quiet.

  “I verified O’Neill’s claim that the building is his father’s store and his dad said they were there with permission.” She shuffled some papers around until she found the one she wanted. “The reason we’re all sitting here, though, is this harassment complaint filed against Meg by Jo Russell.”

  She grinned at me. “Not often we have high school girls in here with two incident files.” She handed my dad the form. “Look this over, then I’ll need Meg’s statement and your signatures.”

  Scanning the paper, my dad pointed out a few things, like Jo’s claims that I’d called her multiple times and that I’d knocked on her door late at night. That I’d tried to “get my hands on” one of her paintings. His eyebrows arched at me in question. I shook my head.

  “Tell Officer Bain where this report is false,” he said.

  “Okay.” And I will not cry.

  “Anytime, Miss Kavanagh.” The officer clicked her pen and waited with her hand over a blank sheet of paper.

  My hand slipped into my jacket pocket, looking for my phone, my connection to Henry. But my phone wasn’t there. It was in the console of the Jeep.

  “I’m doing some volunteer work for Jo,” I said. “Or I was. I didn’t realize she saw that as harassment. I’ve never called her. I’ve never actually knocked on her door, either—at night or during the day. I’ve spoken with her in her yard twice and I drove down her street earlier today without stopping. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. I’ve been concerned.”

  “About what?” Officer Bain said.

  “I’m afraid for her. I don’t think she’s taking care of herself.” I looked toward my mom for backup.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “I told Meg to try to help Jo. Jo suffers from dementia. Were you already aware of that?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Officer Bain said, chuckling. “We’re aware. We keep tabs on her. She gets annoyed easily and it’s always worthy of a 911 call.”

  “My daughter stopped by to help Ms. Russell out around her house.” My dad leaned forward even more, with his elbows on the table. He did this when he wanted to be taken seriously. He was acting like this might affect my future. “She would never act inappropriately.”

  “But I did show up uninvited,” I said. “Where do I sign to say I’m sorry, or whatever it is she expects?”

  “You sign the report here,” Officer Bain said, pointing to the signature lines. “But it’s not to say you’re sorry and it’s not acknowledging you’ve done anything wrong. It just says you’ve been made aware of the complaint.”

  Dad and I signed and pushed the forms back across the desk.

  “My advice to you, Meg,” Officer Bain said, “is to steer clear of Jo Russell.”

  There was nothing to say to that, so I just nodded and stood up. I was ready to find my Jeep, call Henry, and sleep. I opened the door while my parents cleared up details with the officer.

  The front desk area of the station was quiet. I leaned against the wall and looked around. That’s when I noticed Quinn sitting in a chair pushed into the corner of the room. He watched me and did the chin lift thing. What does that even mean? Hey, how you doin’? Or, If you’re done here, can we play a game of basketball? I tucked my hair behind my ear, feeling self-conscious.

  “You holding up?” he said.

  “I’m okay. It’s just…I feel creepy now.”

  Quinn stood and walked over to me. He reached out his hand and dragged the backs of his fingers over my wrist in a way that felt too intimate. I wrapped my other hand around that wrist like it hurt.

  “Sorry,” he said. He pushed his hands into his pockets and looked down at his feet.

  “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Yep.” He didn’t act like I’d dismissed him. “Holy crap, Meg, I wish tonight had gone differently. I had fun, though.”

  I nodded, trying to simultaneously understand the meaning behind his words and to let their meaning float somewhere over my head. I couldn’t tell a guy, who wasn’t Henry, that I’d had fun with him. “It was a purely high school moment.” I smiled up at him. “We played car tag and won. No big deal.”

  “No big deal,” he repeated. His gaze slowly took in my whole face. When he finally turned to go, I noticed he tur
ned his toes in a tiny bit when he walked.

  EIGHT

  henry

  My body jerked awake, over and over, like it was still juiced for a fight. I catalogued all the ways the day could have been even worse. Raf could’ve been killed. I could’ve been killed, too. I watched the minutes roll over on my clock and finally, when my body couldn’t take it anymore, fell asleep around two o’clock.

  Five minutes later, John came in and woke me. At least it felt like five minutes. But daylight already burned through my window, so it had to be at least seven in the morning.

  “Mornin’, Henry. Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got some things to discuss and they’re not ones to let simmer.”

  I sat up and punched my pillow behind my back, groaning with the new pains that had appeared in my shoulders and neck overnight. I glanced at my phone in my hand. I must have fallen asleep trying to get hold of Meg. We hadn’t gone a day without talking since I’d been here.

  “Let me go first, John.” I tried to shake off my lack of sleep and line up all the points I wanted to make. My voice sounded like I’d eaten gravel in the night. “I’m sorry I took him. I’ve put you in a bad situation now. In all fairness, though, you should have been up front from the start about Raf’s juvie sentencing.”

  “You have a point.”

  “I felt like that was my one shot to place the order and we were so close. Like, within minutes of having it done. I never dreamed, being that far from his old neighborhood, we’d see anyone who knew Raf. I thought I could pull rank on him and teach him a lesson, I guess.”

  John nodded and rubbed his hand over his dark, military-short hair. “That’s not your job here, Henry. I have to be the one to teach Raf any lessons. You’re a temporary volunteer and, as far as these kids are concerned, that’s it.”

  Temporary volunteer. The words stung, but hearing them from my brother-in-law’s mouth gave them an extra measure of hurt. I sucked air into my lungs, like I was a kid again and someone had just insulted my mother.

  “Maybe more temporary than I’d first planned.” I let my words hang in the air for a minute. He could draw his own conclusions. “But about involving myself in Raf’s fight…I’m not apologizing for that. I didn’t see any other way. I don’t think it would’ve ended well if I hadn’t been the one to end it.”

  “Back that up, man,” John said. “There wouldn’t have been a fight if you’d minded your own business in the first place. You did a stupid thing, Henry, taking one of our kids to Managua without our permission. Now I’m not here to come down on you like your dad would, because, you’re right, I should’ve given you all the information. We all make mistakes. It is what it is, though.”

  I’d been just about to tell him I’d made a decision in the night when he laid today’s La Noticia de Managua on my lap and there I was, front-page news. My passport photo and Raf’s mug shot from yesterday were side by side, looking like a clueless tourist and a punk kid.

  Fortunately Raf’s name wasn’t listed because he was a minor, but mine was—giving all the haters an American face and an American name as the reason American-run orphanages weren’t doing their job. The Nicaraguan government had been looking for reasons to run us all out of the country for a while now.

  I got the gist of the Spanish article from the headline—“American Volunteer Ignores Court Order, Endangers Minor.”

  The implications settled over me like a blanket of ice. I might not have known about the court order yesterday, but that detail wouldn’t matter in the eyes of the government or the public. They were ready to condemn us because of who and what we represented.

  Now, even if I stayed, I’d need to keep out of sight. I shouldn’t go into Managua, not to find supplies or find labor, not to freaking eat at a restaurant. Raf’s next stop, if he showed his face again, would be a juvie nightmare. And that nightmare would be preferable to the blowback he could get from those gangsters, who’d named themselves the eaters of the dead, for the love of….

  “That’s not all,” John said. “The article mentions Quiet Waters by name. Thankfully, our location isn’t given. It’s possible the reporter had a moment of integrity and knew printing our location would be begging for a hit. But anyone with a computer and motivation could find us if they wanted to.”

  I listened to John while I scanned the article for clues about how much they knew already.

  “Let me translate the important part of that article for you,” he said. “It lists our major funding sources. It names the charities that support us. This gives the Ministry of Family a reason to look at us.”

  “I screwed up, John.”

  John glanced up at me and then down at the article. “The reporter catalogued the licenses we’ve received or applied for, including your contractor’s license. He had a source at the permitting office who said none of our construction projects have been approved. He claimed our finances are being reviewed for tax errors.”

  “What? You have a file full of approved forms, and our finances are none of their business.”

  “You’re right,” John said. “None of this is true. But no one cares if it’s true or not. It’s just lousy timing. I’ve never told you about Programa Amor.”

  “What?”

  John sighed. “It’s a program started by Ortega a few years ago that aims to remove kids from orphanages and return them to their lousy homes or put them in foster situations. We’ve been operating under the radar, hoping they’d forget about us.”

  I shook my head, completely out of my depth. “I’ll leave tomorrow, John. You can call the Ministry of Family office and tell them you disciplined me and sent me packing. We can fix that part of this.”

  John dismissed this idea with a wave of his hand. “Get that out of your head now, Henry. I’m not firing you and sending you home. We need you here.”

  I raised my hand to object, but he ignored me. “You know, with all of this trouble, there’s still something far worse, in my mind.”

  “Do I even want to know?”

  “Raf is angry. Unreachable. He’s refusing to come out of his room.”

  John, who’d been leaning against the edge of the bunk, eased down to sit on Whit’s empty bed. His voice grew hollow. “He doesn’t know what to think or who to blame, so he’s blaming you. He’s only fifteen, even if he acts like he’s twenty-five. We’d made a lot of progress with him, with his stinking attitude and anger issues, but I think we’ve lost any gains we’d made.”

  “Permission to speak freely?” I poked the beehive that was John’s patience. “Do not get mad. Just listen.” I waited for John to nod his head. “Find him another home. He doesn’t belong here around these kids. It’s like tracking mud all over white carpet. You don’t have time to watch him and do everything else you have to do.”

  John was quiet for a long time. I figured he was thinking about my suggestion. In hindsight, I know he was counting to ten to keep himself from bouncing my head off the wall.

  “I don’t like to talk about the backgrounds of these kids I love. Once they’re here, it doesn’t much matter to me what happened in the past.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. John was frustrated with me. “Kate and I made the decision not to tell you everything about their pasts because we wanted you to learn to love them for who they are now. Maybe we made a mistake. I should have been more open about Raf’s situation with you.”

  I shifted on the bunk, already dying to know more about this kid with gang tattoos who read fancy books and spoke nearly perfect English. “Can you tell me now?”

  John stared at me, the lines around his eyes growing deeper. “Raf…Rafael Garcia. His story should be a movie.” John locked his hands behind his head and stretched. “Raf had a mom who loved him. Smart, smart woman. She had a Ph.D. in Sociology and taught at Central American University in Managua.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  John shook his head. “Raf got her brains. He’s a smart cookie. Reads all the time. He flies in
the stratosphere in our little school here. You ever wonder why his English is so perfect?”

  I nodded. “He sounds like us.”

  “His mom made sure of it and they traveled to the States a lot when he was little.” John paused here, remembering something that made him smile.

  “If he’s so smart, what was he doing in a gang?” Was I the only one who saw the disconnect there?

  John’s smile changed, telling me I wouldn’t believe what came next. “His mom studied the origins of gangs in Nicaragua—like how they came about during the revolution and how the members are one hundred percent Sandinista.”

  He stood up again and paced the room as he talked. “Gangs here are different—they’re violent, yes; they deal drugs, yes; but they’re respected by the neighborhoods because they keep a semblance of order. Their members are from rich families and poor families. They mix it all up—one for all, all for one.”

  “Such musketeers,” I said, throwing a Nerf ball of Whit’s at the wall.

  “Anyway, his mom’s focus in the last ten years of her life was Los Comemuertos. She moved to Reparto Schick, the toughest neighborhood in Managua, to be close to her subjects.”

  “Dang,” I whispered.

  “Unfortunately, her obsession with this gang meant her son grew up believing he’d get her attention if he joined. By ten he was running drugs for them and doing grunt work. He was initiated by twelve and moving up in rank. His mom either didn’t know or turned a blind eye.”

  John glanced at me to see if I followed.

  I nodded my understanding. “He got her attention and she got dead.”

  “Pretty much,” he agreed. “He walked in on one of his brothers attacking a girl who lived next door to Raf. He went to the police and informed on the guy—serious no-no. The rapist went to lock-up, but the cop was dirty and he leaked the name of the informer. The gang iced Raf’s mom in retribution.”

  I rubbed my hands through my shaggy hair. “But, John, come on,” I said. “They should have the equivalent of a witness protection program here. He should be in a safe house with a new name.”