The natives are restless, so I offer a bribe. “The first three finished can choose something from the prize basket.”
And they’re back to work. Toys and treats always do the job.
Stutts is leaning back in his chair in front of the fall leaves display on the wall—deep red and orange and yellow ones the kids brought in for Mrs. C. to help them iron between pieces of waxed paper. His eyes are half closed, and he’s dividing his attention between the door and the computer. The shadows under his eyes look like bruises; I doubt he sleeps much. You could almost feel sorry for him—except that he’s holding a gun on a room full of little kids.
Patrick’s head is on the table, one arm bent to form a pillow. Stutts reaches over and opens his son’s backpack. He pulls out Patrick’s jacket, wads it up, and pushes it under his head. Patrick burrows into the soft fleece. The unexpected tenderness surprises me—and motivates me to try to make a connection with him.
Screw your courage to the sticking place, Emery. It’s now or never. I walk to the front, pull a chair within a few feet of Stutts, and sit down, my knees shaking a little. He looks over at me, then back at the door. But he doesn’t tell me to go away. I can feel Jake’s eyes on me from across the room.
“Patrick’s a great kid,” I say to him.
He glances at his son. His face softens just a little. “Yep.”
“He doesn’t talk a lot, but he always knows the right answer if you call on him.”
No comment. I feel a little silly talking to myself, but I keep going.
“You must read to him a lot.” I look around the room, like I don’t care if he answers or not—no pressure.
“My wife—she does.”
Long silence. Nick lets out a whoop of victory and the other kids at the computer moan. “Your turn, Kaela,” Jake says.
“My parents always read to me when I was little,” I say.
Stutts squints his eyes like he’s trying to focus on something across the room.
“You read much?” I ask him.
He shrugs, then says without looking at me, “Tom Clancy, stuff like that.”
“Did you always want to join the military?”
“No.” He sighs and shifts in his chair like he wishes I’d go away. But he doesn’t run me off. “Didn’t know what else to do,” he mumbles, “when I graduated.”
Long pause.
“I guess you’ve seen a lot . . . over there. A lot of bad stuff.”
“What’re you trying to say?” He turns to look at me, his eyes cold, his voice hard. “You think I’m crazy?”
“No, no, not at all.” I keep my voice casual, trying not to show how much he scares me. “I just think that would have a big effect on anybody, that’s all.”
“You could say that.” He’s watching the door again.
I wait.
“You know what an IED is, kid?” he finally says, glancing over at me.
“An explosive device.”
“You got it. Improvised explosive device. Shit’ll blow. You. Up. It’s packed into empty soda cans, paper cups, plastic bags, food containers, dead animal carcasses—you name it. People think you can just avoid stuff in the road when you’re driving over there. You know why you can’t?”
I shake my head, trying not to show my surprise that he’s talking to me.
“Because there’s trash everywhere. The roads are lined with garbage. No way to know which garbage’ll kill you. You ride down the road looking as hard as you can for the stuff that’s gonna make you dead—and you know all the time you can’t tell it’s comin’ until it’s too late.” He glances at me with a sneer. “So if I seem a little jumpy to you, princess, you’ll have to excuse me.”
“I didn’t say you were.” I’m navigating my own land mines here. “I just don’t know what it’s like there. I’m just asking you . . . because I’m interested.”
“What do you want to know?”
“About the people. Were you able to get along with the Iraqis?”
“Yes, I’ve spent time with Iraqi families in their own living rooms, talking about their culture. I’ve given their children candy and treated their women with respect. I’ve had little old men shake my hand and thank me for helping them. I’m not some meathead who goes around busting in doors and intimidating people, if that’s what you think.”
“No, I never—”
“That said,” he cuts me off and continues, “if you try to kill me or my buddies, that makes you the enemy, and you are going down. I don’t care who you are or what your religion is or isn’t; we’ll hunt you down and we will take you out. That is nonnegotiable.”
His tone is steely; the volume escalates. Jake looks up, but I shake my head slightly. A tense silence hangs in the air.
I try another angle. “Were you able to talk to your family much?”
“Had Internet most of the time, and I phoned some.” His eyes are heavy—from fatigue or booze, I’m not sure which.
I try not to look at the gun—or think about his sweaty hands.
“How long were you there?”
“This last time, a year—but I was there two years starting in 2005.”
“Where’s ‘there’? What part?”
“Baghdad.” He runs a hand across his cropped hair.
“I guess there were a lot of things you can’t ever really describe.”
He stares at me, narrowing his eyes. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“Sure, no problem, I understand.” I stand up and walk over casually to read the kids’ papers hanging on the wall. Mrs. Campbell helped them write out their Rules for Life. She likes for them to be free to write without worrying too much about spelling. The one closest to the window is Tyler’s. His rules are:
1. Dont leev yur bike in the dry way.
2. Dont poop in the bat tub.
3. Dont fergit to pee befor hid and seek.
The obsession with potty business makes me smile, but the narrow scope of their problems before now tugs at my heart.
The rules changed today.
I can hear car doors slamming outside, and I wonder if there are news cameras. Hensonville’s a sleepy little town. A purse snatching at the mall gets top billing on our one local TV station’s nightly news, and police don’t have much to do besides stop speeders . . . until today.
When kids start school here, moms worry about whether they’ll have somebody to sit with at the lunch table, or whether they’ll have a nice teacher—not whether they’ll come home.
My mother must be climbing the walls by now. I glance at Jake at the computer and wish I had a way to let her know I’m all right.
I turn back to Stutts and say casually, “I’m just going to fix these blinds where they’re twisted.”
He looks at the small gap in the blinds and says, “Go ahead.”
I reach for the problem spot, which is, conveniently, at eye level.
What I see takes my breath away.
There are police cars everywhere, people running, news trucks lining the curb, and SWAT team guys suiting up beside a dark-colored van. I’m sure we don’t have a SWAT team; they must have brought them in from somewhere else. Yellow crime scene tape has been used to block off the front of the building, and the parking lot’s been cleared.
There are two single-file lines of kids walking fast out of the building, with teachers and policemen walking beside them. They’re evacuating the school—getting as many kids as they can out of the reach of Brian Stutts. I’m guessing they decided not to empty the classrooms in our wing.
And then I see something that nearly drops me to my knees.
Four ambulances.
All lined up in a row in front of the school.
Waiting for victims of the shooter. Waiting to take them—us—to the hospital. Or to . . . My head spins, the scene blurs, and I reach out to steady myself on the windowsill. I take deep breaths, fighting the spell that threatens to pull me under.
I turn to look at th
e children behind me working quietly, mostly unaware that their lives could be cut short at the whim of a madman. Dear God, please help us find a way out of this.
I realize if I’m going to help these kids, I need to concentrate on the here and now. I straighten out the blinds and walk away from the window, but I’m careful not to look at Stutts. Maybe I was a fool to try to strike up a conversation with him when SWAT team guys are suiting up to protect themselves from him. My head tells me to stay away, but my gut says I have to make him see us as people, so he’ll know who we are. Maybe then it’ll be harder for him to—
I can’t think about that. I won’t let that picture into my head.
CHAPTER 12
JAKE
I’M TRYING LIKE HELL TO BE INTERESTED in the kids’ computer games, ’cause I hate when grown-ups give you those little “uh-huh,” “that’s nice” comments when they’re not really paying attention. But my mind is racing—if I could talk to Cole, he’d figure out what we should do. People don’t give Cole a lot of credit for smarts, but most of the time he’s great at getting out of trouble—he’s had lots of experience. He definitely comes through in an emergency. Emery says I spend too much time with Cole, and my dad thinks so, too. After we got into trouble this summer, my dad had some line about if you hang out in a barber shop, you’re eventually gonna get a haircut.
Emery just doesn’t understand our friendship, but Cole’s my boy. He checks in with me every few days to see if I need anything, he’d beat the crap out of anybody who said a word against me, and if there’s a crisis, he usually has me laughing like a hyena by the end of the disaster. He’s been great since the weed thing; I think he’s trying to make it up to me for not taking the blame, even though he never apologized.
Emery gives me a look from the back of the room that makes me wonder if there’s something going on outside. What the hell was she trying to do anyway, talking to Stutts? Does she think they’re going to be buddies or something? This ain’t the freakin’ Oprah show. The best course of action is to stay as far away from that guy as possible.
Her eyes have that intense look they get. They study you like they’ll swallow you whole. A shaman’s eyes, I told her once. I don’t know if she can see the future, but she can damn sure see anything you’re trying to hide.
We started going out after we met up at a party at Tab’s house. We’d been talking in art class, and okay, I’m not gonna lie, I liked her a lot. This’ll sound really cheesy, but for the first time since my mom died, I actually woke up feeling pretty good just knowing I’d see Emery when I got to school.
I’ll admit I felt a little off base with her at first. Emery has a low tolerance for bullshit, so I knew my usual tricks weren’t gonna work. But I liked it that I was never sure what she was gonna say—and that I could count on her to always tell me the truth.
Things were going good. But then something happened. Okay, full disclosure: I was a jerk, I admit it, but when Stacey Jordan called and invited me to Heather Raby’s lake house for a party that Sunday afternoon, I told myself she was just being friendly. I mean, senior girls don’t go after junior guys. It wasn’t a date. We didn’t even ride out there together. She just asked if I wanted to meet her there. Seriously, Stacey Jordan—who’s gonna turn that down?
Emery was working on a research paper that weekend, so I didn’t mention the party. Stacey and I hung out all afternoon, mostly with everybody else. I had a few beers, and then a few more, and Stacey was being pretty friendly, especially when she asked if I wanted to take a walk in the woods with her. Sure, I felt a little guilty about making out with her, but like Cole said, Emery didn’t own me. It wasn’t like I’d made some big commitment to her.
I had a lot to drink—way more than I should have—and I think I said something to Stacey like I wanted to get to know her better, and I guess she took it the wrong way, ’cause the next thing I know, Stacey’s posted on Facebook that we’re in a relationship. Hell, I don’t know why she did it. Who knows why girls do shit like that?
I knew something was up when Tab called me at one in the morning and said, “Asshole,” and hung up.
I was waiting at Emery’s locker when she got to school that day. I tried to talk to her. I told her Stacey didn’t mean anything to me, but that just made her madder. She wouldn’t even look at me. She just opened her locker, pulled down the picture I’d taken of us on that first day of art class, tore it in little pieces, dropped it at my feet, and walked away. She wouldn’t answer my phone calls—I tried for days.
I did everything I could to make it up to Emery. I even wrote her a long note about how I felt about her. I’ve never been able to talk to any other girl the way I could talk with Emery. We always had a great time together. And even though we never said we were exclusive or anything, to be honest, what I did was pretty low. I mean, I’d definitely be pissed off if she’d done it to me.
I can blame it on the beer, but it’s a pretty sorry excuse if you get right down to it. The thing is, if you have to think about whether something’s right or wrong, it’s probably wrong.
Bottom line, I screwed up. I wanted another chance to make things right, so I left the note on her car while she was at an Honor Society meeting at school.
And then I waited. I was pretty sure that note would do the trick. I mean, hell, I’d go out with me if I read the stuff in there. It was an epic apology.
And then I waited some more. Two days passed, then three. I started to call her again after a week with no word, but what was the point? I’d said everything I had to say. When she never even bothered to answer me, I knew we were finished.
I was a complete jerk, but everybody makes mistakes. I just wish there was a way for Emery and me to start over.
• • •
That’s why I was happy about getting partnered with her for tutoring, even though I knew she wouldn’t make it easy. I was hoping I could spend time with her again and maybe show her I’m not a total dick.
“Heard you got put with Emery Austin for tutoring,” Cole said after school the day the list was posted. News travels fast.
“Too bad she hates my guts,” I said.
“She doesn’t really,” Bethany, his latest girlfriend, said, patting me on the shoulder.
Bethany was kinda rubbing my shoulder, so I moved away from her. I’m a friendly guy, and girls get the wrong idea sometimes. Emery makes fun of me ’cause I got voted Biggest Flirt in the yearbook freshman year, but sometimes I get the feeling she doesn’t think it’s funny.
Who knows how girls think? Guys are like simple machines—we’re pulleys and levers that react to whatever happens right then, and then we’re over it. Girls are complex computer systems—complicated motherboards no one can understand. All I know is, it seems like every time I pay attention to somebody, the girl has me practically engaged by the next day. Look, I just like to have a good time. I’m not interested in getting too serious—with anybody. Well, with almost anybody.
CHAPTER 13
EMERY
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Rose says suddenly, tugging at my hand. It’s the first time she’s preferred me over Jake—this is a girl thing.
“Me too,” Natalie says.
I turn to Stutts, but he frowns and shakes his head before I can even ask.
This is going to be an ongoing problem with eighteen first graders. What are we going to do?
I look around the room for tools to build a makeshift bathroom.
“You know what this place needs?” I turn to Rose. “A private potty. Jake, can you get me one of those big plastic tubs up there—with a lid?” I reach up and lift the huge corkboard off the wall. Jake comes over to help me, but it’s not very heavy, just awkward.
“What’s that for?” Rose asks.
“A wall. A wall for our very own bathroom,” I tell her.
Rose looks doubtful.
“I’ll hold this up in front of you while you use the plastic tub as a toilet,” I say. She looks horr
ified. “Hey, it’ll be fun—just like camping. Haven’t you ever used the bathroom in the woods?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, you have missed a real treat, I’m telling you.” I’m acting like peeing in a plastic tub in a room full of people is an amazing adventure. “Alicia, hand me that Kleenex box, will you?”
“My cousin showed me how to go without getting my clothes wet,” Natalie announces. “I’ll go first.”
“Awesome,” I say. For once I’m grateful for Natalie’s need for the spotlight. “And will you show Rose?”
Rose frowns. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, “no one can see you with this big wall up. It’s a little easier for the boys to go to the bathroom in the classroom, but we girls’ll manage just fine.” I push a chair behind the bulletin board wall. “Here’s something to hold on to if you need it for balance.”
Natalie’s skills as a toilet tutor are in high demand. Three other girls line up immediately, and then four of the boys. Jake holds the wall for the guys.
“Nice work, Teach,” Jake says as I put the lid on the “potty.”
“I just hope you don’t have to hold the wall for me,” I tell him.
“You need to go?” he asks. “I got you covered.”
“Not just yet. But thanks.”
He helps me get them all settled back on their carpet, and I sit on the floor with them, watching them color. The tension shows in their small bodies. DeQuan grips the crayons so hard he breaks one, Kenji’s tiny tennis shoes tap the air anxiously, Alicia fiddles nervously with the button on her shirt, and Mason Mayfield III is drumming on a notebook with a pencil. At every sound in the quiet room, heads bob and eyes dart.
Olivia is chewing on her fingers. I reach over and pull her hand away and point to her painted nails. “Pretty,” I whisper, and she smiles and drops her hands into her lap. Carlos cracks his knuckles, then gives me an oops look, like he’s been told at home not to do that.
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