Telephone, Sarah thought, not Spread the Rumor. That was the name of the game.
Her Tether vibrated in Virginia’s hands. “A new love note.” Before the girls could huddle around, Sarah took one last desperate swipe. The Squaws pushed her off, all elbows, forearms, and offensive fouls.
“That might be my dad,” Sarah said. “Give it back!”
Debby raised a brow at the phone. “Mr. Bevilacqua’s your dad? Gross! I told him you’d meet him.”
“Meat him,” Virginia corrected, nudging one of the blondes with her knee, yuk-yuk-yuk.
“You’ll get us all in trouble,” Sarah said.
“Trouble?” Debby asked brightly.
“We’re supposed to go straight to class.”
“Oh, well, you heard her, girls. Off to class!”
The whole team of them started walking off.
“Wait!”
“Yes?” Debby turned back.
Sarah didn’t know what else to say. No matter what she did, these girls weren’t giving her phone back. Debby and the Squaws all smiled down at Mr. Bevilacqua’s newest love note.
“Ew!” Debby said. “If you don’t come, he says he’s gonna give you detention.”
“And guess who teaches detention?” Virginia added, earning a bunch of laughs.
“You don’t teach detention,” Sarah said.
The Squaws pushed her farther back. “Are you even talking right now?”
“Oh my God!” Debby said. “Now he’s telling me how he can’t wait to get to second base!”
“Gross!” one of the Squaws said, and the girls all broke out laughing, holding their bellies and occasional six-pack.
Sarah finally snatched her phone from Deb, but only because the girls were done with her now, laughing and shoving her off. Sarah mashed the DELETE button, trying to forget the note Debby had been about to send creepy old Mr. Bevilacqua.
It really was him, too, she couldn’t believe it. All those years, what a creep.
“See,” Debby said, “she won’t even go through with it. “Just like she did fighting Anastasia. She pussed out.”
“I did not!” Sarah said. “Erica did!”
“Yeah, because you lied!” Debby was screaming now, right in Sarah’s face, all spittle and teeth and ripe antiperspirant. “You didn’t think we’d find out? I told you we played Telephone, you stupid bitch!”
Sarah cowered now as the Squaws grew larger around her and started backing her toward the showers. At first Sarah had wanted only her phone, but now she just wanted to make it out of here with her teeth.
She’d seen the Squaws give one girl a swirly before, back in middle school when their team was called the Gold Nuggets. Just the beginning of this year, they’d thrown tampons at that poor Catholic girl. They’d forced her to transfer out, and now this. Their sudden solidarity for Anastasia.
The Squaws had known all along then, hadn’t they? They’d played along with Sarah’s little lie about what had caused the fight, and for what?
Debby gave Sarah a dismissive wave and the Squaws returned to their lockers to get dressed.
NV Me reacted immediately:
<-10,000 pts!!!>
Tears boiled in Sarah’s eyes. Not just because of her plummeting rank. Not just because her friends were all terrible human beings—she was used to that part.
No, Sarah cried because she’d asked each and every one of them, she’d begged in gym, but not a single one of her so-called friends cared enough to sneak out and give her a ride to HMS. Sarah had even offered them gas money, from what little savings she had left.
As much as these girls had changed in the last five years, Sarah had known most of them since kindergarten. Some of them had even been at HMS That Day, hunkering under desks, trying not to sob and give themselves away. They’d all lost the same friends, same as Sarah.
Many of her friends now had younger brothers and sisters at HMS, so Sarah had assumed they’d understand and want to go with her, or do anything they could to help out.
But nope.
And to think, Debby had acted so horrified at first. Burnt Valley Twats, Sarah thought. Then she had another thought.
Gary . . .
Maybe if the girls wouldn’t give her a ride, maybe a boy would. After all, Gary hadn’t lost anyone at HMS. He was just like Anastasia Disney. No ghosts for him in this town.
Eyes stinging and hot, Sarah blinked down at her half-finished love note to Mr. Bevilacqua.
She erased her message and keyed in something new. Then she slammed her locker shut. “I’m meeting him.”
“You’re lying,” Debby said as all the other girls looked up from their lockers, too.
Sarah strode out.
Screw them.
They were the ones pussing out.
They were.
Poking their heads into the hall, the Squaws watched Sarah explode out the back of the school. They all scrambled to the big sidelight to watch her go, some of them in bras and panties, sliding around in cotton socks.
NV Me buzzed, and Sarah didn’t even need to see her rank. She had memorized what the different types of vibrations meant, each varied pulse. There was a separate buzz for when she went up in rank, and one for when her rank went down.
She wiped her eyes and kept marching, grinning now, hugging herself to keep warm. Her grin slipped when she caught sight of the dugout.
The baseball diamond, sunken the way it was below the plane of the school, tucked one of the dugouts against the cut bank. The top of the bank was nearly level with the narrow roof.
Near the stairs leading down, Sarah looked back. The Squaws were still gathered there next to the door, ghostly behind the glass. She flipped them off and tromped down to the diamond.
The dugout was dark, and it smelled dank, like mud, concrete, and old chew spit soaked into the dirt. Today it also smelled of Axe body spray.
“Hey there, Princess,” the man in the Indian suit said. He was sitting there in the dark of the dugout, just a cartoon-sized silhouette.
Like a lot of backwoods schools, Burnt Valley High hadn’t moved past the stereotypical racist mascot. It was stupid, too, because the Ebumnanyth that Sarah had learned about in school looked nothing like most Native Americans, nothing like their own school mascot at all, actually.
For starters the Ebumnanyth didn’t wear headdresses. No regalia, no real adornments of any kind. Just pelts to keep them warm, and handmade ropes for the cracks. Ebumnanyth were more like Neanderthals, like cavemen, not really evolved. They’d even lived in caves. They looked sort of like fish people, too. Pale. Wide mouths. Big eyes.
This man in the Indian suit, more Native than Ebumnanyth, stood from the dugout’s scarred bench. His fake head and foam headdress wobbled under its own weight.
The Indian folded his arms in front of his chest and did a little dance, kicking out one foot, then the other, his leather tassels dancing all along his hides. Big, sneering, with a tomahawk nose: the Indian’s expression never changed. It made his dance look sarcastic, lewd.
Opening his arms for a hug, the Indian came at Sarah with huge thrusts of his tasseled hips.
She snapped a picture of him and stepped back. “You’re a dirty old pervert, you know that? Stop right there.”
“Come on.” The Indian reached up and removed his own head, revealing Mr. Bevilacqua. He grinned, black hair slicked back over his bald spot. “Want to run the bases?” he asked, cocking his head at the diamond.
“I want you to take me to HMS,” Sarah said. She was recording him now. She had no plan ever to stop.
“Okay,” Mr. Bevilacqua said, “and then straight to home base.” He reached for Sarah’s hip.
She batted him away and kept recording, filling the frame with his big stupid face and gross nose, inflamed from years of drinking.
“You’re going to give me a lift,” Sarah said, st
reaming the video live to her wall on Follow. “And if you so much as reach over to tune the radio, I’ll send your pervo little texts to the principal. And to my dad. And to Deputy Bill, all right?”
Bevilacqua’s grin slid off his face, as slick and thin as his hair.
Ten minutes later, he and Sarah were pulling up to a roadblock just south of HMS. Deputy Goff strode over to the van for a little chat.
Sarah, still recording, turned her phone out the passenger window and up the hill. Harcum Middle School, through all those trees, was meant to resemble a castle, or something just as stupid. To her, though, it had always felt like a prison.
The tail of the small regional airliner stuck up out of the roof of the school, intermittently visible through flows of toxic smoke. The metal had been licked black from the flames.
Bevilacqua rolled down his window for Deputy Goff. “Hey, Officer, what’s—”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll have to ask you to exit the vehicle.”
“Excuse me, what?”
Goff, glasses blinking, yanked Bevilacqua out through the door. He slammed him down on the hood, and Sarah screamed. Her phone captured everything.
“You have the right to remain silent—”
“I haven’t done anything! You can’t!”
“Anything you say or do—”
“What did I do?”
“—will be held against you in The Provider’s court, you dirty pedophile motherfuck.”
Goff ground Bevilacqua’s nose into the van’s hood, but he wasn’t even paying attention to what he was doing; he was reading something off his glasses instead.
Coming up for air, Bevilacqua sneezed out blood.
Goff laughed.
Sarah turned her phone back to the school on the hill, the crumbled, flaming castle.
“Oh my God.”
She cranked down the window and craned out her neck, looking even higher.
The heart. It was still hovering there, in the air above the school. Only now it was warped, faded, its lines bleeding into the sky, as if Sarah’s own heart, her own blurry, misshapen heart, had been ripped out of her chest and shot through with an arrow, launched way up there where you couldn’t breathe—she couldn’t breathe!
Sarah turned to ask Deputy Goff what had happened to her brother—and what about her dad?—but she puked all over Mr. Bevilacqua’s van instead.
CHAPTER 29
Half the school stood in the football field, staring at the flames of HMS, but Steve didn’t see everyone there.
The sixth and seventh grade halls had been evacuated safely, and Steve had evacuated his own class. The field was full of crying, terrified children and teachers. But the entire cafeteria had collapsed under the weight of the plane’s fuselage, and one of its wings had sheared away a piece of the eighth grade hall.
“It’s okay, folks!” Principal Warner shouted through a megaphone app on his phone. “Firefighters have arrived, and our Tether system has worked as intended. It sent out a distress call to every available emergency response center in the tri-county area. The firefighters are now preparing to spray the fuel fire with a special kind of foam.”
Steve looked around for George Ingram’s class. “You seen George?” he asked Mary McPhail.
“Oh my God,” she said, covering her mouth.
Steve stared at the school. “Ingram’s over in that corner that got clipped off. Isn’t he?”
“Oh my God.”
“JJ,” Steve said, and took off toward the school.
“Hey!” Principal Warner boomed from the track. “Steve! You can’t go in there!” But Steve didn’t give two shits what Principal Warner said.
He burst into the main entrance of HMS and immediately started coughing and calling out for his son.
The eighth grade hall spurred off near the back of the cafeteria, but the cafeteria boiled and raged and spewed out smoke as thick as the thickest ash while white foam rained down from above. Steve shielded himself against the heat and backed off, wheezing, hacking, trying to catch his breath.
He would have to circle around, then; go through the giant bay of lockers, get to the hall that way, the way he’d evacuated his class. It would take longer.
God, he was already sweating.
Coughing, crawling, blinking the sting out of his eyes, Steve headed toward the lockers. The alarm blared overhead, but he couldn’t see the flashing lights through all the smoke. It was like driving in dense fog, no familiar landmarks. He turned down the wrong hallway and got lost.
“JJ!” he screamed, eyes weeping now from the smoke. He twisted his body around on the floor, trying to reorient himself. “Someone, please!”
Ahead of him, a shape materialized, a stark shadow against the flame. Straight black suit. Big black phone. Pointed black shoes taking giant steps. Suddenly a big, hot tongue lapped at Steve’s face.
“Barksdale! Oh my God, what are you doing here? Get out of here, boy—go!”
Barks bit down on Steve’s sleeve and tugged him in a different direction. Steve thought the dog was trying to save him, trying to drag him to fresh air. Then his sense of direction came back to him.
“Good boy,” Steve said. “Take me to him! Take me to our boy!”
Barksdale trotted ahead, and Steve crawled after him, into the huge bay of lockers. On the other side, more than a mile away, it seemed, Steve could see the eighth grade hall. The doorway had caught fire, and someone was screaming on the other side.
“JJ?” Steve wriggled toward the door. “It’s me! It’s Dad!”
Holding his breath, Steve climbed to his knees and reached for the door lever, only to cringe back. His skin had sizzled against the metal bar.
My coat, he thought, shrugging out of his jacket. He wrapped it around his hand and hit the lever. This time, the door popped open, and Steve slammed it into the automatic catch.
“JJ!” he screamed.
The entire end of the eighth grade hall was nothing but fire and twisted aeronautical wing. Flames slithered along the ceiling tiles toward Steve.
A few feet ahead, something glowed near the floor. It looked like a phone, tethered to a black lump. Barksdale raced forward and started dragging the crying lump toward Steve.
The flickering and flashing of fire, shadowed intermittently by the thick shadow of smoke, formed a strobe light. In the crazy disco, Steve was transported back to the gymnasium, to the PCo assembly; instead of a lump on the floor, he saw JJ, suffering a seizure on the crowded stands.
“Mark?” Steve said as he got his first good look at what Barksdale had dragged in. “Are you all right? Where’s JJ?”
Mark looked back at him with glassy eyes, then slowly looked away. He wasn’t helping Barksdale at all, just lying there on his back. Barksdale was really straining against the kid’s weight.
Steve grabbed Mark’s hoodie and pulled, but nearly recoiled when he saw the huge pool of quickly congealing blood.
Mark’s leg.
His blue jeans had looked like red jeans at first, but only around the piece of shrapnel stabbed into his thigh. Mark didn’t care. He was too busy playing some kind of Lego game on his Tether, some sort of world-building app.
“Come on!” Steve shouted, tugging at Mark. “Push with your good leg!” He gave another fierce yank, and Mark’s Tether went tumbling out of his hands. “Leave it!” Steve said as Mark lunged toward it, screaming.
There was creaking and cracking from above, smoking bits of material raining down.
“It’s collapsing,” Steve said. “Hurry!”
He dragged Mark through the burning doorway as timbers and ceiling tiles gave way. A hot flood of smoke and scalding particulates whooshed over them. Part of the heat had been deflected off of Steve because Mark had fallen over him, creating a shield.
It cooked the kid.
Burnt his hair.
Still, Mark didn’t seem to register pain.
“Let me get it!” he screamed, bucking like Barksdale as Steve hel
d the collar of his hoodie. “I was fixing it! You have to . . . let me . . .”
Finally, Mark passed out and crumpled against Steve. Asphyxiation. Blood loss. Burns to his scalp and face.
Huffing, puffing, Steve felt like his lungs were filling with hot ash. He dragged Mark into the bay of lockers anyway, even as his vision filled with ash, too.
“Barksdale!” he screamed, using up his last bit of oxygen in the hopes the dog would help him drag the kid out. Barks had disappeared, though, back into the smoke.
Steve tried to call him again, but couldn’t keep his head off the floor. He tried picking it up, but it was too heavy, a bucket full of ash—he was nothing but ash, and the man in the black suit kept strolling toward him, strobing through the smoke.
CHAPTER 30
Bill started to turn the moving van around when he saw the roadblock. He paused for a second, though, not sure he understood what he was seeing.
In the van ahead of Bill, someone sat in the passenger seat. The driver, Mr. Bevilacqua, sat in the road on the other side of the blockade, hands cuffed behind his back. Blood streamed from the gym teacher’s swollen nose, busted lips, and a knot above his brow.
“What’s happening?” Bill asked her, but Aaron 2 didn’t reply. It was pretty obvious what was happening.
Goff and a few other deputies stood over Mr. Bevilacqua. One of them held his nightstick, tapping it against his palm.
Smiling, as if he hadn’t been doing anything wrong at all, Goff waved at Bill and started toward the moving van.
“Shit,” Bill said, cranking the wheel around, trying to decide whether or not to run.
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