Chapter 2
So, I was going to stay home and work on my story.
You can guess how long that lasted.
About two minutes after Fox and Indira left, I hopped in the Pilot (yes, Bobby was still letting me borrow it) and sped after them.
It was late January, and although winter on the coast didn’t involve a lot of snow, it did feature long, sunless stretches and unending showers of icy rain and the pervasive sense that you would never be warm again, which was why I cranked up the heater on the Pilot as I drove into Hastings Rock.
Today, of course, was the exception to that bit about the rain, with a clear sky of thin blue and that aggressively insistent sun.
The other thing about winter here was that there was still so much green—all that dense, temperate rainforest with spruce and cedar and hemlock.
If you were into movies about vampires, with lots of thick fog and the possibility of werewolves, it’s basically a dream, and most of the time I loved it—but sometimes, on a day like today, it was nice to feel the sun on your face. (Post-coffee.)
Hastings High had been updated in stages over the years (the snarky part of me wanted to say, since Fox’s day).
Honestly, it was a surprisingly nice-looking school: the grounds were clean, and it had a brick veneer, and over the front doors was a big window of etched glass that said HASTINGS ROCK PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL.
We’d missed the morning drop-off rush because Keme was now getting his rides to and from school with Millie (it was so cute, but also, cue the gagging noises).
Fox’s Van was parked in one of the visitor spots.
(Yes, it was a 1989 Toyota Van, and yes, it was even worse than you’re imagining.) And Fox and Indira were marching straight toward the school.
Fortunately they were so intent on their mission that they didn’t spot me.
As a matter of fact, they seemed so intent that I was currently very happy that I wasn’t a certain young lady named Victoria or Tori or whatever she was calling herself these days.
I wasn’t sure of the specifics, but I figured if Tori didn’t straighten up and fly right—in more or less those terms—well, there were a lot of fairy tales about kids ending up in ovens.
By the time I parked, Indira and Fox were already inside. I hurried after them. The doors were locked—standard school security—and when I buzzed, Mrs. Wools said, “Hi, Dash.”
“Hi, Mrs. Wools. I’m just dropping something off for Keme.”
(The best lies, it turns out, are the ones that are believable because three days a week your feral wolf-child “forgets” his environmental science textbook at home.)
“Oh, Indira just—”
“Yep, I’m bringing something for her to give to Keme.”
(Okay, that lie wasn’t quite as strong.)
“Uh, all right, come on in—”
The door buzzed, a lock clicked, and I was in.
If you’ve ever been inside a high school—or, for that matter, any public building built in the last twenty years—you probably have a good idea of what the place was like.
The color palette was cream and chrome and blond wood, and the flooring was speckled vinyl tile that does a great job of hiding dirt but makes impolite noises at the absolute worst moments.
Right then, though, I couldn’t hear anything over the babble of student voices.
We had apparently arrived during passing period, and the halls were full of teenagers.
On general principle, I don’t have anything against teenagers.
In fact, as someone who is still thirteen years old (on the inside, anyway), I kind of relate to teenagers.
That being said, though, I was feeling significantly less kinship the third time someone crashed into me because they wouldn’t look up from their phone.
At the far end of the hall, Indira and Fox were turning the corner, so I followed them into the human pinball machine. A bell rang, and the flood of adolescents thinned to a stream, and then to a trickle. By the time I turned the corner, the hall was almost empty.
But not completely.
Fox and Indira had pinned a girl against a row of lockers. They weren’t touching her. They weren’t even standing particularly close to her. But I had a fairly good idea that this was Tori, and that Tori was smart enough to know that if she tried to escape, bad things would happen.
She didn’t look like a bully, but of course, that didn’t mean anything.
If anything, she looked like Juggalo: she was swallowed up in a black hoodie, a Metallica T-shirt, and a pair of flared black jeans that looked like the modern version of JNCOs (if you weren’t alive for them, in the ’90s, the legs were so wide you could have stuffed a Great Dane up there).
“We know you broke into his locker,” Fox said. “Now, confess!”
Tori stared back at him with the kind of blank-faced contempt teenagers have perfected.
No judgment, but as someone who has elicited a few confessions in his day, I wasn’t sure Fox and Indira knew what they were doing. I had the sneaking suspicion I was going to have to jump in to help. I mean, this was kind of my wheelhouse—
Tori started to slide around Fox and Indira, but before she could, Indira said, “Tori.”
That was it.
That’s all.
She didn’t yell.
She didn’t threaten.
She didn’t even put her hands on her hips.
But I swear to God, every hair on my body stood up, and the air crackled.
“It wasn’t me,” Tori blurted, and all of a sudden, she sounded like she was going to cry. “It was Mr. Minor.”