“That was some impressive detecting,” I whispered in her ear. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“Then come visit. It’s only a twelve-hour train ride.” She swatted my arm and breathed a laugh, although her eyes were wet. “Leave me your address. If I find any of your stolen stuff, I’ll mail it back to you.”
“Will do,” I said.
I looked at Brandon and swallowed.
“Let’s start walking to the theater,” Meg announced. “Slowly. We have a new seating chart without Ever and Kate. We might need the extra time.”
“Subtle, Margaret,” Brandon snorted.
“You’re welcome, rabbits,” she whispered.
“Elliot Lawrence Gabaroche!”
My blood froze in my veins. There was no way. This couldn’t be happening. I’d prepared for the worst, but this was the worst times a Bosch painting of the worst.
“Is that…?” Brandon asked vaguely.
“Yeah,” I said, unable to hold back the quiver of panic in my voice. “Those are my parents. All of them.”
I’d known that this was a possibility from the second my train pulled out of the station the night I’d run away, but it was different seeing the fury of my family in person rather than in my imagination.
My mom wasn’t in uniform, thank God, but she was a blazing fury. Six foot tall, solidly built, hair pressed and rolled away from her round face. The polar opposite of thin, pale Beth, who was keeping stride and was equally pissed. And my father and Aunt Bobbie bringing up the rear.
I supposed I should be thankful that they hadn’t brought Grandmother Lawrence with them. The last thing I needed was Colonel Shirley Lawrence strutting around in her ancient dress blues, threatening to whup me and Isaiah for not waiting at attention when they got there.
I turned back to Brandon and grabbed his hand. “I don’t want to leave you like this,” I said as fast as I could. “I don’t want to leave you at all. And I’m so sorry for how everything happened. Because I really do like you. More than I thought I could like someone and this is the absolute worst way to tell you that because if I kiss you in front of that angry mob we will both die. So please know that you made me believe in the Disney of it all and that I will never forget you and you’d better go win a scholarship and use it to major in math, you freaking sexy nerd.”
“Ever,” he said, his eyes wild and pleading. “Elliot. I can’t—”
“You have to,” I said, shoving him toward the retreating team. I turned toward my family again, aware that if I watched him leave I’d lose my confidence. I’d come this far. It was time to finish this.
Fear is the mind killer.
I stepped forward, keeping my face impassive, which was hard when a mob of adults was waiting to tear me apart.
“Where is your luggage?” Mom asked. “We are leaving right now.”
“I cannot believe you did this to us,” Beth said. “We were all in a panic. And you couldn’t return a single phone call?”
“I swear to God, I will sue this school from one side of that river to the other,” Dad said.
“Mom, Dad, Beth, Aunt Bobbie,” I said, nodding to each of them in turn. “I need to talk to you about Isaiah.”
“You don’t get to dictate a single term—” Dad started, his voice like a grizzly’s rumble.
“I’m not trying to get out of being in trouble,” I interrupted. “I know I messed up—”
“You ran away,” Beth said shrilly.
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I won’t try to explain to you why, because it probably doesn’t matter.”
“You’re goddamn right,” Mom said. “It doesn’t matter. You scared the hell out of all of us. You lied and you played us against each other—”
“Yes,” I said, swallowing hard. God, the force of their disappointment was enough to peel back a layer of my skin. I pictured my spine filling with steel to keep me standing upright when I so wanted to lie down and cry again. “But I need to talk to you about Isaiah.”
“Where is he?” Aunt Bobbie asked, looking into the distance as though she could make him appear.
“He’s about to win a scholarship to one of the best colleges in the country,” I said. “And I think you should let him come here.”
Aunt Bobbie tucked her chin back, looking at me like I’d lost all of my damn mind. She raised an imperious eyebrow at me. “Elliot, my son will be lucky if I let him cross the street when I get him back home, much less come back to the school he ran away to.”
“Just think about why he came here,” I said. “Please think about who Isaiah is. Picture him at BMT and then picture him here. He isn’t Sid. Please don’t make him outrun himself all the way into enlisting. It’s not what’s right for him.”
“Elliot,” Mom said. “That’s enough.”
I didn’t take my eyes off of my aunt. I pointed the way my team had walked off. “And if you go watch the last round of the Melee, you can see how much he belongs here. He made friends here because he was with other genius kids. He belongs with people as smart as him. That’s why you guys moved off base, isn’t it? So that he could go to a good school and actually do something with his IQ instead of just talking about it? He’s doing something with it now. Don’t make him disappoint you because you wanted something from him he couldn’t do.” My throat convulsed. I balled my hands into fists. “We didn’t come here to disappoint you. We came here even though we knew you’d be disappointed. Please see the difference.”
38
I held Starship Troopers over my head, reading the yellowing pages while nursing a coconut water ice pop that Beth insisted on buying because they were low-sugar. They were also low-taste, but when it was over a hundred and ten degrees, the only thing to do was lie down on the floor of the kitchen and eat Popsicles, waiting for autumn or death. Whichever came first.
Upstairs, something bumped against a wall. A door slammed.
“Ethan!” I shouted. “What’d you break?”
A pause.
“Nothing!” he called.
A lie, for sure, but he was almost ten and there was a chance that he was finally mature enough to put whatever he’d broken back together before I figured out what it was. And if not, we had hours before Dad and Beth were home from work, and lots of superglue.
But not so much wood glue. Hm. That could be a problem. Especially since I no longer had the right to drive my car. It was now parked at Beth’s parents’ house, waiting for me to prove that I was a responsible member of society again.
If Ethan broke a bone or I went into anaphylactic shock, our parents were willing to just pay the ambulance bill rather than let me have my car keys.