huge roll of bills in his coat pocket, held together with a rubber band. “Where’d you get this money?”
“It was in the backseat,” the teen said. “They said they’d leave it in the backseat.”
Jagger Jonze held up his hand for silence. “Who said?”
The words floated up to us almost as if the whole thing were being amplified. Like a stage play. Scripted and acted.
The twitchy teen boy said, “She texted me to leave it in her car. The one with the turtle decal.”
There were murmurs, heads shaking.
“Who texted you?” Jagger seemed believably bewildered.
“One of the runners,” the boy said.
“The runners? Did you just say runners?” Jagger Jonze paused. “Are you saying there’s a runner in our midst?”
The crowd went dead silent.
“This is Rory Miller’s car,” Jagger Jonze said, confused.
“I didn’t get the name,” the teen said.
“Are you saying that Rory Miller is a runner?”
Jinny Hutsall turned to the crowd and repeated the line.
Then one of Jinny’s brothers prompted the teen. “And Feliza Lopez too.”
“I don’t know—I didn’t get any names.”
Fee and I just looked at each other. Holy freaking insanity.
Jagger took the baby from Jinny, cradling her against his shoulder. We could feel the heat from the mob, waves of fear and outrage. Emergency vehicles screamed in the distance.
The baby’s cries somehow rose above it all as Jagger Jonze walked through the crowd with the tiny thing, swaddled so that you couldn’t see its little face. Then he lifted her in the air like Simba from freaking Lion King, which seemed like a bad idea, and gestured for Jinny’s brothers to let the teen go.
It seemed like another bad idea when he placed the baby in the arms of the twitchy father, who’d basically just admitted he’d try to sell her for parts.
Sherman. I spotted him weaving through the crowd. At first I thought he was trying to find me, to make sure I was safe, and to tell me he’d take care of everything. But nah—he was fleeing the scene. Sugar Tits’ Mazzi pulled up to the security gates at the edge of the campus. And Sherman was gone.
All of a sudden, two more of Jinny’s brothers came steaming toward the crowd from the walkway that leads to the gym bathroom where we’d almost been locked in. Her brothers looked freaked, having obviously failed to find us trapped. I saw one of them shake his head at Jinny.
Jagger called out to the crowd, “Find them!”
We could hear sirens, first responders closing in. We didn’t exchange a glance, Fee and I, as we turned. We ran back the way we came, skirting the ridge, past the pool and the soccer field and the gym, then up the path that leads to the mountain hiking trails behind the school, tripping over roots and rocks and branches, on our way, although I didn’t know it at that point, to Javier’s cabin.
We didn’t get far before the earth rocked under our feet and we fell on the rocky trail. Earthquake? We got up and looked back toward our school. Smoke was billowing from a corner of the gym. It took a minute to register that a bomb had just exploded in the bathroom. The bomb, Jinny’s bomb, had torn a portion of the roof off and flames were shooting out of broken windows and skylights. No time to say Holy Shit.
We ran. And ran. And kept on running. Fee was a soldier—gutting it all the way. Thank God for five years of cross-country. And thank God for full moons.
We heard barking dogs—police dogs, we figured. I pulled Fee toward a nearby creek, and we hiked up our dresses and waded through to throw them off our scent. On the other side, I grabbed a baseball-sized rock, smeared it with menstrual blood then hurled it as far as I could back across the creek, into the brush in the direction of the school—I’d seen a TV show about a murderer on the run scattering rocks with his scent to confuse the dogs. Fee grabbed a rock and spit on it, then hurled it—pretty good arm actually—too. We carried on throwing rocks saturated with our scent until the barking got too close. Then we climbed higher into the hills, through spiky bushes and spiny grass. Each summit we made meant another descent, over dry, crumbly rock and patches of hoary-leaved briar.
We’d been running for I don’t know how long when I realized we were headed in the direction of our gardener’s cousin’s house in the