“I don’t know.” She sounded irritated. “Does that poor excuse for an emergency vehicle have a siren? Maybe we can startle them into submission.”
Derek sent a frantic glance over the crowd and noticed that Callum was leaning against the school bus, arms crossed over his chest and a tiny smile curling the corners of his mouth. For Callum, that small grin was the equivalent of belly laughter.
Scowling, Derek gave a short nod. “Code Three it is.”
* * *
Using the flashing lights as a distraction, Zoe reached over and grabbed Maya’s arm, towing her little sister several feet away from stupid Chase.
“I hate him,” Maya said matter-of-factly, her voice just loud enough for Zoe to hear. She pulled at the back of her coat in an attempt to dislodge the last of the melting snow.
“Me too.” Zoe wiped the moisture off the back of her sister’s neck with her glove. “If Micah were here, Chase would’ve been too chicken to do anything to you.”
“That’s because Micah would’ve punched him in the face and made Chase cry in front of everyone.” Releasing the hem in defeat, Maya gave a full-body shiver. “I wish the fifth-graders got to come today, too.”
“It’ll be okay. We’ll watch him. If he gets too close, we’ll go stand by Ms. Rey.”
“Fine.” Despite her reluctant agreement, Maya’s face screwed up in a scowl. “I wish that dork-brain would fall in the water, though.”
With a grin, Zoe eyed the reservoir with its thin coat of ice. “Yeah. It looks really cold.”
Their gazes met, and the two girls started to giggle.
“Zoe and Maya Springfield!” Ms. Rey’s crisp voice stopped their laughter. “Listening ears.”
With slightly guilty nods, they turned back to the pair of presenters.
“Derek is really bad at this,” Zoe whispered as the man struggled to talk while donning a goofy-looking suit.
“Yeah. Remember when he babysat us that one time?”
Clapping a hand over her mouth to hold back renewed giggles, Zoe nodded. “The spaghetti,” she managed to say between her fingers, and it was Maya’s turn to try to muffle her laughter.
A sharp poke at her side turned Zoe’s repressed giggles into a grunt of pain. Chase was standing right next to her, holding a slimy-looking stick. She took a quick step away from the smirking boy, pulling Maya along with her.
“Leave us alone,” Zoe whispered, but Chase just reached out with the stick again. She barely jumped back in time to dodge getting a slime trail across the leg of her jeans. When Zoe craned her neck to check for Ms. Rey, hoping the teacher would notice and put a stop to Chase’s latest stupid behavior, she noticed Ms. Rey was staring at Derek.
Zoe looked back and forth between Ms. Rey and Derek, trying to figure out why the teacher was watching him so closely. It wasn’t like Derek was doing anythinginteresting. He’d managed to get the funny-looking suit on all the way, and he’d taken a few steps out on the ice.
Ms. Belcher was trying to make Julius—who was always too hot—put his coat back on, and the two parent chaperones were all the way on the other side of the group, talking to each other. There wasn’t any help coming from the grown-ups, so Zoe was going to have to take care of this herself.
The stick whacked the side of her boot, and Zoe refocused on Chase.
“I’m going to tell,” she lied. Her brothers had taught her never to rat out anyone. “Then you’ll have to sit on the bus. Ms. Rey said so.”
With a shrug, Chase dragged the tip of the stick through a puddle of partially frozen mud. “Don’t care. This is dumb, anyway.”
That time, when he swung, he aimed at Maya. Pulling her sister behind her, Zoe kicked at the stick, trying to knock it out of Chase’s hand, but she missed. Instead, mud spattered across her jeans. Rage-inspired heat prickled along the back of her neck and across her cheeks.
“You’re such abully, Chase DuBois!” Even in her flush of anger, Zoe remembered to keep her voice low so as not to incur the wrath of Ms. Rey. “Why don’t you just go jump in the reservoir?”
“Like that guy?” Chase scoffed, pointing his muddy stick at Derek, who was back on shore, explaining different pieces of equipment. It actually looked kind of interesting, and Zoe wished that Chase would leave them alone so she could move closer to the presenters for a better view. “He’s a tool. His stupid suit looks like something a baby would wear.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “Like you could do what he does.”
His smirk fading, Chase swung the stick through the air next to his leg, the acceleratingswish-swishrevealing his growing temper. “I bet I could.”
She made a contemptuous sound. “Ha. You’d be too scared even to walk out on the ice.”
