Sasha
Roxie is standing on her front porch, crying, when Sasha and Drew arrive. Drew jumps out of the car immediately and rushes to her.
“Rox, what happened? My mom will tell the school there was an emergency if you got busted,” Sasha hears him say as she approaches them.
“Itisan emergency. My mom’s gone,” Roxie says, shivering and hugging herself inside her hoodie, against the biting wind. She turns around and goes inside, and Sasha and Drew follow. Roxie starts pacing, talking a mile a minute. Sasha thinks about how bizarre Andi’s been acting and immediately knows this can’t be good.
“She tried calling me and then texted me to call her, and I did, but she didn’t answer, so I didn’t worry about it at first. She’s always at the VA on Wednesday mornings, so I thoughtit would be safe to come meet you here, but... then I realized our folder’s gone.”
“Oh,” Drew says, sitting down on the armchair behind him. “Shit.”
“What?” Sasha snaps.
“There’s just a lot of... everything in there. All our work. Evidence,” Drew says.
“My Facebook is open on my computer... my last conversation with you that says to meet you at your dad’s is up on the screen,” Roxie says. “She probably figured out who your dad is from all the papers in the folder. But she wouldn’t know where he lived, and even if she did and she was driving there or something, she’d answer my call. I don’t know what she’d do when she saw all of this—if she’d go to the smoke shop or any of the other people we investigated for answers—but if she did, she could be in trouble... and it’s our fault.”
“Maybe she found it and went to the police,” Sasha says, but then she pulls out her own phone and sees missed calls from Andi, and a chill runs through her.
“I called the police,” Roxie says. “I told them I couldn’t reach her. She didn’t call them or go in, and they told me I have to wait to see if she turns up at least till later today until they’ll worry about it or take a report.”
“Let’s not panic,” Sasha says. “The folder’s gone. You can’t show it to me, so tell me. What the hell did you find that’s so scary? You need to explain everything. Now.”
Roxie sits on the sofa and buries her head in her hands. Drew looks to her and then back to Sasha. After a moment, he sighs and nods. Then he starts explaining.
“Dad came to the Labor Day cookout thing. When the car blew up. I saw him.”
“What?” Sasha snaps. As far as she knows, Raff hasn’t left his house in a few years. He’s not capable of getting around. He turned agoraphobic, she assumed, or was too lost in his addiction to make any attempt at a life outside of that prison he created for himself.
“He was parked down the hill, and I went and talked to him. I was shocked to see him there. Roxie was with me,” he says.
Sasha’s mouth is hanging open. She slowly sits on the edge of the coffee table and stares at her son, listening intently.
“He was drunk,” Roxie adds, as if the detail was necessary.
“Some guy he knows drove him, and he got out of the car and was crying, saying he’d do anything to get you back. I didn’t let him go up to the party. I told him to go home.”
“What?” Sasha repeats in a whisper to herself, because this is so hard to imagine from Raff that she doesn’t know what else to say.
“I thought he meantget you back—you know... romantically, but then after the bomb, I thought he meant revenge. That’s why I asked you if you thought it was meant for you. He was so blasted that day—like more than usual. Maybe he got some drug from the meth head–looking guy with him, I don’t know, but I thought, what if it was him that did it and he got the wrong car?”
“He would never do that,” Sasha mutters, but then Drew’s question from earlier buzzes in her ears.Did you pay for it?After all this time, is Raffy harboring hatred for her because he did prison time and she went and got remarried and still has a life? No. That just can’t be.
“The friend was some drunk he met in AA. Ironic,” Roxie pipes in. Sasha looks to her, wondering how in the world thisteenage girl knows more about her husband than she does. It’s impossible they should know any of this.
“Dad was hollering and falling over, and the rando guy helped me get him back into the car and said something to us like, ‘This is how you treat him after all he’s been through? He did his time, leave him be,’ or something like that and I didn’t know what that meant, so... then I looked him up. I googled Dad’s name. I never thought about researching him before for any reason, but then it all came out, so we went out to his house. I felt sorry for him—for what had happened to him. It finally made sense that he is the way he is, and I felt bad.”
Sasha holds her heart and tries to understand Raff’s behavior. He would do anything to get her back? She’s there at his house helping him all the time and he’s never said anything like that. It’s like an unspoken pact they’ve made—to never talk about the past. She wonders why he would act like that—leave the house, have a meltdown.
And it’s like Drew read her mind, because he says, “Like I said, he was on something—that guy he was with was a total tweaker. Dad told me half the people he knows in AA do drugs instead. I think that’s why he was losing his shit and also why I wondered if he was capable of the bomb thing. ’Cause he wasn’t himself.”
Sasha remembers the construction paper she found, shaped like a bomb. “The school threat,” she says, looking between Drew and Roxie.
“That was me,” Roxie says, “but it wasn’t a threat. It was a diversion.”
Sasha stands and walks a few feet away, looking out the window for a moment, in disbelief at how deep these two are in—bomb threats, withholding evidence.
“You both thought creating more fear and chaos was gonna stop people from worrying about the car bomb? That it would change the investigation?” she asks, because even though that seems like it could be teenage logic, these kids are smart and embedded in this. That seems risky and kind of stupid.
