“Aaronson?”
“Here!”
“Adler?”
“Here,” Everett said, and it wasn’t until our teacher hit the Cs that I sat up and scanned the classroom for the third time.
“Cruz?” Mr.Goldberg said in his monotone drone. “Cruz…? Cruz…? Cruz…?”
Isa didn’t answer.
My stomach spun.
Something’s off,I thought.Something’s weird.
Because while Grace was rarely absent, Isa wasneverabsent. I was pretty sure her perfect attendance record dated back to kindergarten. “It’s not healthy, Scott,” I once heard Mom say to my dad, back when Grace and I’d been in fourth grade. “She caught strep from Everett, yet James said she was on the school bus this morning. She told him she couldn’t miss their quarterly math exam.” She sighed. “She’ll burn out if Luis and Pilar make this a habit…”
Izzy, where are you?I snuck a text under my desk and watched the gray typing dots appear. But then they disappeared, with no message ever appearing onscreen.
She’d ignored me.
Closing my eyes, I couldn’t help but think:You gave her a good reason to…
Chapter 3
Isa
“Kidnapsomeone?” I gasped, heat swirling like Dante’s inferno on the back of my neck. “Grace, please stop joking around. I’ve already agreed to ‘take the day off’ with you. Just tell me what time we’re getting our nails done, or when we’re leaving for the movies.”
Because I could do that. I would do that. That was enough fun for me.
Before my best friend could explain, her phone began to play an old song, the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” I suspected she was the only person our age who used music for her ring tone—it was such a millennial move—but I loved that about her. “James,” she reported. “It’s James.”
My heartbeat sped up. “James?” I whispered. “Why’sJames calling?” It was late enough in the morning that James should’ve been in school by now.
Or “jail,” as he and I secretly called it.
“I don’t know,” Grace whispered back, as if her brother could hear us. “But I should probably answer.”
I swallowed while she waited for the final ring before tapping the screen to accept the call. “Hello?” she said with an appropriate dose of pain and suffering in her voice.
Grace was a generally good actress off the cuff. It was one of the things that made her such a wonderful student body president. She had the ability to be annoyed one second but charming the next.
I’m not like her,I’d thought when volunteering to be her campaign manager last year.I can’t just turn it on and sparkle.
No one would vote for Isabel Cruz, the girl with the resting “If You Say the Wrong Thing, IWillJudge You” face.
“Gracie!” James greeted us over the line, a cheerful chirp that was as much an act as his sister’s. Something in my stomach knotted, remembering James’s voice on the phone last night, but I still battled back an automatic giggle. He was good, alwaystoogood. “I’m here with Principal Unger….”
The laughter died in my throat.
Principal Unger.
Grace grabbed my hand.
“She wanted to see how her president was doing.”
“Oh, Principal Unger, hi,” Grace said carefully, squeezingmy fingers so tightly that I squeaked in alarm. She let go and motioned for me to zip my lips after I whispered for her to pretend to throw up again, a convincing dry-heave. Right here, right now, anything toget off the phone.“I’d, um, rather not give you too many details if that’s okay,” she said instead. “There’s a bucket involved….”
