These people were puppets and their strings were made of terror. Their whispers died the minute he looked at them.I’m not who you think I am,George wanted to say, but that was no longer true. He was exactly who these people thought he was.
His frustration and fury had been a live grenade, dropped into his hands. What was he supposed to do with it? Let it tear him to pieces? Instead, he had run. Far and fast, behind enemy lines. And then he had thrown it right back at them.
They huddled together in the waiting room, leaving as large a gap between themselves and George as they could. They seemed be waiting for something from him—a demand, a tantrum, an explanation.
They had all heard him talking to the cop. They knew there was someone out there who wanted to rescue them. Hope was a pretty damn good weapon.
On the other hand, George had this pistol. When he waved it they jumped, they cried, they shivered. They listened to him.
He just had no idea what to say.
He started to pace. He had come here with intention, but not with a plan. Somehow he hadn’t imagined that there would be people left, when he finished teaching his lesson of retribution. He knew how these things ended. In a standoff, with him and a bunch of cops in flak jackets.
But then, he had more leverage than just the gun.
He had hostages.
—
WREN HUGGED HER KNEES TOher chest in the closet and cursed herself for being conscientious. Who knew that trying to be responsible was deadly?
She could have been like most teenagers on the planet and just waited until things got so intense between her and Ryan that it was too late to plan ahead. She could have brought a pack of condoms to the register at the Rite Aid, or she could have told Ryan that it was his problem. But there had been a girl in her homeroom last year who’d gotten pregnant and had stayed in school until her water broke during gym class. Wren had sat on the bleachers with her till the ambulance arrived, holding her hand while the girl’s fingernails squeezed little half-moons of pain into her skin.Is there anything I can do?Wren had asked, and the girl had turned to her, panting, and said,Yeah. Use anything but Trojans.
So instead, she and Ryan had talked about It. When to do It. Where to do It. Since Ryan was the one who was working out those logistics, Wren volunteered to be the one in charge of birth control. Which, as it turned out, was easier said than done when you were a minor and trying to keep your private business private.
So much for not being a risk taker. You could take all the precautions in the world, and bad things still happened.
That made her think of her aunt.
When Wren’s dad went to hostage negotiator training for a few days, and Bex babysat, she’d let Wren skip school. She called it a mental health day. They would lie wedged together in her hammock in the backyard, like peas in a pod, and play a game of choice:Would you rather grow a tail, or grow a horn?
Would you rather always be too hot, or always be too cold?
Would you rather stay overnight in a haunted mental hospital or have to ride a broken roller coaster?
Would you rather eat nothing but stuffing, or drink only gravy?
Would you rather know the day you’re going to die, or know how you’re going to die?
For Wren, the answers were obvious. A tail, because you could hide it in clothing. Be too cold, because you could add layers to get warm. Stay at the mental hospital, because being terrified beats getting killed. Stuffing, because it wasstuffing. And knowing the method of your death would be better, she had been sure, than counting down how much time you had left.
Wren was currently rethinking that last answer.
Now, Wren thought of another one:Would you die if it meant someone else could live?
Was that what her aunt had done for her?
Wren shivered in the closet beside Olive, who smelled like lemons and was being really nice, but all things considered, the odds that they could avoid getting caught hiding were pretty slim.
At least Olive was old. That sounded terrible, Wren knew, but it was true. Olive had lived her life, or most of it anyway. There were hundreds of things Wren hadn’t done. Sex, for one, but that was a given. She’d never broken her curfew. She’d never gotten trashed. She’d never been asked to prom or gotten a hundred percent on a math test or climbed up the water tower at Jackson State.
She hadn’t gotten her license, either. She had a learner’s permit—she’d applied for it the day she turned fifteen. Her father knew she had been waiting for this moment, and when she bounced into the kitchen on the morning of her birthday, he was already wide awake, as if he’d been waiting for her. He intentionally took his sweet time eating breakfast and finishing his cup of coffee while Wren squirmed, desperate to be taken to the DMV. “Give me a lesson,” she begged, as they walked out of the building with that sacred piece of paper.
“Now why didn’t I think of that?” he said, grinning, and he drove her to the police station parking lot, way out back, where they had summer Friday barbecues. He had set up an obstacle course of orange cones. He showed her how to adjust her mirrors and check her blind spots, and for ten minutes alone they practiced shifting the car from park into drive with her foot firmly on the brake.
Eventually he let her inch between the orange cones, moving five miles per hour. “You want to stay toward the middle around the corners,” he told her. “You never know who’s on the other side.”
“Got it.”
