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“There’s a thousand factors that could lead to it not working the way we want to. To be honest, the odds are against us.” He took a breath, sighing before he went on. “Maybe we’re thinking too far ahead.”
“What do you mean?”
He was quiet for a minute and brushed his palm down his thigh as he seemed to be thinking. “You’re worried about the end. But if the idea is sound and you want to try, maybe we should focus on that—on trying. There’s no harm in trying, right? If it’s not meant to be, we’ll know after we’ve tried. And if we have set parameters and clear boundaries, even if it doesn’t work, we should still be able to maintain our relationships as they are now.”
It sounded reasonable. “If everyone else wants to.”
“If you want to, I imagine they will. But you have to tell them you’d like to try, and then give it a good effort.” His gaze drifted over my face. “If you doubt it, they’ll doubt it, too.”
“I’m scared of what might happen.”
“Sometimes, you have to fake courage in order to find yours,” he said gently. “You have to put yourself out there and forget about the results. You just have to try your best and trust your instincts.”
North had seemed to lose his faith when I’d started to doubt. The others seemed reluctant—maybe he was right, maybe they were waiting on me. “So you think if I told them all I wanted to try, they’d believe in it more?”
That millimeter smile returned. “I don’t think any of them would dare fail in trying to make you happy,” he said. “Including me.”
My lips trembled as I kept them together, not daring to breathe or say anything that might ruin the moment. While I considered what all of us being together meant, Mr. Blackbourne was the hardest to imagine in that picture. I wasn’t even sure if he included himself in the plan.
These small slips of affection—a kind word, a gentle touch, his millimeter smile—hinted that he did think of me that way, but it was possible I was misinterpreting his actions.
“I should get going,” he said suddenly as he leaned away from me and turned to collect his coat. “You should sleep and be ready for tomorrow.”
“What about Luke?”
“I’ll talk to him,” he said. He turned, the silver in his eyes appearing to glow from the little light spilling out of the closet into the room. “You, Miss Sorenson, should summon up some courage. Talk to the ones you know have agreed to the plan, and have a strong heart-to-heart with them about trying. Luke should be included, when you get a chance.”
“I will,” I said, determined, even though I suspected it would take a lot of that fake courage he’d talked about.
He stood up, moving to the door and opening it before he turned and flicking off the closet light. My eyes took a moment to adjust.
When they did, Mr. Blackbourne was still standing in the doorway, looking in at me.
The silence loomed. I waited.
“Goodnight, Miss Sorenson,” he said in a whisper.
“Goodnight, Mr. Blackbourne.”
THANKS
“Now that two people are missing, things are going to get more complicated,” Kota said to Nathan and me one morning on the way to school. “Now that Hendricks is apparently off on sick leave, he left behind damaging evidence about a lot of the faculty, and even some of the students. There’s memos about pot being sold to students by a teacher. There’s the JH14 that got passed around. Coaches have been caught altering grades.” He shook his head before he went on. “Once someone started pointing fingers, others started firing accusations back. He’s probably off to avoid all the fallout, but I don’t know what his exit strategy is.”
“There isn’t a Vera at the school board, either,” Nathan said. “Someone got a hold of that stationary and made it up. That Ms. Wright didn’t even know her supervisors’ names, just blindly followed protocol at the very hint she thought she was in trouble. I wonder if Sang wasn’t under Mr. Hendricks’s thumb, and he was the one that might have suggested she compare to the paper books and get to the bottom of Sang being absent out of spite. That might be Mr. Hendricks using Sang to get her into trouble. If she’s in suspension, she’s not around to talk about Mr. Hendricks and what he’s been getting her to do—spy on us. Or to make her look like a bad kid, so no one would believe her.”
If I was in suspension, would that make me a less reliable person? That didn’t sit well with me. “She also lied to me,” I said.
“That’s something Dr. Green and Mr. Blackbourne are looking into,” Kota said. “She did seem rather confident, but we need to go over her phone records and see if maybe she called another Mrs. Sorenson and the mix up set off a more complicated case against you. Right now, we just have to seem like we’re behaving. He’s trying to make this as low key as absolutely possible. This is the plan for now. Hopefully, it works.”
We’d given up on bringing school books after the first day. We did bring our bags, though, with food and supplies. Nathan had been going to bring his Nintendo DS with him, but Kota said it would be too obvious if he was smashing buttons. So instead, Kota had three tablets and had us load games and books onto it. We made sure to mute them ahead of time, and Kota dimmed the screens and slipped covers on them so they looked like actual books. We each had a small paper notebook inside our bags, along with a pencil in case she gave us actual work to do.
I gave up my real phone and the boys put their fake ones in the basket, though we could use our tablets to communicate. Kota warned us though that we shouldn’t send anything private. We needed to be more careful about our messaging.
I’d managed to read the Hardy Boys book Silas gave me, and had given it back. I started a couple of the books Kota had loaded on my tablet, but I found I couldn’t really focus for longer than a half hour.
It was a slow two days. Luke was there, but since we had to sit quietly, and I didn’t want to send him any private messages that might would be upsetting, I simply sent him little smile faces and hearts.
He sent hearts back.
I couldn’t tell him about what Mr. Blackbourne told me to do. Not during school.
We did, however, go over names for the new skunk. Luke sent me pictures. He’d moved the dog house and the makeshift pen into his bedroom. There was a short video of Luke tossing the sunk a tennis ball, and the skunk would scoop it up, and waddle backwards toward the dog house, dragging it inside like he wanted to keep it.
After a debate that lasted a good portion of the first day and well into the second, we finally settled on Sprinkles. He’d told me why in a message.
Luke: The back of his tail reminds me of the black and white sprinkles on my favorite kind of cupcake at that one bakery I like.
I was amused he could associate cupcake sprinkles with a skunk, but every other name after that point didn’t seem as interesting. Sprinkles kept the name.
After each day, though, I did get to be with Luke at the diner but when we were together, we were also watched by Uncle, who was directing us to make pies and chop vegetables.
“Thursday will be a big day,” Uncle told us. “It’s Thanksgiving.”
By the time that night came, I was so tired from chopping and being very careful about pie making that I slipped into bed way before anyone else.
???
The sound of water spraying against tile had become familiar to me since Nathan’s bathroom had been completed. On most mornings, I didn’t pay attention.
But now, on Thursday morning, the shower sounds were hard to ignore, for some reason. When I closed my eyes, I kept picturing being in Nathan’s bathroo
m with the shower running—with me actually in the shower.
I shivered, and covered my head with one of the pillows. It usually didn’t affect me just to listen to the shower, today it felt amplified and raw.
A lump formed in my throat. I swallowed to push it back, telling myself it wasn’t a big deal. Trying to convince myself that perhaps it was just a heavy rain. Or maybe the television was on loud and there was a waterfall scene in a movie. Was the sprinkler running and hitting the window pane? I closed my eyes tight to avoid looking at the window to keep my imagination going.
The opportunity to tell the others about being unable to shower had slipped away since Nathan’s new bathroom had been completed. Guilt seeped in whenever I went in that bathroom and realized I should have said something. I often bathed when Nathan was away, or just told him I felt like a bath. As far as he knew, things were normal.
I knew I’d have to tell them eventually. If life ever settled down, I would.
I held the pillow over my head, willing myself to forget about showers and wait until he was done.
“Sang.”
Through the thickness of the pillow, the voice calling for me was muffled. I ignored it for a moment, mostly out of sheer laziness, not wanting to get up.
“Sang…”
I groaned and peeked out from under the pillow. No one at the door. The shower was still running.
I sat up quickly, suddenly terrified. What if he had fallen in the shower and hurt himself? Was he in there all broken and calling for help?
I scrambled to get out of bed, quickly padding down the hallway. The door to the bathroom was closed so I touched the handle. Finding it unlocked, I twisted and opened the door a crack so I could peek in.
The bathroom was steamy but I could still see. The shower was big and took up half the room. The bottom was covered in stone tile, and the top half was a big glass pane. It had an opening wide enough to walk into and no door. Very modern.
Nathan was in under the spray, his head tilted back. He was rubbing his hands through his reddish brown hair. His back was to me, and with his arms flexed, his shoulders bunched, big and muscular. His biceps were large and defined: perfection.
