“I’ll go find him one,” June offered.
“No,” I said. I looked at Eli with a knot of irritation tangled in my chest. He was always like this. Scared of new things, new people, new situations. I thought I was helping him. I thought it was what friends did. You pushed each other past the fear until the fear stopped. “Don’t be lame and just go look. Two seconds.”
“I don’t want to,” Eli said.
“You never want to do anything. Maybe we shouldn’t hang out with you anymore.”
His eyes widened because that was a sore spot for him; he was picked on at school and felt left out.
June touched his arm. “It’s okay. We’re right here. Just pick one. I promise it’ll be fine.” She gave him a big smile that seemed to relax him.
Between the two of us, we talked him into it. Her gentleness and my insistence. He climbed into the back of the van with his shoulders pulled up to his ears and his hands curled into fists at his sides.
The man climbed in after him and started showing him options. Flavors, colors, different pops lined up in a second cooler. His voice was easy and patient.See, I thought.Nothing to worry about.
Then the man leaned back toward June. “You want to come pick another one too, sweetheart? No charge.”
June paused. She was licking the last of the chocolate off the stick, and she glanced at me with a tightness around her mouth, the first sign of unease.
“Nah,” she said. “I’m good.”
“It’s fine,” I told her confidently. Because I was nine and nothing truly bad had ever happened to me. My parents were rich so I grew up with anything I ever wanted. Except them.
June shook her head, and because I had a crush on her I didn’t push her the way I pushed Eli. He was still in the truck with the stranger, so June and I began talking about her ice cream bar, whether chocolate-dipped was better than plain vanilla. She laughed about the chocolate smeared on her chin and I reached out and wiped it off with my thumb because I’d seen my father do that to my mother once, and June looked at me with those blue eyes and for two seconds the world was exactly what I wanted it to be.
The van doors slammed shut.
Eli screamed.
It cracked in the middle, like his voice couldn’t hold the full realization of what was happening: an eleven-year-old boy calling for help from inside a locked van.
June and I threw ourselves at the back doors. I grabbed the handles, pulled, but they didn’t move. June was hitting the metal with her open palms, screaming his name.
The van started to back up suddenly, so we jumped out of the way. The man was now in the driver’s seat, window rolled down with the same cheerful music playing. He was holding a small, black gun in those red-knuckled hands.
He pointed it at us. “Too bad you didn’t want to join your friend.”
He spat on the ground and leveled the gun.
Adrenaline kicked in, and I acted on pure instinct. I grabbed June and pulled her behind the nearest tree, a thick oak ten feet from the road. A shot whizzed past us as we ran. Thankfully, the stranger was a bad shot.
Unfortunately, hunting was allowed in the woods so no one would pay attention to the gunshot that just cracked through the air.
We ducked behind a tree before the second shot rang out and pressed ourselves against the bark. I felt June’s body shaking against mine, or mine against hers. The bark bit into my shoulder blades. My legs wouldn’t hold me, so we both slid down the trunk until we were sitting in the dirt.
After an eternity of holding our breaths and shaking, the man fired a third shot into the tree that made June shriek. Then the van drove away. Tires crunched the gravel and faded into the distance.
June tried to stand. “We have to tell someone.” She was pulling at my arm, her fingers slick with tears she’d wiped across her face. “Dorien, we have to run back right now.”
I couldn’t move. The man had a gun. What if he was circling the road? What if he was waiting around the next bend, parked in the trees, watching for us to come out?
“We can’t,” I said. “H-he’ll come back. He could be anywhere.”
“Eli is in that van.”
“I know.”
“We have to go,” she pleaded.
