He had imagined his vengeance as if it were a movie he had seen long ago, where someone wronged took justice into his own hands. He saw himself bursting through the front door of the Center with his gun raised like Stallone or Willis; he saw a doctor cowering under the heel of his boot; he saw an apocalyptic landscape of destruction left in his wake as he emerged, the vanquisher.
Here is what had not been part of his vision: the ringing in his ears when the gun fired, the spray of people’s blood, the way they begged for mercy.
George glanced at the group of people huddled in the waiting room. The doctor, injured. The nurse who was hovering near him. The blond girl who kept tugging at her hair. The one who had just killed her baby. The lady who was struggling to breathe. He had done that to her. It made George feel sick, watching her suffer. In the abstract, eliminating everyone who was tied to the Center had seemed masterful, necessary. In truth, it was messy.
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 TO her 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 was stuffing. 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.”
“But seriously, Wren. There could be a biker.”
“Okay.”
“And maybe there’s not a bike lane, so you turn the corner, and you clip him and he goes flying off his bike and smacks his head on the pavement and then you get out and call 911 and follow him to the hospital and you find out that he’s dead and you have to tell his family you’re the reason why.”
She glanced at him. “Dad.”
“Eyes on the road!”
“This isn’t even a road!”
He put up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. Turn left.”
She put on her blinker and rotated the steering wheel.
“You know that you don’t have the right of way.”
“There aren’t any other cars.”
“But if you jump out in front of someone who’s going straight, and they T-bone you, it will probably take the Jaws of Life to get you out of the wreckage. And by then, your ribs could be broken and penetrating your heart and you could slowly bleed to death—”
“Dad.”
“Sorry. It’s just that there are a million drivers I don’t know and don’t trust … and there’s only one you.”
Wren put the car into park. “I’m not going to die in a car wreck,” she vowed.
Her father looked out the window, eyes straight ahead. Then he smiled, the same kind of half smile she had seen on his face when she told him that she could read to herself at night now; the same kind of smile he’d had when she crossed the auditorium in fifth grade to get a silly graduation certificate; the same kind of smile as when she came downstairs for the first time wearing mascara and lip gloss. “I’m gonna hold you to that,” he said softly.
—