I nodded. The digging and going underground might have been kind of weird. But this, I understood.
“Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I was just coming out and saw the lights, then heard you coming. Actually, grabbing you was kind of an impulse move.”
I looked up at the doors again. “You have good instincts.”
“I guess. You know what’s weird, though? I just put that hook and eye in last week. Lucky thing.” He squinted up at it, then turned back to me. “The bottom line is, you don’t want to get arrested for drinking under age. It’s not fun. I know from experience.”
“How do you know I haven’t been already?” I asked.
He studied me, all seriousness. “You don’t look like the type.”
“Neither do you,” I pointed out.
“This is true.” He thought for a moment. “I rescind my earlier statement. You could very well be a delinquent, just like me.”
I looked below me again, taking in the small, tidy space. “This doesn’t really look like a den for delinquents.”
“No?” I shook my head. “What were you thinking? Junior League? ”
I made a face, then nodded at the stack of books: in the thrown light, I could barely make out one of the spines, which said something about abstract geometry and physics. “That’s pretty heavy reading material.”
“Don’t go by that,” he said. “I just needed something to prop the flashlight on.”
From above us, I heard a sudden burst of music. The cops, apparently, were gone, and the party was starting up again with whatever legal stragglers remained. Dave got up, climbing the stairs, and popped the hook, then slowly pushed open one of the doors overhead and stuck his head out. Watching from below, it occurred to me he looked younger somehow: I could easily picture him as an eight- or nine-year-old, digging tunnels in this same backyard.
“Coast is clear,” he reported, letting the door drop fully open, hitting the ground with a thud. “You should be able to get home now.”
“I’d hope so,” I said. “Since it’s only, like—”
“—fourteen feet, seven point two inches, to your back deck,” he finished for me. I raised my eybrows, and he sighed. “I told you. Weird kid.”
“Just kid?”
Now, he smiled. “Watch your step.”
He climbed up the stairs out onto the grass, then turned the light back on me as I followed him out, offering his hand as I neared the top. I took it, again feeling not strange at all, his fingers closing around mine, supporting me as I stepped up into the world again.
“Your friends were at the party,” I said. “They were looking for you.”
“Yeah. It’s already been kind of a long night, though.”
“No kidding.” I slid my hands in my pockets. “Well ... thanks for the rescue.”
“It was nothing,” he replied.
“You kind of saved my ass,” I pointed out.
“Just being neighborly.”
I smiled, then turned to cross those fourteen feet, seven point two inches back to my house. I’d only taken a couple of steps when he said, “Hey. If I saved your ass, you should tell me your name.”
I’d been in this place many times in the last two years, not to mention once already today. The name I’d chosen, the girl I’d decided to be here, was poised on the tip of my tongue. But in that place, at that moment, something happened. Like that quick trip below the surface had changed not only the trajectory of my life here, but maybe me, as well.
“Mclean,” I said.
He nodded. “Nice to meet you.”
“You, too.”
I could hear the music from the party, that same bass thumping, as I crossed to the deck. As I pulled open my side door, I glanced back, just in time to see him climbing back down the stairs, the flashlight’s glow rising up around him.
I went into my house, kicking off my shoes and padding down the hallway to the bathroom. When I turned on the light, the brightness startled me, as did the faint dusting of dirt that covered my face. Like I, too, had been tunneling, digging, and had only just now come up for air.
Three
Jackson High was not the Gulag. It was also no Fountain School. Instead, it was pretty much just like all the other public high schools I’d attended: big, anonymous, and smelling of antiseptic. After filling out the typical mountain of paperwork and having a rushed meeting with a clearly overworked guidance counselor, I was handed a schedule and pointed toward my homeroom.
“Okay, people, quiet down,” the teacher, a very tall guy in his early twenties wearing leather sneakers and a dress shirt was saying as I approached the door. “Typically, we’ve got twenty minutes’ worth of stuff to do in five minutes. So help me out, all right?”